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This 1905 copy of Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle, illustrated by Arthur Rackham, is #79 of a signed 250-print limited edition by Heinemann. The binding is vellum, and the second half of the book is composed of over four dozen colored plates separated by tissue guards that bear quotes from the story.
A quote from one of the tissue guards, just because it made us smile:
In celebration of Arbor Day, we thought you’d enjoy some lovely engravings from a 1786 edition of John Evelyn’s famous work, Sylva: or A Discourse of Forest-Trees and the Propagation of Timber in His Majesty’s Dominions, first presented to the Royal Society (of which Evelyn was a founding Fellow) in 1662. This edition includes “An Historical Account of the Sacredness and Use of Standing Groves” and “Terra: A Philosophical Discourse of Earth.”
“The Cedar Tree”
“A South East View of the Green Dale Oak near Welbeck”
“A Winter View of the Canthorpe Oak”
This gorgeous trained wedding gown, leather slipper, and orange blossom headpiece were worn by Lucy Lee Scarborough at her wedding to Joseph M. Chestnutt in Attala County, Mississippi, on June 7, 1893. Part of the Hays-Ray-Webb Family Papers.
In celebration of the spookiest season, Special Collections’ current exhibit, “A Cabinet of Curiosities,” features some of our favorite weird items!
The case above features Minié balls (a type of bullet) from Vicksburg, a 1612 manual for identifying witches (detailed in this post), an 1829 book about magic and miracles, and a lacquer box and eggs from Russia.
This taxidermy oddity, a two-headed bobcat, comes from the Jerry Clower Collection!
Pictured above: a pillbox of baby teeth, a syringe case with medicine vials, and a 1665 Royal Society publication featuring the article “Observables upon a Monstrous Head” - regarding a deformed colt born with no nose, a single eye, and four eyebrows!
On this day in 1865, President Abraham Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth at a performance of Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theatre. Below is a broadside advertising the play’s final night, along with an illustration of the devil whispering into John Wilkes Booth’s ear. Both items are on display in the Lincolniana Gallery at the Ulysses S. Grant Presidential Library @msstate.
Our medical history collection includes this 1810 work by Samuel Scofield, A Practical Treatise on Vaccina or Cowpock, a work celebrating and advocating for vaccination.
As more and more people worldwide are being vaccinated, we wanted to reblog this post from 2018.
In 1948, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ray Sprigle shaved his hair and mustache and went to Florida to acquire a deep tan. Then he went South as James R. Crawford, a light-skinned Black man from Pittsburgh. Sprigle was on an undercover mission, aided by the national secretary of the NAACP, to expose Jim Crow injustices and cruelties.
For four endless, crawling weeks I was a Negro in the Deep South.
I ate, slept, traveled, lived Black. I lodged in Negro households. I ate in Negro restaurants. I slept in Negro hotels and lodging houses. I crept through the back and side doors of railroad stations. I traveled Jim Crow in buses and trains and street cars and taxicabs. Along with 10,000,000 Negroes I endured the discrimination and oppression and cruelty of the iniquitous Jim Crow system.
In one of the most harrowing stories in the article, Sprigle is horrified to learn about a Clarksdale, Mississippi, mother and newborn baby who died because their local hospital didn’t admit Black people:
Dr. Hill didn't even seek admission for his wife and unborn baby. Just before midnight he put them into an ambulance and started a mad drive north to Memphis and its Negro hospital, 78 miles away, in a desperate race with death.
Though we balk at blackface (however it is presented) today, many in 1948 saw Sprigle’s undercover work as the only way to reach a large segment of the white population, in that white people would believe the experiences of a white man. Sadly, this is often still true today.
This booklet, reprinted from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, includes a response from Mississippi journalist Hodding Carter. It is held in the Mississippi State University Libraries’ Special Collections.
Those interested can read Sprigle’s entire piece here.
Happy International Women’s Day! Here are some of our favorite photographs of women from the library’s Special Collections.
The Charles Templeton sheet music collection contains dozens of original songs from "King of Ragtime" Scott Joplin. View them in the digital collections here: https://msstate.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/search/searchterm/scott%20joplin
(please be aware that some cover artwork features racist imagery of the time)
First edition of Native Son by Richard Wright, 1940. Wright was born in Roxie, Mississippi, in 1908.
Presentation copy of the Emancipation Proclamation given “To His Excellency A. Lincoln” by the Free Colored People of New Orleans. On display in the Frank & Virginia Williams Collection of Lincolniana in the Ulysses S. Grant Presidential Library at @msstate.
We were saddened to hear of the death of Charley Pride. A native of Sledge, Mississippi, Pride served in the Army and played semiprofessional baseball before pursuing music full time. Despite racial discrimination from radio stations and record companies, Pride broke barriers throughout his decades-long, legendary country music career. In 1971, Pride won the Country Music Association’s entertainer of the year award, the first (and still the only) Black artist to do so. In 1993 he was invited to join the Grand Ole Opry and in 2000 he became the first Black member of the Country Music Hall of Fame. He amassed over 50 top 10 country hits throughout his career. One of 11 children from a sharecropping family, Pride grew up listening to Grand Ole Opry radio broadcasts and bought his first guitar from a Sears Roebuck catalog. We send our thoughts to his family.
