Pierre Toussaint’s Portrait at Columbia

One of the most frequently reproduced images from the University Archives is an early 1850s portrait of Pierre Toussaint taken by former University President and enthusiastic amateur photographer Nathaniel Fish Moore. This photograph, long held by the Moore family, arrived at the Archives in 1944. It was initially incorrectly credited and its subject misidentified, but […]

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Linking Names in Our Archival Collections: Shared Authority Review (Interim update)

One of our collaborative work-from-home projects since the COVID pandemic started in March 2020 is our ongoing review of linked authority records in our archival collections. The shared authorities in our archival collections are managed in ArchivesSpace and are utilized across four of our distinctive collections including the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, the […]

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Event | Online film screening of Spaceship Earth and filmmaker conversation

In this time of creating pods with family and friends, watching filmmaker Matt Wolf’s documentary Spaceship Earth [trailer] at the start during the early days of COVID lockdown was fascinating look at groups dynamics. Yes, there is science, but it was also…there was DRAMA. How did a groups of counterculture-oriented scientists decide to embark on […]

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Still Presidential: Former Presidents at Columbia

Columbia has hosted future Presidents and sitting Presidents. Here, we focus on a few other former Presidents who came to the University. Can you guess which former president served as a featured speaker at an engineering school fundraiser, as a guest lecturer at the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education desegregation case, […]

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