Every season prior to the break we publish a blog post to send you all off with some Rensselaer holiday history cheer. This year, we’ve honed in on the Van Rensselaer family recipe booklet published by Historic Cherry Hill, entitled Selected Receipts [Recipes] of a Van Rensselaer Family 1785-1835.

An astute subscriber to RPI History Revealed recently pointed out that the Archives blog has been going strong for ten years!  In honor of the blog’s creator, Amy Rupert (a.k.a. AmytheArchivist), I think it’s time to harken back to one of her signature series - mystery images!

Not long ago I happened upon something of great interest to me as an RPI archivist – a photograph album documenting Rensselaer and its vicinity in the early twentieth century.  This is the story of how we acquired not one but seven photo albums compiled by Mr. Louis Blackmer Puffer, RPI Class of 1909.

Throughout October, archivists and archives across the nation honor American Archives Month by explaining who they are, what they do, and the successful impacts they (and their collections) have on communities. For this celebration we decided to share some projects with the Rensselaer community and shed some light on how the Institute Archives gets used and who we work with.

The last total solar eclipse to cross Upstate New York took place on the morning of January 24, 1925, reaching its peak at 9:11 a.m. This week’s eclipse prompted a researcher to send us a photograph of the event as viewed from Troy.

The Institute’s ninety-third commencement took place on Wednesday, June 13, 1917 in the ’87 Gymnasium. Eighty-nine students received bachelor’s degrees: 53 in Civil Engineering, 19 in Electrical Engineering, 12 in Mechanical Engineering, and 5 in Chemical Engineering.

Student Army Training Corps, '86 Field, RPI, 1917The first week of April 2017 marks the one hundredth anniversary of the United States entry into the Great War, or the First World War as it came to be called. On April 2, President Woodrow Wilson went before a joint session of Congress to request a declaration of war against Germany.

We haven’t blogged about mystery images in a while, but since they’re always fun I’d like to introduce a twist on that theme. Today I want to share a couple of “mystery publications” with our readers: KITE and Student Buyer’s Guide (SBG).  I found several issues of each while organizing some old campus publications that were donated to RPI.  Now I want to know more about them!

The first two buildings erected on the Warren estate property, purchased by the Institute after the 1904 fire which destroyed the Main Building, were the