In this 1997 letter from Special Collections, Pride and his wife Rozene send their congratulations to comedian Jerry Clower and his wife Homerline on the occasion of their 50th wedding anniversary. (Jerry Clower collection, University Archives, Mississippi State University Libraries).
Born the youngest of twenty children in Mississippi in 1917, Fannie Lou Hamer became one of the most powerful voices of the Civil Rights movement. She fought tirelessly for civil rights, voting rights, and equal representation until her death in 1977.
Broadside from the Clay County (Mississippi) civil rights movement collection.
Letter from the Allen Eugene Cox papers.
You can read Hamer’s famous “sick and tired” speech here.
Happy Birthday to Fannie Lou Hamer!
The first Master’s thesis submitted at @msstate was written by a woman, Clara Southmayd Ludlow (1852-1924). She attended MSU, then called the Mississippi Agricultural & Mechanical College, while her brother worked as a professor of military science. Concerning Lichens was submitted in 1901, the year she earned her Master of Arts degree in Botany. She went on to earn her PhD at George Washington University in 1908. The American Society of Tropical Medicine & Hygiene awards a medal in her honor.
This collection of short stories by writer and lawyer Samuel Alfred Beadle (1857-1932) was published in 1901 in Jackson, Mississippi, and includes wonderful photographs of African American social life.
Beadle’s son, Richard Henry (1884-1971), went on to become a successful photographer in Jackson. Some of the photographs in Adam Shuffler may have been taken by him, though he would have been only a teenager at the time.
The Lantern Project is one of only a few in the South and is funded by a $340,424 grant from the National Historic Publications and Records Committee, a branch of the @usnatarchives National Archives. In addition to MSU Libraries, the University of Mississippi Libraries, Delta State University, the Historic Natchez Foundation, Columbus-Lowndes County Public Library and the Montgomery County (Alabama) Archives also are participating.
This undertaking compiles a wealth of 19th-century documents from across the South and, upon completion, will provide a fully text-searchable, indexed collection containing digital images of original documents that include individuals’ names and detailed physical descriptions. Primarily inspired by patron need, the project is based on a similar effort at the Virginia Museum of History and Culture called “Unknown No Longer.”
The database will utilize records created or used by slave owners or the legal system to track enslaved persons, such as inventories, bills of sale, and probate and other court records, which will allow scholars and genealogists to trace victims’ movements and empower descendants to uncover their ancestries and reconstruct family trees impacted by slavery.
Collections of holiday poems and short stories were popular Christmas gifts in the early nineteenth century. Above, Gem of the Season (New York, 1849); the 1836 edition of The Gift, published in Philadelphia and edited by Eliza Leslie; and Marshall’s Christmas Box: A Juvenile Annual (London, 1835).
Imagine looking at this sweet picture of children and using it to promote something so ugly. The White Sentinel, 1956.
This letter (and the one that prompted it) must be the 1786 version of the comments section!
Buhler hall, August 6th, 1786
Inclosed here is your most rascale and damd Lyable Character you have wrote against me wich I hope you will proved before the Comandant and all the head People here, the worst Brut upon Earth has got a better one I do not know where I deserve it, I have told you more then ones if you would go away you may, I did not hold you, I wrote you this because I determined never to speak to such a mean fellow wich will cut of a mans Character behind a mans bak and being in his Employment. I desire you, and tell you if you do not prove me as such as you have wrote, I insist upon a Lye bill, and put up at the Church, I am willing to pay you but you must give me full satisfaction and receive what you deserve first then I will settle with you I beg of you not to speak to me any more because I am a very cruel man my Passion may overcome and the Blow perhaps may prove fatal for me and you. If i was a man, that is a murderer, a thief you could not make me worster a Savage is better then you make me, therefor money is trash, my Character is dear to me and you shall make it good if it should cost Life and property. I will let you know if you do not know better to cut of a mans honor and Repatation I am well known in this country - let any man say anything against my Character, if you was in America, I would have your Ears cut of and pillored but give me your Lye bill and go about your business, I beg of you dont disturb me in my Rooms Whe shall both go to the Comandant and receive orders to appoint Arbitration what you deserve, I do insist upon one months imprisonment besides you cannot expect favours from a man of such stamp where everything is lost in him, therefore bring me only from six principal inhabitants proof that I am the man I forgive you if not cruelty and inhumanity shall take place as you proscribe me to Seth Lewis
John Buhler who is totaly lost but must learn from a mean proud, and poor impudent fellow
Click here to see more from the wide-ranging Todd A. Herring Collection.
