Ashes refer us to the fire, indexing words we cannot read. They document what has been lost forever. As light as air, ashes flutter with a breath, they degrade, they will not last. Ashes tell us what has survived, what can be rebuilt, and what is irrevocably altered. Ashes bear witness.
On Tuesday, May 11, 2021 at 6 pm, the library will celebrate the winners of the 2020 Wesleyan Library Undergraduate Research Prize at a virtual event, which will begin with a talk by Wesleyan Professor of History Ronald Schatz
About the instrument
The janggo, or janggu in folk styles, is a Korean drum, perhaps the most prominent of Korean percussion instruments. The body is carved into a hollow hourglass shape from a solid piece of paulownia wood, and stretched pieces of animal skin are fastened to metal hoops to form the heads on either side.
It’s been just over a year since the University Archives first asked for your experiences related to COVID-19. Thank you to all those who responded – we’ve been slowly adding all the submissions to our Digital Collections! We have a new project aimed at the whole Wesleyan community to learn what this year has been like. … Read more
Scrapbooks are repositories of ephemera, containers of memories, self-curated collections of the meaningful bits and pieces of a life. Creating scrapbooks was a popular pastime for American college students from the 1870s until World War I.
Musical instruments are designed to be played: to be hit, struck, blown, and handled by humans in a variety of ways. Over time, this repeated interaction in combination with environmental conditions can have a tangible effect. Just as with any physical object, an instrument’s material – whether wood, metal, animal skin, or other – wears down, weakens, and breaks over time. Sometimes these issues can be fixed, but in other cases the instrument is beyond repair.
Nineteen young women in beautiful dresses are carefully posed by a photographer. The rear entrance of their residence, Webb Hall, is in the background. Their housemother keeps watch from on high, her arms folded in a no-nonsense gesture.
Queen of home: her reign from infancy to age, from attic to cellar by Emma Churchman Hewitt is a comprehensive, 528-page introduction to all aspects of household management. Presented in a narrative style that addresses readers directly, Hewitt and her invited experts take on the task of explaining to the novice homemaker how to succeed as the “queen” of her home.
William Henry Fox Talbot, Lace, ca. 1845. This image of lace is an example of a calotype, an early photographic technique. William Henry Fox Talbot, the author of this work, invented the calotype in 1841 as a competing medium to the daguerreotype, another early photographic technique, in which an image imprinted on thin metal. To … Read more
This grim entry in Wesleyan’s Alumni Record, published in 1883, offers a sad glimpse into the tangled web of Wesleyan’s early connections with Africa. Read in context with the Missionary Lyceum logbook (“Curiosities belonging to the Missionary Lyceum”) pictured above, inventories from the Archaeology & Anthropology Collection, correspondence in President Willbur Fisk’s Papers, and other sources, we can piece together a network of personal relationships and events that likely led to Wesleyan’s holding one of the largest groups of pre-1850 cultural objects from Monrovia, Liberia, in an American collection.
