“First of all, congratulations on finishing your oral exams.” So reads the first sentence of a correspondence found in the first box of the Center for Economic and Social Rights (CESR) records, which I am processing as part of the Graduate Student Internship Program in Primary Sources at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library this […]
Category: Human Rights Collections
Cross-postings | An interview with archivist Chris Laico about the Columbia Human Rights
Our colleagues in Global Studies sat down with RBML archivists Chris Laico to discuss archives and his daily work with the Center for Human Rights Documentation & Research. I view my work as similar to an eternal graduate student, in a good way. I learn something every day. There is a fundamental need to understand […]
Global Sexualities in the RBML Collections
The Columbia Research Initiative on the Global History of Sexualities (CRIGHS) recently launched a website and research guide describing approximately 150 archival collections, databases, oral histories, and other sources available across the Columbia and Barnard libraries of interest to historians of sexuality. […]
What is this place? A short intro to RBML
That is the question we hear a lot at the beginning of the new academic year as students explore Butler Library and end up here, in the Rare Book & Manuscript Library, aka “The Pink Palace.” The Rare Book & Manuscript Library (RBML) is Columbia’s principal repository for primary source collections. The range of collections […]
Pride Month and history in the RBML collections
Getting to tell your own story is a gift, but it means that you have to contend with other people’s stories, and I guess that can mean arguing, maybe for 50 years straight. And that’s O.K. – Who Threw the First Brick at Stonewall? Let’s Argue About It The RBML’s archival, manuscript, oral history and […]