Edith Wharton: Designing the Drawing Room

Edith Wharton: Designing the Drawing Room brings together both aspects of Wharton’s career. It explores the rules she defined in The Decoration of Houses and their application in her own homes, alongside her attention to design details in the handwritten manuscript of The Age of Innocence. This exhibit focuses on Wharton’s treatment of the drawing room, which provides a particularly rich context for understanding Wharton’s elite New York City society at the turn of the twentieth century and the role of women within it.

12 Portraits: Studies of Women at Yale

The portraits featured in this exhibit are drawn from a larger series of photographs by Tanya Marcuse (MFA ‘90). The project was commissioned by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in honor of the university-wide 50 Women at Yale 150 celebration, which aims “to showcase the depth of women’s contributions to Yale and to the world, to celebrate women at the university, and to inspire thoughtful conversation about the future of women at Yale and in the larger society.”

Go, Little Book: Portable Medieval Manuscripts from the Beinecke Library

Three portable medieval manuscripts, in celebration of the Medieval Academy of America’s meeting in New Haven, Connecticut, March 18-20, 2010

Date created: March 2010

Not Reading in Early Modern England

Drawing on the early modern and Osborn collections at the Beinecke Library, this exhibit showcases three genres of early modern study aids: the commonplace book, the epitome, and the index. 

“Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing”

The song “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” written by James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamond Johnson at the turn of the twentieth century, is often known today as the Black National Anthem and is sung in schools, churches, and civic settings throughout the United States.

This exhibit offers a look at the creation of the song, and at the lives and careers of the brothers who created it, through primary sources held in the Yale University Library. It is intended to provide teachers and students at the K-8 level with information about the history of the song, but also to serve as a primary-source teaching tool that can be tied into various aspects of the curriculum at the teacher’s discretion. Captions are often minimal so that the material may speak for itself.

Gather Out of Star-Dust: The Harlem Renaissance and The Beinecke Library

In an era that made Bessie Smith and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson household names, taught the world to Charleston, and introduced America’s favorite poet, Langston Hughes, Black American cultural and intellectual endeavor surged into the American mainstream. Hughes himself described the period most aptly, just after it ended, as the time “when the Negro was in vogue.”  Called a “movement” or “renaissance” by many of its own participants, and now most commonly remembered as the Harlem Renaissance, the period from about 1917 to about 1939 saw unprecedented achievements in Black American publication, performance, and visual arts. In the century since, this period has captured the American popular imagination with its style, music, and dance.

The Illustrated Word

An online exhibition curated by Yale University undergraduate students in the Spring 2006 course “Print Culture at the Fin de Siècle.”

Date created: 2006

Petrarch: The Power of the Word

Imprints: David Plowden, a Retrospective

An online exhibition of the photographer David Plowden who has documented vanishing landscapes and artifacts, forming an image of life in 20th century urban and rural America.

Date created: September 1997