Featured Collection
Abolition Broadsides, 1831–1865
What These WallsRemember, ThisEvening Reveals
Thursday, March 13 · 7:00 PM — A guided evening with Dr. Miriam Osei-Bonsu, archivist and historian of the antebellum press.
A broadside printed in 1847 named names.
Three of them lived two blocks from here.
Among the vault's most requested items is a hand-pressed broadside from the Cleveland Anti-Slavery Society, dated October 1847. Folded into a surveyor's field journal donated by a local family, it was discovered only in 2019 during a routine re-cataloguing. The broadside names twelve individuals who sheltered freedom-seekers — a cooper, a schoolteacher, a woman listed only as "M. Holloway."
This spring, a genealogist traced M. Holloway to a deed recorded in the county register — a deed signed by a woman whose granddaughter still attends church three streets away. The document in the vault and the woman in the pew are part of the same sentence. This evening, we read it aloud together.
"The archive doesn't preserve the past — it keeps the past from being used against the present."
— Dr. Miriam Osei-Bonsu
4,200+
Items in the vault
1803
Earliest document
38
Counties represented
Cleveland Anti-Slavery Society, 1847
Deed signature, 1851
Speaker
Dr. Miriam Osei-Bonsu
Archivist & Historian of the Antebellum Press · Case Western Reserve University
"I keep coming back to this one broadside because it refuses to let anyone be a footnote."
Miriam has spent fifteen years in reading rooms from Philadelphia to Accra, tracing the print networks that carried abolitionist ideas across the antebellum United States. She doesn't lecture — she reads aloud, passes things around, and asks questions that don't have tidy answers.
She will bring three items from the vault to the table. Attendees are welcome to examine them, gloved, under her guidance.
Every Evening Leaves
Something Behind
4
Evenings in 2025
Nov 2025
The Surveyor's Journals
Cartographic Records, 1799–1812
"I found my great-great-grandfather's township in the margin notes. I cried."
Sandra Kowalczyk
Genealogist, Cleveland Heights
38
attended
Sep 2025
Letters Never Sent
Civil War Correspondence, 1862–1865
"Full house. We ran out of chairs and nobody left."
Prof. James Adeyemi
History Dept., Oberlin College
40
attended
Jun 2025
First Editions & First Voices
Faulkner & Southern Gothic, 1929–1942
"The marginalia alone was worth the evening. Someone had argued with Faulkner in pencil."
Thea Drummond
Doctoral Candidate, Case Western
35
attended
Feb 2025
The Deed That Changed the Block
Property Records & Community History, 1870s
"I brought my whole book club. We're still talking about it."
Renata Ibáñez
Book Club Organizer, Tremont
32
attended
You Should Be in the Room
When This Happens
Thursday, March 13 · 7:00 PM
Stacks Special Collections
2847 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, OH 44115
Admission is free. Registration ensures your seat at the table.