Library Blogs

Women in Early America (NYU, 2015), edited by Thomas Foster, is the latest in a line of scholarly histories examining the ways that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century women were actually key players in the economic, cultural, and political life of the American colonies despite the many legal and societal obstacles they had to overcome due to their gender. Most chapters in this wide-ranging work, each written by an expert in the field, focus on specific regions or identities. There is a chapter on the gendering of slave ownership in colonial Jamaica, for example, and another on trade and power in Early French America and Detroit. More familiar topics are also covered, like the connections between witchcraft and resistance to patriarchy or the lives of loyalist women in British-occupied New York City. Our own Mary C. Kelley, Ruth Bordin Collegiate Professor of History, American Culture, and Women's Studies, contributes the final chapter of the book. As in her well-known work Learning to Stand And Speak: Women, Education, And Public Life In America's Republic (UNC, 2006), Kelley discusses the ramifications of a revolution in women’s educational opportunities between the Revolutionary and Civil Wars that enabled many to take up positions in the public sphere as writers, educators, and reformers.

I am frequently asked by students and faculty: where do our rare book collections come from? While we have purchased many extraordinary books since the early years of the University of Michigan, many of our treasures were bequeathed by grateful alums and faculty. The reasons why they donated these artifacts are often fascinating, revealing little-known stories that shed light not only on the history of our institution but on our country at large. The book featured in this post is a rare seventeenth-century edition and Latin translation of the Homer's Iliad...

A project from the Shapiro Design Lab automatically tweeting out images from the University's history.

Now that 2016 has passed, it can be interesting to look back at which games were most popular over the course of the year.

The Shapiro Undergraduate Library is starting off the new year with a bicentennial-themed display of books about all 200 years of U-M's history. A critical part of that history, and a strong component of our display, is the inclusion of women at the university. In this post, we feature five of our many books about women at Michigan.

A curator's overview of the exhibit “The Florence Flood, November 1966: The Conservation of Books at the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale and Beyond.”

Over the past several months, Digital Content & Collections has worked on new procedures for handling accessions from patrons for HathiTrust. What happens if no HathiTrust contributing institution has their volume on their shelves, and the volume is a good addition to the HathiTrust corpus? In these cases, U-M Library steps into the breach. We can easily handle a small throughput of these volumes from HathiTrust, and we handle three kinds of accessions: physical, digital and virtual.

An 8-year project to digitize our Islamic Manuscripts Collection is now finished!

The Unwilling Vestal is a historical novel, originally published in 1918, about Brinnaria, a young girl in ancient Rome who is forced to become a Vestal virgin after she refuses to marry the man her father has chosen for her. During her thirty years of service as a Vestal virgin, she is determined to stay true to the man she loves and marry him at the end of her service. But her rejected suitor threatens to have her accused of breaking her vows, and the emperor Commodus (who may be familiar to you as the villain of the movie Gladiator) will go along with the accusation unless Brinnaria proves her innocence. The Unwilling Vestal still reads well, and is full of fascinating details about ancient Rome.

The Liber medicinalis (Book of Medicine) is a medical treatise of around 1,200 dactylic hexameters, traditionally attributed
to the second-century Roman author, Quintus Serenus Sammonicus (d. beginning of 3rd c. AD). It contains sixty-four therapeutic recipes,
divided into two sections: recipes for illnesses affecting individual organs listed from head to toe, and recipes for general ailments like injuries, fevers, fractures and dislocations, insomnia, toothache, and poisoning.