Browse Exhibits (10 total)
50 Years of Title IX at Central Michigan University
Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 called for gender equality in all aspects of the educational experience at institutions accepting federal funding.
Title IX expanded over the decades to include a range of experiences beyond academics. In the months and years after the passage of Title IX, it encompassed athletics and other extracurricular activities, and in 2011, the Obama administration broadened Title IX to include issues of sexual violence on college campuses.
Alma's Gardener: Louisa King
Pictures of the Alma, Michigan, garden of Mrs. Louisa King, a renowned gardener and horticulturalist of the early twentieth century.
Bird's-eye View Collection
Panoramic maps were a popular way to depict US cities during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Known as bird's-eye views, these maps were drawn representations of a city from an aerial view. While not drawn to scale, they generally depicted major landscape features, buildings, and streets.
The Clarke Historical Library has gathered the largest collection of Michigan bird's-eye views in the state. These views have been scanned to be made more widely available. Researchers wanting a reproduction of these images should contact the Clarke Historical Library.
Build It Yourself: Bay City's Aladdin Company
From modest bungalows to international housing developments, the Aladdin Company transformed the way people imagined and built homes in the twentieth century. Headquartered in Bay City, Michigan, Aladdin shipped more than 75,000 kit homes across the United States and the world, reaching communities as distant as England, Japan, and Iceland.
Drawing from the collections of the Clarke Historical Library, this exhibit explores the people, places, and stories connected through Aladdin's innovative housing designs, revealing how one Michigan company left a lasting mark on local neighborhoods and global history.
Douglass Houghton Field Notes
Douglass Houghton was Michigan’s State Geologist when Michigan became the 26th state of the union in 1837. As the State’s geologist, Houghton surveyed and mapped both the Lower and Upper Peninsulas. The handwritten journals displayed in this exhibit describe his expedition from Ann Arbor on July 4, 1837, and conclude four years later, on August 13, 1841, at the end of his research journey in Lenawee County.
From West Point to Savannah: the Correspondence of Orlando M. Poe
This collection highlights correspondence and documents held by the Clarke Historical Library that chronicle several chapters in the career of noted Civil War Engineer & Great Lakes Surveyor Orlando Metcalfe Poe (1832-1895).
These letters span the first decade of Orlando Poe’s military career. During this time, he graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, served in the Great Lakes Survey, and was Chief Engineer for General William T. Sherman during the "March to the Sea." The correspondence provides a window into Poe’s development as a Topographical Engineer and allows for a behind-the-curtains view of his rise to prominence during and after the Civil War.
J.O. Lewis Indigenous Portraits
In 1819, J.O. Lewis started working as a government employee, traveling with Michigan territorial governor, Lewis Cass, as part of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. As part of his duties, J.O. Lewis was tasked with painting official portraits of Tribal leaders in an effort to preserve a record of Native American history, what was believed, at the time, to be a vanishing culture. Lewis accompanied Cass to four major treaty expeditions where he painted Potawatomi, Ojibwe, Odawa, Winnebago, Shawnee, Sioux, Miami, Fox, and Iowa leaders.
The Clarke Historical Library has a total of 87 lithograph portraits of Great Lakes Tribal leaders, most of which are from the Lewis Aboriginal Portfolio and others being from McKenney and Hall’s History of the Indian Tribes of North America.
Michigan's Sunrise Coast in Historical Photographs
Historical photographs including stereographs and postcards of cities, villages, and other notable locations along Michigan's Lake Huron coast, from Bangor Charter Township in Bay County to Mackinac Island in Mackinac County.
Remarkable Legacies: Stories of Intrepid Michigan Nurses from the Clarke’s Archives
This exhibit explores the documents and stories of several nurses from Michigan, following the advancement of nursing from a private, individual duty to a professionalized career, and offers a look at numerous historical documents including letters, military papers, photographs, and more.
These papers span several eras, from the U.S. Civil War to WWII and beyond, showcasing the voices and efforts of several women and men working with medicine.
The John Greenleaf Whittier Correspondence Collection
This collection features over 50 letters to John Greenleaf Whittier (and several to his sister, Elizabeth Whittier) from prominent abolitionists, poets, orators, politicians, and friends. Also featured is one letter from Whittier to the Women's Suffrage Association.