February 16, 2014, Filed Under: Art, Exhibitions + EventsIn the Galleries: Frank Nicolet Lucien poster pays homage to poem “In Flanders Fields” In the spring of 1915, John McCrae, a young Canadian surgeon, conducted a burial service for a friend, killed by German artillery during the Second Battle of Ypres, in the First World War. Inspired by the friend’s death, McCrae composed a poem, which he discarded, believing it to be no good. An… read more
February 16, 2014, Filed Under: Art, Exhibitions + EventsIn the Galleries: Gordon Conway “Vanity Fair” cover illustration highlights shifting gender roles in World War I World War I played a crucial part in the transformation of gender roles. As men left for the battlefields, women took on traditionally male occupations at home. Buoyed by this experience and a new sense of confidence, these women started demanding more rights and independence. These shifting roles were mirrored… read more
February 13, 2014, Filed Under: Authors, Books + ManuscriptsHartley Coleridge’s Valentine’s Day sonnet As Elizabeth Bennet commented in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, poetry is not always the food of love. “If it be only a slight, thin sort of inclination,” she tells Mr. Darcy, “I am convinced that one good sonnet will starve it entirely away.” For Hartley Coleridge’s sake, let us… read more
February 12, 2014, Filed Under: Books + Manuscripts, Exhibitions + EventsLetters detail adventures, boredom of Monuments Men recovering art stolen by German Nazis In 1943, the Allies of World War II established the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Program—an organization tasked with recovering, restoring, and returning stolen or lost cultural artifacts. The members of the MFAA, known as the Monuments Men, included over 300 artists, architects, educators, directors, and scholars. Together, they made… read more
February 3, 2014, Filed Under: Books + Manuscripts, Cataloging, Digital CollectionsLetter reveals lessons in seventeenth-century home economics in London According to Mary Evelyn, the wife of John Evelyn, a renowned English intellectual, diarist, and horticulturalist in the late seventeenth century, it cost £313 and 1 shilling to set up a proper upper-class household for eight people in London in 1675. In today’s dollars, the dishes, silver, glasses, linens, and… read more
January 21, 2014, Filed Under: Books + ManuscriptsNotebooks illuminate creative process behind Billy Collins’s poem “The Names” Among the papers in the recently acquired Billy Collins archive are materials related to his poem “The Names,” which was written to commemorate the victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks. Interspersed throughout the poem are the names of 26 victims of the attacks, one name for each letter of… read more
