Tag Archives: 1850’s

Food, Glorious Food!

By guest blogger Alex Olkovsky, a graduate student in American Studies While many collections in our archives contain business and legal documents, there are also numerous focused on people’s daily and domestic lives. Unsurprisingly, these collections are where we can … Continue reading

A Day in the Life: June 1

Here’s a slice of life from June 1st over the last 170 some-odd years, representing a cross-section of materials from the digital archive — from the serious to the silly, the magical to the mundane.

Everyday mysteries of the archives

Part of the fun of looking through archival material is solving mysteries. When we don’t know much about the provenance of the collection –when there’s only the material itself to go on –that mystery is even more challenging, but potentially more fun. … Continue reading

Family Connections

With a collection as regional as the one at the W. S. Hoole Special Collections Library, it’s not surprising to find some occasional overlap. The Wynne Family Papers and the Meriwether Family Papers come together with the Coleman family, as you can see … Continue reading

Newly online: materials about slave labor at UA, 1820s-1860s

We know them by first name only, and there’s a good chance those are not the names they were born with. Men called William, Moses, Edwards, Patrick, Sam, Major, Quillen, Arthur, Speers, Robert, Andrew, Swindle, Peter, Erasmus, Anderson, Jack, Isaac, … Continue reading

Augusta Evans Wilson, novelist and Confederate patriot

In the 19th century, more and more women became not just occasional novel writers but full time authors. Hoole Special Collections Library houses the papers of Georgia native Augusta Jane Evans Wilson, who published nine sentimental novels, including Beulah, the … Continue reading

Hugh Davis farm journals, 1848-1880

Hugh Davis (1811-1862) was an Alabama lawyer turned plantation owner. Being a learned man, his record books from the Beaver Bend farm are thorough and articulate, describing both day-to-day activities and overall running of farming operations, including the relationship between … Continue reading

Early history of the University of Alabama?

We’ve just loaded a box of the Manly Family papers into the transcription interface, in the hopes that YOU would like to transcribe correspondence and diaries relating to the early history of the University of Alabama. Basil Manly, Sr. (1798-1868) … Continue reading

Letter from Westly Townsend, An Empancipated Slave

A few months ago, we blogged about a project funded by the NHPRC to digitize the Septimus D. Cabaniss Papers. This is a really fascinating collection, containing the personal and business papers of a Civil War era attorney from Huntsville, … Continue reading