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ANTH 245: Ethnographer's Craft

Archives & Special Collections Library

Archives & Special Collections Library
(845) 437-5799
Library, Ground floor of the Ingram Library addition (north end)
spcoll@vassar.edu

REGULAR HOURS
10am – 5pm
Monday-Friday
Closed daily for lunch (12-1pm)
Appointment required

Social Science Librarian

Elizabeth Salmon

she/her/hers

Email Me

Contact:

Main Library Rm. 117

(845) 437-5767

Subjects: Anthropology, Economics, Political Science, Sociology, Urban Studies

Vassar Collections

VC Digital Library
Digitized versions of a variety of Vassar-related material including student diaries and letters, photographs, and other collections.
Vassar Library Search
Access the vast resources available at the Vassar College Libraries.

*Use the left menu options to filter results by Library-->Special Collections*
Vassar College Digital Newspaper & Magazine Archive
The Vassar College Digital Newspaper & Magazine Archive provides access to a wide range of publications that were published by Vassar College students from 1872-present and the Alumnae/i Association.

Food Studies Online
Archival content, visual ephemera, monographs, and videos that explore how food shapes the world around us. Topics include organic farming/small farms, school lunch programs, childhood nutrition, marketing and advertising, environmental impact of GMOs, food security, famine, labor practices, and gender roles through history.
Food and Drink in History (AMExplorer)
Primary source material documenting the story of food and drink throughout history and illustrating the links between food and identity, politics and power, gender, race and socioeconomic status, as well as charting key issues around agriculture, nutrition and food production.

National Museum of American History: Advertising Collection
preserved advertising campaigns for several familiar companies, such as Marlboro, Alka-Seltzer, Federal Express, Cover Girl, and Nike. It also holds the records of the NW Ayer Advertising Agency and business papers from Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, Carvel Ice Cream, and other companies with images dating back to the late 1700s.

ARTstor
With approximately 300 collections composed of over 2.5 million images (and growing), scholars can examine wide-ranging material such as Native American art from the Smithsonian, treasures from the Louvre, and panoramic, 360-degree views of the Hagia Sophia in a single, easy-to-use resource.
Requires Flash Player 6 or higher. Pop-up blocking software must be disabled or set to allow pop-up windows from www.artstor.org and cookies must be enabled.
North American Indian Thought and Culture
Biographical information on indigenous peoples from all areas of North America. Includes biographies, auto-biographies, personal narratives, speeches, diaries, letters, and oral histories.
North American Women's Letters and Diaries
North American Women's letters and diaries

New York Public Library Digital Menu Collection
The New York Public Library digital menu collection contains over 18,000 items.
Your Story, Our Story: Foodways Collection
Features objects that tell personal stories of American immigration and migration, presented by the Tenement Museum.
Culinary Institute of America Digital Collections
Over 40,000 historical menus includes menus from CIA restaurants and donations from major menu collectors; the collection illustrates the history of dining in America and abroad, with menus from all of the states and over 80 countries, as well as ships, railroads and airlines.
Traditional Foodways of Native America: Oral Histories of Native Food Revitalization
Over 30 oral history interviews with Native American elders, teachers, farmers, hunters, wild food foragers, fishermen, cooks and chefs, activists, and advocate, featuring contemporary Native American community leaders and traditional food gatherers sharing diverse stories of native foodways, their cultural knowledge and practices of indigenous nutrition and health.

