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

Today when most people think of Mardi Gras in New Orleans they think of big parades and parties with plastic beads and cheap masks. It turns out that there is an entirely different side to Mardi Gras where after the parade, guests attend lavish balls to honor the chosen king and queen of carnival. The Read More

Catholic University in the summer is a veritable garden of verdant lawns, blossoming flowers, and the rustling leaves of the campus’ many trees. Yet CatholicU was once home to hundreds of plants which would normally have no way of surviving the hot, muggy summers that our swampy city lovingly provides for us. No, these plants Read More

There is perhaps no more famous book to come out of the first age of printing (barring the Gutenberg Bible of course), than the Liber Chronicarum — or, as it is more commonly known, the Nuremberg Chronicle. Published by Anton Konberger in 1493, the Nuremberg Chronicle was an ambitious project even from its conception. Its goal Read More

In Special Collections, we’ve dressed in our grandest greens to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day. In that spirit, we wanted to take a moment to highlight some books in our collection which are a lot more prepared than us to celebrate the Irish saint’s day, such as these books from our Nineteenth-Century Irish Poetry collection, housed Read More

Scattered throughout Catholic University’s Special Collections are a range of resources related to the history of Mexico. We are happy to offer a new Library Guide to those materials. Here are a few of the highlights: The National Catholic Welfare Conference, forerunner of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, became involved in U.S.-Mexican affairs just after its Read More

The following is a selection from Catholic University student Moira McCoy’s class paper on Andrea della Robbia’s Annunciation, a piece of Renaissance-era Italian art held by Special Collections at the University. Ms. McCoy’s piece was submitted as an assignment for Professor Tiffany Hunt’s course ART 272: The Cosmopolitan Renaissance and edited by Special Collection’s Dr. Read More

Special Collections has shared the University’s treasures with many classes from many schools and departments over the years: History, Library Science, Religious Studies, Anthropology, and Education among them. While we often use our museum collection materials for instructional purposes, we were privileged with our first visit from a class in the Department of Art, Rome School Read More

Hannah Kaufman is a Graduate Library Pre-Professional (GLP) at The Catholic University of America, who also works in Special Collections. Since starting my position as the new archives GLP, I have been working on the finding aid for the USCCB/NCCB Secretariat for Cultural Diversity. Having never created a complicated finding aid before, I took one Read More

  In January, 2000, the U.S. Department of Labor held a ceremony in Washington, D.C. to honor Terence Vincent Powderly (1849-1924), the 1999 Labor Hall of Fame inductee. He joined fellow Hall-of-Famers such as rival Samuel Gompers, friend Mary Harris “Mother” Jones, and fellow Pennsylvanian and labor leader Philip Murray. The Labor Department Report announcing Read More