A daguerreotype of a young Baltimore merchant, the first victim of a bitter, homicidal political era, resides in the Special Collections Research Center in Swem Library—a ghostly message from the past.
New Material
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May 28, 2019 -
November 22, 2017Down in the belly of Special Collections sits a mysterious blue velvet box. Its contents are simultaneously mundane and bizarre, important for the study of language in Spain, and remarkably unremarkable. The box bears the inscription Matxin de Zalbaren Gutuna, La Carta de Machin de Zalba, 1416. What is it? Why do we have it? What makes it both special and ordinary? -
November 13, 2017This past spring Sharon Summers, Charles W. Scandrett, Janet S. Hunt, Barbara J. Kaufman, and Sandra S. Ellender generously donated the Civil War diary of Henry Alexander Scandrett to the Special Collections Research Center. Scandrett fought for the Union during the war and recorded his experiences in the pocket diary. -
October 25, 2017As a child of the 90's, I'm pretty familiar with trading cards. Pokémon and Yugio cards were all the rage throughout my younger years, but little did I know that trading cards have a much richer history than keeping myself occupied throughout elementary school. -
August 30, 2017In 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 (Mss. -
June 14, 2017 -
May 31, 2017It 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. -
March 29, 2017The 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. -
March 22, 2017The 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. -
February 15, 2017On February 11 the exhibition, Written in Confidence: The Unpublished Letters of James Monroe, opened to the public.