New Exhibition: By Hand
By Hand: A Celebration of the Manuscript Collections of Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
January 18 – April 29, 2013
By Hand celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript with an exploration of its manuscript collections. The exhibition begins where the Yale College Library collection of early manuscripts began, with a mirror of humanity, a copy of the Speculum humanae salvationis given by Elihu Yale. It ends with the manuscripts and drafts of “Miracle of the Black Leg,” a poem written by U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey while she was a research fellow at the Beinecke Library in 2009.
Manuscript, from the Latin term “by hand,” derives from the ablative case: locational, instrumental, situated always in relation to something or someone else. Like the term, this exhibition explores the reflections of humanity in the Beinecke’s manuscript collections, presenting them as markers of the social contracts of love, creativity, need, power, that bind us into historical record even as they bind us to one another.
The exhibition ranges across the Beinecke Library manuscript collections, in an extraordinary display of the Library’s manuscript holdings, from papyri of the 2nd century A.D. through working drafts by contemporary poets, from manuscripts in the original Yale Library to recent additions to the collections. On view are manuscripts, notes, and proof copies of works by Langston Hughes, Rachel Carson, Edith Wharton, Zora Neale Hurston, Terry Tempest Williams, James Joyce, F. T. Marinetti, Goethe, and others; the Voynich Manuscript, the Vinland Map, the Lewis and Clark expedition map and journals, the Martellus map; the last paragraphs of Thoreau’s manuscript of Walden; letters, postcards, poetry, and notes by Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Georgia O’Keeffe, Franz Kafka, Mark Twain, Erica Jong, and others; early manuscripts from a tenth-century Byzantine prayer roll, a fragment of lyric verse on papyri, the Rothschild Canticles, a fourteenth-century ivory writing tablet, and the first illuminated medieval manuscript known in a North American collection.
Celebrating 2012
Congratulations to the many scholars conducting new research in the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of African American Arts and Letters and the Yale Collection of American Literature in 2012. Information about some of this year’s most exciting projects can be found at the following links.
Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance: A Portrait in Black and White by Emily Bernard
http://beineckejwj.library.yale.edu/2012/03/26/cvv-bernard/
“Gertrude Gertrude Stein Stein: What are the Questions?” by Joan Retallack
http://beineckepoetry.library.yale.edu/2012/10/25/retallack/
All We Know: Three Lives by Lisa Cohen
http://beineckepoetry.library.yale.edu/2012/11/18/cohen/
“The ‘Librarian’s Dream-Prince’: Carl Van Vechten and America’s Modernist Cultural Archives Industry,” by Kirsten MacLeod
http://beineckejwj.library.yale.edu/2012/11/18/macleod/
1917, Impossible Year by Wendy Moffat
http://beineckepoetry.library.yale.edu/2012/10/10/moffat/
On a Farther Shore: The Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson By William Souder
http://beineckeroom26.library.yale.edu/2012/12/01/souder/
Saul Steinberg: A Biography By Deirdre Bair
http://beineckeroom26.library.yale.edu/2012/12/01/bair/
The Suppressed Memoirs of Mabel Dodge Luhan: Sex, Syphilis, and Psychoanalysis in the Making of Modern American Culture, Edited by Lois Palken Rudnick
http://beineckeroom26.library.yale.edu/2012/11/10/luhan/
Documenting Abyssinia: Imperial Ethiopia and African-American Literature byNadia Nurhussein
http://beineckepoetry.library.yale.edu/2012/10/01/nurhussein/
“History and Ordinary Womanhood” by Teresa Barnes
http://beineckejwj.library.yale.edu/2012/07/12/new-research-barnes/
Delmore Schwartz’s ‘International Consciousness’ by Alexander Runchman
http://beineckepoetry.library.yale.edu/2012/09/05/runchman/
“Radical Reading Practices in the Archives of H.D. and Gertrude Stein: A New Approach to Autobiography” by Zoe Mercer-Golden, Yale Class of 2013
http://beineckepoetry.library.yale.edu/2012/06/04/mercer-golden/
My Dear Governess: The Letters of Edith Wharton to Anna Bahlmann Edited by Irene Goldman-Price
http://beineckepoetry.library.yale.edu/2012/05/14/wharton-bahlmann/
The American H. D., by Annette Debo
http://beineckepoetry.library.yale.edu/2012/05/10/new-research-debo/
“Making a Cosmiconcept: The Negotiation of Authority in Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Visual Art and Writing” by Zoe Mercer-Golden, Yale Class of 2013
http://beineckejwj.library.yale.edu/2012/05/29/mercer-golden/
