Digital Collections

Albert Einstein Digital Collection

Einstein and Otto Nathan walking in garden

A gift of Morris and Adele Bergreen in 2003, Vassar College Libraries' Albert Einstein collection documents a lesser-known aspect of Albert Einstein’s career: his social and political work in the United States and abroad, with special attention to Jewish affairs. The collection was formed by Einstein's friend and executor to his will, Otto Nathan, an economist and professor at several institutions of higher learning, including Vassar College. It is composed of correspondence between Einstein and Nathan, as well as letters from Einstein's wife, Elsa, to Nathan, some manuscripts, ephemera, and photographs of Einstein. A number of letters discuss the fate of Jews in Europe and other aspects of World War II. Others deal with Brandeis University, Jewish affairs in the United States, and personal matters. Browse this collection

Antonio Márquez Collection

[Untitled] (Printed image of a child in black and white with purple watercolor and white chalk superimposed )

Dr. Antonio Márquez (b. 1923 - d. 2010), poet, painter and academic, was born in Arriate, Malaga, Spain. As a young man he studied in Spain under the Jesuit order, and went on to study in Ecuador (1951- 1953) as a member of that order, then went on to to study in the U.S. at the Seminary of St. Andrew’s in Hyde Park, NY. Márquez completed his Doctorate in Philosophy of Religion from Pontifical University of Salamanca, Spain in 1970. Browse this collection

Elizabeth Cady Stanton Papers

Papers include correspondence with Susan B. Anthony, Paulina Wright Davis, Elizabeth Smith Miller, Gerrit Smith, and others relating to family matters, her children, the woman's movement, her lectures and travels, publication of her books and articles, women and religion, abolition, temperance, and other social causes, 1839-1902; phrenological report by L.N. Fowler on the character of Stanton, 1853; and clippings, articles, transcripts of her speeches, an autobiographical sketch, and photographs. Other items include correspondence by Margaret Stanton Lawrence and others on the women's movement, other social causes, and Stanton's career, 1796-1921; and manuscripts and typescripts by Margaret Stanton Lawrence about Elizabeth Cady Stanton's life and career. Browse this collection

Jasper Parrish Papers

The collection includes correspondence of Jasper Parrish, 1790-1829, and others, 1757-1869, relating to the Painted Post treaty, payments to Indians, supplies to the Seneca mission, conduct of the St. Regis Indians, and work of the Quakers among the Indians. There are addresses and messages, 1803-1823, of Timothy Pickering, Thomas Jefferson, and John C. Calhoun to Iroquois chiefs including Red Jacket, Cornplanter, Farmer's Brother, Little Billy, Young King, and others. There are also legal papers, agreements and deeds, 1791-1824, including a deed of conveyance pertaining to the property of Mary Jemison. Records of Jasper Parrish's business transactions include receipts, invoices, notes, and accounts, 1793-1837. There are military and government records relating to the War of 1812 and the New York State Indians, including annuity payment agreements to the Indians and petitions for payments not received, a census of the Six Nations, 1792-1828, and other miscellaneous items, 1799-1860. There is also a set of transcripts along with an introduction prepared by Dorothy May Fairbank, Vassar Class of 1940, another set of transcripts created in 1954, and two biographical narratives of Jasper Parrish contributed by Caroline Townsend Monks, who was Vassar Class of 1940 and a direct descendant of Jasper Parrish. Digitization of the collection was made possible by a generous grant from Dr. Georgette Bennett in honor of Dr. Leonard Polonsky CBE. Browse this collection

John Burroughs Journals

John Burroughs Journal, 1887 (January - June)

John Burroughs (1837-1921) was a noted naturalist, essayist and a significant figure in the history of environmentalism. He was born in a small town in the Catskills and spent the bulk of his adult life in West Park. Note: not all of the journals include a transcription, so a keyword search of the collection will not include hits from all of the volumes. Browse this collection

Landauer Longfellow Collection

The Landauer Longfellow Collection consists of approximately 300 pieces of sheet music and some bound volumes (totaling more than 6500 pages) featuring the poetry of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The items were published in the United States and Europe primarily throughout the nineteenth and early twetieth centuries. The collection is notable for its multiple iterations of the same poem, allowing comparisons between composers, arrangers, etc., as well as its large collections of covers, providing additional analyses of illustrators and publishers. Browse this collection

Matthew Vassar Papers

Matthew Vassar, founder of Vassar College, was born in the County of Norfolk, England, emigrated with his parents and other family members to Dutchess County, N.Y., in 1796. Vassar College was chartered in 1861 and opened its doors to students in 1865. It was not the first venture in higher education for women, but the extensive advertising and publicity for the college brought the question of women's education to popular attention with greater force than ever before. Matthew Vassar strongly believed in women's mental capacity, in proving that woman's mind was equal to man's; and he intended that his college should both prove that point and prepare women to live in the modern world. Browse this collection

Music Programs

One of the oldest continuous collections of concert programs in an academic institution, the Music Programs Digital Collection documents Vassar College Department of Music events from 1866 to the present. Browse this collection

