New Digital Collection: Katharine Wright Haskell Letters

We are pleased to announce the launch of a new digital collection from the Katharine Wright Haskell Papers (MS-700). The collection consists of letters written by Katharine Wright Haskell ranging from 1922 to 1928. They contain a variety of details from her personal life, from major historical moments to minor details of her daily life and interpersonal connections. Through her life, Katharine assisted her brothers in their engineering and business ventures, was an activist in the first-wave feminist movement, taught high school, and was an Oberlin College Board of Trustees member.

The first 50 letters (with dates ranging from 1922 to December 1925) of the collection are now available to be freely accessed online, anytime, through the Wright State University Campus Online Repository (CORE Scholar): Katharine Wright Haskell Papers (MS-700) digital collection. Images of the original letters, as well as typed transcriptions, are available in the online collection.

These letters illustrate her life in her later years, allowing us a glimpse of who she was as a private person. She writes of her thoughts on a variety of topics and her daily life. Among other topics and events we get insight to her life as companion and assistant to her brother Orville, her burgeoning romantic relationship with Henry, and her friendship with explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson.

This digital project has been produced by the University Libraries’ Special Collections & Archives, through the combined efforts of its archivists, metadata librarian, and digitization specialists, who collaborated to provide the digitization, metadata encoding, and uploading of digital content to CORE Scholar.

Special Collections & Archives would also like to make a special acknowledgement to Lois E. Walker for sharing her transcriptions of these letters and to the Haskell family, who donated the letters in 2022 in honor of Dawne Dewey, the long-time head of WSUL Special Collections & Archives.

Please visit the Special Collections & Archives’ CORE Scholar page to browse additional digital collections.

If you have questions or comments about this or any of our many collections, please don’t hesitate to contact us!