Collections

The William A. Speck Collection of Goetheana: Original Artwork is an artificial collection comprising original artwork that came to Yale from various sources, mostly during the Speck Collection's early decades. It includes some of the Collection's best-known holdings, including an anonymous silhouette made of Goethe in 1786 as well as original sketches and engravings by Goethe. Other artists represented include Wilhelm von Kaulbach, Georg Melchior Kraus, Johann Heinrich Lips, and Moritz Retzsch.

The William A. Speck Collection of Goetheana: Theater Ephemera consists of eighteenth- through twentieth-century theater playbills, programs, broadsides, posters, and other ephemera documenting performances of plays, operas, magic and puppet shows, burlesques and lectures based on works by Goethe (primarily Faust) and other German and European writers and composers.

Print collection of portraits, views, and illustrations focused on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The portraits are of persons associated with Goethe, and include an extensive file on Goethe. The views are of places where Goethe lived or visited, particularly Weimar, and the illustrations are of scenes and characters from Goethe's works.

Collection consists of correspondence, notes and drafts, card files, personal and family papers, documenting the founding of the Speck Collection and William A. Speck's activity as a Goethe collector and interpreter.

The papers consist of correspondence, volumes, albums, legal and financial papers, and photographs relating to the Tuttle family of Connecticut.

The papers largely reflect William A. Larned's post as Professor of Rhetoric and English literature (1839-1862) at Yale College. Included are lecture notes, notebooks with freshman prize compositions, grade books, and a student resolution requesting that his portrait be painted (1847). In the small amount of correspondence are five letters from Larned to his aunt, Mrs. John Mason. One is from Salisbury, North Carolina where he taught, and the remainder are from Yale College on his teaching and religious ideas.

Correspondence and financial records of William Barrett Pease, son of a New Haven bookseller and Civil War veteran. Most of the letters are from members of his wife's family and relate to Pease's real estate holdings in Brooklyn. A letter (1879 Jul 3) from Samuel Chapman Armstrong, the founder of the Hampton Institute, offers Pease a position at the Institute.

Approximately seventy letters of the Calhoun family of Boston, over half written by or to William B. Calhoun while he was a student at Yale College (1810-1814). Topics discussed include family affairs, Calhoun's experiences at Yale College and the War of 1812. Later family letters are written from various parts of New England and one is from a brother describing his travels in Turkey in 1838. Few of the letters reflect Calhoun's political career in the state legislature of Massachusetts (1825-1835) or as a congressman (1835-1843).

Correspondence, writings, memorabilia, scrapbooks and printed matter chiefly concentrated in the years 1910-1923. The correspondence includes photocopies of thirteen letters from Woodrow Wilson to Hale (1911-1915) discussing various aspects of United States foreign policy. Between 1913 and 1914, Hale travelled in Central America as Woodrow Wilson's special emissary to Mexico and then to Nicaragua. His letters to his wife during this period describe the political upheavals in those countries and his opposition to United States recognition of the Huerta government in Mexico. Also of note are three letters from Sigmund Freud in which Freud discusses the proper use of psychoanalysis in connection with Hale's just published study of Woodrow Wilson. Other important correspondents include William Jennings Bryan, John Burroughs, Thomas Hardy, Oliver Wendell Holmes, William Dean Howells, H. L. Mencken, Theodore Roosevelt and George Bernard Shaw. There is only a small sampling of his writing and one sermon. The largest part of the collection is made up of scrapbooks and printed matter (1914-1923), reflecting Hale's position during World War I as a secret agent of the Germans. Included are pro-German periodicals and pamphlets published before the United States entry into the war and post war pamphlets on the question of German war guilt and the Versailles Treaty.

William Butler Davis (1871-1937) was a graduate of the Wesleyan University class of 1894 and a musician. He served as a choirmaster, organist, and music teacher in Connecticut during his career.