Newspaper & Magazine Archive

The Vassar College Digital Newspaper Archives provides access to a wide range of newspapers and magazines that were published by Vassar College students from 1872-present. Browse this collection

Printers' Marks in the Vassar College Library

This collection provides images of, and information about, all of the extant printer's marks in the windows of the Vassar College Library. Printer's marks are visual emblems that identify the printer of a particular book. They first appeared in the 15th century, and helped early printers establish their businesses and protect their work in what was still an emerging and precarious field. They also have an artistic quality, and many make use of elaborate symbols and patterns. Users will find images of the marks, brief biographies of the printers, and short descriptions of the marks. They can be searched by name, location of printer, or location in the library. This project was created by Katherine Durr (VC '15) as part of the Ford Scholar program under the supervision of Professor Ron Patkus in Summer 2013. Browse this collection

Ruth Benedict Papers

Approximately 8,000 pages from the Ruth Fulton Benedict Archive (held at the Vassar College Archive) have been digitized, including notes from various field expeditions to the American Southwest in the 1930s. The Ruth Benedict Papers are now freely available to the public via Alexander Street's website Browse this collection

Somos Vecinos Oral History Project

Somos Vecinos is an oral history project that invites Latin American immigrants in Poughkeepsie to share their stories. The project is ongoing and consists of a growing collection of life history interviews, conducted in Spanish, with audio recordings, transcriptions, and translations accessible to members of the Vassar community. Browse this collection

Susan B. Anthony Collection

vcl_Susan-B-Anthony_F01-52_1887-07-13_001

Susan Brownell Anthony was born in Adams, Massachusetts, on 15 February 1820, Her parents, Daniel Anthony and Lucy Read, raised her and her seven siblings as Quakers. After a series of financial setbacks and relocations, the Anthony family settled in Rochester, New York, where Susan B. Anthony became acquainted with many abolitionists and women's rights reformers of her day, including William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Amelia Bloomer and Samuel May. In the early 1850s she formed an alliance with Elizabeth Cady Stanton that was critical to the fight for woman suffrage. The main concern of Anthony's letters from 1854-1866 was the antislavery movement. After the Civil War she directed all her energy to the struggle for equal rights for women.Major Correspondents include Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, Samuel May, Eliza R. Whiting, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. (Letters from Anthony to Stanton are in Vassar's Stanton collection). Most letters are hand-written and have an accompanying transcript. Digitization of the collection was made possible by a generous grant from Dr. Georgette Bennett in honor of Dr. Leonard Polonsky CBE. Browse this collection

The Associated Emeritae/i of Vassar College (AEVC) Oral History

The Associated Emeritae/i of Vassar College (AEVC) was founded in the fall of 2007 with the principal goal of representing the interests and concerns of more than eighty retired members of the Vassar Faculty. In support of this goal, the AEVC began compiling oral histories from its members in 2018. Additional interviews are available on-site only in VCL Archives and Special Collections. To make a request please email spcoll@vassar.edu. Browse this collection

The Library Café

The Library Café is a weekly program of table talk with scholars, artists, publishers and librarians about books, scholarship, and the formation and circulation of knowledge. It is hosted by Thomas Hill, Vassar College Art Librarian.,http://library-cafe.org/ Browse this collection

Transactions of the Association of Russian-American Scholars

This collection houses the complete set of the bilingual almanacs published by the Association of Russian-American Scholars in the USA (ARAS) titled – in two languages – Transactions of the Association of Russian-American Scholars in the USA / Записки Русской Академической Группы в США. The publication was launched in 1967 by US-based and Russian-born academics, most of them exiles from Soviet Russia who were denied publication in the USSR due to their political status. Browse this collection

Vassar College ANTH-AFRS 386 Interview Project

The interviews in this collection are a result of the projects by students in Vassar College's "ANTH/AFRS 386: Situating Blackness" course in Spring 2015. The course encouraged students to explore the meanings of blackness (and raced identity categories) as lived experience at Vassar College and beyond. Browse this collection

Vassar College Archives Audio Collection

The Vassar College Archives Audio collection captures nearly 80 years of collegiate music traditions, oral histories, and intercollegiate and local collaborations between faculty, students, and the surrounding community. These unique recordings help to document changes in higher education, including Vassar’s transition from single sex to a co-educational college, and are valuable to scholars in fields ranging from gender and cultural studies, to musicology and local histories. Browse this collection

Vassar College Archives Film and Video Collection

The Vassar College Film and Video Collection is part of the holdings of the College Archives. It consists of several thousand items in a variety of formats which together provide important documentation for the history of the college in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The examples available here date from the 1920s to the 1990s. Topics include the campus, reunion, commencement, inauguration, lectures, events, and other aspects of life at Vassar. Browse this collection

