Archives

2019: The Year in Archival Research by Meredith Mann, Manuscripts and Archives Division, Stephen A. Schwarzman BuildingFebruary 3, 2020

Each year, the New York Public Library’s Brooke Russell Astor Reading Room is an intellectual home to hundreds of researchers who seek out our rich holdings of manuscripts, archives, and rare books in order to better understand the past and create new knowledge.  To reflect on the wide and exciting range of work this produces, we’ve rounded up a sampling of publications whose authors relied upon the Library’s archival and rare book collections in their research. This list, like last year’s, is but a snapshot of the projects supported daily in our Reading Room. We hope that it inspires you to explore our collections and begin a project of your own! If you're able to visit us at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building on 42nd Street, our Made at NYPL exhibition showcasing original works created using the Library's resources is on display through July 3, 2020. 

General Custer, Libbie Custer and Their Dogs: A Passion for Hounds, from the Civil War to Little Bighorn by Brian Patrick Duggan. McFarland & Company, Inc.

This entry in the Dogs of the World publishing series follows dog enthusiasts General George and Libbie Custer and their pack of forty hunting dogs. As part of his comprehensive research, Duggan draws from the Marguerite Merington papers. Once private secretary to Libbie Custer, Merington’s research notes and drafts can be consulted alongside the published edition of letters, edited by Merington in 1950.

— Tal Nadan

Mr. Straight Arrow: The Career of John Hersey, Author of Hiroshima by Jeremy Treglown. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

In this biography, Treglown approaches the work of John Hersey and his career-defining book, Hiroshima. Documentation in the New Yorker records contextualizes the creation of the work. Additionally, correspondence between editor Harold Ross and Hersey provides insight into the relationship of these two prominent forces in mid-century journalism. Treglown expands beyond the seminal work and brings light to a lifetime of contributions, often overshadowed by Hiroshima’s legacy.

— Tal Nadan

The Most Spectacular Restaurant in the World: The Twin Towers, Windows on the World, and the Rebirth of New York by Tom Roston. Abrams Press.

By tracing the creation of Windows on the World, Tom Roston shows how closely food culture and the dining industry are woven into the fabric of New York’s social and economic life. He pairs archival research of the Joe Baum papers with over 100 interviews of Windows staff for a rich portrait of the glamorous restaurant and a deeply affecting account of its part in the September 11 attacks.  


— Meredith Mann

Outside Looking In by T.C. Boyle. Ecco.

In his most recent novel, T.C. Boyle follows a young grad student and his family at Harvard University in the early 1960s. Pulled into the orbit of Timothy Leary, they become increasingly involved with Leary’s iconoclastic psychology theories and experimentation with psilocybin and LSD. Boyle consulted Leary’s papers to gain a clearer picture of his Harvard years and time in Zihuatanejo, Mexico and Millbrook, New York.  


— Meredith Mann

Remembrance of Things Present: The Invention of the Time Capsule by Nick Yablon. University of Chicago Press.

What is cultural memory, and how do we preserve it? These questions are near and dear to an archivist’s heart, and also central themes of Nick Yablon’s book. By tracing the history of the time capsule, Yablon explores our hopes of documenting the present and thus communicating with the future. From the Library’s Modern Historic Records Association files, Yablon explores how an early 20th century organization attempted to document lives “writ on water” and, in so doing, grappled with the question of  what was worth saving without the perspective of historical hindsight.  


— Meredith Mann

Serial Encounters: Ulysses and the Little Review by Clare Hutton. Oxford University Press.

In this monograph, Hutton offers a close textual analysis of James Joyce’s Ulysses in its first available form in the United States, published in installments in the Little Review. A reader of the serial version experienced a number of endings to the text, as compared to reading the 1922 first edition, published by Sylvia Beach of Shakespeare and Company in Paris. A figure in this publication history is Irish-American patron John Quinn, whose papers are available for research—including extensive letterbooks that can be perused online.  


—Tal Nadan

Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature by Jean-Christophe Cloutier. Columbia University Press.


Stemming from his participation in the discovery and publication of an unknown Claude McKay novel, Cloutier discusses the state of black literary archives in institutions, as well as the creation and use of documents by black authors in their work. The resulting study incorporates a number of manuscript collections from repositories along the East Coast. Foundational to this discussion are the efforts of Carl Van Vechten, who (along with Langston Hughes) served as a historiographer of the Harlem Renaissance. From the Van Vechten papers, Cloutier incorporates the correspondence of this prominent white advocate of black authors and liaison to university archives.  


—Tal Nadan

Suffrage and the City: New York Women Battle for the Ballot by Lauren Santangelo. Oxford University Press.


Lauren Santangelo gives a vivid account of New York City and the fight for women’s suffrage. New York City is shown as the epicenter for the suffrage movement with Santangelo focusing on the years 1870 through 1917. She successfully links the urban growth of New York, particularly Manhattan, to the growing suffrage movement. Santangelo draws upon the Lillian D. Wald, National American Woman Suffrage Association and the Schwimmer-Lloyd papers to create a mesmerizing account of the women’s suffrage movement.  


—Cara Dellatte

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval by Saidiya Hartman. W.W. Norton.


In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman focuses on the lived experience of black women in early 20th century America, a demographic long ignored by the traditional documentary record. To overcome this lack, Hartman creatively and tenaciously scours an array of sources to reconstruct and reanimate the stories of her subjects. She dug deep into the Library’s Committee of Fourteen records—a citizen’s action group investigating brothels, speakeasies, and other sources of ‘vice’ in turn-of-the-century New York City—to surface arrest notes for a young girl named Eleanora Fagan, or as we now know her, Billie Holiday.  See this document in Made at NYPL, an exhibition currently on the third floor of the Library’s Schwarzman Building.  


— Meredith Mann

Who Owns the News? A History of Copyright by Will Slauter. Stanford University Press.

Will Slaughter gives an engaging account of the history of news and newspapers from their inception to the modern day. He explores how copyright law and journalism are intertwined and what that means for technology, government policy, and the publishing world. To aid his research, Slauter worked with the Adolph S. Ochs papers from the New York Times Company records  and the Richard Rogers Bowker papers.

— Cara Dellatte
 

 

View all posts by Meredith Mann