ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses an undergraduate seminar, “Into the Archives: The Ephemeral Langston Hughes,” that draws on recent work in Black bibliography, as well as best practices in primary source literacy, to explore new methods for teaching literary history. Co-designed by faculty and librarians and hosted by the University of Delaware’s Special Collections and Museums, the course takes its inspiration from a single box of ephemera related to the poet and playwright Langston Hughes. Over the course of the semester, students read across Hughes’s expansive oeuvre, create item-level metadata for the collection, produce digital StoryMaps, and mount a pop-up exhibition with the ephemera. In the process, students learn to think like curators and to tell stories at once visual, material, and textual. Centering ephemera also creates new avenues for studying Hughes, who typically appears briefly on undergraduate syllabi as a Harlem Renaissance poet of the 1920s. Led by the ephemera, students are drawn instead to later works by Hughes and to a wider field of African American print culture as it unfolds in local bookstores, schools, churches, and political spaces beyond Harlem.
