Rare edition of Rip Van Winkle

This 1905 copy of Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle, illustrated by Arthur Rackham, is #79 of a signed 250-print limited edition by Heinemann. The binding is vellum, and the second half of the book is composed of over four dozen colored plates separated by tissue guards that bear quotes from the story.

A quote from one of the tissue guards, just because it made us smile:

Happy Arbor Day!

In celebration of Arbor Day, we thought you’d enjoy some lovely engravings from a 1786 edition of John Evelyn’s famous work, Sylva: or A Discourse of Forest-Trees and the Propagation of Timber in His Majesty’s Dominions, first presented to the Royal Society (of which Evelyn was a founding Fellow) in 1662. This edition includes “An Historical Account of the Sacredness and Use of Standing Groves” and “Terra: A Philosophical Discourse of Earth.”

“The Cedar Tree”

“A South East View of the Green Dale Oak near Welbeck”

“A Winter View of the Canthorpe Oak”

Here comes the bride!

This gorgeous trained wedding gown, leather slipper, and orange blossom headpiece were worn by Lucy Lee Scarborough at her wedding to Joseph M. Chestnutt in Attala County, Mississippi, on June 7, 1893. Part of the Hays-Ray-Webb Family Papers.

A Cabinet of Curiosities

In celebration of the spookiest season, Special Collections’ current exhibit, “A Cabinet of Curiosities,” features some of our favorite weird items!

The case above features Minié balls (a type of bullet) from Vicksburg, a 1612 manual for identifying witches (detailed in this post), an 1829 book about magic and miracles, and a lacquer box and eggs from Russia.

This taxidermy oddity, a two-headed bobcat, comes from the Jerry Clower Collection!

Pictured above: a pillbox of baby teeth, a syringe case with medicine vials, and a 1665 Royal Society publication featuring the article “Observables upon a Monstrous Head” - regarding a deformed colt born with no nose, a single eye, and four eyebrows!

Last Night

On this day in 1865, President Abraham Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth at a performance of Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theatre. Below is a broadside advertising the play’s final night, along with an illustration of the devil whispering into John Wilkes Booth’s ear. Both items are on display in the Lincolniana Gallery at the Ulysses S. Grant Presidential Library @msstate.

As more and more people worldwide are being vaccinated, we wanted to reblog this post from 2018. 

“This inestimable blessing”

Our medical history collection includes this 1810 work by Samuel Scofield, A Practical Treatise on Vaccina or Cowpock, a work celebrating and advocating for vaccination. 

“The annals of history do not present to us a discovery of equal importance with that of Vaccination.”

The word of a white man

In 1948, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ray Sprigle shaved his hair and mustache and went to Florida to acquire a deep tan. Then he went South as James R. Crawford, a light-skinned Black man from Pittsburgh. Sprigle was on an undercover mission, aided by the national secretary of the NAACP, to expose Jim Crow injustices and cruelties.

For four endless, crawling weeks I was a Negro in the Deep South.

I ate, slept, traveled, lived Black. I lodged in Negro households. I ate in Negro restaurants. I slept in Negro hotels and lodging houses. I crept through the back and side doors of railroad stations. I traveled Jim Crow in buses and trains and street cars and taxicabs. Along with 10,000,000 Negroes I endured the discrimination and oppression and cruelty of the iniquitous Jim Crow system.

In one of the most harrowing stories in the article, Sprigle is horrified to learn about a Clarksdale, Mississippi, mother and newborn baby who died because their local hospital didn’t admit Black people:

Dr. Hill didn't even seek admission for his wife and unborn baby. Just before midnight he put them into an ambulance and started a mad drive north to Memphis and its Negro hospital, 78 miles away, in a desperate race with death.

Though we balk at blackface (however it is presented) today, many in 1948 saw Sprigle’s undercover work as the only way to reach a large segment of the white population, in that white people would believe the experiences of a white man. Sadly, this is often still true today.

Listen to Black people. Believe them when they tell you about their experiences.

This booklet, reprinted from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, includes a response from Mississippi journalist Hodding Carter. It is held in the Mississippi State University Libraries’ Special Collections.

Those interested can read Sprigle’s entire piece here.

Happy International Women’s Day! Here are some of our favorite photographs of women from the library’s Special Collections.

