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Category: International History

Two men smiling in military uniform with forest in background

Behind the Scenes: Preserving the Edwin Swillinger Scrapbook

Posted by: Josh Levy

Manuscript collections often include scrapbooks, which tell unique stories but can be challenging to preserve. With Edwin Swillinger’s scrapbook, archivist Katherine Madison chose to disassemble it in order to provide the best care for the many photographs and other documents depicting Swillinger’s military service and life in post-World War II Japan.

Handwritten copy (with deletions crossed out and additions added) of the first few sentence of Jefferson

“Great Elocutionary Power and Dramatic Force”: George Kennan’s Lectures on Russia as Reported in American Newspapers, 1889-1893

Posted by: Laura Kells

In a class project for a course on Imperial Russian history at Virginia Tech, students learned about the Manuscript Division's holdings of explorer and lecturer George Kennan's personal papers and examined newspaper accounts of his lectures using the Library's Chronicling America website.

Handwritten copy (with deletions crossed out and additions added) of the first few sentence of Jefferson

Finding Rats in the Barry Commoner Papers

Posted by: Josh Levy

In the late 1960s, Barry Commoner and the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems became involved in an ambitious, federally funded effort to understand the ecology of the sewer rat, and then kill it. That project’s failure at a moment of heightened political radicalism reveals how the rat-human relationship can highlight histories of economic injustice. With a major reprocessing of the Barry Commoner Papers now complete, those stories, and more, emerge with far greater clarity.