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November 2020
"View of an Island at Sunset" hand-tinted lantern slide, 1930. Dennis Glen Cooper Collection.
Selector: Members of the Special Collections Team
While many special collections, including our own, are closed due to the pandemic, digital primary sources are available 24/7! Check out digitized special collections from the Wayne State Library System, as well as collections from other institutions to which the Library has access.
- Digital Collections at Wayne State University LibrariesThe Wayne State University Library System, through its digital publishing initiatives, strives to bring unique, important, or institutionally relevant content to Wayne State University’s academic community and to the larger world. Our Digital Collections represent text, images, and audiovisual material that support this mission through a diversity of projects.
CHANGING FACE OF THE AUTO INDUSTRY 1902-1940
Contains images from the Detroit Public Library's National Automotive History Collection and Burton Historical Collections. These photographs and postcards document the auto industry in the Detroit area during the first half of the twentieth century.
THE DETROIT SUNDAY JOURNAL
The Detroit Sunday Journal was a weekly tabloid newspaper, published by striking union workers from the Detroit News and Detroit Free Press. The strike began in July, 1995; spanning four years and just over 200 editions, the Sunday Journal was published from November 19, 1995, through November 21, 1999. Circulation for most editions was 40,000-60,000. It was available through the mail and in stores and corner boxes throughout Southeast Michigan.
DIGITAL DRESS COLLECTION 1850-1990
Contains images of clothing worn in Michigan during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Clothing reflects the culture and the time period of the wearer, so this collection offers insight into Michigan life and society. The items shown here are held in the collections of Wayne State University, The Henry Ford, Detroit Historical Society and Meadowbrook Hall.
THE LINCOLN LETTERS 1861-1865
Contains digitized copies of letters written to and from Abraham Lincoln. These letters mostly focus on appointments, pardons, and discharges, as well as requests for political favors. These letters are part of the Frank Howard Collection of Civil War History in the Wayne State University Library Special Collections. Additional related materials are available.
HERMAN MILLER CONSORTIUM COLLECTION 1905-1994
In 1988, Herman Miller, Inc. established the Herman Miller Consortium to share the historical product collection that had been accumulating as part of Herman Miller's corporate archives in Zeeland, Michigan. The consortium collection, now held by thirteen museums all over the country, contained about 750 pieces of furniture, as well as a large quantity of product literature.
WPA MUSIC MANUSCRIPTS 1935-1943
These music manuscripts represent the unique work of music copyists--men and women employed by the government with the task of copying music for the WPA orchestras, bands and choruses to perform. The full collection is housed in the Detroit Symphony Orchestra's Archive, and consists of more than 300 compositions.
VIRTUAL MOTOR CITY 1860-1980
Images from the Detroit News Photograph Collection, a premier photojournalistic resource that primarily documents the city of Detroit, its people, places and events from the late 19th century through the 1980s (bulk 1900-1980).
VAN RIPER FAMILY CORRESPONDENCE 1836-1889
This collection consists of 78 letters written between 1836-1889 to members of the Van Riper family of Wayne County, Michigan. The majority of the letters are between cousins, Alexander and Henry Van Riper, from the years surrounding the Civil War; others are written between various family members and friends.
DETROIT FOCUS QUARTERLY
The Detroit Focus Quarterly was published by Detroit Focus, a non-profit arts organization that supports art and artists in the Detroit area. The publication, published from 1982 to 1998, included interviews with artists, articles about the art scene and current issues, and listings of art exhibits. Wayne State University Special Collections has related archival materials from Detroit Focus.
FIRST U.S. HUMAN-TO-HUMAN HEART TRANSPLANT 1967-12-06
The first U.S. heart transplant took place on December 6, 1967 at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, N.Y., just three days after Dr. Christiaan Barnard performed the world's first transplant in Cape Town, South Africa. The original slides from this collection have been donated to the National Library of Medicine.
