The J. Rives Childs Collection of Casanoviana at Randolph-Macon College was a bequest from J. Rives Childs, a 1915 R-MC alumnus and retired diplomat, who collected these materials during his more than 30 years in the Foreign Service in Europe and the Middle East. It is one of the world’s most extensive collections of early and rare editions of Casanova’s Memoires, consisting of over 2000 items including numerous rare volumes in many languages ranging from Norwegian to Bengali to Arabic and includes the first edition, published in German. In addition to the Memoires and writings of Casanova, the collection contains bibliographies, biographies, sales catalogs, correspondence, playbills, illustrations, operettas, films, and of course, the Casanova action figure. Casanova’s lurid tales of romantic escapades during his life as an adventurer across Europe made his name synonymous with seduction and womanizing.
Childs, a self-proclaimed “defender of Casanova as something other than the caricatures drawn of him by the mythmakers,” published biographical and bibliographical works on Casanova, the great lover, spy, adventurer, author, and librarian.
Learn more about the Casanova collection and other specialized and unique collections in the Flavia Reed Owen Special Collections and Archives.
Throughout her prodigious life, activist and lawyer Pauli Murray systematically fought against all arbitrary distinctions in society, channeling her outrage at the discrimination she faced to make America a more democratic country. In this definitive biography, Rosalind Rosenberg offers a poignant portrait of a figure who played pivotal roles in both the modern civil rights and women’s movements. Murray accomplished all this while struggling with issues of identity. She believed from childhood she was male and tried unsuccessfully to persuade doctors to give her testosterone. While she would today be identified as transgender, during her lifetime no social movement existed to support this identity. She ultimately used her private feelings of being “in-between” to publicly contend that identities are not fixed, an idea that has powered campaigns for equal rights in the United States for the past half-century. Summary provided by publisher
In this raw, searing new narrative account, Howard Jones reopens the case of My Lai by examining individual accounts of both victims and soldiers through extensive archival and original research. Jones evokes the horror of the event itself, the attempt to suppress it, as well as the response to Calley’s sentence and the seemingly unanswerable question of whether he had merely been following orders. My Lai also surveys how news of the slaughter intensified opposition to the Vietnam War by undermining any pretense of American moral superiority. Compelling, comprehensive, and sobering, Howard Jones’ My Lai chronicles how the strategic failures and competing objectives of American leaders resulted in one of the most devastating tragedies of the Vietnam War.
Part detective story, part political history, Timothy Tyson’s The Blood of Emmett Till revises the history of the Till case, not only changing the specifics that we thought we knew, but showing how the murder ignited the modern civil rights movement. Tyson uses a wide range of new sources, including the only interview ever given by Carolyn Bryant; the transcript of the murder trial, missing since 1955 and only recovered in 2005; and a recent FBI report on the case.