Puget Sound Archives & Special Collections

Rare books and archival material from the second floor of the Collins Memorial Library at the University of Puget Sound. Currently run by Peer Research Specialist Julia Masur '19. Have a question? Ask us!

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Regester and students in Johnston's Negro in U.S. History class, 1949

Del Gibbs and students, 1952

Happy last week of classes, Loggers! Study hard and good luck on finals!

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Local Conditions: One Hundred Views of Mount Rainier (At Least), Chandler O’Leary 

It’s time for May’s Archives Hashtag Party! This month’s theme is  #ArchivesInBloom. We love these vistas of Mount Rainier with flowers featured in one of our new acquisitions, Chandler O’Leary’s Local Conditions.

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Square dance in Warner Gymnasium, 17 Feb 1950

Sigma Mu Chi Marine Dance Program, 1932

Happy International Dance Day!

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Academic procession into Jones Hall, as seen from Howarth Hall, 1933

Commencement is right around the corner! There are only three weeks left until the Class of 2019 graduates. They may be leaving campus, but once a Logger, always a Logger!

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Mount Rainier from Vashon Island

Columbia River Country

Yellowstone Falls (from below)

Happy Earth Day! Our planet is full of so many beautiful places, some of which are pictured here in paintings from the Abby Williams Hill Collection.

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The Trail, March 26, 2010

Easter sunrise service, 1948

It’s a big weekend for religious holidays on campus, with Passover starting tonight and Easter this Sunday.  Passover, also known as Pesach, is a major Jewish holiday that celebrates liberation by God from slavery in ancient Egypt and their freedom as a nation under leadership of Moses. It is an event of learning, thankfulness, food, coming-together, and family. The campus seder is welcome to everyone, and will take place tonight at 6:30pm in Upper Marshall Hall. Greek life is sponsoring an Easter egg hunt for children ages 2–12 from 1:00pm-3:00pm on Karlen Quad. It is free and open to all members of the campus and Tacoma community. The Center for Intercultural and Civic Engagement will also hold an Easter service at 2:00pm in Kilworth Memorial Chapel, followed by an Easter celebration at 4:30pm in the Social Justice Center, hosted by InterVarsity Christian Fellowship.

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Lu’au 1976 & 1983

Congratulations to all of the dancers who performed in the annual lu’au this weekend (including one of our student employees)! Lu’au is an important campus tradition that has been going on for almost fifty years, and it’s always so great to see the students’ hard work on the performance pay off.

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Student worker Mali Matthews ‘22 is hard at work prepping for our Spring Family Weekend open house later today! Stop by between 3pm and 4pm to examine some of our archival materials and ask any questions you have about the university’s history.

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Collins Memorial Library reading room, circa 1961

Perry donates books to Collins Library as Taylor looks on, 1969

Goman directs movers inside the Collins Library entrance, 1954

Happy National Library Week! This year’s theme is “Libraries = Communities”, and we’re grateful to be part of the Collins Memorial Library community here at Puget Sound. From working with liaison librarians to create engaging class sessions for students to hosting library events, we love collaborating with the rest of the library staff!

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Freshman beanies.

Happy April! This month’s #ArchivesHashtagParty is #ArchivesArtifacts. These beanies were part of a long-standing tradition at Puget Sound. The hats evolved over the years, but the idea behind them remained the same. All freshmen were required to wear the beanies as a hazing ritual. In order to stop wearing them, they had to beat the upperclassmen at some sort of competition during Homecoming. If they lost, they had to wait until Thanksgiving until they were allowed to be seen on campus without them. If an upperclassman caught a freshman without a hat, the freshman was subject to penalties, including getting their hair dyed green.

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The Trail, April 1, 2016

The Trail, April 1, 1988

Happy April Fools Day from the A&SC! We loved digging through old issues of the student newspaper, The Trail, to find some fun jokes in honor of the holiday. While shin-kicking sounds like a painful endeavor, maybe the new Jacuzzis in the athletic complex will help athletes recover.

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Livre d’heures, Vat. Ross. 94

The book of hours is a Christian devotional book popular in the Middle Ages. It is the most common type of surviving medieval illuminated manuscript. They were developed for lay people who wished to incorporate elements of monasticism into their devotional life. Like every manuscript, each manuscript book of hours is unique in one way or another, but most contain a similar collection of texts, prayers and psalms, often with appropriate decorations. Illumination or decoration is minimal in many examples, often restricted to decorated capital letters at the start of psalms and other prayers, but books made for wealthy patrons may be extremely lavish, with full-page miniatures. Tens of thousands of books of hours have survived to the present day, in libraries and private collections throughout the world. This particular book of hours is a facsimile of one produced in Flanders during the late 15th century.

