Harriet Rice Baldwin was just 14 years old when the Great Blizzard of 1888 hit Middletown on March 11. The storm raged on through March 14, depositing as much as 50 inches of snow in some parts of Connecticut. Her future husband, George Willets Davison (Class of 1892), then a student at the Wesleyan Academy…
By Suzy Taraba ’77, MALS ’10, Director of Special Collections & Archives Paula Beer-Hofmann, the wife of the Austrian dramatist and poet Richard Beer-Hofmann, died in Switzerland on October 30, 1939, as she and her husband were leaving their home in Austria for a new life in America, far away from Hitler’s regime. Heartbroken but still determined…
Who remembers Foss House? And what about the Art Lab? Appropriately located on Foss Hill, Foss House was once the home of Archibald Foss, Class of 1852, professor of Latin and Hebrew and brother of Wesleyan President Cyrus Foss, Class of 1854. In 1880, George I. Seney, Class of 1845, bought Foss House and donated…
Did you ever wonder what Wesleyan was like more than 140 years ago? Find yourself daydreaming about what students of the time thought of the brand new buildings on College Row or the fledgling sport of “base ball”? Perhaps you’ve wondered about the elaborate facial hair of Wesleyan students in a period when sideburns and…
Wesleyan graduates have a long tradition of founding educational institutions. Some were established to help right social wrongs. The Colored Normal School in Richmond, Va., the first public high school for African American students in the former capital of the Confederacy, was founded in 1867 by Ralza Morse Manly, Class of 1848, and funded by…
Did you know that Wesleyan owns one of the country’s most complete collections of William Butler Yeats? Also in Special Collections & Archives in Olin Library, you’ll find more than 30 different editions of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Our poetry collections are both broad and deep: British poets of the World War I era,…
The new College of the Environment stands firmly on the foundation of nearly 180 years of science at Wesleyan. From its beginning in 1831, the natural sciences have been a key part of the University’s curriculum. Early science instruction was especially strong in geology and astronomy, and several early alumni made their marks in these…
Trick question: What do the 18th-century British legal reformer Lord Mansfield, migratory birds, the 1936 Berlin Olympics, and Prohibition repeal in the United States have to do with each other? Answer: All can be studied through Wesleyan’s Collection on Legal Change. These seemingly unrelated topics offer a glimpse into the riches of a fascinating group…
For most of Wesleyan’s first century and a half, the issue of whether men and women should be educated together seemed to be considered in forty–year time periods. From 1831 to 1871, all male. From 1872 to 1912, coeducational. From 1913 to 1955, resolutely all male, with no plans for coeducation. But in 1956, the…
Imagine a Wesleyan without academic departments based on traditionally recognized disciplines. Students (perhaps even faculty) live, eat, study, and socialize together in groups organized around intellectual interests. Faculty teach in areas far removed from their academic specialties and students take an active role in developing their own educational programs, in independent study, and even in…
