Michelangelo's Handwriting
Shelf Life
In this episode, we’re joined by scholars Bill Wallace and Isabella Magni to dissect a letter written by Michelangelo in 1545. But we’re less interested in what the letter says than in the way it was written. What does Michelangelo’s style of handwriting reveal about who he was as an artist and how he saw himself in Renaissance Italian society?
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The Meaning of "Fa-La-La"
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Non-lexical vocables—your fa-la-la’s and hey-nonny-no’s—didn’t originate as nonsense filler-syllables for brightening up a song. In Renaissance England, they were used to advance a song’s satirical critique of society or as a lyrical surrogate for something that couldn’t be expressed explicitly.
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The Quest for Gutenberg Fragments
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Eric White, Curator of Rare Books at the Princeton University Library (and author of "Editio Princeps: A History of the Gutenberg Bible"), tells us about his quest to find the existing fragments of the Gutenberg Bible, two of which are right here at the Newberry. Eric speaks with Jill Gage, the Newberry’s curator of printing history.
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The War on Bugs
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Newberry conservators systematically intercept spiders, ants, book lice, and other bugs before they can reach the treasures in our collection. We speak with conservation staff about this important (and kind of gross) work, and then we join them as they patrol the deepest recesses of the library for pests.
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To Meme or Not To Meme
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Book historian (and esteemed Twitter user) Sarah Werner discusses memes, reaction GIFs, and the promise and peril of being a library on social media.
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Mourning Glory
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“Not only does the wearing of black protect the mourner from unnecessary levity; but it reminds everyone else that they’ll eventually be in that position, too, and it stirs empathy.” Debra Mancoff, a scholar of art, culture, and fashion, walks us through the conventions and sartorial semiotics of mourning in Victorian England and America, and tells us how attitudes toward death and dying have changed over the years.
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The City Logical
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Daniel Burnham may have made Chicago beautiful. But Edward Brennan made it logical.
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The 1862 Int'l Exhibition Revisited
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The 1862 International Exhibition, held in London, is an oft-overlooked event within the pantheon of 19th-century world’s fairs—and for good reason. Occurring just 11 years after the Crystal Palace Exhibition in London, the 1862 rendition came off as derivative, and a cloud hung over it due to Prince Albert’s recent death, Queen Victoria’s prolonged period of mourning, and the American Civil War.
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Don't Bring a Bow and Arrow to a Laser Gun Fight
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Educator, poet, and comic-book creator Lee Francis IV (Laguna Pueblo) discusses how comics can fill a gap in Indigenous-created literature, while at the same time serving as a vehicle for presenting Native stories and identities in modern, dynamic settings rather than the ahistorical past in which pop culture often portrays Native characters.
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African American Genealogy
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Genealogist Tony Burroughs breaks down the procedures for finding African American ancestors and discusses why a unique set of research tools is necessary for doing African American genealogy. According to Tony, the same institutional forces that marginalized black Americans in the past also buried traces of their lives in the historical records that genealogists count on to fill out their family trees. Navigating the legacies of slavery, segregation, and discrimination is part of the process of finding one
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