In 1933, psychoanalyst Frieda Fromm-Reichmann fled Nazi Germany. Before landing in the United States, she passed through France. An item from the Manuscript Division’s collections tells this story.
Join the Manuscript Division and an interdisciplinary panel of scientists and scholars on August 1, at 12:00pm (EDT) to reflect on the global legacies of the atomic bomb.
Join historians Meg McAleer and Josh Levy at noon (EDT) on Thursday, May 11, as they discuss founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud’s narrow escape from Nazi-controlled Vienna with Andrew Nagorski, author of the new book Saving Freud: The Rescuers Who Brought Him to Freedom.
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.
On September 25, 1910, in Aotearoa New Zealand, a stunning Maori kite caught Alexander Graham Bell's eye. His journals show Bell's brief encounter with an indigenous scientific tradition and reveal his own obsession with transporting human beings through the air in enormous tetrahedral kites.
The Polish Declarations of Admiration and Friendship for the United States present a snapshot of Poland in 1926 through stunning illustrations and a virtual census of one-sixth of its population, just before the unimaginable devastation caused by war. This blog is a tribute to Samuel Ponczak (1937-2022), an untiring advocate for the collection.
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.
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.