Each year, the staff of Special Collections choose several items from the Rare Books collection to undergo conservation [1]. We prioritize rare or unique items that we believe are likely to be of broad academic interest and whose condition would otherwise make it difficult for researchers to consult them without causing further damage. The goal Read More

Guest author Nicholas Brown, Ph.D. is a recent doctoral graduate from Catholic University’s Department of History and Anthropology. Most of us, when we think about libraries, imagine books. (Fair.) Catholic University’s Special Collections houses thousands of texts, ranging from Rare Books’ medieval manuscripts to the dissertations of former CUA doctoral students kept by Archives. But Read More

“Preservation is documents and artifacts, recordings, digital media and all the tangible information that requires our professional advocacy and stewardship–the love and sweat of our labor. However, beyond all of that, most importantly, preservation is MEMORY and memory is the people and the communities who make them…” – Tamar Evangelestia-Dougherty, Preservation Week Honorary Chair Since Read More

James Joseph Norris (1907-1976) was a New Jersey born alumnus of Catholic University with a renowned career as global humanitarian working with war refugees and notable as the only layman to address the Second Vatican Council with a speech he wrote and delivered in Latin. He was the eldest child of James Henry Norris and Rose Read More

April 13 is the birthday of Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), an American Founding Father, primary author of the Declaration of Independence (1776), and Governor of Virginia (1779-1780) as well as the first Secretary of State (1790-1793), second Vice President (1797-1801), and third President of the United States (1801–1809). A Virginia planter and Enlightenment thinker (i.e. Humanism, Read More

The Metrorail subway system arrived in Washington Saturday and the response was so overwhelming that prospective riders waited in lines for up to four hours to ride in trains that were often so overloaded that they refused to move because of the weight of the overcapacity crowds. – John Koppish, The Tower, Vol 54, Issue Read More

Predating modern cat memes by thousands of years, humans have always found a way to commemorate our feline companions. The Magner Collection showcases a few superb Pre-Columbian ceramic pottery pieces to excite any cat lover. These ceramic artifacts likely originate from the Pre-Columbian civilization known as the Chavín Culture (900 BC – 250 BC). Located Read More

Dear readers, do you ever look up in Mullen Library and notice a blank spot on the wall? Was anything displayed there, if ever? And if there was once something there, what happened to it? Well… The portrait of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart, which His Eminence Cardinal Spellman presented to the Catholic University in Read More

As Special Collections at Catholic University celebrates our three hundredth blog post and eleven years with The Archivist’s Nook we reflect upon how we got here and offer a few staff favorites from across the spectrum of our holdings of university records, museum objects, rare books, and American Catholic History manuscript collections. Eleven years ago, Read More

February 24 is the birthday of noted Austrian born physicist and humanitarian, Dr. Karl Ferdinand Herzfeld (1892-1978), who was also an esteemed professor at The Catholic University of America (CUA) in Washington, D.C. from 1936-1968. Having arrived in the United States in 1926 to teach at Johns Hopkins University, Herzfeld was not a refugee from Read More