June 18 2015 marks the the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo. Bestselling historical novelist Bernard Cornwell has spent years researching the antagonists and walking the battlefield; the fruits of that labor is his first nonfiction book, Waterloo: The True Story of Four Days, Three Armies and Three Battles, which attempts to paint the full picture of the battle. We interviewed Cornwell ... [more]

The Texas State Library has compiled a list of missing material, including early Texas Republic material and maps missing from its archives. A link to a PDF list of missing material may be found at the Texas State Library website here. This site also includes information on ownership markings and the text of state law on the right of recovery of Texas public records. [more]

A New England Correspondence Archive: Descriptive Notes and Approach to Valuation Recently a Massachusetts antiques dealer sought me out to evaluate an archive of approximately 100 autograph letters received by one Edward B. Dearborn (1807-1886), including many related to teaching, mostly in rural New England schools in the late 1820s and early 1830s. What at first appeared to be a boring batch of... [more]

Last week the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin announced its acquisition of writer Ian McEwan's archive. The archive is comprised of a broad range of materials, from childhood items to his earliest stories to drafts of all McEwan's published works to correspondence with other notable literary figures. In addition to the spectrum of content represented in the archive, there ... [more]

On May 1, Emory University's Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Book Library (MARBL) opened the archive of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to the public. The SCLC was founded in 1957 by seminal civil rights leaders including Martin Luther King Jr. in response to the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Black leaders in the southeast were cognizant that the boycott was the beginning of a much l... [more]