History Commons^™

Ms-293: Gillilan Family Letters, Jessica A. Cromer, Carly A. Jensen, Merlyn Maldonado Lopez

All Finding Aids

This collection contains approximately 90 letters written by various letters of the Gillilan family, including Lewis, his parents, wife, and children. The bulk of the letters are written by Lewis between 1909 and 1910, but there are also a significant amount written by his daughter, Lois, in 1939. These letters provide insight into the life of a stagecoach driver and a young woman studying medicine in Europe during the rise of the Nazi party, amongst other things. Many of the early letters also depict Lewis and Ellen navigating their personal relationship as it was contested by their families.

All of …

Ms-289: John D. Rentz Civil War Diary, Danielle S. Russell

All Finding Aids

John D. Rentz’s Civil War diary chronicles the time he spent with the 96th Pennsylvania Infantry between December 26, 1863, and September 6, 1864. The diary details a wide array of information pertaining to his life with the regiment and the progress of the Civil War.

Rentz’s pension letter is very simple, merely asking for B. Penrose’s assistance with securing a renewal of his pension. The “Rebel letter” written by Margaret Jones to Joseph King is also simple, providing a few details about the rainy weather, the progress of the crops, and expressing Jones’s desire to see her brother.

The …

Seeing With The Eyes Of The Soul: Visionary Women, Meditative Lives Of Christ, And Their Readers In Late-Medieval England, Caitlin J. Branumthrash

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation investigates the interactions in the transmission and reception of visionary women’s texts, devotional retellings of Christ’s life, and female book cultures in late-medieval England (ca.1350-1550). Surveying English manuscripts and texts containing the texts of St. Birgitta of Sweden and Mechthild of Hackeborn indicates a link in the commensurate popularities of the Life of Christ genre and the visionary women. Devotional Lives of Christ written by men incorporate visionary texts, though they reflect implicit medieval misogyny even as they celebrate the holy women. In contrast, a Life of Christ written by a medieval English nun blends the lived experiences …

Reimagining History Dataset 3.0, Michelle R. Warren, Neil Weijer

Other Faculty Materials

The Middle English prose Brut chronicle survives in nearly two hundred manuscripts. This corpus has been the subject of extensive study for more than a hundred years. The most recent research, however, has turned out to be the most fragile. In 2017, the multiyear digital humanities project “Imaging History: Perspectives on Late Medieval Vernacular Historiography” disappeared from the live Internet, only a decade after its publication. Shortly afterwards, we began a project called "Re-Imagining History"--to create a new dataset of information about the Brut manuscript corpus and learn how digital infrastructure might shape the production and preservation of historical data. …