Monthly Archives: November 2010

Bronze Memorial Stars

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Dear Mr. Mudd:

What is the ori­gin of the stars on Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity build­ings? Is there any data­base list­ing the loca­tion of each star?

The bronze stars on win­dow sills of Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity dor­mi­to­ries com­mem­o­rate the University’s stu­dents and alumni who died in World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and in the Viet­nam War. An addi­tional 13 bronze stars hon­or­ing those who died on Sep­tem­ber 11, 2001 are located in a memo­r­ial gar­den between East Pyne and Chan­cel­lor Green.

clawbronzestars

Let­ter from the Soci­ety of the Claw to mem­bers seek­ing fund­ing for the ini­tial stars.

The orig­i­nal 140 stars, hon­or­ing stu­dents who lost their lives in World War I, were placed in 1920. These stars were donated by mem­bers of the Soci­ety of the Claw, an orga­ni­za­tion of mem­bers of the Class of 1894 who, as a sign-on con­di­tion, promised to either attend the next five reunions or every reunion through­out their lives. The Soci­ety also inducted hon­orary mem­bers who had done an “unusual ser­vice” or “brought excep­tional honor” to Prince­ton, such as Woodrow Wil­son ’1879. The Soci­ety of the Claw raised $431.65 for these stars, which were then placed on the win­dow sill of each dorm room last occu­pied by a Prince­ton stu­dent who lost his life in the war.

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ACLU Records Processing Project Progress

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The Mudd Man­u­script Library has fin­ished the first phase of an NHPRC-funded project to process the most recent records of the Amer­i­can Civil Lib­er­ties Union. After an exten­sive sur­vey, we have a record of the con­tents of each of the 2,461 boxes. This is an increase of nearly 500 lin­ear feet of mate­ri­als from what we had ini­tially esti­mated would be included in the project. To put that in per­spec­tive, instead of a project the length of 5.5 foot­ball fields, it is closer to 6.8 foot­ball fields. Many of the addi­tional mate­ri­als are case files and project files, but there is also a sig­nif­i­cant increase in the num­ber of orga­ni­za­tional records.

Emma Watt ’13 with 1200 boxes of ACLU Records

The records will be divided into the six series, closely fol­low­ing the arrange­ment of the ear­lier ACLU records to aid researchers in tran­si­tion­ing between the two sets:

Series 1: Orga­ni­za­tional Matters
Series 2: Project Files
Series 3: Sub­ject Files
Series 4: Legal Case Files
Series 5: Regional Offices

Series 6: Printed Mate­ri­als and Audio­vi­sual Materials

The next phase in the project is to cre­ate an inven­tory of the col­lec­tion, which will be the main tool for researchers to locate rel­e­vant doc­u­ments. Work began in Sep­tem­ber with the return of the Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity under­grad­u­ates to cam­pus who will do the actual work of typ­ing the inven­to­ries. The able assis­tants on this project are Jamie LaM­on­tagne (Class of 2011), Bran­don Joseph (Class of 2012), and Emma Watt (Class of 2013). Simul­ta­ne­ously, project archivist Adri­ane Han­son will be review­ing the records for mate­ri­als that should be restricted due to legal require­ments, ensur­ing that the max­i­mum num­ber of records can be opened at the com­ple­tion of the project.

Despite the addi­tional lin­ear feet involved, the project is still sched­uled to be com­pleted on time in Sum­mer 2012. We will pub­lish a tra­di­tional find­ing aid online to describe the con­tents of these records and also cre­ate a guide to link together the numer­ous col­lec­tions related to the Amer­i­can Civil Lib­er­ties Union at the Mudd Man­u­script Library. In addi­tion to the records for ear­lier peri­ods in the ACLU’s his­tory, some of these include the per­sonal papers of: