Clements Library announces 2023-2024 Fellowships
The William L. Clements Library is delighted to announce 2023-2024 visiting research fellowship cohort: With 26 awards, this cohort will be the largest in the fellowship program’s history. Awardees include postdoctoral scholars and faculty from both public and private institutions, graduate students, independent researchers, public historians, and curators. The library will support long-term, short-term and week-long residential fellows over the coming academic year, and will also fund remote...
Stitched Together
As a mother to a kindergartener, I have gotten quite adept over the past few years mending a variety of things. I have sewn patches on torn pants, stitched together a jacket mysteriously sliced open on a slide, taped ripped pages in favorite books, and even once tried to figure out how to put a peel back on a banana when my son got offended that it was ‘naked’. Which is to say that caregivers get creative. I am also a historian and a curator, working with the remarkable collections at the...
New Manuscript Finding Aids: Winter 2023 Part One
Collections of manuscripts continue to be added to the Clements Library’s holdings to benefit the learning and research of our community of users. The most recent batch of new finding aids includes several thematic groupings, underscoring how archival collections speak to each other and work together to deepen our collective knowledge about the past. * * *Children and Education Materials that demonstrate educational practices have much to tell us about how children learned, what Americans...
2023-2024 William L. Clements Library Research Fellowships: Applications Now Open
The William L. Clements Library invites applications for week-long, short-term, long-term, and digital fellowships to support research in the library’s rich collections. Our Fellowships Program enables researchers at all levels of study to make use of our world-class materials related to the history and culture of America and the Caribbean before 1900. We are proud that the Clements will continue to prioritize research support by offering four new fellowship opportunities in addition to those...
Breaking into the Past: An Instance of Code Cracking in the Tinder Postcard Collection
Claire Danna is the current Joyce Bonk Fellow at the Clements library and a graduate student at the University of Michigan’s School of Information. Their primary work at the Clements has involved scanning the Tinder postcard collection and helping to shape the library’s first Zooniverse project. She has also presented on aspects of the collection and its connection to U.S. postal history in the Clements Library Bookworm webinar series.The David V. Tinder real photo postcard collection provides...
The 1893-1894 Tour of Linus, “The $100,000 Oregon Wonder” Horse
In October 2021, the Clements Library obtained a cabinet card portrait of one of the famous late-19th-century "Oregon Long-Haired Wonder" horses. It is a beautiful photograph, showing this chestnut-colored Clydesdale with his hair braided and done up with ribbons, standing beside a currently unidentified man. On its own, this photograph has something valuable to say about horses and their appearance in the late-19th-century United States, the value of unusual animals to entrepreneurs and...
New Graphics Finding Aids: Fall 2022
The Clements Library is pleased to announce that the following collections in our Graphics Division are now described online and may be requested for use in the reading room. The Clements Library is now open for research by appointment. All researchers are encouraged to contact Clements Library staff for guidance on how to complete their research with both digital and physical materials. Please contact us with any questions about your research. * * * Wella and Pet Anderson...
New Manuscript Finding Aids: Summer 2022
The William L. Clements Library continues to acquire and process collections to help tell the diverse story of the American past. The 43 new finding aids listed below provide a sampling of these efforts. Here you will find manuscript materials that speak to women’s lives -- from a Confederate woman’s diary, a hair album with clippings from friends and family -- or collections that speak to women’s relationships to music, translations, or friendship. Several recent acquisitions expand our...
Clements Library Announces 2022-2023 Fellowship Awards
From June 2022 to May 2023, the William L. Clements Library will host 22 recipients of visiting research fellowship awards. These awards have been made possible by the generosity of contributing foundations and individual donors, whose gifts enable the library to bring scholars from around the world to Ann Arbor. We are delighted to share the diverse and exciting range of supported projects that may eventually result in dissertations, books, articles, conference presentations, and even podcast...
Announcing the 2022-2023 Inaugural ATBL-Clements Transatlantic Fellow!
The William L. Clements Library has partnered with the American Trust for the British Library (ATBL) to become part of a unique set of fellowship opportunities, beginning with the 2022-2023 fellowship cycle. The newly-established ATBL-Clements Library Transatlantic Fellowship will support research projects promising to place the collections of both institutions in dialogue. By examining a topic through the lens of multiple, trans-Atlantic collections, researchers can illuminate less-examined...