The senior thesis, the capstone of a Princeton student’s academic experience, has moved further into the 21st century with Thesis Central, a new thesis collection and management tool. Working closely with the Office of Information Technology and the Office of the Dean of the College (ODOC), the Princeton University Archives launched the site on Monday, March 27 in order to begin collecting the theses that are due during the months of April and May.
Courtney Perales ’17, Anthropology. Thesis Due: April 17.
Seniors will log into the system with their NetIDs, with much of the necessary information pre-populated into the collection form. In fact, seniors will only need to do three or four things after logging in: provide their thesis titles; upload the thesis files (and any supporting files such as datasets or videos); affirm they followed University rules regarding the work; and, if their department requires one, cut and paste their abstracts. Students are also provided a link to the ODOC page should they wish to request any type of restriction.
Antoine Crepin-Heroux ’17, Electrical Engineering. Thesis Due: May 8.
After departmental and library review, all theses will be available via DataSpace by the start of the new school year. Since its launch in 2014, use of the online database has been very high. Last year students on campus searched and downloaded over 14,000 theses, an impressive number given that the database has not yet reached 5,000 individual theses. (For copyright reasons, theses are not downloadable from off campus.)
See the Mudd Library website for detailed information about the new submission process.
Q: From your FAQ website: “In 1896, when expanded program offerings brought the College university status, the College of New Jersey was officially renamed Princeton University in honor of its host community of Princeton.”
I am currently editing a novel that includes both Nassau Hall and Princeton; would the use of “Princeton” be anachronistic in 1818? Or was “Princeton” used informally, much as “Augusta” in reference to that city’s Masters Tournament?
A: While the college was informally called Princeton before its official name change in 1896, the earliest reference in that form that we have here in the University Archives dates from 1853 (within a publication entitled “College As It Is”). Our sources before 1853 are scanty, due to a paucity of things created (no student newspaper yet, no yearbooks, etc.). However, your question piqued my interest and so I did a search of the America’s Historical Newspapers database and found frequent references to “Princeton College” or “Princeton college” starting in 1772. For fun, I have attached a photo (above) of that first article from a Philadelphia newspaper, the Pennsylvania Packet [page 1, issue 43, Publication Date: August 17, 1772].
Update, May 29, 2014: Additional research into this revealed that an October 18, 1756 newspaper ad used the phrase “Prince-town college.” This is notable not only for its earlier date, but also that this was about five weeks before the college actually started operations in Princeton (November 28, 1756). According to Princeton, 1746-1896, by Thomas J. Wertenbaker, it was during fall break that the college moved from Newark to Princeton, “although carpenters and plasterers were still working in Nassau Hall when the session began” (p.40). So it can be safely said that the institution was known as Princeton from the very start of its time in the town of Princeton.
New-York Mercury, page 4, issue 219; October 18, 1756
The Mudd Library is pleased to announce that the final two series of the third subgroup of American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) records have been processed, and that the entire collection has been addressed is now available to the public. These materials join ACLU records long held at the Mudd Library: The Roger Baldwin Years, 1917–1950 and American Civil Liberties Union Records 1947–1995. As a whole, this collection documents the civil liberties organization’s work in areas including civil rights, children and women’s rights, freedom of speech (and all First Amendment questions), due process, the right to privacy, and church-state separation issues, and this third subgroup covers the years between 1975 and 2000 predominantly. The records are of vital historical and cultural importance to the nation, and we are grateful that the work on these records was supported by a grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC).
Founded in 1920, the ACLU’s mission is “to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States.” The group has been integral in myriad landmark court cases since its inception, and the collection of new materials housed at Mudd consists, notably, of records from the Reproductive Freedom Project, the Women’s Rights Project, the Robert Bork Supreme Court nomination hearings, the Iran-Contra affair, and Texas v. Johnson (the 1990 flag-burning case). The newly available records also include over 300 boxes from the ACLU’s Southern Regional office, which handled many important civil rights cases
Adriane Hanson, who managed the processing of the new ACLU materials, began in June 2010, and with the help of several Princeton students, she inventoried and processed 2,500 linear, the single largest and fastest processing project in Mudd Library’s history. Mudd Library’s entire ACLU collection, which is its largest and most used, now spans about 4,200 linear feet.
