As part of the 100-year anniversary celebration of the CU Boulder Archives in 2018, we completed a project to bring you 100 Stories for 100 Years from the Archives. The year-long celebration emphasized increased community inclusion, process transparency and accessibility.  We want to emphasize that we have only touched the surface of the treasures found in the CU Boulder Archives and we hope you enjoy the stories.

1871 Ethiopian Magic Scroll is made of very tightly bound goat skin and handwritten in red and black ink

From the Archives and Preservation: 1547 Land Deed

April 25, 2018

This handwritten land deed from the 16th century came through the Preservation unit to have a new custom box created. The 1547 deed for parcels of land in England was sealed with a seal as big as our Conservator’s hand. Want a closer look? Materials like this are available to...

Closeup on Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd Lincoln's signatures on a land dead from Special Collections

Abe Needed Mary's Signature, and the Deed Needed Preservation

April 24, 2018

The CU Boulder Archives are part of a larger department, which includes CU's Special Collections and Preservation units. We work very closely with our wonderful colleagues in the other units and, as part of our ode to Preservation Week, will be featuring a few stories of projects between the units...

A large negative that will be digitized after being cleaned and restored a bit by preservation.

The Role of Preservation

April 23, 2018

Throughout our series, 100 Stories for 100 Years from the CU Boulder Archives, you have seen a lot of photos from our collections, but not all of the photos in our collections are in such great condition. Due to chemical processes and variables outside of our control, some styles of...

Protesters with a sign that reads "Hell No, We Won't Glow"

Happy Earth Day from the Archives!

April 22, 2018

The 2018 Earth Day theme focuses on the end of plastic pollution. The CU Boulder Archives does not hold much about plastic pollution, but we do focus on collecting the environmental concerns of fallout from atomic projects in our Atomic West collecting area. These images from the Robert Godfrey Papers...

Lachlan McLean photograph of a pioneer woman with a burro in 19th century Clear Creek County

From the Archives: Lachlan McLean

April 20, 2018

The Lachlan McLean Photograph Collection contains this photograph of a pioneer woman with a burro in 19th century Clear Creek County. It was used by Time-Life Books, The Women; with text by Joan Swallow Reiter, (Alexandria, Va.: Time-Life Books, 1978). Perhaps because the shot was the first page sized shot...

Virginia Blue campaigning for reelection as the Treasurer of the State of Colorado

From the Archives: Virginia Neal Blue

April 19, 2018

Born in Meeker, CO, Virginia Neal Blue earned a BS in Economics from the University of Colorado in 1931. Blue went on to become a Regent of the University of Colorado system (1953-1959) and Chairman of the Colorado Commission on the Status of Women (1964-1966). In 1967, she successfully ran...

Boulder activists from the BASJ

From the Archives: Boulder Action for Soviet Jewry

April 18, 2018

As the Soviet Union began to crumble in the late 1980s, a group of Jews in Boulder organized to aid and resettle Soviet Jews who faced increasing discrimination from the Soviet state and refusal of their requests to emigrate (earning them the label of “refuseniks”). These Jewish Boulderites called themselves...

Perry Como and Louis Armstrong, from the AMRC collection

From the Archives: the American Music Research Center

April 17, 2018

The American Music Research Center is the oldest center for the study of music of the American Continents in the United States. Founded in 1966 by Sister Mary Dominic Ray, the Center was located at Dominican College, in San Rafael, California, until 1989. That year, through the efforts of then...

CU Boulder's the Hill neighborhood, as it looked at the turn of the 20th century.

From the Archives: The Hill

April 16, 2018

When the University of Colorado was established in 1876, very little of Boulder extended south of Boulder Creek and the campus was placed on a short grass prairie slope hundreds of yards south of town. In 1885 there was a photo taken of a carriage on "9th street", a dirt...

Drawings of flowers by Seville Flowers

From the Archives: Seville Flowers

April 14, 2018

Spring is upon us! Find some flowers blooming in CU’s Archives, in the Seville Flowers Collection . Seville Flowers was a professor of botany at the University of Utah from 1936-1968 and his collection contains class lectures and notes, manuscripts, and drawings of specimens from that time. Yes, that is...

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