No one who is alive today knew Ruth Peck Fisk (1795-1885), the wife of Wesleyan’s founding president, Willbur Fisk (1792-1839). Her portrait resides in the Middlesex County Historical Society. Her grave is in Wesleyan’s campus cemetery on Foss Hill.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Cartes-de-visite, such as this clever little pastiche from the prominent New York studio of C.D. Fredricks, became commonplace in the U.S. in the period just before the Civil War. Here, the giant photographed head of an anonymous man sits atop a pint-sized caricature of his body, the angle of his spindly legs echoing his spectacular handlebar moustache.
Like an archaeological excavation through layers of what has been left behind, this series of artist’s books digs deep to create beauty amid decay and loss. Each of the ten titles (so far) in the Stratigraphic Archives is a new exploration of remnants of the past.
Literary commonplace books flourished in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries. Compilations of excerpts from beloved, meaningful, or thought-provoking texts, typical literary commonplace books like this one offer a window into the reading habits of their makers.
This graphically arresting envelope depicts President Abraham Lincoln as the Great Comet of 1861, which could be seen with the naked eye throughout the summer in much of the United States. The anonymous illustrator has combined several visual elements to create greater meanings: the white stars on a blue background representing both the heavens and … Read more
