June 19th, known as Juneteenth, has long been a key African American holiday — a day to commemorate emancipation and freedom from enslavement. The date was first celebrated in Texas, in 1865, to mark the end of slavery after the Civil War. In the RBML, archival documents related to African American freedom reflect the […]
Tag: history
Anti-Racist and Black Liberation Archives in the Rare Book & Manuscript Library
The extrajudicial murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, which followed the lynching of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia, and coincided with a global pandemic that has taken disproportionate toll on African Americans, reveals that systemic racism is a life or death matter–for the millions of people who suffer its effects, and for a nation that purports […]
Increasing visibility of the Muslim world
The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), recently awarded Columbia University and its peer institutions — The Free Library of Philadelphia, the University of Pennsylvania, Haverford College, and Bryn Mawr College — $500,000 to digitize Islamic manuscripts and paintings dating from 1000 to 1900. “Arising from an extraordinary confluence of collecting foresight, scholarly curiosity, and shared expertise, […]