New Digital Collection: Katharine Wright Haskell Letters

Posted on July 24, 2023 by specialcollections

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.

Letter from December 16, 1925, partial page 1 (click on the image to view larger)

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.

Katharine Wright, 1914
Katharine Wright, 1914

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!

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New Exhibit: Spies & Superheroes

Posted on July 17, 2023 by Lisa Rickey

On the evening of July 8, Special Collections & Archives staff participated in the Air Force Museum Foundation‘s second “After Dark” event, themed “Spies and Superheroes,” at the National Museum of the United States Air Force.

We brought an exhibit about spies and superheroes (ok mostly spies/espionage/reconnaissance), as well as a few original items from our collections, including airplane spotter publications and Civil War-era field glasses (binoculars), and spoke with many of the 300+ attendees at the event.

Archivist Toni Vanden Bos sharing the story of a World War II era “resident spy” with some visitors.
Archivist Lisa Rickey eagerly awaiting visitors.
Even Darth Vader was interested in learning about Special Collections & Archives!

If we missed you at the event, you can still check out our exhibit on the fourth floor of the Dunbar Library, just outside our entrance, from now until the beginning of October.

“Spies & Superheroes” exhibit now on display on the Dunbar Library 4th floor.

The next “After Dark” event will be the “Steampunk Soiree” on October 14. Watch the AF Museum’s “After Dark” Events page for more information & tickets.

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Archives Featured in Oakwood Register

Posted on July 13, 2023 by Lisa Rickey

Extra! Extra! We were featured in the Oakwood Register newspaper on July 5 with an article about our Louis Lott architecture photos.

The article, “Wright State archive preserves architectural images of early Oakwood, Dayton : Archivists hope to identify homes photographed by prominent local architect,” focuses on the Louis Lott Architecture Negatives Collection (SC-381). Over 200 images from the collection are available online in CORE Scholar.

Check out the Oakwood Register article here (see page 8).

Thanks to the article, we have already had multiple readers contact us to provide identifications to some of the previously unidentified homes featured in the online gallery.

If you have additional information about any of the photographs, the best way to share that with us via email at [email protected], and be sure to include the item identifier number (e.g., sc381_01_04_03) or URL (e.g., https://corescholar.libraries.wright.edu/special_sc381_photographs/25/) for the particular image.

If you are interested in seeing the records that have been recently updated based on additional information submitted by users, search the collection for the word thanks (or click this link).

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