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Shakespeare’s Shelf-Neighbors: Reading Race in the 19th Century Bookstore
Simone Gulliver, Ph.D. student in History, writing as part of 2024 course “Professional Archiving and Curating for Academic Settings,” co-taught by Holly Jo Mengel, Head of Archives and Manuscripts Processing, and Professor Zita Nunes, Department of English Before there was Strand Bookstore or Gotham Book Mart, there was David Longworth’s Shakespeare Gallery in the Park…
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King Nutcracker: Music for Voice and Ballet
STORIES FROM THE ERIC MANDELL COLLECTION OF JEWISH MUSIC MATERIAL For decades, children and their families have poured into theaters every holiday season to see the ballet, the Nutcracker. Whether it is a small community ballet company or a professional one, going to see the Nutcracker has become a holiday tradition for many families all…
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Re-Introducing the Philadelphia Orchestra Association records
STORIES FROM THE PHILADELPHIA ORCHESTRA ASSOCIATION RECORDS A little under a year ago I wrote a post to introduce readers to the Philadelphia Orchestra Association records and share the areas of the collection that were open and available to researchers at Penn Libraries’ Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts. I’m now extremely…
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Escaping Romania: Moshe Gerstel’s fight to save his children from the Holocaust
STORIES FROM THE NIR AND INNA FELDMAN COLLECTION OF HAIFA MATERIALS The Nir and Inna Feldman collection of Haifa material contains mostly photographs, architectural drawings and correspondence in what is an amalgamation of over a hundred micro collections, demonstrating the rapid infrastructure and cultural development of the area, as well as the influx of immigrants from…
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How to Fund a School in the Mid-Nineteenth Century
The Institute for Colored Youth, now Cheyney University, is the oldest of the Historically Black Colleges and Universities in United States (HBCU). It was founded after Quaker philanthropist Richard Humphreys bequeathed $10,000, which equals roughly $366,041.86 (CPI Inflation Calculator) in today’s money, of his estate to the creation of a school to “instruct the descendants…
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A Publisher’s Network: Richard E. Snyder’s Relationships with Writers, Politicians, and More
I recently finished cataloguing a collection of papers from Richard E. Snyder, the former President, CEO, and Chairman of Simon & Schuster. The collection was full of surprises from start to finish. Throughout the process, I learned a lot about how this collection possibly came to be and I absorbed more information about the publishing…
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