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.
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.
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).
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
88 Books that Shaped America
The Library of Congress has recently identified a list of important American books: 88 Books that Shaped America. The list (see below) includes the work of many writer whose literary manuscripts are represented in the Yale Collection of American Literature, including: Mark Twain, James Baldwin, Eugene O’Neill, Walt Whitman, Richard Wright, Thornton Wilder, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Rachel Carson, W. E. B. Du Bois, William Carlos Williams, Zora Neale Hurston, Henry David Thoreau, and Langston Hughes. The Yale Collection of American Literature also includes distinguished copies of many of the titles on the list, such as: Gertrude Stein’s copy of The Great Gatsby, Sinclair Lewis’s copy of For Whom the Bell Tolls, James Weldon Johnson’s copy of The Weary Blues among many others. To locate detailed descriptions of these and other books and archives, search Orbis, Yale Library’s Catalog for Book and Yale’s Finding Aid Database. For images from Beinecke Library collections, visit the Beinecke Digital Library.
The Library of Congress’ list of 88 books that shaped America
“Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” by Mark Twain (1884)
“Alcoholics Anonymous” by anonymous (1939)
“American Cookery” by Amelia Simmons (1796)
“The American Woman’s Home” by Catharine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe (1869)
“And the Band Played On” by Randy Shilts (1987)
“Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand (1957)
“The Autobiography of Malcolm X” by Malcolm X and Alex Haley (1965)
“Beloved” by Toni Morrison (1987)
“Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” by Dee Brown (1970)
“The Call of the Wild” by Jack London (1903)
“The Cat in the Hat” by Dr. Seuss (1957)
“Catch-22” by Joseph Heller (1961)
“The Catcher in the Rye” by J.D. Salinger (1951)
“Charlotte’s Web” by E.B. White (1952)
“Common Sense” by Thomas Paine (1776)
“The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care” by Benjamin Spock (1946)
“Cosmos” by Carl Sagan (1980)
“A Curious Hieroglyphick Bible” by anonymous (1788)
“The Double Helix” by James D. Watson (1968)
“The Education of Henry Adams” by Henry Adams (1907)
“Experiments and Observations on Electricity” by Benjamin Franklin (1751)
“Fahrenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury (1953)
“Family Limitation” by Margaret Sanger (1914)
“The Federalist” by anonymous/ thought to be Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay (1787)
“The Feminine Mystique” by Betty Friedan (1963)
“The Fire Next Time” by James Baldwin (1963)
“For Whom the Bell Tolls” by Ernest Hemingway (1940)
“Gone With the Wind” by Margaret Mitchell (1936)
“Goodnight Moon” by Margaret Wise Brown (1947)
“A Grammatical Institute of the English Language” by Noah Webster (1783)
“The Grapes of Wrath” by John Steinbeck (1939)
“The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
“Harriet, the Moses of Her People” by Sarah H. Bradford (1901)
“The History of Standard Oil” by Ida Tarbell (1904)
“History of the Expedition Under the Command of the Captains Lewis and Clark” by Meriwether Lewis (1814)
“How the Other Half Lives” by Jacob Riis (1890)
“How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie (1936)
“Howl” by Allen Ginsberg (1956)
“The Iceman Cometh” by Eugene O’Neill (1946)
“Idaho: A Guide in Word and Pictures” by Federal Writers’ Project (1937)
“In Cold Blood” by Truman Capote (1966)
“Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison (1952)
“Joy of Cooking” by Irma Rombauer (1931)
“The Jungle” by Upton Sinclair (1906)
“Leaves of Grass” by Walt Whitman (1855)
“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” by Washington Irving (1820)
“Little Women, or Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy” by Louisa May Alcott (1868)
“Mark, the Match Boy” by Horatio Alger Jr. (1869)
“McGuffey’s Newly Revised Eclectic Primer” by William Holmes McGuffey (1836)
“Moby-Dick; or The Whale” by Herman Melville (1851)
“The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass” by Frederick Douglass (1845)
“Native Son” by Richard Wright (1940)
“New England Primer” by anonymous (1803)
“New Hampshire” by Robert Frost (1923)
“On the Road” by Jack Kerouac (1957)
“Our Bodies, Ourselves” by Boston Women’s Health Book Collective (1971)
“Our Town: A Play” by Thornton Wilder (1938)
“Peter Parley’s Universal History” by Samuel Goodrich (1837)
“Poems” by Emily Dickinson (1890)
“Poor Richard Improved and The Way to Wealth” by Benjamin Franklin (1758)
“Pragmatism” by William James (1907)
“The Private Life of the Late Benjamin Franklin, LL.D.” by Benjamin Franklin (1793)
“The Red Badge of Courage” by Stephen Crane (1895)
“Red Harvest” by Dashiell Hammett (1929)
“Riders of the Purple Sage” by Zane Grey (1912)
“The Scarlet Letter” by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850)
