A small display of original art for Christmas and the winter season painted by Pauline Baynes is on view through December in the Special Collections Instruction Gallery, Sawyer Room 408, Monday through Friday, 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Baynes (1922–2008), a prolific artist and designer, is best known as the illustrator of the “Narnia” books […]
Carl F. Liss, Williams Class of 1953, has kindly given the Chapin Library a scarce children’s book, African Folk Tales written by Pauline E. Dinkins, M.D. (1892–1961) and illustrated by Effie Lee Newsome (born Mary Effie Lee, 1885–1979), published in 1933 by the Sunday School Publishing Board of Nashville, Tennessee. Only eight copies of this […]
The Chapin Library has been able to acquire, on its Class of 1940 Americana Fund, an apparently unique broadside by John Paul Jones (1747–1792), the “Father of the American Navy”. The sheet was almost certainly printed in Portsmouth, New Hampshire in 1777, as a means of raising a crew for the sloop Ranger, the command […]
This has been a good year for additions to the Chapin Library, both by gift and by purchase, as always in support of the work done by students and teachers at Williams, and following the purposes of our various funds. Here are only a few of the acquisitions made between July 2015 and June 2016, […]
War was declared between Mexico and the United States in May 1846 in the wake of disputes over contested territory along the Rio Grande and the U.S. annexation of Texas. Fierce battles followed, in Mexico and the Southwest and on the Pacific coast. One of the most important of these was the Battle of Chapultepec […]
“I just recall a man making the rounds of the fraternities and quickly drawing many of the members,” recollects Dick Debevoise, Class of 1946. We know no more than this about how and why George Pal came to Williams to draw student caricatures in 1946. Happily two of Pal’s drawings survived and were gifted last […]
Selections from the Heritage Collection formed by Paul Breman (1931–2008) are on view on the first floor of Sawyer Library through February 3rd. Dutch-born and educated, Paul Breman was known among black poets as “that crazy white boy who takes us seriously”. Breman’s collection encompasses in depth the poetry of black Africa and of the […]
A second group of documents has been transferred to the Chapin Library from Chesterwood, the former Stockbridge, Massachusetts country home and studio of the sculptor Daniel Chester French. The bulk of the Chesterwood Archives was given to the Library in June 2010, but plan files and a few boxes were kept back for further sorting. […]
Oliver Goldsmith (1730?–1774) is best known as a novelist, poet, and playwright. But he also published two works in the sciences: History of the Earth and Animated Nature (1774) and A Survey of Experimental Philosophy (1776). The Chapin Library recently acquired a copy of the latter, much rarer title, published after Goldsmith’s death but evidently […]
For an earlier generation, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas on November 21, 1963 was a defining moment. Those of us old enough to remember can say exactly where we were when we heard about that tragedy, and some of us with archival foresight preserved newspapers and magazines which recorded the […]