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Local Conditions: One Hundred Views of Mount Rainier

We recently acquired Local Conditions: One Hundred Views of Mount Rainier (At Least), a stunning artist book by Chandler O’Leary, a Tacoma-based illustrator, letterer, and entrepreneur. O’Leary was inspired by Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai and his collections of woodblock prints from the mid-1800s: Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji and One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji. Just like Mount Fuji, Mount Rainier is part of the Ring of Fire, and both Hokusai and O’Leary were drawn to their local volcanoes. Unlike Hokusai, who saw Mount Fuji as eternal and immortal, O’Leary sees Mount Rainier as impermanent and ever-changing. Through her series of prints, she sought to capture 100 unique views of Mount Rainier, observed over a two-year period from September 2008 to October 2010. The book contains 120 image flats that make up all of the 100 real-life scenes, and can be combined in new ways to create new views of Mount Rainier. To learn more about how the book works, visit the Archives & Special Collections or take a look at O’Leary’s blog post about it.

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Students outdoors on campus, 1987

Student artists, summer, 1968

Hedges and Morrison ski on the ridge next to the Cayuse Pass ski area, circa 1949

Happy spring break, Loggers! Whether you’re soaking up the sun or hitting the slopes, we hope it’s a good one!

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Mss.057 African-American Communist Party Pamphlets

The Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) was founded in 1919 and it played an important role in defending the civil rights of African Americans during the height of its popularity in the 1930s and 40s. The CPUSA was a prolific publisher of reports, transcripts of speeches, essays, convention materials, and most notably, pamphlets. Pamphlets were inexpensive to print and produce, easy to hand out, and an affordable way to spread ideas to audiences both large and small. This collection of pamphlets dating from 1928 through 1974 contains notable examples of the type of information being disseminated by the CPUSA. Mss.057, the African American Communist Party pamphlet collection contains 53 pamphlets created between 1928 and 1974 by the Communist Party of the United States of America. The covers of two of those pamphlets are pictured.

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Snowfall on campus, 1993

It may almost be spring but it’s snowing on campus again! We think our campus looks beautiful in any weather (although we might be a tad biased), but the snow is especially pretty.

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Abby Williams Hill (1) (2) 

Niguel Canyon: Wild Buckwheat

Happy Women’s History Month! While women’s history should be taught and celebrated year-round, today, we’re highlighting one of our most prolific collections created by a woman: the Abby Williams Hill collection.

Abby Williams Hill (1861-1943) was a landscape painter, social activist, and prolific writer with an insatiable love of travel and learning. She produced a remarkable collection of landscape paintings showcasing the grandeur of the American West, as well as a vast archive of letters and journals addressing issues of continuing social and historical interest including African-American and Native-American rights, early childhood education, the plight of tuberculosis patients, and the preservation of our national parks.

She often said, “I was cut out for the wilds”. She preferred hiking with her four children, being outdoors, and wearing comfortable men’s clothing to the typical female duties and fashions of the day. Between 1903 and 1906, Hill accepted four commissions from the Great Northern and Northern Pacific railways to paint the spectacular vistas of the Pacific Northwest and Yellowstone National Park.  Her paintings for the railroads were used in promotional materials and exhibited at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, the 1905 Lewis and Clark Exposition in Portland, the 1907 Jamestown Tricentennial Exposition, and the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition in Seattle.

In addition to her work as an artist, Hill was the founder and first president of the Washington state chapter of the Congress of Mothers, the forerunner of today’s Parent Teacher Association (PTA). In her work for the congress she advocated on behalf of immigrant and disadvantaged families. Later in life, she embarked on a letter writing campaigns to create a system of national sanitariums for tuberculosis patients and to reduce road building and development in the national parks.

The Abby Williams Hill Collection was donated to the University of Puget Sound in the decades following her death in 1943. Many of her paintings are on display on campus.  Abby Hill’s personal papers, including correspondence, diaries, news clippings, ephemera, family photographs, and artifacts, reside in the Archives & Special Collections in the Collins Memorial Library and are available for viewing by appointment only.  For questions about the Hill Collection, please contact [email protected]. Visit the Archives Abby Williams Hill Collection webpage for additional information about the collection.