On May 3, the Radcliffe Institute celebrated the renovation and reopening of Fay House with a ribbon-cutting ceremony. Fay House has been at the heart of Radcliffe College, and now the Institute, since its very earliest days.
To celebrate librarians, we are highlighting the papers of Jane Maud Campbell. This small Schlesinger collection is available entirely online through Harvard's Open Collections Program.
While working on collections at the Schlesinger Library, archivists often get to experience the life journey a person or family takes as they go from birth to death with all that happens in between.
Schlesinger Library had a visit from Carme Ruscalleda, owner/founder/chef of the eponymous restaurant Sant Pau and head chef Jerome Quilbeuf, who are at Harvard to lecture on caramelization in Harvard's Science and Cooking course, came to get acquainted with Schlesinger's rich historical resources on food.
Out of the blue, in March, came a call from the great-granddaughter of Edna Lamprey Stantial. Stantial was for many years archivist of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Her name is familiar to those who study that era, but there is no significant collection of her papers anywhere. That made the answer to the question of whether Schlesinger Library would be interested in Stantial's papers easy—yes!
Students arriving at Harvard this year with smart phones in hand might not consider how students of yesteryear communicated. In 1914, a Radcliffe student would have read the following in the Red Book (Radcliffe's student handbook).
The fight for woman suffrage was long and hard-fought by several generations of women. In 1902 Susan B. Anthony inscribed the following to her fellow suffragist Caroline H. Dall in the just completed volume four of The History of Woman Suffrage:
Radcliffe student carrying on in Hopper's footsteps with a later version of the Mark computer
Grace Murray Hopper ("Amazing Grace") was interviewed in Schlesinger Library's Women in the Federal Government Oral History Project. Hopper relates in the interview that as a child she loved taking things like clocks apart and trying to put them back together.
One of the most powerful documents to come across the Schlesinger Library conservation bench is this single-leaf manuscript from the recently processed Additional Papers of the Poor Family.