ELOISE RAMSEY COLLECTION OF LITERATURE FOR YOUNG PEOPLE 1880-1923
Eloise Ramsey was a Professor of English Education at Wayne State University, where she taught for 36 years. Ramsey believed that it was important for future teachers to take courses in children's literature. She provided over 400 rare or notable books to start this collection, which is now part of the Special Collections in the Wayne State University library system.
BUILDING THE DETROIT RENAISSANCE CENTER 1973-1996
The Renaissance Center sits on 14 acres in downtown Detroit. Its construction began in 1973 under the Ford Motor Company. The "Building the Detroit Renaissance Center" collection documents this construction. It was purchased in 1996 by General Motors. It's now known as the GM Renaissance Center or RenCen and hosts GM as well as other businesses.
MICHIGAN OPERA THEATRE PERFORMANCE IMAGES 1964-2004
These photographs document forty years of performances at the Michigan Opera Theatre. These materials were digitized and cataloged with the assistance of the Wayne State University School of Library and Information Science. The original images are held at the Allesee Dance and Opera Resource Library.
WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY BUILDINGS COLLECTION 1890-1990
The Wayne State University Photograph Collection, housed at the Walter P. Reuther Library, contains thousands of photographs documenting the built environment of main campus. This digital collection represents over 1,000 of these images, spanning the 1890s-1990s.
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE COLLECTION 1850-1901
This collection consists primarily of letters written by Florence Nightingale throughout her life. Major topics of the letters include medical care for the soldiers and the poor, the role of nursing, and sanitation and public works in colonized India. These digitized items are part of a larger collection in the Wayne State University Library Special Collections, which contains more correspondence, books, and other items.
- ArchiveGridArchiveGrid allows you to search by topic and receive results from over 1000 archival repositories.
- ArchivesCanadaA gateway to archival resources found in over 800 repositories across Canada.
- Digital Collections @ WSUThe Wayne State University Library System, through its digital publishing initiatives, strives to bring unique, important, or institutionally relevant content to Wayne State University’s academic community and to the larger world. Our Digital Collections represent text, images, and audiovisual material that support this mission through a diversity of projects.
- Directory of Corporate Archives in the United States and CanadaIncludes companies that maintain their historical records themselves, as well as companies that contract with historical consulting firms to maintain their archives collections for them, and libraries that contain business records.
- DPLA (Digital Public Library of America)The DPLA brings together images, books and more from the digital collections of public institutions across the United States.
- Enslaved: Peoples of the Historical Slave TradeA robust, open-source architecture to discover, connect, and visualize 600,000 (and growing) people records and 5 million data points. Explore or reconstruct the lives of individuals who were enslaved, owned slaves, or participated in the historical trade.
- EuropeanaExplore 54,242,701 artworks, artifacts, books, videos and sounds from across Europe.
- The European LibraryOnline access to the collections of the 48 National Libraries of Europe and leading European Research Libraries.
- Library and Archival Exhibitions on the WebCurrently hosted and maintained by the Smithsonian Institution Libraries, this guide has grown to include over 3000 links to online exhibitions from libraries, archives, and museums around the world.
- Library of CongressThe Library of Congress is the largest library in the world and maintains archival collections in a multitude of formats.
- National Archives and Records AdministrationThe National Archives and Records Administration manages our nation's records and maintains locations across the country, including presidential libraries.
- Visual History Archive This link opens in a new windowThe USC Shoah Foundation's Visual History Archive is a fully streaming video collection of more than 55,000 primary source testimonies of survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust and other crimes against humanity. History is preserved as told by the people who lived it, with each testimony offering unique insight and knowledge. The vast majority of the testimonies contain a complete personal history of life before, during, and after the interviewee’s firsthand experience with genocide.
Adam Matthew Digital Archives
- Defining Gender This link opens in a new windowDefining Gender provides access to a vast body of original British source material that will enrich the teaching and research experience of those studying history, literature, sociology and education from a gendered perspective.
