News

Selected stories from the Beinecke Library, YaleNews, and external media outlets (the latter noted by source in parentheses after title of article).

  • Library Fellows present lightning talks on paper, poetry, protest, and more

    April 26, 2023

    Fellowship Program Director Jae Rossman invited six of this season’s residential fellows to share what they had been poring over in the Beinecke Library’s reading room. In March, the scholars delivered a series of five-minute lightning talks—illustrated with slide shows—to an audience gathered in Sterling Memorial Library lecture hall. Topics ranged from nuclear poetry, sound poetry, and writing paper to abolitionists and revolutionary thought. Images included typewritten poems, historic newspaper clippings, and photographs of desert landscapes.

  • Love, Judy Blume (Slate)

    April 22, 2023

    Blume’s letters are part of the collection of Yale University’s Beinecke Library, which the film’s directors, Davina Pardo and Leah Wolchok, visited for research. And while it tells two correspondents’ stories, they’re clearly stand-ins for dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands more letter-writers who developed relationships with Blume over the years. Kim, who is now 54 and a writer herself, told me, “If I poured so much emotion into my letters, and she was getting 1,000 or 2,000 a month, how much collective American emotion is in that collection … is beautiful.”

  • Library staff supports young historians in Connecticut History Day regional contests

    April 11, 2023

    “This was my first year taking part in the event,” Lerner said, “and it was Melissa Barton’s all-staff email that encouraged me to do so. I most enjoyed interviewing the students. Their engagement with primary sources was encouraging, as was their willingness to voice the frustrations and difficulties they encountered while researching and creating an exhibit. All students expressed a deep curiosity about their topics, and each ended up teaching me something new!”

  • Uncovering the link between 'Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing' and Yale's historic Beinecke Collection (Connecticut Public Radio/WNPR)

    March 23, 2023

    "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing," also known as the Black National Anthem, was adopted by the NAACP and prominently used as a rallying cry during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. This year, the song was performed at the Super Bowl by Waterbury native Sheryl Lee Ralph, an actress on “Abbott Elementary.” That’s not the song’s only tie to Connecticut.

  • By studying ancient residues, scholar finds clues of humanity’s past

    March 21, 2023

    The Peabody’s collections alone are an incredible resource but there’s so much more. I can consult rare primary sources at the Beinecke Library and Medical Historical Library, artifacts in the Yale Babylonian Collection and the Dura Europos collection at the Yale University Art Gallery. The university is uniting these collections so that scholars can easily work across them. That’s hugely important. You know how when we gaze at stars, we’re seeing a point of reference that originated thousands or millions of years ago? Yale’s collections are like human starlight. They capture and preserve evidence of how people lived hundreds and thousands of years ago. How they ate, drank, and healed themselves.

  • 8 Things To Do In New Haven: Complete Guide To Connecticut's Beloved City (The Travel)

    March 18, 2023

    For any book lover, library lover, or lover of anything historic or noteworthy, a trip to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library is an essential stop on a trip to New Haven. This is another museum of sorts, located within the Yale University complex. The library houses some truly rare books, manuscripts, and important literary artifacts. Some areas require special access, but there is ample space where the public can view them. The library is quite impressive to take in, even if the visitor is not a big literary buff. With frequent exhibits and lots to learn and see, this is a great place to visit when in the vicinity of Yale.

  • Infinity has a price

    March 1, 2023

    One of Yale’s most intriguing investments is a 375-year-old “perpetual” Dutch bond that still pays interest. It was issued by the Hoogheemraadschap Lekdijk Bovendams, a semi-public organization charged with maintaining the dike along the Lek river in the Netherlands. The water authority was founded in 1323; its successor still operates today, in the province of Utrecht, as the Stichtse Rijnlanden. This is where Yale Beinecke curator Timothy Young showed up in 2015 to collect twelve years of past interest payments, amounting to 132 euros. The authority was glad to pay. There are few entities in the world that can claim such a long, continuous history of good credit.

  • History, found. Richard Henry Greene was the first Black graduate of Yale College. Now, we can see him.

    March 1, 2023

    Nine years ago, a researcher at an auction house reminded Yale of a forgotten piece of its history: Yale College’s first Black graduate, Richard Henry Greene of the Class of 1857. We wrote about the rediscovery of Greene’s accomplishment at the time, but one thing was missing. We could find no pictures of Greene. Now, we have a face to go with the name, thanks to Greene’s great-great-granddaughter, who recently shared with the Yale Alumni Magazine two tintype images of him in his Civil War uniform. (He was an assistant surgeon in the US Navy during the war.) They are the only known images of Greene. What’s more, Greene’s descendant is able to shed a bit more light on the life of this pathbreaking alumnus.

  • In balance Noguchi's marble garden, at eye level.

    March 1, 2023

    Looking out at the sunken sculpture garden from the reading room of the Beinecke Library, a visitor sees what the artist, Isamu Noguchi, once described as a “landscape . . . purely that of the imagination.” Designed as an integral part of the Beinecke when it was built sixty years ago, The Garden (Pyramid, Sun, and Cube) is prized for both its form and its function.

  • Suffragist, Activist, Journalist: The Incredible Life of Jersey City’s Own Ella Barksdale Brown (The Hoboken Girl)

    February 27, 2023

    Her involvement with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Circle for Negro War Relief, the New Jersey Civil Rights Bureau, and the National Association of Colored Women led to her friendships with such pioneering civil rights leaders as W.E.B. Dubois, Booker T. Washington, Paul Robeson, and James Weldon Johnson. Archive boxes in Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library hold letters of well wishes, sympathy, news, and greetings between Ella and her illustrious peers.

  • In Memoriam: Howard R. Lamar, eminent historian and former Yale president

    February 24, 2023

    With the help of Archibald Hanna, the founding curator of the Yale Collection of Western Americana, Lamar mined the rich collection of Western research materials donated to Yale by philanthropist William Robertson Coe. The result, a dissertation on territorial politics (later published as “Dakota Territory, 1861–1889”), marked a turn from the then-dominant “frontier thesis” promulgated by historian Frederick Jackson Turner to a more realist look at the forces of capitalism, culture, and environment in the development of the American West.

  • In "What Could Have Been," New Haven's Past Haunts Its Present (Arts Paper)

    February 23, 2023

    The year is 2023. Just beyond East and Water Streets, the nation’s first Historically Black College is gearing up for its 192nd anniversary. Balloons bob in the breeze outside. Buildings reach into the blue New Haven sky. Gulls cry and cackle above the water, and sound like they are laughing. All day, the nation’s most prominent Black scholars file in and out of the campus buildings, holding a history that is nearly two centuries old. Except, their path to that day never happened. The year is 2023, and the space is just an ocean of asphalt and road, with a labyrinth of highway winding above. It didn’t have to be this way.

  • Doc Reveals The New Haven HBCU That Could Have Been (New Haven Independent)

    February 23, 2023

    On Wednesday night at the New Haven Museum, New Haveners had a chance to learn, together, about an uncomfortable truth: that, in 1831, New Haven’s white community leaders overwhelming rejected a serious proposal to found what would have been the first U.S. Black college, on the land where the interchange of I‑95 and I‑91 now exists. That story is told in What Could Have Been: America’s First HBCU, a short and powerful documentary written by Tubyez Cropper and Michael Morand of the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library and directed and edited by Cropper. Released in April 2022, the film on Wednesday night enjoyed a robust audience at the museum on Whitney Avenue dedicated to New Haven’s history.