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This collection includes eight oral history interviews with Jewish alumnae/i conducted by Caitlin Haskett (class of 2020) during a fellowship project, "Mid Century Jewish Mawrtyrs: A Collection of Oral Histories," through the Pensby Center between June and July 2019. (Note: only six of the eight oral histories are currently accessible.)

John Hunt, a Quaker minister from Chester, New Jersey, was born in 1740, the son of Robert and Abigail (Wood) Hunt. He kept a journal for more than 40 years, recording Quaker concerns and daily events. This collection includes manuscript journals, 1770-1800; fragments of 1805, 1806 & 1808; and 1814-1824.

This notebook was created by Joseph A. Meyer (1856–1894), a Massachusetts Institute of Technology architecture graduate who accompanied John Henry Haynes on the Nippur expedition in order to make archaeological sketches. This journal and sketchbook covers the dates May 28 to July 19, 1894. The journal relates daily life at the excavation site in Nippur, Iraq, including work done and materials found, and includes numerous sketches of scenery, architecture, and materials found.

Joshua Evans, a Quaker minister and abolitionist, was born in 1731 in West Jersey, a member of Haddonfield Monthly Meeting. About the year 1754, he experienced a religious conversion and thereafter devoted his life to sharing his rigorous interpretation of the Gospel through an ascetic and pious life style and simple ministry. Barely educated, he nevertheless was acknowledged as a minister by Haddonfield Monthly Meeting in 1759. Evans was a vegetarian and a fervent proponent of the peace testimony, Quaker plainness, and ending slavery. In 1798, he traveled through the southern states condemning slavery in the strongest terms. Returning to New Jersey, he died in July 1798. A detailed inventory of the Joshua Evans papers held by the Friends Historical Library is available at https://archives.tricolib.brynmawr.edu/repositories/7/resources/2442

Katrina Thomas (1927-2018) was a graduate of Bryn Mawr College class of 1949. After graduating, Thomas had a long career as a freelance photographer. She worked extensively in Africa and the Middle East, and her photographs have appeared in Time, Newsweek, Aramco World, and publications of the U.S. Information Agency. Thomas began photographing ethnic festivals and parades in the late 1960s as a way of documenting the increasingly diverse nature of American society. Within a few years, she focused on weddings, in which she could see the importance of cultural traditions to a community more clearly than in the often-scripted and commercialized festivals. Capturing the weddings on film highlighted a community’s religious and cultural traditions while revealing how those traditions were changing in a new world. Her ethnic wedding photographs were featured in Something Old, Something New: Ethnic Weddings in America, a traveling exhibit cosponsored by Modern Bride and the Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies in Philadelphia in the 1980s. This collection includes 800 photographs captured by Thomas between 1963 and 2001, documenting the ways in which immigrant groups maintain and adapt wedding practices in the United States. While the greatest number took place in recent immigrant families, there are also many in older immigrant communities. Thomas sought out weddings where the family had decided to maintain or revive their group’s ceremonial traditions, although often enacting them within a contemporary context.