Special Collections Highlights

New Ivy Day Webpage

Special thanks to our intern, Rachael Murphy, who created this webpage of information about Ivy Day, a 19th Century campus tradition. Several marble plaques featuring ivy leaves can still be found on campus buildings today. These pages explain why.

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Mystery in the Archives

By Matthew Revitt In June of this year, I received a call in Special Collections from Harold Borns, Professor Emeritus in the School of Earth and Climate Sciences and the Climate Change Institute. The mystery Professor Borns wanted to solve was whether Fogler Library’s University Archive records could prove that scientist Louis Agassiz came to […]

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News of the Day

By Pauline Bickford-Duane and Brad Beauregard In Massachusetts, a researcher at MIT hopes to verify that a well-known artist visited the University of Maine early in her career. In the Midwest, a UMaine alumnus searches for old photographs of his family members. Here in Maine, several former classmates reminisce on their early writing careers with […]

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Newspaper

The Spirit of the League

With the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, the particularly civic-minded and altruistic women who had fought for universal suffrage were free to take up further initiatives with a renewed faith in democracy. Many of them spoke of their single-minded pursuit of the vote as a kind of temporary renunciation—as necessitating a neglect of […]

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archive photo of children working

The Labor of History

In a box of aged photographs and letters, Dr. Charles Scontras sees more than what’s readily apparent. An average viewer might take in people walking in parade-format or the way a few worn edges hint at a document’s age. Scontras sees people lobbying for safer working conditions, better hours. He sees a time, not long […]

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Preserving the Sounds of the Past

In the mid-1980s, Barry Darling delivered a collection of recordings and materials from WLBZ Radio to Special Collections at Raymond H. Fogler Library. He wasn’t sure what would become of the recordings, but he had a feeling he was bringing them to the right place. “I worried they would just get thrown out if I […]

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speical collections intern holding record

Listening to Local History

By her own account, Delaney Fitzpatrick didn’t know what to expect when she came to Fogler Library to find an internship. As a sophomore at the time, Fitzpatrick had trouble finding the right opportunity. When her adviser, UMaine Professor of History Dr. Micah Pawling, told her about an opening to work in Special Collections at […]

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Special Collections Finding Aids

Ever wonder what’s in the archive? A new section of DigitalCommons@UMaine allows for searching and browsing the contents of the Special Collections Department’s largest manuscript collections which include university records and historic materials related to Maine business, education, arts, politics, and more.

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