Libraries open to students on campus and across the globe (Yale Daily News)

September 3, 2020

Students studying remotely, though unable to use library spaces, have access to nearly all library materials through various services provided by the University. Once COVID-19 cases spiked in the spring, library staff began digitizing thousands of library resources that can be easily accessed online. They have scanned over 20,000 images in the last month from the Beinecke Library alone, according to Beinecke Director Edwin Schroeder.

"New to the world" Talking to Leonard Marcus '72, a scholar of children’s books.

September 1, 2020

After our May/June and July/August issues reported at length on the pandemic and dissected the brutality of racism, we at the Yale Alumni Magazine dearly wanted to deliver something more joyful. COVID-19, let alone racism, won’t disappear soon; we’ll be coming back to those subjects. But for September/October, we turned to children’s books. As Leonard Marcus ’72 told me—and we at the magazine have embraced the concept for this issue—“Children’s smiling is relevant to getting through a crisis.”

Lola Hayes and "Tone Pictures of the Negro in Music" (WNYC)

August 31, 2020

The November 29th program considered "the musical setting of poems by Langston Hughes and included the bard himself. "Langston Hughes was guest of honor and punctuated his interview with a reading from his opera Troubled Island."[2] The original Hughes-annotated WNYC script is below.

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.

The U.S. hid Hiroshima’s human suffering. Then John Hersey went to Japan. (Washington Post)

August 6, 2020

In the fall of 1945, a few months after the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, New Yorker writer John Hersey went to lunch with his editor, the legendary William Shawn, to discuss story ideas. One of them would change the world. Hersey and Shawn suspected that the U.S. government’s wartime propaganda machine had covered up the human suffering of the atomic bombs that leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki 75 years ago this month. Pictures from Japan showed destroyed buildings and decimated neighborhoods, but little was known about the human toll, especially from radiation.

1917 NAACP Silent Protest Parade, Fifth Avenue, New York City

July 26, 2020

The Older Frederick Douglass Revealed In Yale's Newly Acquired Collection Of Family Scrapbooks (WNPR)

July 13, 2020

Yale historian David Blight says when he first saw a collection of family scrapbooks of the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass, he was astonished. Blight had been fascinated by Frederick Douglass all of his life. He’d written a book and edited autobiographies about the escaped slave who became the greatest orator of his day. But the scrapbooks offered new insights into Douglass’ life and eventually inspired Blight’s 2018 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. The materials belonged to a collector, Dr. Walter Evans, and have recently been acquired by Yale’s Beinecke Library. Connecticut Public Radio’s Morning Edition host, Diane Orson, spoke with David Blight.

SAA Fellow: Michael Rush (SAA)

July 7, 2020

Michael Rush, assistant head of the Manuscript Unit in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, will be inducted as a 2020 Fellow of the Society of American Archivists (SAA). The distinction of Fellow is the highest honor bestowed on individuals by SAA and is awarded for outstanding contributions to the archives profession.

Frederick Douglass, Seen Up Close (New York Times)

July 3, 2020

Yale has acquired a renowned private collection relating to the abolitionist and orator, including rarely seen family scrapbooks that offer a window onto his complicated private life.