New Things

It may seem something of an oxymoron to have something new in the Archives and Special Collections.  Our collections are mostly “new to us” rather than brand new but we also work to find new ways to let people know about and get them engaged with our materials.

New Projects

Our newest venture is the Community Space portion of our website.  If you’d like to do more than just browse, now you can help transcribe 19th century documents.  If you have a great memory, you can help us describe photographs. If you have stories about the town or the college, you can send them in.  If you have photographs, you can send us scans.

It’s fairly easy for archives to get administrative records, to document the governance end of an institution or town. It’s harder to get the personal stories, the aspect of history that humanizes events and shows how one event can have more than one perspective.

We know that some classes are having great fun with Facebook pages, gathering stories before reunions and we’d like to capture those stories and photos within the Davidson digital archives to be sure that they will be around and available many years from now.

So dust off those memories — your first visit to campus, a dorm prank, a favorite professor, being a part of Town Day, cleaning up after Hurricane Hugo — what have you got to share??

New to Us

Recent donations include an 1840 letter written by William Dalrymple Johnson, class of 1942 to Samuel Kerr, class of 1843.  The letter describes the Johnson’s hopes of attending  Princeton and a lengthy list of courses offered there. We don’t know much about Samuel Kerr but Johnson did transfer to Princeton and also earned an MA there.  He returned to South Carolina to farm and be active in government.

 

A more modern form of student communication came in from Turner House.  Along with photographs of house events, they donated some of their t-shirts. A bit non-traditional but clothing does tell us about student life and changes in social interactions.  After all, in 1960, who would have ever imagined this image with a Davidson party?