The Fall and Rise of Little Fanny
January 20, 2016
One of the best aspects of working with Manuscripts & Special Collections is that, every so often, we will stumble across something extraordinarily beautiful, profound or moving – and sometimes, we find something like ‘The History of Little Fanny: exemplified in a series of figures‘ (Briggs Collection Pamphlet PZ6.H4). Somehow missed off the list of great children’s …
Inspiring Beauty
January 11, 2016
What do Charles Darwin and the number 7 have in common? It might sound like the set-up to a bad joke, but it the answer – cosmetics – is the subject of our next Weston Gallery exhibition, Inspiring Beauty. No7 ~ 80 years of making up the modern woman. Opening on Friday 15th January, the new exhibition was …
A back-of-the-envelope history of Christmas cards
December 11, 2015
If you were asked to guess what the very first Christmas card depicted, what would your answer be? Most people (according to an unofficial poll of my colleagues) thought either a Nativity scene or possibly one of a snowy landscape. Sensible ideas, but both wrong. The first Christmas card was commissioned in 1843 by Sir …
Nottingham Advantage Award Placement: Working on Westacott
November 30, 2015
This is a guest post by Sophie Burton, an undergraduate student in the Department of History. For the Nottingham Advantage Award ‘Experience Heritage’ module I have been conducting a weekly placement at Manuscripts and Special Collections. The placement has informed me about the different roles within the heritage sector. I have undertaken digitisation work on …
The Unloved Chimney
November 20, 2015
In the Feb 1st 1968 issue of University of Nottingham student newspaper Gongster there appeared a riddle. “What am I?” it teased. Even more excitingly, it suggested that if you were to aid this forgetful soul in establishing its identity then “a reward may well be given”. The riddles’ clues were, for the most part, …
Expressing the Unspeakable
November 3, 2015
A version of this post appeared on the University’s LGBT History blog earlier this year. It’s often overlooked compared to Lady Chatterley’s Lover or its sequel Women in Love, but a century ago this month, D H Lawrence’s The Rainbow was the subject of a court case about sex, literature, and censorship. The set-up is typical for a …
Purchasing Pansies: a new addition to the DH Lawrence collections
October 27, 2015
Manuscripts and Special Collections has recently acquired an important original typescript of D.H. Lawrence’s Pansies. The typescript was purchased by the University of Nottingham with assistance from the ACE/V & A Purchase Fund and the Friends of the National Libraries. The title of the volume of poems has nothing to do with the flower of …
Back to the Future: Time Travelling with the University Time Capsule
October 20, 2015
The countdown is on to the date that Marty McFly and Doc Brown went ‘Back to the Future’ in the sequel to the classic Universal film. But as all archivists and historians know, you don’t need a souped-up DeLorean to travel through time. Imagine being transported back to your parents’ teenage years? That’s just what it’s like …
Spotlight on Slavery
October 18, 2015
Today is Anti-Slavery Day in the UK, which was established to raise awareness of the estimated 20 million people worldwide currently living in slavery. This year also sees the 150th anniversary of the formal abolition of slavery in the United States. The 13th amendment to the Constitution declaring that “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude…shall exist within the …
Manuscripts Mysteries: Canada, Cake and Clergymen
October 12, 2015
The stereotypical, romanticized view of archives is one where researchers delve into a box of yellowed, long-forgotten papers to uncover clues and solve a mystery. But what happens when the boxes present more questions than they answer? For the last few months we’ve been turning to social media in an attempt to find out more …
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