Primary Source Collections: General

ProQuest History Vault
Primary source materials, including letters, papers, photographs, scrapbooks, financial records, and diaries, from ProQuest's University Publications of America (UPA) Collection in a digital format. Includes Black freedom struggle in the 20th century; Struggle for women's rights, organizational records, 1880-1990; and Women's studies manuscript collections from the Schlesinger Library.
Gale Primary Sources
Searches across all Gale Primary Source holdings in our subscription or select specific categories or groups of archives to search within, including 17th and 18th Century Burney Collection, 19th Century UK Periodicals, Archives of Sexuality & Gender, Archives Unbound, Associated Press Collections Online, British Library Newspapers, China and the Modern World, Daily Mail Historical Archive 1896-2004, Economist Historical Archive, Eighteenth Century Collections Online, Financial Times Historical Archive, Illustrated London News Historical Archive 1842-2003, Indigenous Peoples: North America, Nineteenth Century Collections Online, Punch Historical Archive 1841-1992, Sabin Americana 1500-1926, Sunday Times Digital Archive, Times Digital Archive, Times Literary Supplement Historical Archive, U.S. Declassified Documents Online, and Women's Studies Archive.

Digital Public Library (DPLA)
Discover 47,210,791 images, texts, videos, and sounds from across the United States.

American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals Collection
Periodicals from the collection at the American Antiquarian Society documenting the life of America's people from the Colonial Era through the Civil War and Reconstruction. Coverage: 1691-1877.

Cookbook Collections

Mexican Cookbook Collection: University of Texas at San Antonio
UTSA’s Mexican Cookbook Collection is comprised of more than 2,000 cookbooks, from 1789 to the present, with most books dating from 1940-2000. In addition to broad general coverage, the collection includes concentrations in the areas of regional cooking, healthy and vegetarian recipes, corporate advertising cookbooks, and manuscript recipe books.
Internet Archive: Cookbook and Home Economics Collection
Includes books from the Young Research Library Department of Special Collections at UCLA, The Bancroft Library at The University of California, Berkeley, and the Prelinger Library. These fascinating books take us back to an America in the early decades of the 20th century covering topics on cookery, textiles, family and home, budgeting, domestic sciences, and many other delightful topics.
Feeding America: The Historic American Cookbook Project (Michigan State University)
Feeding America is an online collection of some of the most important and influential American cookbooks from the late 18th to early 20th century. The digital archive includes 76 cookbooks from the MSU Libraries' collection as well as searchable full-text transcriptions.
Community Cookbooks: An Online Collection
This research guide highlights to early charity and community cookbooks from across the United States and digitized from the Library of Congress collections.
Early American Cookbooks
Early American Cookbooks is a carefully curated collection of 1450 cookbooks published in the United States between 1800 and 1920, via HathiTrust.

Early African American Southern Cookbooks

Russell, M., Brown, H. Evans. (1866).
Fisher, A. (1881).

Russell, M., Brown, H. Evans. (1866). A domestic cook book: containing a careful selection of useful receipts for the kitchen. Paw Paw, Mich.: The Author.

Fisher, A., Women's Co-operative Printing Union (Firm). (1881). What Mrs. Fisher knows about old southern cooking, soups, pickles, preserves, etc. San Francisco: Women's Co-operative Printing Office, 420, 424 & 430 Montgomery Street.

Additional Resources

The Jemima Code by Toni Tipton-Martin
Call Number: TX715.2.A47 T57 2015
ISBN: 9780292745483
Publication Date: 2015-09-20
The Jemima Code presents more than 150 black cookbooks that range from a rare 1827 house servant's manual, the first book published by an African American in the trade, to modern classics by authors such as Edna Lewis and Vertamae Grosvenor. The books are arranged chronologically and illustrated with photos of their covers; many also display selected interior pages, including recipes. Tipton-Martin provides notes on the authors and their contributions and the significance of each book, while her chapter introductions summarize the cultural history reflected in the books that follow. These cookbooks offer firsthand evidence that African Americans cooked creative masterpieces from meager provisions, educated young chefs, operated food businesses, and nourished the African American community through the long struggle for human rights. The Jemima Code transforms America's most maligned kitchen servant into an inspirational and powerful model of culinary wisdom and cultural authority.

Feast Afrique: Digital Library
Links to 240+ books and collections, referenced in The Jemima Code and more, from 1828 to the present day.
Food Timeline
Part of the Lynne Olver collection housed at the Virginia Tech Special Collections and University Archives; beginning with water and ice, entries range from 17,000 BC to 2009 AD.