May 2021 Archives

Photo: Logan Howard, winner of the Library Map Prize.

In spite of ongoing pandemic-related challenges during the last year, the class of 2021 accomplished a wide range of original research projects using Yale University Library’s collections and resources. Six students wrote senior essays that were recognized with one of three annual library prizes. The winning essays have been published on Eli Scholar.

The Harvey M. Applebaum ’59 Award is for an essay using the library’s collections of government documents and information. This year, a first prize of $500, a second prize of $250 and an honorable mention of $150 were awarded. Many of this year’s essays examined policy inequities in topics such as the history of Black women's reproductive health, the relationship between freedom and resistance for Black people during and after the Civil War, regulatory agency capture, environmental justice and energy subsidies, U.S. consumer culture and regulation of prices, and the 1912 Cuban Race War.

The Applebaum Award is chaired by Kenya Flash, government information librarian. The 2021 submissions were judged by Barbara Esty, data librarian; Cate Kellett, catalog librarian; Scott Matheson, associate librarian for Technical Services; Melissa Grafe, the John R. Bumstead Librarian for Medical History; and Jennifer Snow, librarian for anthropology, sociology, and women, gender, and sexuality studies, producing these results:

First prize: Aakshi Agrawal, Pauli Murray College, a Political Science major, for “Regulatory Agency Capture: How the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Approved the Mountain Valley Pipeline.” Michael Fotos, director of undergraduate studies for Environmental Studies and lecturer in Political Science, was Aakshi’s senior essay advisor. Read Aakshi’s essay here.

Second prize: Trinidad Kechkian, Pierson College, an Environmental Studies major, for “An Equitable Transformation of the Energy System: The Role of State-Level Incentives for Distributed Energy Resources.” Trinidad’s senior essay advisor was Professor Robert Klee, lecturer at Yale School of the Environment. Read Trinidad’s essay here.

Honorable mention: Angela Xiao, Jonathan Edwards College, a History major, for “Battling over Bargain-Hunting: Defining the American consumer through mass-consumption shopping practices, 1909-1915.” Angela’s essay advisor was Professor Beverly Gage, professor of History & American Studies and the Brady-Johnson Professor of Grand Strategy. Read Angela’s essay here.

From left to right: Angela Xiao, Aakshi Agrawal, Trinidad Kechkian, the winners of this year's Applebaum awards.

The Manuscripts and Archives Diane Kaplan Memorial Prize awards $500 for an essay based substantially on research in any Yale Manuscripts and Archives collection.

The Kaplan Prize is chaired by Bill Landis, associate director for Public Services. Jennifer Coggins, archivist for collection development; Mike Lotstein, university archivist; Joshua Cochran, archivist for American Diplomacy; Michelle Peralta, resident archivist for Yale Special Collections; and Jessica Quagliaroli, archivist for Architectural Records, also served as judges for this year’s essay submissions.

Nathalie J. Bussemaker, Morse College, a major in Global Affairs and History, for “Imperialism’s Stepchild: Dura-Europos and the Political Uses of Archaeology in the French Mandate of Syria, 1920-1939.” Professor Jonathan Wyrtzen, associate professor of Sociology, History, and International Affairs was Nathalie’s senior essay adviser. “Nathalie’s senior essay is a strong, fascinating study of the geopolitical uses of archaeology in Syria as it was emerging as an independent country from French colonial administration. She makes particularly creative use of the personal papers of Yale faculty members involved in the Dura-Europos excavation, as well as the Yale presidential records of James Rowland Angell, to analyze and explore the meanings of the archaeological endeavor in the larger context of interwar global politics and imperialism.” Read Nathalie’s essay here.

Nathalie Bussemaker, winner of the Diane Kaplan Memorial Prize.

The Library Map Prize recognizes the best use of maps in a senior essay or equivalent project. This year, a first prize of $500 and an honorable mention of $250 was awarded. The Map Prize is chaired by GIS librarian Miriam Olivares. This year’s judges were Brandon Milliate, librarian for South and Southeast Asian studies; Catherine DeRose, manager of the library’s Digital Humanities Lab; Kayleigh Bohemier, librarian for science research support; Kelly Blanchat, librarian for undergraduate teaching and outreach; Lori Bronars, life sciences librarian; and Rachel Sperling, librarian for environmental studies.

First prize: Logan Howard, Ezra Stiles College, an Environmental Studies major for "Heat Stress in Urban Environments: A Case Study of Heat Vulnerability in New Haven, CT.” The judges said Howard’s essay showed “remarkably well-thought out cartographic reasoning” with maps that were “seamlessly integrated into the body of the paper” giving readers a detailed view of the factors that contribute to temperature anomalies in New Haven. Read Logan’s essay here.

