University of Michigan

Advancing Arts, Culture and Community

Donors encourage new research of Clements Library’s old treasures

The Clements collection includes Civil war era prints and original letters from some prominent leaders as Abraham Lincoln.

Donors to the William L. Clements Library have provided visiting historians with the means to spend more time at Michigan interpreting the Library’s acclaimed collections.

With a $50,000 gift from the Earhart Foundation, of Ann Arbor, and a $60,000 commitment from the Upton Foundation, of St. Joseph, Mich., the Clements now has the ability to provide several semester-long fellowships to experts on early American social, cultural and military history.

The new fellowships build on the Clements’ existing Jacob M. Price Visiting Research Fellowships, which provide six to eight $1,000 awards to visiting graduate students or non-tenured professors. With these awards, however, researchers typically spend just one week at the Clements.

“This funding will allow us to attract top-ranked scholars to the University of Michigan for extended study in the Library's extraordinary holdings of primary sources on early American history,” said Clements Director J. Kevin Graffagnino, who noted that the fellowships will be particularly important for meeting an anticipated increase in research and writing on the U.S. Civil War.

“With the sesquicentennial of the American Civil War approaching, making Civil War-era research a hot field for scholars, these new fellowships will help shed new light on mid-19th-century America and the topics--slavery and antislavery, military history, gender and ethnicity, politics and government, the meaning of individual and collective freedom in America--that the decades around the war illuminate for us,” he added.  “The Clements' holdings of Civil War materials are rich and deep, and we're delighted to make them available to researchers this way."

Founded in 1923 and named for its benefactor, the William L. Clements Library is located on the U-M central campus and is open to the public. It houses one of the finest collections of original resources for the study of America’s past from the late 15th to the early 20th century.

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