A Curious Peril: H.D. and Late Modernism, by Lara Vetter
http://beineckepoetry.library.yale.edu/2012/04/18/vetter/
“(Re)Storing Happiness: Toward an Ecopoetic Reading of H.D.’s The Sword Went Out to Sea (Synthesis of a Dream), by Delia Alton,” by Cynthia Hogue
http://beineckepoetry.library.yale.edu/2012/04/09/new-research-from-the-beinecke-collections/
Thornton Wilder: A Life By Penelope Niven
http://beineckeroom26.library.yale.edu/2012/11/01/niven-wilder/
“Lost in the Zoo: The Art of Charles Sebree” by Rachel Kempf, Yale College Class of 2013
http://beineckejwj.library.yale.edu/2012/05/24/kempf/
“Providing Context: Schervee & Bushong Group Portrait Photograph of Sigmund Freud and Participants in the Psychology, Pedagogy and School Hygiene Conference at Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts, September 1909” by Matthew Mason
http://beineckeroom26.library.yale.edu/2012/07/13/frued-mason/
“John Hersey’s Yale Education” by Zara Kessler, Yale College Class of 2012
http://beineckeroom26.library.yale.edu/2012/06/01/kessler/
“Quite a Story to Tell: The Laughs and Loves of Mary Welsh,” Katherine Fein, Yale College Class of 2014
http://beineckeroom26.library.yale.edu/2012/05/25/fein/
“Placing Joseph Bruchac: Native Literary Networks and Cultural Transmission in the Contemporary Northeast” by Christine M. Delucia
http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/product/Studies-in-American-Indian-Literatures,673235.aspx
New Research from Beinecke Collections
Carl Van Vechten (1880–1964) was an art critic and patron, a novelist, and a photographer from the early- to mid-twentieth century. His most important role, however, was as a collector and archivist of American modernism. This study examines the origins of Van Vechten’s penchant for collecting and archiving, how these interests informed his professional and amateur pursuits, and how they led him to contribute to the creation of a substantial and wide-ranging archival record of twentieth-century American cultural life.
Photographs by Carl Van Vechten are used with permission of the Van Vechten Trust; the permission of the Trust is required to reprint or use Van Vechten photographs in any way. To contact the Trust email: Van Vechten Trust
The English Army’s Only Black Regiment
The Beinecke Library has acquired the William Walker Whitehall Johnston Photograph Album of Wales, the West Indies, and the 1st West India Regiment (GEN MSS 887). This extraordinary photograph album documents people and the built landscape of the West Indies, circa 1859-1865, including enlisted men, non-commissioned officers, and officers in the 1st West India Regiment. The photographs of the regiment depict soldiers, officers, military exercises, and barracks. A group portrait shows officers involved in the Morant Bay Rebellion, including Johnston and generals Luke Smythe O’Connor and Alexander Abercromby Nelson.
Photographs of sites in the West Indies include buildings, markets, and streets. Many images depict sites in Nassau on New Providence, including Christ Church Cathedral, Fort Charlotte, Fort Fincastle, Market Street Arch, Old Fort of Nassau, Queen’s Staircase, and Vendue House, as well as the residence of the governor and an octoganal-shaped city jail. Images of sites in Kingston, Jamaica, include the Coke Memorial Methodist Church, Kingston Theatre, and Up-Park Camp. Several photographs show the settlement and barracks at Castries, Saint Lucia. Photographs of Port of Spain, Trinidad include views of Marine Square and Almond Walk. Photographs of Havana, Cuba depict the Plaza de Armas, including El Templete, the Palacio de los Capitanes Generales, and a monument to Ferdinand VII of Spain. There are also photographs of the lighthouse at Great Isaac Cay, South Bimini Island. Photographs of sites include several panoramic photographs.
The album also includes photographs documenting a stay by Johnston with the Tennant family at Cadoxton Lodge Estate in Cadoxton-juxta-Neath, Wales. Images include portraits, including portraits of Johnston’s brothers, as well as several members of the Tennant family, such as Charles Tennant and Henry Tennant; views of the Cadoxton Lodge Estate, including the house and garden; and several views of the Neath Abbey ruins. Other images include views of iron and tin works, Aberdulais Falls, the Tennant Canal, and the beach at the Mumbles near Swansea. Several photographs depict sites in London, including workmen and boys gathered at the construction site of the Victoria Railway Bridge (later known as the Grosvenor Bridge) over the River Thames.
A detailed description of the album can be found online: William Walker Whitehall Johnston Photograph Album of Wales, the West Indies, and the 1st West India Regiment (GEN MSS 887).
