Another Oberlin alumna scrapbook maker

Anna Julia Cooper

Although I keep thinking I’m done researching scrapbooks per se, heading to Oberlin reminds me that I’ve always wanted to follow up on the scrapbooks of an Oberlin alumna that I saw at Howard University’s Moorland Spingarn collection: The papers of pioneering intellectual, teacher, writer, and administrator Anna Julia Cooper there held her own scrapbooks, but also included one focused on and probably made by Charlotte Forten Grimke, 20 years older than Cooper. Grimke did not go to Oberlin, but other members of her family did.

Scrapbook talk DC May 23, 3:30

Washington, DC was such productive rummaging ground for my research for Writing with Scissors. I am grateful that the Library of Congress saved the scrapbooks of Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Clara Barton, and Anna E. Dickinson, among others, and that Howard University’s Moorland Spingarn Collection preserved some of William Dorsey’s that didn’t end up at Cheyney University, one of John Wesley Cromwell’s, and the extraordinary collection that Joseph W. H. Cathcart passed along to Cromwell. So glad to be heading speaking about these and other scrapbooks in DC at the Washington Area Group for Print Culture Studies, Friday May 23, 3:30, at the Corcoran College of Art + Design, 500 17th St. NW, Washington, DC, RCR Room, Main Atrium. (Yes, that’s the same address as the Corcoran Gallery — plan your afternoon accordingly!)