Today, we begin a series of blog entries in a new category American Civil Liberties Union History covering the ALCU’s early history. Written by Samuel Walker, a professor emeritus in the School of Criminal Justice at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and the author of the only comprehensive history of the ACLU, each entry contains many digitized documents along with Walker’s commentary. These documents are part of 20 reels of microfilm that we digitized recently with Walker’s generous support and can be accessed here.
A note on the citations to the ACLU Records: The location of each document is indicated by the microfilm reel number, the original Volume number in the ACLU Records, and the page number(s) within each volume. Locating particular documents should be fairly easy, although it will often require moving back and forth between reels and volumes.
Documents on particular topics are often scattered among different microfilm reels and volume numbers. This is believed to be a result of the disorganization of the records that occurred when the U.S. Justice Department raided the offices of the National Civil Liberties Bureau on August 30, 1918.
Despite the disorganization of the documents, however, most are grouped together in a logical fashion. As a result, readers who access a document related to the founding of the National Civil Liberties Bureau (NCLB), for example, will find related documents on that subject nearby, and these documents may be of interest to readers.
A disclaimer: the text is Professor Walker’s interpretation of ACLU history and some will not agree with it. This is the nature of historical scholarship, but we encourage you to comment and, where possible, cite other ACLU documents that you find online.
The Graduate School’s policy of having dissertations submitted into DataSpace, the University’s Open Access repository, has been changed temporarily, pending resolution of some outstanding questions. David Redman, Associate Dean of the Graduate School, sent the following message out late today. If you have any questions, please contact us:
Dear Directors of Graduate Studies,
As many of you know, the Graduate School, working with the University Archives, established last fall new procedures for the submission of Ph.D. dissertations to ProQuest. Two significant changes were: a) agreeing to use ProQuest’s Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD) submission portal, which greatly speeded the ability of students to submit their dissertations; and b) eliminating the necessity of a second hard-bound copy of the dissertation in favor of storing an electronic copy of the dissertation on Princeton’s DataSpace and making the electronic “second copy” accessible there. One consequence of the second change was that our students’ dissertations became almost instantly accessible to anyone with a good search engine. In short, Princeton dissertations were “out there” in the world faster than we had imagined. This has caused some anxiety and distress among many of our new Ph.D.’s, so much so that we are amending our procedures in the following way.
By the end of this month, we will restrict access to doctoral dissertations in DataSpace to those on the Princeton.edu domain, that is, to on-campus users.
This is an interim and (we hope) relatively short term address to a larger problem of easy and fast access to Ph.D. dissertations at a time when students, particularly those in the humanities and social sciences, are anxious about their opportunities to publish their work and advance in their careers. The Graduate School has already had preliminary discussion with some members of the Policy Subcommittee about this issue and wants to continue the discussion with them about refining our policies and procedures.
Thank you for your interest in and concern about this issue. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to call (x8-3902) or write me (dnredman@princeton.edu).
–David Redman
Associate Dean
UPDATE: As of today, March 23, dissertations in DataSpace are now restricted to on-campus users only. However, please note that if Google has cached a PDF that it crawled previously, that PDF will remain in Google’s cache until Google expires it. That typically takes a couple of weeks, but that’s entirely up to Google.
UPDATE: As of November 5, all dissertations that have not been granted an embargo are available via Dataspace.
A new exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum features items borrowed from the Princeton University Archives. Princeton and the Gothic Revival: 1870-1930 is a look into "Americans’ changing attitudes to the art, architecture, and style of the Middle Ages through the lens of Princeton University around the turn of the twentieth century" and opens to the public this Saturday, February 25, 2012.
Alexander Hoyle for Cram and Ferguson, architects
The exhibit includes 10 items loaned from the Princeton University Archives, including the signature image for the exhibition, a watercolor of the University Chapel (above). Other items include architectural drawings of the Marquand Chapel, Holder Hall, Madison Hall and the South Court Tower, and some suggested additions for the university library from 1898, which at that time was housed in Chancellor Green.
One piece needed some intricate and delicate conservation efforts from University Paper Conservator Ted Stanley. A watercolor of the proposed exterior of the A. Page Brown, Class of 1877 Biological Laboratory had split in half. Stanley was able to restore the watercolor and the board it was mounted on to its original form to hide the separation. We challenge you to find the seam!
