Tag Archives: 1870’s

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.

New and Notable in Acumen, Fall ’14 – Spring ’15

A lot has come through the digitization pipeline in the last six months or so. Here are some highlights. Diaries Martha Jane Coleman Banks commonplace book Contains diary entries, miscellaneous writings (some appear to be school related), newspaper clippings, recipes, and … Continue reading

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

A Day in the Life: August 25

Archives give us a chance to look at the world in a lot of different ways, through lenses big and small. Today, we take a cross section of life on this date, August 25, across the decades. From 1840 to … 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

1870s English Literature lecture notebook

Philology, n. the study of literary texts and of written records; linguistics, especially historical and comparative linguistics; Obsolete: the love of learning and literature. Long before literature students spent their time looking for symbolism and theme in poems and stories, … Continue reading

Papers of H. D. Clayton Sr., General, statesman, and UA President

Over the last few months, we’ve been digitizing the papers of Henry De Lamar Clayton, Sr. As our student worker Ellyn and I see the final box of materials in sight, it seems like a good time to give an … Continue reading

Jefferson Davis’s Namesake

In 1878, more than a decade after his faction’s defeat in the Civil War, former Confederate President Jefferson Davis wrote a letter to the child of a friend, Confederate General and eventual University of Alabama President Henry De Lamar Clayton. … Continue reading

Temperance to Prohibition

From 1920 to 1933, the United States was officially a “dry” nation. The 18th Amendment made the sale, production, and transportation of alcohol illegal. But the first steps toward ridding the U.S. of alcohol began in the century before, with … Continue reading

Life Studies of the Great Army

One of our great small digital collections is Life Studies of the Great Army, a book of etchings depicting scenes from the Civil War. Published in 1876, it features the work of Edwin Forbes, a relatively well known landscape artist. … Continue reading