Digital Exhibits

This collection of sheet music from the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, the Gaylord Music Library at Washington University in St. Louis, demonstrates how the intersecting values of education and entertainment, high and low culture, class and race played out in the musical publications surrounding the Louisiana Purchase Exposition.

The Assembled Playwright exhibition presents highlights from the Harley Hammerman Collection on Eugene O’Neill. The exhibition includes manuscripts, correspondence, photographs, playbills, posters, inscribed books, and other unique and rare materials by and pertinent to the Nobel Prize-winning playwright.

Higher Ground is a history of Washington Park Cemetery, an African American cemetery located near Lambert St Louis Airport in the city of Berkley.

In 2021 the Washington University Libraries acquired the literary papers of Aaron Coleman, a poet and translator who received his Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing in 2015 and Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature in 2021 from Washington University in St. Louis. The Aaron Coleman Papers consist of drafts of poems from his first two books and other materials related to his time at Washington University.

The Wherein I Am exhibition is organized by PhD Student in Comparative Literature Sarah Maria Medina.

Eyes on the Prize is a 14-part series which was originally released in two parts: Eyes I in 1987 and Eyes II in 1990. This series, which debuted on PBS stations, is considered to be the definitive documentary on the Civil Rights Movement. “Eyes on the Prize” won more than twenty major awards and attracted over 20 million viewers.

This exhibit includes all 127 interviews that were made for the first series subtitled “America’s Civil Right Years 1954-1965." The interviews are part of the Henry Hampton Collection housed at the Film and Media Archive at Washington University Libraries.

The Assembly Series is WashU’s signature public lecture series featuring some of the most prominent voices of the late 20th and early 21st century. WashU Libraries digitized and preserved over 1,400 analog recordings of Assembly Series lectures. Through these efforts, this significant collection of over 70 years of recorded lectures is now available to researchers, students, and the general public.

This exhibition includes a sampling of the numerous works in Washington University’s Julian Edison Department of Special Collections that are of interest to those studying Ancient Greece and Rome. The University owns a collection of over 400 papyri from Greco-Roman Egypt, including both literary and documentary texts; early editions, including incunabula, of several ancient authors; important works by early Humanists; illustrated editions of mathematical and architectural works; editions of ancient authors from the library of Thomas Jefferson; and unusual responses to Greek and Roman literature by modern poets.

More than Talking Heads details the production, original use, and recent restoration of the 183 unedited interviews conducted for the second series of the pivotal civil rights documentary Eyes on the Prize. When done properly, as they were in Eyes on the Prize, the documentary interview is a highly skilled and deeply researched method of constructing historical evidence through personal testimony.

Before publishers started mass producing books with standardized bindings, owners took their books to be bound individually according to their tastes and budget. Intricately cut colors of leather, gold tooling, silver, ivory, and even gemstones would adorn the covers of these highly prized books. The Bound for Beauty exhibition explores the most beautiful books in the University Libraries’ collections—both miniature and average size—and the decorative techniques used to produce such beauty.