My favorite kinds of materials in archives are the ones we might describe colloquially as “well-loved,” where you can tell that someone—or perhaps more than one someone—spent hours writing, reading, and thinking about a topic.
W&M Libraries Blog
manuscripts
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March 29, 2021Posted in: Special Collections -
November 11, 2020Posted in: Special CollectionsWhen I arrived at the Special Collections Research Center this past July 29th for my first day of research into William & Mary’s collection of Maury Family Papers, I felt in my bones that I was in store for a fascinating week of discovery. My hunch proved true. -
February 27, 2019Posted in: Special CollectionsLandrum passport, Grace Warren Landrum Papers -
December 4, 2018Posted in: Special CollectionsAs an archival processor in Swem’s Special Collections Research Center, Mariaelena DiBenigno, PhD candidate, has been reading a lot about World War II. -
May 9, 2018Posted in: Special CollectionsThe quotation in the title of this post is from a letter about an 1890 revolution in Buenos Aires known as The Revolution of the Park. -
January 17, 2018Posted in: Special CollectionsOn the night of Sunday October 16, 1859, twenty-three men emerged from the woods surrounding the town of Harpers Ferry, which sits at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers in present-day West Virginia. Armed with rifles and pikes, their mission was to successfully secure the large cache of weapons kept in the town’s armory and expel the U.S. military from the area. -
November 22, 2017Posted in: Special CollectionsDown 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, 2017Posted in: Special CollectionsThis 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. -
August 30, 2017Posted in: Special CollectionsIn 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. -
July 5, 2017Posted in: Special CollectionsWhat is the difference between printing and publishing? This is perhaps something many of us don’t think about, but there is a difference. After all, we now speak of things being published on the internet, so there is not an inherent relationship between print and publication, at least not anymore. Two documents from the Thomas G.