"From my hand": A letter written by King William III enters Swem Library Special Collections
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On the fourth of July, 1698, an expedition set out from Scotland. The small group of ships set a course for the Isthmus of Darien in modern-day Panama, intending to create a Scottish colony that would be an overland trading link between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans--a seventeenth-century Panama Canal.
Printing Anti-Spanish Propaganda for European Purposes
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It may seem like Spanish empire in the Americas would have little to do with European politics, but we should not assume that the Atlantic world of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was any less global than our own.
Williamsburg before Williamsburg
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William & Mary was founded before the City of Williamsburg, the former in 1693, the latter in 1699. The original of this map, however, was made at some point before 1683, and was used by the Lords of Trade and Foreign Plantations in London in their administration of the colonies. It shows the area where Williamsburg and the College would be built, at least a decade before they came into being.
The ties that bind: How the decay of a binding shows its construction
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Swem Library has a great many books in very bad bindings. Most modern books, for instance, are held together only by glue at the spine. Even modern hardcovers have the same binding. Other than the hard shell surrounding them, they are in all other respects exactly the same as a cheap paperback. In the past, however, bindings were much stronger.
Remembering World War I
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On April 6, 1917 the United States entered World War I, then known as the Great War. A century later, objects in Special Collections reveal memories of Americans' lives at wartime. Among the variety of materials available for research are a collection of Red Cross posters, a veteran's scrapbook, and a nurse's correspondence with loved ones.
The World Before QWERTY
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Can you type without looking at the keyboard? This used to be a skill taught to people who wanted secretarial or clerical jobs. Now of course many of us type quickly because we use computers on a daily basis. But what about the predecessor to the keyboard we know? This is it – a typecase, filled with individual letters which had to be assembled by hand to create anything which needed to be printed.
Believable Lies
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The island of Taiwan, once commonly known in the West by the Portuguese name of Formosa, has recently resurfaced in the news in connection with the One China policy. In the past it was also a subject of interest, although information coming from Taiwan itself was often scarce.
Propaganda and the Beginnings and End of Spanish America
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The arrival of Europeans in the Americas was an event of global importance, and its effect on the people already living here was devastating. That is why in 1552 the Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas wrote a book that he called Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias, or A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies.
Jennie's Search for "More to Life" in Maurice Sendak's "Higglety Pigglety Pop!"
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Most of us, if we recognize the name Maurice Sendak, probably think of him as the man who wrote and illustrated the beloved children's book "Where the Wild Things Are," published in 1963. Yet what some may not know is that Sendak wrote (and illustrated) much more than that one popular book.
SCRC's Exhibition Now Open at the Muscarelle Museum of Art
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In December 2016, David B. Wolf, a New York attorney and collector interested in John Marshall and his biography of George Washington, donated three letters that join an existing collection of John Marshall Papers.
The Research Behind a Catalog Record: Map of Coal Lands in Raleigh County, West Virginia
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An interesting old map, recently cataloged and made accessible in the Earl Gregg Swem Library Rare Books Collection at SCRC, bears witness to the transformation of West Virginia from a region of "breathtaking scenery and lavish virgin forests" to a land where "mountain farming culture was defeated by the ever widening grasp of speculators and absentees" (Barbara Rasmussen.
"Sea Fables Explained"
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Imagine, if you will, a creature with a lower body made of the skin and scales of a carp, a human-like upper body with prominent ribs, "thin and scraggy" arms, "skeleton-like" fingers, the head of a small monkey, and the teeth of a catfish. Sound familiar?
Building a Library in the Seventeenth (and the Twenty-first) Century
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Many of the books in Swem Library's Special Collections have been gifted by individual donors who have themselves built up their own private collections. This practice of endowing educational institutions with the tools of study has long antecedents, but in the seventeenth century a librarian actually laid out a plan for building a library and advocated wider access for scholars.
Is Smaller Better? (When talking about textbooks)
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The University of Leiden in the Netherlands, founded in 1575, is the country's oldest; it is also now one of the study abroad opportunities offered to William & Mary students. In the first three quarters of a century annual enrollments showed a four-fold rise, with the result being that the Elsevier family in Leiden, who already operated a printing press, decided to get into the early modern equivalent of the text-book industry.
"A Christmas present of real and enduring value" : Ferdinand Seidel's Natural History with 179 Copperplate Engravings.
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"Buy 5 Get 1 Free" - that is how the publisher advertised the 1805 edition of Ferdinand Seidel's Naturhistorisches Kupferwerk : mit erklarendem Texte nach Buffon, acquired this fall by Special Collections.
"'Twas the Night Before Christmas"
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Everyone knows these famous lines even if the rest of the poems escapes them. "A Visit from St. Nicholas," more popularly known as The Night before Christmas, was written in 1823 by Clement C. Moore (1779-1863) and is a staple in many families' holiday traditions. But what accounts for the poem's enduring popularity?
Lasting Impressions: Printing from the Fifteenth Century to Today
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In the basement of Swem Library is a room used mostly for storage. Along two walls are machines and wooden cases full of drawers. The machines are printing presses and the cases are filled with type – individual letters cast in metal, designed to be set by hand and printed on the machines.
100 Years of Student History
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If you're a senior at the College, you may know the Colonial Echo through their emails reminding you to get your portrait taken.
Art in the SCRC Collections
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SCRC has an active instruction schedule during the academic year, as professors from all departments bring their students in to see the amazing materials housed in Special Collections. However, many may be surprised to learn that SCRC houses objects, texts, and ephemera related to virtually every discipline.This week included a reminder of how rich a collection we have related to the arts.
Ramsey Stereograph Collection Grants the Illusion of a 3-Dimensional Trip through Time
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This year Kelvin W. Ramsey (Class of 1979), recently donated an additional 159 items to his collection of stereographs and magic lantern slides housed at the Special Collections Research Center.