Collections

Correspondence, clippings, photographs, and papers of Charles Mills Sheldon (1866-1928), British illustrator and war correspondent. Letters were written primarily to his wife, Grace, of London, and often contain detailed descriptions of his experiences abroad. Some of the topics discussed in his correspondence include the Sudan (1896), Cuba (1898), the Spanish-American War, Egypt during the opening of the Aswan Dam (1902), the Durbar in India (1903), and Spain (1906) during the royal wedding and attempted assassination of Alfonso XIII of Spain and Princess Victoria Eugenie of Battenberg, niece of Edward VII of Great Britain. Included are a biography of Sheldon, typescripts of his letters. newspaper articles and clippings, and photographs (1896-1913) of assignment areas (particularly Egypt and the Sudan) and Sheldon himself.

Correspondence, photographs, and military papers concerning the World War II service of 2nd Lt. A.N.C. Lina Nancy Potter (1901-1975) of Narragansett, Rhode Island. Potter enlisted in the United States Armed Forces in 1942 and served as a nurse in a military hospital in India from 1943-1945. This collection consists of 23 letters of her outgoing wartime correspondence to family (her Aunt Harriet E. Weaver and Uncle Charles Weaver of Rhode Island) in the United States, her military papers, and three wartime photographs of Potter and her fellow nurses. Potter's correspondence is of special interest because Potter was allowed to censor her own letters (perhaps because she was an officer) before they were sent to the United States. Thus, Potter's correspondence contains a log of wartime conditions at a hospital near Burma, India. Her letters discuss poor food and housing conditions, status of her work in India, the war in India and China, and aspects relative to women's history during the Second World War.

Diary, 1942-1943, of Corporal Lucian W. Alexander while he was stationed in India during World War II. Alexander was member of the 679th Signal Corps of the United States Army. The diary contains 46 handwritten pages, 10 of those are itinerary pages of places he visited, 8 pages contain more descriptive entries, and last section of the diary contains 28 pages of autographs and addresses.

The diaries were written between 1915-1922 by Munshi Radha Mohan Lal B.A., a Nazim, a city magistrate in the Princely State of Jaipur, today's state of Rajasthan in northwestern India. There are four diaries in Box 1, each spanning one year, and two short ones in Box 2. They are in good condition and all entries are legible. They are written in English, with very few words, phrases, dates, or notes written in Hindi and Urdu. The latter was one of the co-official languages in the general area. There are entries for every day of the year, with some significant exceptions being the period from January 1917 through March 1918 and from 9 March, 1919 to 30 March, 1919. Some of the front pages contain Nazim's official, professional stamp and the last pages usually contain his random notes in English and Urdu (peoples' names, addresses, quotes, business transactions).