Special Collections Interest Group

TULANE UNIVERSITY — Fantastical floats and colorful costumes have become a hallmark of Mardi Gras parades, but did you know these Carnival traditions date back well over a century? Tulane’s Louisiana Research Collection preserves possibly the largest collection of New Orleans Carnival paper items, and the digital Carnival Collection features more than 5,500 original float and costume designs. Most are from Carnival’s “Golden Age” (the 1870s through the 1940s) with about three hundred designs from 1950 to 1970.

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA — The photographs of Kenneth Frederick Marsh (d. 1968) were used to illustrate the following books by photographer Marsh and his wife, Blanche Marsh: Historic Flat Rock (North Carolina), Plantation Heritage, Robert Mills, and The New South, Greenville, S.C. The photographs and negatives depict historic and modern homes, public buildings, textile mills, churches, and scenes of South Carolina and Flat Rock, N.C. Many of the photographs are unpublished.

EMORY UNIVERSITY — Selections from the papers of William H. Scott, an African American Baptist minister and political activist, and his son William H. Scott, Jr. from 1848-1982, including correspondence, scrapbooks, photographs, broadsides, sermons, writings, and other collected material.

UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY — The John C. Wyatt Lexington Herald-Leader photographs follows the changing urban landscape of Lexington, the agricultural, tobacco and horse racing industries, key national events such as World War II and Vietnam, as well as notable regional and national figures.