Catholic University in the summer is a veritable garden of verdant lawns, blossoming flowers, and the rustling leaves of the campus’ many trees. Yet CatholicU was once home to hundreds of plants which would normally have no way of surviving the hot, muggy summers that our swampy city lovingly provides for us. No, these plants Read More

Over the past year, Special Collections staff has continued addressing conservation challenges that arise within the Catholic University’s Rare Books collection. You may see our past blogs on the topic in “Part I”, “Part II”, and “Part III”. As in years past, we have continued working alongside Quarto Conservation and have another surprising sampling of Read More

There is perhaps no more famous book to come out of the first age of printing (barring the Gutenberg Bible of course), than the Liber Chronicarum — or, as it is more commonly known, the Nuremberg Chronicle. Published by Anton Konberger in 1493, the Nuremberg Chronicle was an ambitious project even from its conception. Its goal Read More

Every year, on the week of the 22nd day of September, the passionate community of J.R.R. Tolkien’s enthusiasts gather together all around the world to pay tribute to the creator of Middle-earth. This date wasn’t selected arbitrarily. On September 22nd,  Bilbo and Frodo famously celebrate their concurrent birthday in the first chapter of The Lord Read More

In Special Collections, we’ve dressed in our grandest greens to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day. In that spirit, we wanted to take a moment to highlight some books in our collection which are a lot more prepared than us to celebrate the Irish saint’s day, such as these books from our Nineteenth-Century Irish Poetry collection, housed Read More

Wandering through the Rare Books stacks is always an adventure. The shelves hold all kinds of secrets, waiting for the right librarian to pull them, or the right researcher to request them. But on a rainy October afternoon, with Halloween on the mind, it is the witchcraft books that stand out to me. The Rare Read More

The Special Collections of Catholic University is home to many valuable labor collections. Prominent among these are the papers of Terence V. Powderly, John Mitchell, John Brophy, and Phillip Murray. Less well known, but no less impactful, are the papers of Chicago natives Harry C. Read and Joseph Daniel Keenan (1896-1984). The latter is the Read More

Do you enjoy streaming and watching movies? We are happy to announce a new streaming service Swank Digital Campus! This streaming library includes 1,000 top feature films, documentaries and foreign films from the largest movie studios, including Walt Disney, Warner Bros., Paramount, NBCUniversal, Columbia Pictures, Lions Gate, MGM, Miramax and many more.  Feature films include Read More

Morris J. MacGregor (1931–2018), who died three years ago this month, was a native Washingtonian and an alumnus of The Catholic University of America. Over his lifetime he served both his country and his church; as a dedicated and fearless historian, he documented the tangled record of both the United States Army and the Roman Read More

March is Women’s History Month, so why not celebrate a pioneering woman who was an historian: Catherine Ann Cline, distinguished scholar of Great Britain in the twentieth century and former chair of the History Department at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.  She was especially interested in the rise of the British Labour Read More