John J. Burns Library Blog

2024 Burns Library Wrapped

The stats are in, the students are back, and we’re kicking off the spring semester. As we head into 2025, join us in looking back at a full and rewarding 2024 in our Burns Wrapped! Read More
Cotton Mather Letters

332 years ago, just 30 miles from Boston College’s main campus, a series of accusations of witchcraft in Salem Village would launch what we know today as the Salem Witch Trials. Read More
Women Travelers

Tales from far-off cultures and lands have always captivated the human imagination. From Marco Polo to Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days, both true, exaggerated, and fictionalized accounts of global adventures have had a lasting appeal for the reading public. Read More
Graham Greene and the Latin-American Boom

Greene has often been a topic of discussion on the Burns Library blog, but in honor of Hispanic Heritage month, which is celebrated September 15th- October 15th, I would like to draw attention to some of the Hispanic and Latin American authors he had correspondence with. Read More
A Galileo First Edition with his Handwritten Corrections

Burns Library has recently acquired a first edition of Il Saggiatore (The Assayer), written by Galileo in 1623, with handwritten additions to the volume’s errata sheet in the author’s own hand. Read More
Jack Kirby – The King of Comics

Jack Kirby, often hailed as the “King of Comics,” stands as one of the most influential figures in the history of comic books. Born Jacob Kurtzberg on August 28, 1917, in New York City, Kirby grew up in the tenements of the Lower East Side, a neighborhood teeming with immigrant families. Read More
Mythmaking with Anne Dacier

Bookstores are currently overflowing with reimaginings of Greek classical myths. Our interest in these very human stories has clearly endured across millennia, but just how these stories were transferred into our modern age, and who was responsible for this transference, was a topic of heated debate in Europe for centuries. Read More
Black at BC, 1932: William Bradford Pratt (1904-1975)

William Edward Burghardt (W.E.B.) Du Bois was a scholar, writer, editor, and civil rights pioneer from Massachusetts. The Crisis, a national magazine for Black Americans, began publication in 1910 and is the oldest African American publication in the United States. Du Bois was its editor from 1910-1934. Read More