Month: March 2016
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From Anti-Hero to Soubrette: Actresses in Nineteenth Century America
Written by Rive Cadwallader, archival processor Opera, drama, comedy, burlesque… Decades before contemporary forms of media entertainment, theater was as essential part of American culture. A collection of nearly sixty actors’ role books (Ms. Coll. 1143) from the 1870s hints at the “backstage” aspects of this world including rehearsals, costumes, negotiations with celebrity performers and…
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The Materiality of Reading: A Victorian Woman’s Commonplace Book
This little notebook, covered in marbled paper, was clearly well-used. It once belonged to a young woman named Adelaide H[oratia] E[lizabeth] Seymour and is now UPenn Ms. Codex 1757. While the notebook itself is common, its contents provide a fascinating look at Victorian reading practices, consisting of “Extracts from Novels etc.” which Adelaide read…
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The Lowell Edmunds “Tales of Incest and Parricide” Collection
When I was first assigned the Lowell Edmunds collection of folk tales relating to incest and parricide, I was certainly underwhelmed. A large stack of typed papers from the 1970s seemed to cower in the face of the beautiful manuscripts and photo albums from centuries past that I have had the pleasure of working on.…
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Razmak Brigade in India (1936 to 1939 OR 1939 to 1945)
I was just looking through a photograph album documenting the Razmak Brigade in current day Pakistan that Clémence Scouten recently processed and my interest was sparked. We have loads of photograph albums of the British Army in India before Indian independence in 1947, but very few of them actually document army life in that region. …