William Walker Whitehall Johnston (1835-1886)
William Walker Whitehall Johnston was an officer in the British Army. He was born in Trinidad, where his father, Thomas Francis Johnston (circa 1808-1873) served as a Colonial Secretary. In the British Army, Johnston held ranks from ensign to lieutenant-colonel in the 1st West India Regiment. He commanded troops in Jamaica, British Honduras, and West Africa in the Ashanti War, 1873-1874. Johnston married Mary Elizabeth Farrington (circa 1835-circa 1884), circa 1860, and they had two children, Frances Maude Johnston Hilditch (circa 1862-1895) and William Charles Caley Johnston (1870-1918). In 1884, he married Matilda Ricketts (born circa 1856). Johnston died in London in 1886.
West India Regiment
The West India Regiment was an infantry unit of the British Army recruited from and normally stationed in the British colonies of the West Indies between 1795 and 1927. Intially the regiment sought to recruit both free blacks from the West Indian population together with purchased slaves from West Indian plantations. After the abolition of slavery, enlisted men in the regiment were black West Indian volunteers, with white officers and some senior non-commissioned officers from Great Britain.
Charles Tennant (1796-1873)
Charles Tennant was an English politician and landowner. From 1830 to 1831 Tennant was Member of Parliament for St Albans, and supported the Representation of the People Act 1832 (commonly known as the Reform Act 1832). In 1830 he was one of the founders of the National Colonisation Society, advocating emigration to British colonies. His political publications include The People’s Blue Book (1857) and The Bank of England and the Organization of Credit in England (1866). Tennant also owned Cadoxton Lodge Estate in Cadoxton-juxta-Neath, Wales.
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Event Cancelled: Lecture by Dr. Khalil Gibran Muhammad
CANCELLED: EVENT TO BE RESCHEDULED
Dr. Khalil Gibran Muhammad, director of The New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, will be speaking at Beinecke Library, at 1pm Monday, October 29th, 2012. This event is co-sponsored by the Department of African American Studies’ Endeavors Colloquium Series.
Dr. Khalil Gibran Muhammad took over as director at the Schomburg Center in July of 2011. Dr. Muhammad graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in economics and received his doctorate in American history from Rutgers University. He also served as a fellow at the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit criminal justice reform agency in New York City. Dr. Muhammad was formerly a history professor at Indiana University. His book, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, Harvard University Press, 2010, won the John Hope Franklin Publication Prize for 2011. Dr. Muhammad has participated in a PBS documentary, “Slavery by Another Name,” based on Douglas Blackmon’s book of the same name, and has appeared with Tavis Smiley and Bill Moyers.
The talk will be held in Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, 121 Wall St., Rm 38/39 at 1:00pm on Monday, 29 October, 2012. This event is free and open to the public.
Poetry Reading: C. S. Giscombe
C. S. Giscombe, Poetry Reading
Thursday, October 18th, 4:00pm
Beinecke Library, 121 Wall Street
Yale Collection of American Literature Reading Series
Contact: nancy.kuhl@yale.edu
C.S. Giscombe is the author of books including Prairie Style, Two Sections from Practical Geography, Giscome Road, Here, At Large, Postcards, and Into and Out of Dislocation. Prairie Style was awarded an American Book Award by the Before Columbus Foundation; Giscome Road won the Carl Sandburg Prize, given by the Chicago Public Library. In 2010, Giscombe received the Stephen Henderson Award in Poetry from the African American Literature and Culture Society; he has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fund for Poetry. He is a member of the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley.
Richard Bruce Nugent Papers
The James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection at the Beinecke Library is pleased to announce that the Richard Bruce Nugent Papers are now available for research. A detailed list of materials in the archive can be found here: Richard Bruce Nugent Papers (JWJ MSS 92).
Writer and artist Richard Bruce Nugent (1906-1987) was a member of the Harlem Renaissance arts community that included such luminaries as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Alain Locke, and Wallace Thurman. Nugent’s work appeared in little magazines, including Fire!!, Opportunity and Palms; he also appeared on Broadway in Porgy (1927) and Run, Little Chillun (1933). Nugent’s short story “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade,” which appeared in Fire!! in 1926, ranks him among the first African American writers to openly consider homosexuality in his work.
The Richard Bruce Nugent Papers consist of correspondence, writings, personal and financial papers, subject files, photographs, printed materials, and audiovisual materials. Bruce Nugent’s correspondence consists of family, professional, and personal correspondence, including letters from homosexual love interests. Writings include poetry, short non-fiction pieces, and various fiction pieces, including the novel Gentleman Jigger. Writings by others include drafts and papers relating to Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance by Thomas H. Wirth. Photographs consist of portraits and snapshots of Nugent, his love interests, friends, and family. The bulk of the audiovisual materials consist of interviews with Nugent. Printed materials include books inscribed to Nugent as well as various clippings and ephemera.
