This digital collection, published in March 2019, offers a sample cover, detailed description, and helpful tags for each of the nearly 200 student publications in the Archives’ holdings. The content analysis was done by Kira Zimmerman, OC 2019.
The Oberlin College Archives, in collaboration with Oberlin College students of the 1950s and 1960s
and the staff of the Alumni Magazine, are collecting materials to document Oberlin and civil rights
in this online collection. Begun in 2013, this collection is in progress.
In commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, the
Oberlin College Archives partnered with the Oberlin Heritage Center
in 2011-2012 to build "Oberlin and the Civil War," a digital collection
of Civil War era materials in the Oberlin College Archives.
The Oberlin Shansi Memorial Association, the Oberlin College
East Asian Studies Program, and the Oberlin College Archives and Library
present this online digital collection that documents the activity of
Oberlinians in Asia from the 1880s to the 1950s.
During the summer of 1919, a delegation under the leadership
of Oberlin College President Henry Churchill King and Chicago businessman
Charles R. Crane travelled to areas of the former Ottoman territories.
Their mission was to determine the wishes of the people of the region as
their future was being determined by the major powers at the Paris Peace
Conference. The King-Crane Commission, as it became known, met delegations
and invited written petitions from various religious and political groups.
This digital collection unifies the archival records of Commission members
for the first time. It also includes resources on conducting research in the collection.
This collection consists of 19th century Ojibwe language notes and letters from the Sela G. Wright Papers at the Oberlin College Archives.
Oberlin College and its town in Ohio were founded in 1833 and named in honor of John Frederick Oberlin (1740-1826),
an extraordinary Lutheran pastor who served in a remote region in Alsace until his death in 1826.
Explore individual items from the Oberlin College Archives here, or go to the multimedia presentation
Oberlin's Namesake to explore John Frederick Oberlin's life and work and the relationship between the
College and its namesake in a more interactive format.
In response to popular and scholarly demand for images from the Oberlin College
Archives for illustrations in publications, this virtual collection presents some of the most widely
circulated images from the extraordinarily rich collections at Oberlin College.
The Campus Views digital collection offers a wide range of types of graphic materials,
from nearly the span of Oberlin College's history. The images, selected from various collections in the
Archives, capture the changing built and landscape environment at Oberlin at particular points in space
and time, made for various purposes.
Oberlin College established the Historic Portrait Collection in 1883
on the occasion of its Jubilee celebration. Beginning with less than ten portraits, the
collection’s focus was “to secure, so far as possible, the portraits of the more eminent
men and women connected with our history for a permanent collection.” The College actively
sought life sized oil portraits of former professors and instructors, former and present
members of the Board of Trustees, founders of professorships and prominent donors, early
colonists, treasurers and other officers connected with the institution, and prominent
friends of the anti-slavery and temperance movements who have been in any way associated
with Oberlin (Jubilee Notes, May 1883). In the early decades the portraits hung permanently
in the College Chapel and Peters Hall.
The Oberlin College Archives Museum Collection consists of a photograph and a description of each 3-D item in record group 35 and each painting, drawing, print or other framed item in record group 40. Most of these items have no connection to other record groups. Explore diverse objects, artworks and other framed items from Oberlin's history.
Laurence Howland MacDaniels and Frances Cochran MacDaniels (both graduates
of the class of 1912 of Oberlin College) volunteered for service in the American Committee
for Relief in the Near East (ACRNE), later called Near East Foundation (NEF). This foundation
provided relief in the Near East after World War I. The reader can consult online sources on
the foundation. Select photographs from a photograph album documenting their service in the ACRNE,
1919-20, can be accessed in this collection.
At the close of World War I Oberlinians, like the rest of the nation,
thought about the possibilities of a new era of victory and peace. To remember the
Oberlin men and women who had participated in the fight “to save the world for democracy,”
the College’s administration and the student body sought to make a loving record of their
service. Consisting of more than one hundred and fifty pages, this yearbook material is the
first item in the “virtual collection.”
Students at Oberlin are often assigned research projects that involve examining historical
visual resources at the Archives. In the 2008-2009 academic year students scanned images to
use as illustrations in their papers for courses such as Media & Memory, Meanings of the
Memorial Arch, and Approaches to Western Architectural History.