This is the first time that any of the archives material has been loaned and displayed at the Princeton Art Museum. The exhibit will run from February 25th to June 24, 2012
For more about Princeton and the Gothic Revival: 1870-1930 or the Princeton Art Museum, visit their website.
Noted diplomatic historian Frank Costigliola of the University of Connecticut has been selected to edit the diaries of George F. Kennan, the renowned 20th century diplomat, historian, and public intellectual. Professor Costigliola holds a Ph.D. from Cornell University and is the author of the forthcoming Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances: How Personal Politics Helped Start the Cold War(Princeton University Press, January 2012), in addition to two other books and more than two dozen articles, including an essay on Kennan that appeared in The Journal of American History. He is also a past president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations and has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEH, the Norwegian Nobel Institute, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
Costigliola’s was one of nine submissions received for the project which was announced last December with ads in the New York Review of Books and The Chronicle of Higher Education, as well as on numerous listservs, and the Mudd Manuscript Library blog. He plans a single volume of approximately 600-700 pages and projects a completion date of December 2014. (See Costigliola’s proposal .) Notified of the selection, Costigliola commented, “I am honored by the opportunity to make available to Kennan buffs, scholars of U.S. and international history, and general readers the magnificent, 80-year-long chronicle of this most gifted diplomat, public intellectual, and writer.”
The Kennan Papers are one of the most used collections at the Mudd Manuscript Library and the diaries themselves were only opened in 2009. Kennan was a diplomat and a historian, noted especially for his influence on United States policy towards the Soviet Union during the Cold War and for his scholarly expertise in the areas of Russian history and foreign policy. While with the Foreign Service, Kennan advocated a policy of "containment" that influenced United States relations with the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War, and he served in various positions in European embassies, as well as ambassador to the Soviet Union. His career as a historian was spent at the Institute for Advanced Study, where he continued to analyze the history of Russia, the Soviet Union and United States foreign policies, and foreign affairs.
UPDATE, FEBRUARY 2014: This book has been published by Norton, a full ten months ahead of Costigliola’s original projection. We are very pleased to see Mr. Kennan’s diary printed in a handsome and well-edited volume.
It did not take long after coming to Princeton in 1994 for me to appreciate the importance of Robert Goheen and his place in University history. During his time in the president’s office, the University was transformed physically, socially, and academically and became the modern University it is today. But as I studied the records in the University Archives and came up to speed with his administration’s accomplishments, I had no sense of the man who oversaw this watershed era until one day Goheen visited Mudd Library to conduct research himself.
Expecting an oversize character on the order of Yale’s Kingman Brewster—Goheen’s contemporary who was a caricature in Doonesbury—I found just the opposite. He was a quiet, unassuming man who, if not for knowing his name from the daily log, I would have assumed to be just another of the many senior scholars who visited the library and dutifully went about their work. He did not ask for nor expect any special treatment, nor did his demeanor call attention to himself in any way. I would learn that was the essence of Bob Goheen.
In the coming years, there were a number of occasions where I crossed paths with Goheen, including one spring day when I went to his house to pick up his non-Princeton papers. Later, Secretary of the University Robert Durkee asked me to conduct a video oral history interview with Goheen with the Alumni Council’s Kathy Taylor serving as producer. The four, hour-long videos here are the result of our efforts, and they document the man’s remarkable 72-year association with Princeton as a student, faculty member, and president.
All four interviews are described in a finding aid that contains links to the transcripts of the interviews. (The transcripts also have time stamps which closely correspond with the video time stamp.)
The first interview, conducted on October 21, 2004, covers Goheen’s early life, his undergraduate, graduate, and faculty careers at Princeton, and his selection as University President at age 37. He also reflects on his mentor, Professor Whitney Oates, long-serving trustee Dean Mathey, his predecessor Harold Dodds, and Freddie Fox. (In each interview, I asked Goheen to discuss various people with whom he crossed paths. He freely admited that recalling specific anecdotes is not one of his strengths, and so these tend to be impressionistic.) (Read the transcript.)
