FEBRUARY 2018 NEWSLETTER
Upcoming Events and Lectures
Making Sense of the Burr Conspiracy

Don't miss our first lecture of the season on Tuesday, February 20! 

James E. Lewis, Jr. will be joining us to discuss his book,  The Burr Conspiracy A professor of History at Kalamazoo College, Lewis examines how rumors and reports of Aaron Burr's activities in the trans-Appalachian West in 1805 and 1806 produced a sense of crisis that was broadly held across the new nation. He discusses the various political and cultural forces that shaped how men and women at the time turned vague and often conflicting accounts into enough certainty to act. 

Register for the event here.
African American Literature and the Archive Speaker Series
Sponsored by the Clements Library

In collaboration with the College of Literature, Science and the Arts Critical Contemporary Studies program, we welcome three esteemed scholars to campus who will examine archival approaches to African American literature and cultural production. Nathaniel Mills, Assistant Professor of English at University of Minnesota, will kick off the series with a lecture entitled "The Lumpenproletariat, Black Marxism, and the Archive: Ralph Ellison and Margaret Walker in the Great Depression" on Thursday, February 8th.

For more information, please visit this site.
Clements Exhibits
Open on Fridays from 10:00am - 4:00pm
The Pioneer Americanists: Early Collectors, Dealers, and Bibliographers

This exhibit continues through May 18. From White Kennett, the first great collector of Americana, to Hubert Howe Bancroft, who broke new ground in concentrating on the American West, this exhibit tells the stories of sixteen noteworthy specialists who created and nurtured the Americana field from the late seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries.

The companion book will be available in April 2018.  It is available for preorder  here.
Upcoming Tours
Join us for a behind-the-scenes tour of our award winning library. Please register by selecting one of the links below.


Clements In the News
Ann Arbor Antiquarian Book Fair to Benefit Clements Library
March 4, 2018 

The annual Ann Arbor Antiquarian Book Fair has moved up its date prior to the Michigan Union closing. The fair will now be held on Sunday, March 4 from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. inside the Union Ballroom.

Admission is $5, benefiting the Clements Library. The fair is expected to include 40 book dealers from Michigan and 13 from other states, offering used, rare, and out-of-print books, maps, postcards, photographs and prints for sale.

Learn more about the fair here.
Events Highlight
Representations of Slavery Through Maps

On Friday, January 26, Maps Curator and Associate Director Brian Dunnigan led a history course through primary representations of slavery. Students listened to a brief lecture on history of the Clements Library and studied some pieces from our extensive maps collection. 

Students were able to ask questions, immerse themselves in firsthand accounts of slavery, and understand  the Clements Library's role in preserving these important artifacts.
From the Blog

Soldiers' wartime letters and diaries sometimes contain references to items picked up on the battlefield or seized from enemy property. For example, the Henry Clinton Papers at the Clements Library contain letters and other materials captured or intercepted from Americans during the Revolutionary War. Battlefield artifacts such as bullets and other objects may be found in the realia collections of the Graphics Division. Read more here.
Clements Corner
Successes in Digitization

Our current Joyce Bonk assistant, Corey Schmidt, has scanned and added almost 1,600 portrait prints to the image bank since he started with us in September! At left is a nineteenth century chromolithograph of Martha Washington that was recently added to our digital collection. 

Corey is currently scanning a collection of carte de visite photographs for the image bank and digitizing the Samuel Latham Mitchill papers for the Manuscripts Division.

Staff Highlight
Mary Pedley: Cataloguing and Digitizing Maps

Many years ago, a fellow map librarian said to me, "If you want to study old maps, be ready to do gymnastics."  Those words stuck in my mind as I undertook to help a Dutch colleague by photographing all the maps in a series of Dutch atlases in our collection.  As the picture shows, this endeavor is definitely a gymnastic affair.  A ladder is required to get sufficient height to take in the sometimes very large maps folded inside the atlas. The sheer weight of some volumes demands muscle tone and core strength to move them around. So why, the reader asks, is such a performance necessary at all? Find out here.
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