Libraries in the Library: How We Know What Early Virginians Liked to Read
Do you keep your receipts? Special Collections has a good number of receipts and these seemingly mundane documents can provide valuable insight into early Virginians’ lives.
Do you keep your receipts? Special Collections has a good number of receipts and these seemingly mundane documents can provide valuable insight into early Virginians’ lives.
L'abbé Antoine Banier and his Mythology are unique in the position they take on the historical nature of myth and legend. Banier was a proponent of euhemerism, a school of thought that claims myths, legends, and folklore all have real historical basis.
Joe Catanzaro explains a pivotal moment in cartography captured in our collections.
Abolition was not a radical nineteenth century idea that miraculously emerged from the political ideologies of the Age of Revolution. A 1767 address from Arthur Lee of Virginia serves as a reminder that the abolitionist movement did not have a linear trajectory, and that individuals protested slavery throughout its existence.
Before Jon Stewart ’84 and Trevor Noah, before Stephen Colbert and John Oliver and Saturday Night Live, before Tina Fey and Samantha Bee and Andrea Gibson, there was George Jean Nathan and H.L. Mencken. A slice of the Nathan/Mencken story lives in the Special Collections Research Center at Swem Library.
During World War II, thousands of Italian prisoners of war were sent to the United States to help fill labor shortages created by the war.
On August 23, 1812, Robert Stevens wrote to his parents in Rhode Island from New Orleans in the aftermath of a hurricane, “a Scene of horror & devastation.”
In early 1792, Thomas Dobson, a prominent Philadelphia printer in the middle of printing the first American edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, took a much smaller commission: William Currie’s An Historical Account of the Climates and Diseases of the United States of America.
Recent visitors to Swem Library will have noticed a change in the exhibit facing the front entrance.