NOW ON NEWBERRY.ORG

We’re Live from . . . Home

Right now, Newberry staff aren’t just working from home. They’re livestreaming from home. Each week, our curators, librarians, and educators share favorite collection items and digital learning tools live on Twitter. Even at a distance, we continue to provide access to the Newberry’s unique collection, foster community, and support our patrons’ research, teaching, and learning.

We’re archiving these videos on the Newberry website so you can watch them whenever you like.

Recent videos include a virtual tour of the Newberry’s Curt Teich Postcard Analú López, the Newberry’s Ayer Indigenous Studies Librarian, hosts a live video on Twitter. Archives, the largest public collection of postcards in the country; a demonstration of our online Man’s Greeting, an 1893 book by Potawatomi leader Simon teaching tools for K-12 teachers; a visual and historical Pokagon criticizing the celebration of Columbus and analysis of a 1542 map of Tenochtitlan (present-day Mexico settler colonialism at the World’s Columbian Exposition City) by Hernán Cortés; and a discussion of The Red in Chicago.

A Vestige of the Plague

In January 1340, Pepo degli Albizzi started keeping track of his business dealings in a ledger book that is now part of the Newberry collection. The Albizzis were wool merchants in Florence, and Pepo used his book mostly to record the family’s transactions related to wool-cloth finishing and export.

The last section of the book, however, includes more personal matters. Under the heading “all my other memoranda,” Pepo listed the ten members of his immediate family who died in June and July 1348—when the Black Death struck Florence as it swept across Europe.

A Beginner’s Guide to Transcribing Our Archives

You can help bring our archives into the light by transcribing letters and diaries chronicling American life over the past 200 years. In the process, you’ll contribute to making these documents full-text searchable for researchers online, and you’ll discover stories of how Americans have lived, loved, and weathered difficult times.

To help you get started, we’ve created a step-by-step guide to using our transcription website, Newberry Transcribe.

Access a range of online resources and activities at newberry.org/explore-at-a-distance.