Images: Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life, featuring cover drawing by Richard Bruce Nugent (Vol. 4, No. 39, 1926); Richard Bruce Nugent photographed by Carl Van Vechten, February 16, 1936 (Photographs by Carl Van Vechten are used with permission of the Van Vechten Trust; permission of the Trust is required to publish Van Vechten photographs in any format).
Welcome Giamatti Felllow Nadia Nurhussein
Welcome A. Bartlett Giamatti Fellow Nadia Nurhussein, University of Massachusetts, Boston. Fellowship project: Documenting Abyssinia: Imperial Ethiopia and African-American Literature.
Nadia Nurhussein is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, where she has taught since 2005. She received her PhD in English in 2004 from UC Berkeley and, from 2004 to 2005, was a Visiting Assistant Professor and Postdoctoral Fellow in the English department at Mount Holyoke College. Her research focuses on African-American literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially poetry. Her first book, Rhetorics of Literacy: The Cultivation of American Dialect Poetry, is forthcoming from The Ohio State University Press in 2013. As a Beinecke Fellow, she will pursue research on a second book project about the idea of Ethiopia in African-American literature.
James Weldon Johnson Memorial Lecture
Arnold Rampersad
“Reflections on Nationalism and Literature”
Tuesday, September 18, 4pm
Beinecke Library, 121 Wall Street
James Weldon Johnson Memorial Lecture
Contact: nancy.kuhl@yale.edu
Arnold Rampersad is the author of many books, including: Ralph Ellison; The Life of Langston Hughes; The Art and Imagination of W.E.B. DuBois; Jackie Robinson: A Biography; Days of Grace: A Memoir (1993), co-authored with Arthur Ashe. He is the editor of volumes including Collected Poems of Langston Hughes; the Library of America edition of works by Richard Wright; and as, co-editor with Deborah McDowell, Slavery and the Literary Imagination. With Shelley Fisher Fishkin he was co-editor, of the Race and American Culture book series published by Oxford University Press. He has been awarded the National Humanities Medal and a fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. He has taught at Stanford, Columbia, Rutgers, and Princeton.
The James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of Arts and Letters at the Beinecke Library was founded by Carl Van Vechten in 1941 in honor of James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938), poet, novelist, lyricist, diplomat, educator, and noted civil rights leader. The Collection celebrates the accomplishments of African American writers and artists from the Harlem Renaissance to the present.
Co-sponsored by the Department of African American Studies.
Solomon Sir Jones Films
The Beinecke library is pleased to announce that the Solomon Sir Jones film collection is now available for research; the films can be viewed online from the library’s web page: SOLOMON SIR JONES FILMS, 1924-1928.
The Solomon Sir Jones films consist of 29 silent black and white films documenting African-American communities in Oklahoma from 1924 to 1928. The films measure 12,800 feet (355 min). All films are B-wind positive prints, except one roll that contains approximately 150 feet of orange base B-wind positive.
Jones filmed Oklahoma residents in their homes; during their social, school and church activities; in the businesses they owned; and performing various jobs. The films document several Oklahoma communities, including Muskogee, Okmulgee, Tulsa, Wewoka, Bristow and Taft. The films also document Jones’s trips to Indiana, Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Tennessee, Missouri, Illinois, New York City, South Carolina, Colorado, and overseas to France, England, Palestine, Switzerland, Italy, Northern Africa, and Germany. Slates between scenes identify locations, dates, and subjects.
Jones frequently filmed at various locations by positioning himself outside a building while people exited the building in a line. This perspective provides footage of people as they walk by the camera, usually looking directly at it. Footage of churches includes congregants exiting the service and socializing outside; footage of schools often includes students playing outside or doing exercises; and footage of people at their home includes them outside on their porches or in their yards. Aside from church and scheduled school activities, people presumably exited at Jones’s request for the purpose of being filmed by him.
Solomon Sir Jones (1869-1936), Baptist minister, businessman, and amateur filmmaker. Jones was born in Tennessee to former slaves and grew up in the South before moving to Oklahoma in 1889. Jones became an influential Baptist minister, building and pastoring fifteen churches. He was head of the Boyd Faction of Negro Baptists in America and was a successful businessman.
Image: Still from Film #2:, Solomon Sir Jones Films. Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library; Call number: WA MSS S-2636
African American Studies at Beinecke Library 
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