“Sexual Behavior in the Human Male” by Alfred C. Kinsey (1948)
“Silent Spring” by Rachel Carson (1962)
“The Snowy Day” by Ezra Jack Keats (1962)
“The Souls of Black Folk” by W.E.B. Du Bois (1903)
“The Sound and the Fury” by William Faulkner (1929)
“Spring and All” by William Carlos Williams (1923)
“Stranger in a Strange Land” by Robert E. Heinlein (1961)
“A Street in Bronzeville” by Gwendolyn Brooks (1945)
“A Streetcar Named Desire” by Tennessee Williams (1947)
“A Survey of the Roads of the United States of America” by Christopher Colles (1789)
“Tarzan of the Apes” by Edgar Rice Burroughs (1914)
“Their Eyes Were Watching God” by Zora Neale Hurston (1937)
“To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee (1960)
“A Treasury of American Folklore” by Benjamin A. Botkin (1944)
“A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” by Betty Smith (1943)
“Uncle Tom’s Cabin” by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1852)
“Unsafe at Any Speed” by Ralph Nader (1965)
“Walden; or Life in the Woods” by Henry David Thoreau (1854)
“The Weary Blues” by Langston Hughes (1925)
“Where the Wild Things Are” by Maurice Sendak (1963)
“The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” by L. Frank Baum (1900)
“The Words of Cesar Chavez” by Cesar Chavez (2002)
New Research from the JWJ Collection
History and Ordinary Womanhood by Teresa Barnes
Article Abstract: Contemporary social history is premised on the idea of writing histories of ordinary people. This article reflects critically on the concept of “ordinariness“ as facilitated by the author’s brief moment of personal fame and her professional experiences of learning and writing about women’s and gender history in and of southern Africa. These perspectives then informed her attempts to write and publish a story of the brief encounter in the late 1930s between a member of her family and the brilliant African-American writer, Richard Wright. The article explores the parameters and definitions of “ordinariness“ in African and American history.
About the Barnes-Wright Correspondence: Richard Wright Letters to Margaret Ellen Barnes
About the Richard Wright Papers: Guide to the Richard Wright Papers (JWJ MSS 3)
Image: Photo of Margaret Ellen Barnes, courtesy of Teresa Barnes
Lois Mailou Jones Books
The Beinecke Library has an outstanding collection of books illustrated by African American artist Lois Mailou Jones. The collection includes the many books for which Jones is well known as well as several works for which she is very likely the (uncredited) illustrator. Works about Jones, exhibition catalogs, and ephemeral publications are also present. Titles include: Great American Negroes in Verse, Word Pictures of Great Negroes, Their Eyes Were Watching God (with cover design by LMJ), Reflective Moments, Picture-Poetry Book, Negro Art, Music, and Rhyme, Poems of Leopold Sedar Senghor (with silkscreen prints by LMJ), and many others.
All titles and related materials can be located by searching Orbis, Yale Library’s Catalog for book.
Additional information about Lois Mailou Jones is available from the Loïs Mailou Jones Pierre-Noël Trust.
NAACP Publications and Ephemera
The Beinecke has recently acquired an archive of publications, ephemera, and other materials related to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The forty-two items total nearly 700 pages, spanning more than sixty years, beginning in 1915, with much documentation of the NAACP’s early efforts to end lynching in the United States, including “The Waco Horror” by Elizabeth Freeman, “Brief in Support of the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill” by Moorefield Storey, a 1930’s “Stop Lynching NAACP Legal Defense Fund” pin-back button, etc. Also included are two ephemeral items, representing Anti-NAACP racist publications in the United States. The large majority of publications in the collection are unrecorded by OCLC (or otherwise known in only a few institutional holdings). A detailed list of the collection contents is available here (NOTE: this document includes images and language that some my find disturbing): NAACP Collection Description. Related collections include: Walter White and Poppy Cannon Papers (JWJ MSS 38); James Weldon Johnson and Grace Nail Johnson Papers (JWJ MSS 49); Joel Spingarn Collection (JWJ MSS 11); JWJ Clippings Collection (JWJ MSS 89); Leon F. Litwack Collection Protest Literature (WA MSS S-2616); additional materials may be found by searching the Finding Aid Database, Uncataloged Accession Database, Digital Library, and Orbis (links to these and other tools can be found on the Beinecke Library Home Page).
Image: [Pictorial Broadside, urging membership in the NAACP]: STRONG MAN! [Caption title]. Published by the Pittsburgh Courier, Pittsburg, Penn. Hollywood, California: Distributed by Hollywood Beauty Secrets Company, Owned by Mr. & Mrs. Homer Goodwin [No Date, but circa 1950’s?]. Original promotional broadside, issued by a cosmetics company.
African American Studies at Beinecke Library 
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