In the second interview (conducted on October 26, 2004), Goheen discussed the state of the University upon becoming president, the $53 Million Campaign, the growth and allocation of the University budget, coeducation, the eating clubs, and his contemporary Ivy League presidents. Of special note is his discussion of the 1963 Spring riots (15:35) as they related to the civil rights demonstrations in the South. (Read the transcript.)
In the third interview (November 4, 2004), Goheen discusses coeducation in more detail, campus architecture, the establishment of the Provost’s Office, William Bowen, the growth of the graduate school, and changes in University governance and the Kelley Committee. (Read the transcript.)
Generally speaking, as an archivist, I am concerned with preserving records, not generating them. But in interviewing Goheen, it was a chance to not only create what I hope will be a useful documentation of his long association with Princeton, it was also an honor and a pleasure.
The Mudd Manuscript Library at Princeton University holds the papers of renowned diplomat George F. Kennan (1904-2005); upon the passing of Kennan and his wife, copyright in the unpublished materials in those papers passed to Princeton. Within the more than 300 boxes that make up the collection, twelve boxes contain the diaries that Kennan kept nearly continuously throughout his adult life (they date from 1924-2004).
As Kennan remains prominent in scholarly discourse, there is great interest in these diaries. Several individuals have expressed an interest in publishing them in some form. In order to ensure that they receive the benefit of the best possible treatment, the University is soliciting proposals from all interested scholars and will award one the right of first publication.
Kennan kept the diaries throughout much of his adult life and they detail his private thoughts on the issues facing him both professionally and personally. Kennan’s authorized biographer, John Lewis Gaddis, has read them all and described their self-critical character as resembling those of Henry Adams. In the diaries, Kennan recorded with whom he was meeting, including brief descriptions of the subject of the conversations, and his professional and personal appointments. The earlier diaries, from the period when he was in the diplomatic service, contain his impressions of the countries and the issues they faced. The diaries from his scholarly career include discussions of his research projects and publications, his travels and speaking engagements, and his opinions on public policy matters. Personal details are also found throughout each volume, with a separate “dream journal” covering the period from 1964 to 1977.
Request for proposals
The Library seeks proposals for the publication of the Kennan diaries that answers the following questions:
How will your proposed publication be formatted? (number of volumes, amount of annotation, level of indexing, etc.)
What qualifications do you bring to this project?
What is your plan of work, including a timetable and strategy?
What publishers might you work with? Have you worked with them in the past or have they evinced an interest in working with this project?
Why do you want to undertake this project?
If you plan to seek outside support, what experience do you have with fundraising?
Please include a c.v. for all project participants.
Proposals should include contact information for possible follow-up questions. Word or PDF documents sent as email attachments can be mailed to dlinke@princeton.edu. Any supplementary materials that need to be sent via USPS can be mailed to:
Dan Linke
Mudd Manuscript Library
Princeton University
65 Olden Street
Princeton, NJ 08540
All proposals will be confidentially evaluated by a panel of scholars with an understanding of Kennan’s role in 20th century diplomatic history.
Kennan Diaries Project Advisory Committee
John Lewis Gaddis, Yale University, Robert A. Lovett Professor of History and Kennan’s authorized biographer.
Richard Immerman, Temple University. Edward J. Buthusiem Family Distinguished Faculty Fellow and Department Chair; Director of the Center for the Study of Force and Diplomacy.
Daniel J. Linke, Princeton University Archivist and Curator of Public Policy Papers.
Paul Miles *99, Princeton University, Lecturer in History.
Bradley Simpson, Princeton University, Assistant Professor of History and International Affairs.
Deadline for submission is: May 2, 2011 with an anticipated announcement by August 1, 2011.
One of the major reasons for keeping historical documents is to provide access to them for research use, and scholars travel from around the world to the Mudd Manuscript Library to read our documents in order to write their books and articles. For the first time, with the help of Google Books, we have created bibliographies for volumes written using our collections. Over the past three decades, there have been more than 30 books written using sources from the Princeton University Archives and over 300 books from our 20th Century Public Policy Papers. These files are linked off of our Conducting Research page from Mudd’s homepage.
Both lists are impressive for their scope and help demonstrate how our holdings can be exploited—in the best sense of the word.
If you know of others that should be listed, please send us a message at mudd@princeton.edu. We’ll be glad to update the list.
