Center Church on the Green and Beinecke Library welcome all to a special screening of the documentary film “What Could Have Been” about the proposal for America’s first HBCU in New Haven in 1831

The screening will be followed by a conversation and q&a session with film director Tubyez Cropper and narrator Charles Warner, Jr. They are both lifelong New Haveners and graduates of New Haven Public Schools. Cropper is a Community Engagement Program Manager at Beinecke and Warner is Chair of the Connecticut Freedom Trail.

The Beinecke Library and the New Haven Museum join forces again to celebrate Dictionary Day, with displays at the museum, 114 Whitney Avenue on Saturday, October 19, 12 noon-5pm, and the library, 121 Wall Street, Sunday, October 20, 1pm-4pm. This year, we are also joined by colleagues from the Noah Webster House & West Hartford Historical Society, who will be at the Beinecke Library to share items and insights from their Webster collections.

Business owner, abolitionist, service worker, father, community leader: John William Creed embodies the many strands of New Haven Black history in the 19th century.

His photograph, taken in 1863, was recently found in the Beinecke, included in the back of a photo album of the secret society, Skull and Bones, where Creed worked. The pencil inscription reads “Old Creed, janitor.” Since finding the image of Creed, several other photographs of Black custodians have been located in the Yale collections.

“Amnesia”—a work of interactive science fiction by Thomas M. Disch, published in 1986—was an early attempt to bring video games into the realm of literary art by translating a novelist’s script into a medium that readers could only experience by interacting with a computer.

In this talk, scholar and librarian Lily Todorinova will draw on her recent essay in Higher Education Quarterly that recontextualizes the Yale Report of 1828, a declarative statement about the purpose of higher education, issued at a crucial time in the development of American colleges. Todorinova argues that the report’s advocacy for classical liberal education should be understood alongside the racial concerns of its authors, some of whom were well-known colonizationists who viewed African American education as a threat to New Haven’s social and economic stability.