October 2011 Archives

October 4, 2011

The Eighteenth Lewis Walpole Library Lecture, Friday 21 October

You are warmly invited to join us for the Eighteenth Lewis Walpole Library Lecture on Friday, 21 October 2011 at 5:30 p.m.

Amanda Vickery, Professor of Early Modern History, Queen Mary College, University of London will present “Family Life Makes Tories of Us All: Love and Power at Home in Georgian England”

Yale Center for British Art Lecture Hall
1080 Chapel Street
New Haven
To see the state in miniature one need only go home. Husbands were to govern wives, masters and mistresses to rule servants, and parents to discipline children. The years after 1688 saw the acceptance of new ideas about political authority and social manners, but the household hierarchy endured regardless. Notoriously Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau did not include every adult individual in their democracy of consent, but rather every male head of household, who was seen to represent the interests of his patriarchal entourage. The British considered themselves enemies to tyranny, disparaging and caricaturing ‘oriental despotism’ in foreign families as confirmation of barbarity, but local servitude passed almost unnoticed by political ideas. I have yet to encounter a single gentleman musing on whether it might be possible to reconsider his domestic rule in the light of the new political ideas. ‘Family life’, it was observed in 1779, ‘makes Tories of us all… see if any Whig wishes to see the beautiful Utopian expansion of power within his own walls’.
The new political ideas which advocated government by consent did nothing to revolutionize the structures of domestic authority, but the content and meaning of domestic life was transformed over the eighteenth century.
New ideals of politeness revolutionized domestic manners and interactions amongst the modestly propertied, while the vogue for sensibility in novels and paintings inflated expectations about affection and happiness at home. What then was the balance of love and power in eighteenth-century marriage and family life? And how did dependents live with the contradictions? 'Do you not admire these lovers of liberty!’ snapped Elizabeth Montagu in 1765 ‘I am not sure that Cato did not kick his wife.'
Amanda Vickery is Professor of Early Modern History at Queen Mary College, University of London. She is the author of Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (Yale, 2009) and The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (Yale, 1998) which won the Wolfson, the Whitfield and the Longman/History Today prize. She is the editor of Women, Privilege and Power: British Politics 1750 to the Present (Stanford, 1991) and Gender, Taste and Material Culture in Britain and North America (Yale, 2006). She writes and presents documentaries for BBC2 and BBC radio 4. In 2011, she judged the Samuel Johnson prize.

The Lecture is Free and Open to the Public.

For more information: http://www.library.yale.edu/walpole/programs/annual_lecture.html

Posted by Yale University Library on October 4, 2011 2:51 PM

October 10, 2011

Online Requesting Comes to the Beinecke

On Monday, October 3, The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library discontinued use of all paper call slips in favor of online requesting using Aeon, the online registration, requesting, and transaction tracking system designed specifically for special collections and archives. Patrons will be able to place and track requests through their online account and Yale faculty, students and staff will be able to access their account using their NetID. Returning visiting researchers will be assigned a username and password at the service desk and new visitors may create an account. The Aeon login page is available at http://aeon-brbl.library.yale.edu/. Manuscripts and Archives has been using Aeon for patron registration since July 2010 and plans to go live with requesting later this year.

In addition to providing a convenient method of requesting material for patrons, Aeon allows library staff to process requests more efficiently and to gather more detailed usage statistics than ever before. Questions about the Beinecke implementation may be directed to Moira Fitzgerald at moira.fitzgerald@yale.edu.

Posted by Yale University Library on October 10, 2011 2:30 PM

October 12, 2011

Yale alumni gain free access to JSTOR

Yale alumni gain free access to JSTOR’s extensive online scholarly resources
New Haven, Conn.— Yale’s more than 130,000 alumni worldwide now have access to a treasure trove of online resources thanks to collaboration between the Association of Yale Alumni (AYA), JSTOR and the Yale University Library. Alumni can freely use all JSTOR collections licensed by Yale. JSTOR (short for “journal storage”), a nonprofit service founded in 1995, is a trusted digital archive of over 1,000 academic journals and one million primary sources. To see more of the story click here.

Posted by Yale University Library on October 12, 2011 10:20 AM

October 19, 2011

Yale’s Beinecke Library acquires Eugene O’Neill’s “lost” play

The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University has acquired Eugene O’Neill’s “lost” one-act play, “Exorcism” (1919). The play, along with a facsimile of the typescript, will be published in a cloth edition by Yale University Press in February 2012, and will feature an introduction by the noted American playwright Edward Albee. The New Yorker has acquired first serial rights and published the play in its entirety, with an introduction by theater critic John Lahr, in the magazine’s Fall Books issue on Oct.17, 2011. A short video of the actor Tommy Schrider reading from “Exorcism” was featured on The New Yorker’s website and iPad application.

