Charles Edwin West scrapbooks
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Abstract
32 scrapbooks and loose papers maintained by Charles Edwin West (1809-1900), an administrator at the Rutgers Female Institute (1839-1951), Buffalo Female Academy (1851-1860), and Brooklyn Heights Seminary (1860-1889) who was especially known for his inclusion of mathematics and science in his educational programs for women. The scrapbooks are primarily filled with newspaper clippings, but there is also a sizable amount of ephemera. The scrapbooks are subject-oriented and relate to education, science, art and literature, and necrologies.
Biographical / Historical
Charles Edwin West was born in 1809. He began teaching in 1827 in Massachusetts. After various other moves among schools, in 1839 he became a founder, and principal, of the Rutgers Female Institute in New York City. Here he earned a reputation for running against convention by teaching mathematics and science to the school's woman students.
In 1843, West married Elizabeth Giles (1816-1864). He remained at Rutgers Female Institute for 12 years before moving to Buffalo to start a new school for women in 1851. After nine years at the Buffalo Female Academy, in 1960 he moved to Brooklyn and took charge of the Brooklyn Heights Seminary, where he remained for 29 years. West retired in 1889, continuing to live at 76 Pierrepont Street in Brooklyn and summering in Buffalo. He died in 1900.
Arrangement
The collection is organized by scrapbook topic. Generally the books that lean more heavily toward ephemera (rather than clippings) and hold material more directly related to West's life and career are presented first and are in the first box.
In the container list, labels enclosed in "quotation marks" are original titles as found on the scrapbook cover or spine. Labels without quotation marks were devised by the processing archivist.
Scope and Contents
The collection includes 32 subject-oriented scrapbooks and several folders of loose documents maintained by Charles E. West. The bulk of the documents are newspaper clippings, but a sizable amount of ephemera can be found as well. Much of this ephemera relates to the Rutgers Female Institute and, later, Rutgers Female College. Overall, the scrapbooks concern education (e.g., school administration, finances, notable teachers, principals and other educational figures, and perhaps especially women in education as students, teachers and administrators); scientific matters (microscopy, astronomy); art, archaeology, culture, and literary matters; and obituaries (necrologies) of those well-known and those more likely to have been known personally by West. Individual volumes are noted below in the container list.
Subjects
Organizations
Conditions Governing Access
Open to qualified researchers.
Conditions Governing Use
Photocopying undertaken by staff only. Limited to twenty exposures of stable, unbound material per day. (Researchers may not accrue unused copy amounts from previous days.) This collection is owned by the New-York Historical Society. The copyright law of the United States governs the making of photocopies and protects unpublished materials as well as published materials. Unpublished materials created before January 1, 1978 cannot be quoted in publication without permission of the copyright holder.
Preferred Citation
This collection should be cited as the Charles Edwin West scrapbooks, MS 2807, New-York Historical Society.
Immediate Source of Acquisition
Materials were found on collection shelves in January 2020. The source of the acquisition is unknown.
Separated Materials
A loose leaf binder in the collection held a number of documents related to the historian, Martha Lamb. These included two manuscripts (one with Lamb's reflections about herself and one on the Berkshires), publicity material, ephemera, and clippings. The appearance was that these were actually part of N-YHS's Lamb papers that had somehow gotten mixed with the West scrapbooks. These Lamb documents were removed from West and placed in the Lamb collection (MS 362) in January 2020.
About this Guide
Processing Information
One scrapbook, that concerning the American Numismatic Society, was cataloged as a standalone item sometime before 2008, using call phrase "BV West, Charles". In January 2020 all the remaining volumes were processed by archivist Larry Weimer and the standalone scrapbook and its catalog record were consolidated with the others.