Author: adminuatpa
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The Final Part of a Mamlūk Qurʾān Copy
Written by Kelly Tuttle A serendipitous discovery happened as part of the Manuscripts of the Muslim World project a few weeks ago. Mitch Fraas, the project lead at Penn, came by and dropped off a copy of the Journal of Islamic Manuscripts to me. A break sounded nice, so I turned away from NEP 80,…
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Learning the Alphabet Starting with L, E, N, I, N
Written by Laura Auketayeva In the early Soviet Union, education played a particularly important role in ensuring that the ideology reached every citizen, most effectively, from a very early age. The Soviet student schoolwork collection contains a rare set of remarkable drawings and notes. There are dozens such drawings which give us a unique glimpse…
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Cookies, Cards, and Cultivating Community: Gays at Penn in the ’70s, ’80s, and Beyond!
Written by Hector Kilgoe The LGBT community in the United States and at the University of Pennsylvania has come a long way since the 1970s. The Jeremy Duncan Nicholson* papers provide an illuminating snapshot of the efforts undertaken by students and faculty at Penn in the 1970s and 1980s to cultivate a vibrant gay and…
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Back to School
Written by Donna Brandolisio Heading off to college? You might want to take a peek at this once helpful guide for women published in Philadelphia by the John C. Winston Company in 1949. Off to College by Suzanne Gould Emerson provided young women with helpful advice. “In this indispensable guide book she tells you how…
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Can You Guess What This Soviet Poster Is Trying To Tell You?
Early Soviet posters aimed to end the Old Regime in every way, and that included religion. The poster above is a part of the collection of 48 Soviet propaganda posters from the 1920s and 1930s. This fascinating collection includes anti-religious and anti-capitalist messages, as well as instructional posters on the new ways of Soviet childcare…
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A Small, Maltese Qurʾān
Penn has an eclectic mix of Arabic, Persian and Ottoman Turkish manuscripts that are now being cataloged as part of the Manuscripts of the Muslim World (MMW) project. The project is cataloging and digitizing previously ‘hidden’ materials from Penn and other Philadelphia area repositories. Along the way, lots of fun discoveries are being made about…
Unique at Penn 