1. Robert and Sadye Wier papers

2. Frank and Virginia Williams Collection of Lincolniana

3. John E. Rodabough papers

4. Lucius Marion Lampton, MD Historical Images Collection

5. Clayton Rand papers

6. Mississippi Homemakers Extension Club records

The Charles Templeton sheet music collection contains dozens of original songs from "King of Ragtime" Scott Joplin. View them in the digital collections here: https://msstate.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/search/searchterm/scott%20joplin

(please be aware that some cover artwork features racist imagery of the time)

First edition of Native Son by Richard Wright, 1940. Wright was born in Roxie, Mississippi, in 1908.

Presentation copy of the Emancipation Proclamation given “To His Excellency A. Lincoln” by the Free Colored People of New Orleans. On display in the Frank & Virginia Williams Collection of Lincolniana in the Ulysses S. Grant Presidential Library at @msstate.

We were saddened to hear of the death of Charley Pride. A native of Sledge, Mississippi, Pride served in the Army and played semiprofessional baseball before pursuing music full time. Despite racial discrimination from radio stations and record companies, Pride broke barriers throughout his decades-long, legendary country music career. In 1971, Pride won the Country Music Association’s entertainer of the year award, the first (and still the only) Black artist to do so. In 1993 he was invited to join the Grand Ole Opry and in 2000 he became the first Black member of the Country Music Hall of Fame. He amassed over 50 top 10 country hits throughout his career. One of 11 children from a sharecropping family, Pride grew up listening to Grand Ole Opry radio broadcasts and bought his first guitar from a Sears Roebuck catalog. We send our thoughts to his family. 

In this 1997 letter from Special Collections, Pride and his wife Rozene send their congratulations to comedian Jerry Clower and his wife Homerline on the occasion of their 50th wedding anniversary. (Jerry Clower collection, University Archives, Mississippi State University Libraries).

Happy Birthday to Fannie Lou Hamer!

Fannie Lou Hamer

“I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.”

Born the youngest of twenty children in Mississippi in 1917, Fannie Lou Hamer became one of the most powerful voices of the Civil Rights movement. She fought tirelessly for civil rights, voting rights, and equal representation until her death in 1977.

Broadside from the Clay County (Mississippi) civil rights movement collection.

Letter from the Allen Eugene Cox papers.

You can read Hamer’s famous “sick and tired” speech here.

“Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hooks because our lives be threatened daily because we want to live as decent human beings, in America?”

Concerning Lichens

The first Master’s thesis submitted at @msstate​ was written by a woman, Clara Southmayd Ludlow (1852-1924). She attended MSU, then called the Mississippi Agricultural & Mechanical College, while her brother worked as a professor of military science. Concerning Lichens was submitted in 1901, the year she earned her Master of Arts degree in Botany. She went on to earn her PhD at George Washington University in 1908. The American Society of Tropical Medicine & Hygiene awards a medal in her honor.

Adam Shuffler

This collection of short stories by writer and lawyer Samuel Alfred Beadle (1857-1932) was published in 1901 in Jackson, Mississippi, and includes wonderful photographs of African American social life.

Beadle’s son, Richard Henry (1884-1971), went on to become a successful photographer in Jackson. Some of the photographs in Adam Shuffler may have been taken by him, though he would have been only a teenager at the time.

The Lantern Project is one of only a few in the South and is funded by a $340,424 grant from the National Historic Publications and Records Committee, a branch of the @usnatarchives National Archives. In addition to MSU Libraries, the University of Mississippi Libraries, Delta State University, the Historic Natchez Foundation, Columbus-Lowndes County Public Library and the Montgomery County (Alabama) Archives also are participating.

This undertaking compiles a wealth of 19th-century documents from across the South and, upon completion, will provide a fully text-searchable, indexed collection containing digital images of original documents that include individuals’ names and detailed physical descriptions. Primarily inspired by patron need, the project is based on a similar effort at the Virginia Museum of History and Culture called “Unknown No Longer.”

The database will utilize records created or used by slave owners or the legal system to track enslaved persons, such as inventories, bills of sale, and probate and other court records, which will allow scholars and genealogists to trace victims’ movements and empower descendants to uncover their ancestries and reconstruct family trees impacted by slavery.