Americana

The Beinecke Library’s major strengths in general Americana span the colonial period to the middle of the nineteenth century, complemented by important collections of twentieth century writers and photographers.

  • Hoods in My Hymnal (Oxford American)

    August 25, 2020

    Ishould’ve known the Ku Klux Klan would pop up. Not only was I in Tennessee, where racism punctuates our historical narrative, but this was Lawrenceburg, some scant eighteen miles from Pulaski, the Klan’s birthplace. And the Lawrenceburg folks had been some of the first to join in terrorizing African Americans, carpetbaggers, and scalawags. Still, sitting in the Crockett Theater on a prickly velvet seat surrounded by 1,049 Southern gospel quartet fans, I thought the Klan would stay safely out of this essay. Yes, I thought I could avoid talking about racism even knowing that the “Southern” in Southern gospel is a euphemism for white. The librarian had ended that naiveté. One Google search later, I found my first evidence he was right: a piece of digitized sheet music in Yale’s Beinecke Library.

  • “What, To The American Slave, Is Your Fourth Of July?” (New Haven Independent)

    July 3, 2020

    Babz Rawls-Ivy, Erik Clemons, David Blight, and Walter O. Evans kept a Fourth of July tradition going — by reading Frederick Douglass’s 1852 Oration, “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July.” Yale’s Beinecke Library traditionally holds a public reading of the letter on Independence Day. Due to Covid-19, this year Beinecke recorded local leaders doing the reading at the Institute Library, then put it on Youtube, in installments.

  • Belonging at Yale – Focus on Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month

    May 1, 2020

    Beinecke and other Yale Library special collections steward important collections of contemporary Asian American authors, creators, and communities. Illustrative highlights in the Yale Collection of American Literature include archives of poets such as Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge (2021 winner of the Bollingen Prize) and Arthur Sze – see Contemporary Asian American Poets: A Top Ten List for links and ideas on searching the collections. Recent additions to the Yale Collection of Western Americana include Japanese American family photo albums such as those compiled by Komao and Eiko Baba that include more than 550 photographs documenting their lives, relatives, and acquaintances from 1917 into the 1990s. There are similar holdings for the Torii, Nobuyama, Matsukane, and Ichiyasu families. Several Yale records document Japanese American incarceration during World War II. The guide to those records highlights the important work by the Reparative Archival Description Working Group to provide guidance on the remediation of the description of these collections.

  • Frederick Douglass Railed Against Economic Inequality (Jacobin)

    February 20, 2020

    No single document, of course, can solve the riddle of Douglass’s complex political ideas. But while doing research at Yale’s Beinecke Library, I came across two articles in the 1856 Frederick Douglass’ Paper that have not, to my knowledge, been reprinted or digitized since. (Most of Douglass’s journalistic writing remains unpublished, though a forthcoming volume in the Frederick Douglass Papers should help address that problem.) Nor have they been excerpted, quoted, or discussed at length in the extensive scholarship on Douglass.