News

Selected stories from the Beinecke Library, YaleNews, and external media outlets (the latter noted by source in parentheses after title of article).

  • The Polymathic Mind of John Ruskin (Hyperallergic)

    November 30, 2019

    If Walt Whitman, whose bicentenary all New York has been celebrating, can come across as absolutely contemporary — a big-bearded hipster tipping back Pabst Blue Ribbons and spouting poetry in some Brooklyn dive bar — John Ruskin, also 200 this year, seems stubbornly and remotely Victorian. The Yale Center for British Art’s Unto This Last: Two Hundred Years of John Ruskin aims to assert Ruskin’s contemporary relevance while firmly retaining his 19th-century context.

  • ‘Pass the pickled eel’: a guide to an 18th-century Thanksgiving

    November 25, 2019

    Don’t want to bother with brines, barbecues, glazes, or boiling oil? Consider turning back the clock to simpler times when dining occurred over candlelight, ovens were wood fired, and it was a safe bet that nobody around the table had recently bathed. That’s right: Transport your friends and family to the 18th century for a truly memorable Thanksgiving feast. Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library has resources to guide your gastronomic time travel.

  • Happiness Lab Episode 10: Making the Grade (Podcast)

    November 20, 2019

    From school grades to fitness trackers, we're all being ranked and rated on a daily basis. This is having a huge impact on our happiness and preventing us from living our lives to the fullest. Can giving up on grades radically improve our well-being? This episode includes Laurie Santos' visit to the Beinecke Library to read the diaries of Ezra Stiles from 1785.

  • Listening to Will Wilson’s Portraits (Yale Herald)

    November 18, 2019

    Today wet-plate collodion photography is, unsurprisingly, scarce, enabling the materialization of Wilson’s three figures in PNGB to serve as a bait-and-switch: their initial perceived age soon deteriorates into their present reality. Unlike in Curtis’s images, each subject has chosen their own pose and clothing, has written their own caption, and has been gifted the aluminum plate — the reproductions we see in the YUAG exhibition are archival pigment prints from a high-resolution scan of the original, on loan from the Beinecke. The photographic exchange is literal, as is Wilson’s reinscription of Indigenous culture, both shifting the seat of influence towards equality.

  • How one man’s family photo archive led to a global ‘family’ album

    November 15, 2019

    "Yale has some of the most amazing archival collections in the world, along with outstanding librarians and archivists,” said Harris. “I want my students to see the relationship between their own family narratives and the public record. I love being a conduit so that people can see the potentiality of themselves as architects of the future, and we begin by valuing the past.”

  • ‘Shape, contour, and respect’ — 200 years of indigenous art on view at Yale

    November 11, 2019

    It is the first exhibition to display indigenous works from the Yale Art Gallery, the Peabody Museum of Natural History, and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The show features basketry, beadwork, drawings, photographs, pottery, textiles, and wooden carvings from the early 19th century to the present day, representing more than 40 indigenous nations. It presents the objects as works of art, not historical artifacts.

  • Ray Clemens and Diane Ducharme on the greatest book collector of all time (The Biblio File podcast)

    November 10, 2019

    Earlier this year the Beinecke Library hosted an exhibition entitled Bibliomania; or Book Madness: A Bibliographical Romance. It takes its name from the history of “arrant book-lovers” written by Thomas Frognall Dibdin. "It follows these lovers of the book through four case studies, observing the powerful and often unexpected relationships of books with their readers, owners, authors, collectors, and creators."

  • YUAG Walks The Walk (New Haven Independent)

    November 8, 2019

    Curated by Katherine Nova McCleary (Little Shell Chippewa–Cree), B.A. 2018, and Leah Tamar Shrestinian, B.A. 2018, with Joseph Zordan (Bad River Ojibwe), B.A. 2019, Place, Nations, Generations, Beings uses pieces from the Yale University Art Gallery, the Peabody Museum of Natural History, and the Beinecke Rare Books Library to dive incisively into the complex and devastating history of North American indigenous people.

  • In All Their Glory (zip06)

    November 6, 2019

    McCleary points to a photo from The Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, taken by Diné Navajo photographer Will Wilson of a woman, titled “Casey Camp Horinek, Citizen Ponca Tribe of Oklahoma, “Zhutni,” Tribal Councilwoman, Leader of Scalp Dance Society, Sundancer, Delegate to UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, Matriarch of Wonderful Family (Grandmother, Companion, Mother, Sister), Defender of Mother Earth.” Wilson’s subjects wrote their own labels. “The photographer allows folks to choose how want to dress and pose, and enabled them to write their own caption,” McCleary says.

  • ‘From East to West’ traces 170-year history of Yale’s Chinese Collection

    November 1, 2019

    In June 1849, the Yale College librarian received a three-month-old letter from Canton, China, informing him that the sender, an American missionary printer named Samuel Wells Williams, had purchased six Chinese classical texts for the Yale library. The handstitched texts, about 90 volumes in all, arrived in August at a cost of $9.50 plus an extra dollar for freight. The newly arrived books marked the beginning of Yale Library’s Chinese Collection, the first such collection at an American university and now one of the largest and most renowned Chinese-language collections outside China.

  • Into the archives! (Yale Daily News)

    October 31, 2019

    "Last spring, I sat in the Beinecke Library’s Reading Room, poring over a manuscript copy of Hannah Crafts’ “The Bondwoman’s Narrative.” I saw the meandering cursive writings on the page and where she must have pressed her pen harder into the paper, creating blotches of ink. I was writing a paper about the novel for my English seminar and had read the version I’d gotten from the Yale Bookstore for class. But seeing the manuscript version brought the text alive in a way it hadn’t been before; I felt closer to the author, closer to the words."