Vassar College Early Images

Group of six Vassar College students: "The Pleiades", 1876

The Images of Early Vassar collection consists of materials relating to the early history of Vassar College, from its founding in 1861 to the early years of the 20th century. The images provide visual documentation of Raymond Avenue, college buildings and buildings relating to Matthew Vassar, class groups, faculty, presidents, students, trustees, Vassar Lake, and Matthew Vassar and his relatives. Browse this collection

Vassar College LGBTQ Oral History Project

The Vassar LGBTQ Oral History Project is a partnership between the LGBTQ Center, the Women's Studies Program and the Vassar College Archives that began in the fall of 2012. The goal of the project is to capture the experiences, stories, and reflections of LGBTQ and ally alumnae/i as well as former and current LGBTQA staff members. Browse this collection

Vassar College Library Gargoyles and Grotesques

On northern wall of western arm, third from west [location: C9]

Vassar College Library was built in 1905, the architecture and the style of the building is perpendicular Gothic, with many embellishments. Among those embellishments are approximately thirty-six gargoyles and grotesques. Gargoyles are decorative water-bearing fixtures meant to redirect rainwater away from stonework while grotesques, although similar in appearance, are meant only for adornment. Browse this collection

Vassar College Memorial Minutes

Conrow, Georgianna, 1878-1954 Memorial Minute

The Memorial Minutes collection consists of short biographical pieces from Vassar faculty members, read in their honor at faculty meetings from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The collection includes biographical information from many notable people in Vassar history, including George Sherman Dickinson, Achsah Mount Ely, Henry Noble MacCracken, Cornelia Raymond, John H. Raymond, Lucy Maynard Salmon, Adelaide Underhill, and Henry Van Ingen. Browse this collection

Vassar College Songs

The Vassar Songs collection features volumes from 1881-1915, and a special seventy-fifth anniversary book from 1940. Browse this collection

Vassar College Student Diaries

The Student Diaries collection provides access to more than fifty diaries from Vassar students from the nineteenth century. The diaries concern life on campus, other students, classes, relationships with their professors, vacations, family news, and other subjects; some volumes have short entries on daily activities while others have longer, more reflective entries. Students include Florence Wislocki, 1922; Frances M. Bromley, 1875-1877; Abby Holden, 1871-1872; Bertha Keffer, 1868-1871; Elma G. Martin, 1892-1893; Anne Page Brydon, 1922-1923; Helen Hartley Pease, 1914-1915; Anne Wyman, 1878-1880; Marjorie Anthony Markwich, 1914; and Constance E. Anthony, 1915. Browse this collection

Vassar College Student Letters

The Student Letters collection contains letters from Vassar students primarily during the nineteenth century. The letters were written by students to family, friends, and Vassar faculty, with some letters received by students from family and friends, concerning life at Vassar, their studies, social events, and family affairs; students include Ruth Adams, 1900-1904; Grace Louise Fletcher Chase, 1907-1916; Muriel Tilden Eldridge, 1911-1914; Roberta T. Johns, 1901-1903; Marjorie Newell MacCoy, 1907-1910; Sybil Huntington May, 1911-1922; Alice Thurston McGirr, 1902-1906; Margaret M. Shipp, 1901-1911; Laura A. Skinner, correspondence with Frances M. Bromley, 1876-1882; Sidney Lewis Smith, 1902-1906; Fanny Simpson Townsend, 1898-1903; and Gertrude C. Valentine, 1908-1911. A finding aid is available for this collection. Browse this collection

Vassar College Student Photo Albums

The Student Photo Album collection contains material from Vassar students primarily during the nineteenth century. Browse this collection

Vassar College Student Scrapbooks

Babbott, Elizabeth (French). Scrapbook, 1910-1912

The Student Scrapbooks collection provides access to scrapbooks from Vassar students from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Students include Adelaide Claflin Mansfield, 1893-1897; Anne Southworth Wyman, 1878-1932; Caroline Barnes Ross, 1901-1906, Elizabeth French Babbott, 1910-1912, Lucile Cross Russell and Jeanne Russell Janish, 1887-1938. Browse this collection

Vassar's Millionth Volume

The original collection of books that comprised the library when Vassar College opened its doors in 1865 was the gift of Matthew Vassar. He donated between 3,000 and 4,000 volumes from his personal library and purchased an additional 1,000 from Elias Magoon, one of the college's first trustees. Today the library is renowned as one of the finest college libraries in the world. In 2011, the 150th anniversary of the college's founding, the Vassar Libraries acquired the college's millionth volume — Anatomia humani corporis by Govard Bidloo, a 17th-century anatomy atlas. Browse this collection

Wolven Glass Plate Negative Collection

This collection includes more than 3,500 glass plate negatives created by photographer Edmund Wolven. Most of the images are of Vassar College people, events, buildings and grounds, but there is a subset that relates to other local educational institutions and Poughkeepsie. Wolven, born in Poughkeepsie in 1876, worked for many schools and colleges in the area. He began taking photos for Vassar College in the late 1890s, and became the official college photographer between approximately 1900 and 1910. The latest photographs in this collection are from the 1940s. Browse this collection

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