- Everyday Life & Women in America This link opens in a new windowEveryday Life & Women in America c.1800-1920 showcases unique primary source material for the study of American social, cultural, and popular history in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
- Sex & Sexuality This link opens in a new windowSex & Sexuality makes accessible the unpublished papers of prominent sexologists, sex researchers, societies, advocacy groups and campaigners working across America and beyond during the twentieth century. The collection also includes a significant proportion of correspondence between professional and private individuals, autobiographical accounts, official records and literary works.
- Gender: Identity and Social Change This link opens in a new windowEssential primary sources documenting the changing representations and lived experiences of gender roles and relations from the nineteenth century to the present. This expansive collection offers sources for the study of women's suffrage, the feminist movement, the men’s movement, employment, education, the body, the family, and government and politics.
- Perdita Manuscripts This link opens in a new windowthe Perdita Project based at the University of Warwick and Nottingham Trent University. Perdita means lost woman and the quest of the Perdita Project has been to find early modern women authors who were lost because their writing exists only in manuscript form.
- African American Communities This link opens in a new windowFocusing predominantly on Atlanta, Chicago, Brooklyn, and towns and cities in North Carolina, this collection focuses on race relations across social, political, cultural and religious arenas. Through pamphlets, periodicals, correspondence, official records and in-depth oral histories, it reveals the challenges of racism, discrimination and integration, and the expressions of a unique African American culture and identity.
- Everyday Life & Women in America This link opens in a new windowEveryday Life & Women in America c.1800-1920 showcases unique primary source material for the study of American social, cultural, and popular history in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
- Jewish Life in America This link opens in a new windowBased on a rich variety of original manuscript collections from the American Jewish Historical Society in New York, this indispensable resource offers captivating insights into the everyday lives of the American Jewish population over three centuries.
- Popular Culture in Britain and America This link opens in a new windowPopular Culture explores the dynamic period of social, political and cultural change between 1950 and 1975. The resource offers thousands of colour images of manuscript and rare printed material as well as photographs, ephemera and memorabilia from this exciting period in our recent history.
- Business, Economic and Labour History This link opens in a new windowA range of important sources from Britain and America, covering key subjects within this historical field, including Keynesian economic policy in post-war Britain; international labour movements; the London Stock Exchange; and the papers of important economists.
- Literary Manuscripts This link opens in a new windowComplete facsimile images of 190 manuscripts of 17th and 18th century verse held in the celebrated Brotherton Collection at the University of Leeds.The database includes first lines, last lines, attribution, author, title, date, length, verse form, content and bibliographic references for over 6,600 poems within the collection.
- Popular Culture in Britain and America This link opens in a new windowPopular Culture explores the dynamic period of social, political and cultural change between 1950 and 1975. The resource offers thousands of colour images of manuscript and rare printed material as well as photographs, ephemera and memorabilia from this exciting period in our recent history.
Illustration from a mid-nineteenth century edition of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
Private Collection / J. T. Vintage / Bridgeman Images
- Gale Primary Sources Nineteenth Century Collections Online This link opens in a new windowA digitized collection of primary sources related to the nineteenth century. Materials within the collection consist of monographs, newspapers, pamphlets, manuscripts, ephemera, maps, statistics, and more. Twelve archives are available.
Available archives include:
- Asia and the West: Diplomacy and Cultural Exchange
- British Politics and Society
- British Theatre, Music, and Literature: High and Popular Culture
- Children’s Literature and Childhood
- Europe and Africa: Commerce, Christianity, Civilization, and Conquest
- European Literature, 1790-1840: The Corvey Collection
- Mapping the World: Maps and Travel Literature
- Photography: The World through the Lens
- Religion, Society, Spirituality, and Reform
- Science, Technology, and Medicine: 1780 – 1925
- Science, Technology, and Medicine: 1780 – 1925, Part II
- Women: Transnational Networks
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The Ramsey Collection
The Eloise Ramsey Collection of Literature for Young People contains children's literature from the 18th century onward. These works contain valuable insights into the lives and experiences of children. Some items from this collection have been digitized and made available through the WSU Digital Collections.
Digitized by the Wayne State University Digital Publishing Team