“We are starting to really look at diversifying our collection and making it more representative of everyone who wrote and published,” Makarowski said.
This poetry volume seldomly comes up on the rare book market, and she knew it would be invaluable in classes. “I would love for a student to undertake it as a research project.”
Instructors are already taking notice. Wegner shared the book with Steven Conn, the W.E. Smith Professor in History, and his Student Citizens students. Student Citizens is a grant-funded program that brings rising seniors from under-resourced regional high schools to the Oxford campus for two weeks.
While studying works like Plato’s “Apology” and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Conn expected another terrific class tour of special collections and was pleasantly surprised by this “lovely kind of plum” that he believes democratizes the collection.
He witnessed a new level of engagement from the students who are mostly students of color.
“Phillis Wheatley is right there on the frontispiece of the collection, and that kind of brought them up,” Conn said. “These were 16- and 17-year-olds, mostly girls, who were able to project themselves – to flip through the page and say, ‘This is a poet and here she is,’ which was kind of thrilling for these students.”
Along with its American literature, the Havighurst Special Collections celebrates other unique collections. Below are samples that set Miami University apart.
Smith’s Illustrated Astronomy (1852)
The copy of this astronomy textbook is from the personal library of Ohio Gov. Charles Anderson, an 1833 graduate of Miami University.
“You can tell that he was really passionate about studying for his astronomy. He wrote copious notes – it's one of my favorite examples of readership interaction. It also has the older names for some of the planets like Herschel for Uranus and Le Verrier for Neptune.”- Rachel Makarowski, special collections librarian