“Exorcism,” set in 1912, is based on O’Neill’s suicide attempt from an overdose of veronal in a squalid Manhattan rooming house. The play premiered at the Provincetown Playhouse in New York City on March 26, 1920. Following a few performances, however, O’Neill abruptly chose to cancel the production and to retract and destroy all known copies of the script. O’Neill biographers have speculated that the play, produced as the playwright’s father was dying, was perhaps too revealing of O’Neill’s own demons and potentially distressing for his parents.
Despite long-held presumptions that the play was irrevocably lost, O’Neill’s second wife, Agnes Boulton, apparently retained a copy of the play, which she gave as a Christmas gift to the writer Philip Yordan after her divorce from O’Neill. Yordan is perhaps best known for his O’Neill-inspired play, and later film, “Anna Lucasta,” starring an all-black cast.
The typescript, with edits and emendations in O’Neill’s own hand, was discovered by a researcher working in Yordan’s papers, together with the original envelope; the label is inscribed: “Something you said you’d like to have / Agnes & Mac” (Morris “Mac” Kaufman was Boulton’s third husband).

O’Neill, a four-time Pulitzer Prize winner and the only American playwright to receive the Nobel Prize for literature (1936), returned to many of the issues that surface in “Exorcism” in his heavily autobiographical play “Long Day’s Journey into Night,” published posthumously in 1956 and considered to be his masterpiece.

The discovery of “Exorcism” after 90 years adds significantly to O’Neill’s biography, intimating the overwhelming role that suicide would take in his personal life, along with the issue’s influence and impact on his work, noted Louise Bernard, curator of the Yale Collection of American Literature for Prose and Drama. The play also marks a pivotal moment in O’Neill’s prolific career, providing further insight into the later works for which he is now revered, she adds.
"The rediscovery of O'Neill's famously 'lost' play ‘Exorcism’ is quite remarkable and a wonderful supplement to the large and substantive collection of Eugene O'Neill Papers housed at the Beinecke Library,” said Bernard. “The revelation of this highly autobiographical play is a valuable addition to our knowledge of O'Neill, whom many consider to be the father of modern American drama."

The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library is the principal repository for the Eugene O’Neill Papers.
For inquiries about the play or the Eugene O’Neill Papers, contact Louise Bernard (louise.bernard@yale.edu).
For inquiries about the play’s publication in book form this February, please contact Brenda King (brenda.king@yale.edu), publicity director, Yale University Press.

Posted by Yale University Library on October 19, 2011 4:50 PM

October 21, 2011

First Ever Library Study Break Coming Soon!

Susan Gibbons, University Librarian, warmly welcomes all Yale students to the first ever library study break!

Wednesday November 2nd, 3:30-5pm
L&B Room in Sterling Memorial Library
Free food, drinks and giveaways
An opportunity to meet the new University Librarian

Spread the word and come join us!

Posted by Yale University Library on October 21, 2011 4:23 PM

October 24, 2011

Engineering & Applied Science Library to Relocate in January

As preparations are made for the new Engineering & Applied Science Information Commons at 17 Hillhouse Avenue, the services and staff of the Engineering & Applied Science Library will relocate to interim space within the J. Robert Mann Jr. Engineering Student Center on the first floor of Dunham Laboratory starting in January 2012. Relocation of collection materials has begun and the present location in Becton Center will be vacated at the end of the fall term in December 2011. It is expected that the library will remain in the interim location until January 2013.

The renovated space in the Mann Student Center will provide a convenient access point to information services and library collections. In addition, it will be more fully utilized as a student center configured for research and study. The space will include workstations that provide access to a variety of information and research software resources. It will contain flexible seating and tables that can be arranged to accommodate seminars, presentations and gatherings, as well as group and individual study.

The information services that will be available in the interim space include:
• Information assistance from the engineering librarian and staff;
• Reference collection;
• Pickup and return location for library materials and document delivery services.

Services moving to other locations during the interim period:
• Materials placed on course reserve will be available at the Bass Library.
• High use books from the Engineering & Applied Science Library collection will be available for browsing and borrowing in a distinct location in Sterling Memorial Library;
• Lower use materials will be delivered upon request and will be made available at the interim location, or any other Eli Express library location on campus;

The Library staff will continue to provide the same high level of service patrons currently receive. If you have questions, please feel free to contact Andy Shimp, Engineering Librarian, at andy.shimp@yale.edu or (203) 432 7460 or Jill Parchuck, Director of the Center for Science and Social Science Information, at jill.parchuck@yale.edu or (203) 432-3304.

Posted by Yale University Library on October 24, 2011 2:17 PM

October 28, 2011

New Library Exhibit: Making Sense of Religion

Making Sense of Religion
October 3, 2011 – February 4, 2012

Sterling Memorial Library, Memorabilia Room
Presented in partnership with the Initiative for the Study of Material and Visual Cultures of Religion in collaboration with Yale Manuscripts and Archives, this exhibit features material from the
Yale Divinity School Archives, Yale Manuscripts and Archives, the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, and the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical History Library.

The exhibit is free and open to the public.

Posted by Yale University Library on October 28, 2011 1:17 PM