Blogs are excellent for highlighting treasures in archival collections. Below a few posts that I particularly enjoyed researching and writing.
How Rutgers is connected to Sojourner Truth
It is easy to confuse the first owner of Sojourner Truth, described by her as Colonel Ardinbergh (Hardenbergh) of Hurley, Ulster County, with the father of Rutgers University’s first president and a founding trustee. Instead, it was the first president’s brother, who had the same name as his father and also served as Colonel in the Revolutionary War, who lived nearby.
Scorched Dutch 17th century autographs
The only native Dutch speaker at Rutgers Special Collections and University Archives, I have made it a mission to list Dutch materials in the collections, which nobody had been able to read before. The search yielded some surprising results. (Read the blog)
View more blog posts at Rutgers Special Collections and University Archives
Student life in the 1920s: the letters from Ella Geer (Violin ’27)
The last blog post that I wrote for “Notes from the Archives” at the Curtis Institute of Music featured the letters of Ella Geer, a violin student who studied at Curtis for one year in the “Roaring Twenties.” Although she did not know it, she witnessed the last year that Leopold Stokowski—according to the school’s Catalogue, “the salient figure among the great conductors of today”—was in charge of the Orchestra Department. The blog was a compendium to an exhibit about student life at Curtis.
Protecting Country and Indians
The papers of Junius Wilson MacMurray (1843-98) at Mudd Manuscript Library do not only include Civil War diaries and letters, but also notebooks and reports concerning his investigations of land disputes of the Lower Columbia River Indians in 1884, and his observations about their religious beliefs. (Read the blog)
Helene van Rossum 