Peek in the Stacks

As the semester winds down across campus, enjoy some holiday-themed materials from our rare book, manuscript, and archival collections.  From the rare book collections are several holiday-themed works, including 1844 and 1899 editions of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, as well as a work from Special Collections' Children's Books Collection, The Birds' Christmas Carol, about a young girl born on Christmas Day who plans a holiday ...

A native of Erie, Pennsylvania, John M. Sell enlisted in the 83rd Regiment of the Pennsylvania Volunteers on July 29, 1861. He was commissioned First Lieutenant on August 27 of that year, and promoted to Captain on September 4, 1862. After fighting in numerous battles over two years, Sell was shot in the left leg on July 2, 1863 during the Battle of Gettysburg. In one of the most commonly-performed medical procedures of the war, a ...

The Travel Scrapbook Collection consists of two scrapbooks from 1919 that contain numerous photographs, postcards, and clippings documenting a months-long vacation from British Columbia to Japan, China, Singapore, the Philippines, Burma, and India. Though we do not know who took the vacation or made the scrapbooks, they are typical of those from the early 20^th century in that photos and clippings were glued to black album paper, and captions were written directly onto the photographs themselves as frequently as they were written on the album pages...