Author: Amey Hutchins
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If Today Is Sunday, This Must Be 1798
A section of a diary kept between 1797 and 1800 by the Quaker farmer Jacob Peirce recently joined the collections of the Penn Libraries as Oversize Ms. Codex 2079, thanks to the Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture. Peirce was a busy man, but he found time to write brief entries about the work of the…
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This seventh day of February
335 years ago today, William Penn sold 500 acres of land in Pennsylvania to John Kirton. The date was recorded as 1681, but as the new year in England at that time began on March 25, this is actually February 1682 according to the present calendar system. The deed recording this transaction is one of…
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Anniversary of another Marian Anderson milestone
Sixty years ago today, when the contralto Marian Anderson appeared at the Metropolitan Opera as the fortune teller Ulrica in Giuseppe Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera, she was the first African-American to sing a solo role at the preeminent opera house. The Marian Anderson Papers (Ms. Coll. 200), one of the treasures of the Kislak…
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Old Friends Reunited
Earlier this month, Middle East Studies Librarian David Giovacchini brought a Turkish manuscript to the Special Collections Processing Center for cataloging. David had already created the core of a catalog record for the manuscript, identifying the author, text, and the source manuscript from which this manuscript had been copied. But there was also a bit…
Unique at Penn 