Honorable mention: Nora Heaphy, Morse College, an Ecology and Evolutionary Biology major for "Climate Niche Evolution in C4+CAM Portulaca and Closely Related C3+CAM Lineages.” The judges commented on the essay’s strong cartographic design, rigorous attention to detail and effective display of geospatial data. Read Nora’s essay here.

Nora Heaphy, honorable mention for the Library Map Prize.

Almost a century and a half of the Yale Daily News (YDN), the nation’s oldest continuously published college daily, will soon be fully accessible to researchers online, thanks to a $500,000 gift from an anonymous Yale College graduate and former YDN reporter. The gift will allow the library to finish digitizing past copies of the YDN since its founding in 1878 and—through the launch of a new digital platform—make it easier for researchers to search and find materials in the YDN Historical Archive.

As the primary source of news and debate at Yale, the YDN is published every weekday by its student staff when the university is in session. Many of the paper’s student editors, writers, and contributors have gone on to prominent careers in journalism, letters, and public life. Among them are Perry Bacon Jr., William F. Buckley, Lan Samantha Chang, Michiko Kakutani, Joanne Lipman, Wesley Morris, Samantha Power, and Garry Trudeau.

The library began digitizing the YDN in 2008. In its first phase, many friends supported the project by funding a series of years of the paper’s publication. Issues from the paper’s founding in 1878 through 1995 are available online, and the new funding will allow the library to digitize and upload issues from 1995 to the present.

The new, more user-friendly platform, publicly launched this week, is already helping researchers. Susan Chen ’22, an economics major and current publisher of the YDN, and her 15 person staff have been using the online archive to compile memorabilia books that offer each Yale class a snapshot of their four college years through the eyes of the newspaper. The new interface has made it easier to search through past editions by date, time, or keyword. Chen especially likes the ability to download a PDF of each edition, a function not possible on the previous platform.

Each digitized newspaper page displays crisply on the screen and the zoom-in feature can highlight smaller text and images. The ability of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to recognize text within images enables users to search for keywords within any article, image, or advertisement. Once an article is selected, the software can identify all the article’s locations. For instance, if a story begins on page one and continues on page six, the entire article can be viewed together.

With about 35 yearbooks completed, Chen said using the YDN Historical Archive has been a remarkable experience. Through its unique lens, she has seen how the university community responded to major issues of the time, such as the Vietnam War or women being admitted to Yale. Recurring topics through the years, such as race, equality, and gender issues, have triggered for her “glimmers of the present” discourses. In addition to more serious topics, she also discovered some “hilarious snippets” such as the one from 1967 about a phantom foot nibbler in the stacks. “I’m so, so grateful to the library for taking on this project or else this history would be lost,” Chen said.

Billy Schroeder ’22, a history major, has been using the YDN Archive to write a research paper on William Beinecke ’36. He struggled to find primary sources until a librarian suggested the historical archive, with dozens of relevant articles from the early 1930s. He learned through the newspaper’s football rosters that Beinecke was a right tackle! “I couldn’t be happier with the archives and think it’s a great resource for the Yale community,” Schroeder said.

“This gift is already making a significant impact on researchers at Yale,” said Basie Gitlin, the library’s director of development. “We are tremendously grateful to the donor, who, as a YDN student reporter during their time at Yale, fully understands the value of such a resource to the Yale community and to researchers around the world.” A portion of the gift will form the nucleus of an endowed fund to support the ongoing costs of hosting and preserving the digital archive. To fully endow the fund, the library is seeking to raise another $250,000.

-- by Amanda Patrick

Join Barbara Rockenbach, Stephen F. Gates ’68 University Librarian and the Sterling Library Exhibition Committee at 4:00 pm on May 11 to celebrate the completion of Kathryn Schmechel’s senior essay exhibition “Free the New Haven Panthers”: The New Haven Nine, Yale, and the May Day 1970 Protests That Brought Them Together.

Kathryn Schmechel ’21 will give an overview of the exhibition, discussing how she selected and displayed images from the library's collections. There will also be a conversation with her advisors, Crystal Feimster, associate professor of African American Studies, History and American Studies, and James Kessenides, Kaplanoff Librarian for American History. There will be some time for Q&A at the end.

The senior exhibition project sponsored by Yale Library provides one rising senior with funding and training in curatorial skills which culminates in the production of a library exhibition based on the student’s senior essay topic using materials from the Yale Library collections.

Register for the event here. The Zoom event URL will be sent via your registration confirmation.

Man with Sunglasses Standing in Woolsey Hall Auditorium at a Black Panther Party Rally, photographed by John T. Hill, 1970.