Columbia’s Rare Book & Manuscripts Library Welcomes the Josefina Báez Papers, the Tenth in the Latino Arts and Activisms Collection

Rare Book & Manuscripts Library’s Latino Arts and Activisms (LAAS) collection has acquired the papers of writer, performer, and theorist Josefina Báez. The LAAS collection seeks to acquire the papers and records of Latinos and Latino organizations in New York that may be of enduring significance as research resources for the city and the world. […]

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Researcher Profile | Leïla Morsy on the closure of Black Medical Schools

  Senior Lecturer at Flinders University’s College of Medicine and Public Health, Leïla Morsy visited the RBML as part of her work on The Medical Color Line, a project that examines how powerful philanthropies in the early twentieth century restructured medical education and underfunded Black medical schools, excluding  Black doctors from the medical field and creating long-lasting legacies […]

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Research at the RBML | Scott Spillman on Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick

  After more than a decade working in the RBML, historian Scott Spillman has made unexpected discoveries in the Richard Hofstadter papers, examined a class syllabus that pre-dates historians Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick’s landmark collaboration Slavery (1959), and found unexpected correspondence in which Elkins and McKitrick lay out the genesis of their analysis of […]

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Mass incarceration from one family’s perspective, a Curatorial Short with Kurt Boone

In the RBML’s continuing Curatorial Shorts programming, we feature a collection of oral histories on mass incarceration collected by Kurt Boone for the Oral History Archives at Columbia. The collection holds eight interviews by Boone. Boon is a collector and documentarian of urban culture – including hip hop, graffiti art, and street style. You can […]

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Research at the RBML | Marija Dalbello delves into the Industrial Workers of the World collections

Labor movements have often had to create their own newspapers to disseminate their message. In the early twentieth century, the Industrial Workers of the World managed dozens of dailies as part of their broader organizing strategy, including The Industrial Workers and Solidarity, as well as periodicals for non-English speakers, such as Industrialisti, for Finnish speakers. […]

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