In 1849, a mob of white supremacists eager to seize anti-slavery mailings attacked the US Post Office in Pendleton, South Carolina. They burned leaflets and letters in a bonfire on the village green to make clear their stance against incendiary ideas. This essay explores the context of these events by considering an initial spate of mailings that…[Read more]

This entry examines the elasticity of the term “archive” and the tensions that surround its ever-expanding usage as a keyword across disciplines. As a term that connotes a place, a practice, a profession, and, with the archival turn, a metaphor, archive/s offers an opportunity to think across the institutional contexts that define the work of sch…[Read more]

In a hapless attempt to explain how a man living on unemployment who reportedly has no cell
phone, computer or clue could have received a clear majority win in the race for the Democratic
Party’s U.S. Senate nomination, Democratic state Sen. Robert Ford opined that perhaps a
disproportionate number of the black electorate voted for Alvin G…[Read more]

This GIF chronicles the movements of a runaway slave New England through the publication of his first memoir. He was forced to resettle and wander through Connecticut and Rhode Island because of poverty and security. He is most associated with Litchfield, CT and New Haven CT where he spent the most time and which figure most prominently in his…[Read more]

Both the friends and enemies of Brander Matthews attested to his sociability. Clayton Hamilton wrote in 1929 that Matthews had a “genius in the gentle art of friendship.” (86). Nicholas Murray Butler, President of Columbia University, observed that “Matthews knew everybody and everybody knew him” and Mark Twain even jokingly inscribed one of his…[Read more]

SHORT-TERM
library fellowships are quite likely the single most common kind of national research grant given out to scholars in the humanities. The Massachusetts
Historical Society alone gives out twenty short-term library fellowships. Almost every major private university and scholarly library (including the Huntington, Newberry, Yale’s B…[Read more]

This essay places at the center of twentieth-century African American knowledge production the librarians and collectors who mapped blackness as a capacious site of inquiry in the decades before Black Studies. Between 1900 and 1950, they created infrastructures for inquiry into black history and culture through the production of bibliographies,…[Read more]

Entering Howard University’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, one still passes through the “catalog room,” an antechamber filled with rows of card drawers. Inaugurated in 1930 by librarian Dorothy Porter, this catalog of the “Negro Collection” served for much of the twentieth century as one of the only extant portals to African American…[Read more]