With Halloween right around the corner, here at the Clements Library our thoughts have turned to all things spooky that send shivers up your spine. While perhaps not as sinister as ghouls and goblins, the bare human skeleton has a disconcerting effect all its own that...
Post by Brian L. Dunnigan, Associate Director and Curator of MapsThe Clements Library is known to historians and scholars of other disciplines as a primary source repository of “Americana” dating between 1492 and 1900. For all too many members of the history and the...
Post by Clayton Lewis, Curator of GraphicsA preoccupation with self-image swept across society when a new technology enabled a flood of inexpensive portrait photographs. The enthusiastic gathering of photographs of friends and public figures and the sharing of them in...
Post by Jayne Ptolemy, Manuscripts Curatorial AssistantIn 1880 William Brunton, a Unitarian minister from Boston, began composing a special diary that recorded the everyday activities of his young son, Herbert, whom he affectionately called Bertie. “It is a work...
Post by Jayne Ptolemy, Manuscripts Curatorial AssistantIn mid-July 1860, travelling salesman George P. Slade wrote a letter to a female correspondent about his experiences plying his trade in the Midwest. In his attempts to sell fruit trees, he covered a great deal of...
Post by Clayton Lewis, Curator of Graphic MaterialsDuring fall semester 2014, University of Michigan Professor Martha Jones’s African American Women’s History class embarked on a detailed examination of a pair of photograph albums from the Clements Library...
Archives specialize in documenting change over time, but the holdings at the William L. Clements Library also reveal how some things remain stable through the years, including the excitement surrounding Christmas morning. On December 20th, 1840, Edward H....
Post by Clayton Lewis, Curator of Graphic MaterialsDavid Claypoole Johnston. Col. Pluck. [Boston?] : Pendleton, lithographer/publisher, circa 1825.A pair of recently acquired prints point to a little known episode in American military history and pose questions about...
The Manuscripts Division at the Clements Library is proud to announce the completion of a National Historical Publications and Records Commission’s (NHPRC) processing grant, which began in 2011. Former Curator of Manuscripts Barbara DeWolfe, current Curator...
