All are invited to a special display in the Beinecke Library reading room (121 Wall Street, New Haven) to mark Constitution Day, September 15, 2024, from 1pm to 4pm. This event commemorates the 237th anniversary of the signing of the United States Constitution by the members of the Constitutional Convention on September 17, 1787, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Shining Light on Truth presents evidence of the essential role of enslaved and free Black people in New Haven and at Yale. It celebrates Black resistance and community building. And it illuminates knowledge kept alive in archives and memory for more than three centuries—even when the dominant culture chose to ignore, bury, or forget.
“Amnesia”—a work of interactive science fiction by Thomas M. Disch, published in 1986—was an early attempt to bring video games into the realm of literary art by translating a novelist’s script into a medium that readers could only experience by interacting with a computer.
In this talk, scholar and librarian Lily Todorinova will draw on her recent essay in Higher Education Quarterly that recontextualizes the Yale Report of 1828, a declarative statement about the purpose of higher education, issued at a crucial time in the development of American colleges. Todorinova argues that the report’s advocacy for classical liberal education should be understood alongside the racial concerns of its authors, some of whom were well-known colonizationists who viewed African American education as a threat to New Haven’s social and economic stability.
An introductory tour of the Beinecke Library, its mission, history, architecture, collections, and services, led by a library staff or student guide. Tours last approximately 45 minutes. Reservations are not required. Note: see the library’s website (beinecke.library.yale.edu) for current public health protocols and other important visitor information.
Marking the forty-fifth anniversary of the first videotaping by the Holocaust Survivors Film Project, a grassroots New Haven community initiative that evolved into the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, “In the First Person” will be the first large-scale public exhibition of footage from this groundbreaking collection. Powerful excerpts from nineteen video testimonies presents the experiences of survivors and witnesses to the atrocities and genocide committed by Nazi Germany and its collaborators.
To mark Independence Day 2024, the Beinecke Library continues its tradition of public readings on July 5 at 4pm on the library mezzanine of the Declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776, and of the oration by Frederick Douglass given on July 5, 1852, in Rochester, New York, in which he asked: “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?”
Collective Consciousness Theatre and Kulturally LIT have partnered to present a reading of James Baldwin’s play Blues for Mister Charlie at the Beinecke Library this Summer.
An introductory tour of the Beinecke Library, its mission, history, architecture, collections, and services, led by a library staff or student guide. Tours last approximately 45 minutes. Reservations are not required. Note: see the library’s website (beinecke.library.yale.edu) for current public health protocols and other important visitor information.
