⚠️ Some library services will be disrupted this month as we upgrade our technology platform. Check status to plan ahead.
Join us for an introduction to preserving your own archives and to the digitization tools available in the New Haven Memory Lab. Jennifer Coggins, Beinecke Library’s Community Engagement Archivist, will cover basics of saving and sharing your personal archives and ways that digitization – creating digital copies – can be useful in the process.
Join Beinecke Library and New Haven Free Public Library in celebrating the launch of the New Haven Memory Lab – a digitization station to help New Haveners preserve and share their personal, family, and organization histories. Located in Ives Squared at the Ives Main Library, the Lab is provided as part of the Beinecke’s New Haven Community Archives Support program.
To mark Independence Day 2025, the Beinecke Library continues its tradition of public readings on July 7 at 4pm on the library mezzanine of the Declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776, and of the oration by Frederick Douglass given on July 5, 1852, in Rochester, New York, in which he asked: “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?”
Whitman on Walls! (WoW!) is a hybrid project juxtaposing film and live performance in response to New York poet Walt Whitman’s radical “Song of Myself.” Devised by Compagnia de’ Colombari Director Karin Coonrod in response to performance cancellations in 2020, Colombari’s original production of MORE OR LESS I AM, based on Whitman’s iconic poem, was transformed into seven short films featuring 50 performers from around the world.
A new exhibition to be installed at the Schwarzman Center, Shining Light on Truth: Black at Yale & in New Haven Lives at Yale & in New Haven, will illuminate ongoing research that recovers the essential role of Black people throughout Yale and New Haven history. The exhibition puts back at the center of local storytelling people who have always been central to local history. It celebrates Black community building, resistance, and resilience on campus and in New Haven.
“Flying Bird’s Diary” is a multi-award winning short 2024 film written by Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel (Mohegan) and directed by Madeline Sayet (Mohegan), based on the life of Fidelia Fielding, AKA Flying Bird (1827-1908), last speaker of the Mohegan language and a member of the CT Women’s Hall of Fame.
Celebrating the life of Yale’s Willie Ruff in conjunction with Yale School of Music’s Willie Ruff Memorial Concert. The exhibit features oral histories recorded by Willie speaking with other legendary Black musicians and composers. These oral histories are part of the Gilmore Music Library’s Oral History of American Music project and is presented in partnership with the Yale School of Music’s March 29th Willie Ruff Memorial Concert.
“SENSATION!” is an exhibit about your body: your eyes, ears, nostrils, skin, and tongue. It’s also about that strange, seductive sixth sense, your imagination. How does the news touch your imagination to make your body feel?
Today, “sensational” writing is an exaggerated, titillating representation of sex or crime. In the 1800s, though, “sensational” simply meant creating a strong impact on the senses. When we recover this historical definition, many newspapers begin to seem sensational.
Please join us to celebrate the opening of “SENSATION! Reported Bodies in 19th-Century American Media”, on view in the Sterling Library Exhibition Corridor from April 28 to September 28, 2025. Curator Anne Gross ‘25 will provide a tour of this exciting exhibition and will be available for questions and conversation over light refreshments afterwards. No registration is necessary.
Nora Krug is a German-American author of illustrated non-fiction books on the subjects of history, war, and memory. Her graphic memoir, “Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home,” (winner of the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award, among others) confronts WWII and Krug’s own German family history under the Nazi regime; her illustrated adaptation of Timothy Snyder’s “On Tyranny” was published in 2021; and last year, she published “Diaries of War,” a work of graphic journalism on Russia’s renewed invasion into Ukraine.
