Passport to Pequot Brochure

PASSPORT TO PEQUOT

K-12 EDUCATIONAL PROGRAMS AT PEQUOT LIBRARY

About Pequot Library

Pequot Library opened to the public in March 1894 and is a destination library, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, that serves as both a circulating li brary and a historically focused museum of rare books, manuscripts, and archives from our Special Collections. At Pequot Library we help children develop lifelong in terests in reading and learning through engaging programs and activities that integrate architecture, art, rare books, manuscripts, and archives into interactive tours and hands-on classes and workshops.

School Group Exhibition Tours

Our docent-led tours of Pequot’s historic building and rotating Special Collections exhibitions engage students with theme-based curated selections from our collections of rare books, manuscripts, and archives. Students ex amine the primary source materials on display, make connections between history and our 21st-century world, and participate in hands-on activities that allow them to respond creatively to what they’ve learned. Tours are aligned with Connecticut Core Standards and can be tailored to your educational needs.

Current Exhibition

The Lure of the Garden: The Enduring Desire to Work and Shape the Land

On view through February 5, 2023

With materials dating back to the 1500s, The Lure of the Garden invites students to explore the enduring desire to shape and cultivate the land, from the propagation of the “three sisters” — corn, beans, and squash — by Native Americans to gar den clubs, war-era Victory Gardens, and community and pollinator gardens.

The exhibit reflects the changing tastes, styles, and purposes of gardens, as well as their enduring allure. The resulting collection of materials contains everything from practical advice on laying out gardens, raising poultry, and keeping bees to propagating vegetables and keeping the accounts of the farm. Materials from the archives, including diaries and day books from local farmers, document the variet ies of plants and fruit trees planted, as well as local produce like Southport Globe Onions and potatoes that were shipped from our humble port to New York City.

Tour themes can include:

• The role of agriculture in Connecticut’s history and the importance of proximity to water in Colonial and post-Colonial trade.

• The role of exploration, discovery, trade, and exchange with regard to food, plants, and medicine.

• Connecticut war gardens and the changing roles of women and young people to increase the food supply, boost morale, and support the national war effort.

• Exploring where our food comes from.

Upcoming Exhibition

Alphabets, Bedtime Stories, and Cautionary Tales: Children’s Books and the Shaping of American Identity

On view February 16 – May 4, 2023

The 18th and 19th centuries witnessed the emergence in England and America of new attitudes toward children and education at the same time that America was casting off its royal authority. The result was a booming market of print materials that, for the first time, contained text and illustrations geared toward a young audience. This exhibition draws upon such works found in the extraordinary Children’s Historical Collection in Pequot Library’s Special Collections to explore the ways that 18th- and early 19th-century children’s books reflect the changing political, economic, and social climate of America in the years following independence.

Tour themes can include:

• How children’s books from Colonial America and today reflect the way that American identity has changed over time.

• How children’s books reveal the ways the lives of people who lived in Con necticut in the past are similar to and different from people living in Connecti cut today.

• The ways that children’s books are used to influence and change society.

Colonial America and the American Revolution

Do words have the power to spark a revolution? Ex plore this question and more through a docent-led school tour of Pequot Library’s Special Collections treasures of early Americana. Students will exam ine first-hand extraordinary primary source material from our collection, including pamphlets that me morialized and politicized key events in the early years of the American Revolution, from the Stamp Act to the Boston Massacre to the Battle of Bunker Hill. By looking at the same works that circulated in the streets, coffeehouses, and homes of Revolu tionary-era Americans, students will experience the media environment that shifted public opinion from loyalty to rebellion against the British crown.

Tour themes can include:

• The significance of the slogan “no taxation with out representation” in the American Colonies.

• The major events that increased tensions between Britain and its Colonies, eventually leading to the Revolution.

• The role of Connecticut in the Revolutionary War and the significance of Connecticut’s contribution to America’s story.

• How the media, as it existed in Colonial Ameri ca, influenced an American national identity.

Meet the Orchestra

Meet the Orchestra is a concert series for students in grades PK-8. The program is made possible through our long-standing partnership with Music for Youth (MFY), a volunteer-led, nonprofit organization com mitted to bringing professionally performed classical music into the lives of young people. The purpose of Meet the Orchestra is to introduce students to in struments in the orchestra while exposing them to the repertoire of various ensembles during an inter active experience in Pequot Library’s architecturally and historically significant Auditorium.

Custom Programs

Our historic building and Special Collections offer much to complement K–12 curriculums, and we are happy to work with you to design customized tours and programs tailored to your specific educational needs. Pequot’s Special Collections feature a wide variety of rare books, archival material, manuscripts, photographs, maps, and ephemera to enhance your classroom or school curriculum, including:

• The four Shakespeare Folios – two intact plays from the First (1623), and complete Second (1632), Third (1666), and Fourth (1685)

• A collection of local manuscript materials and printed ephemera from the 18th century, including firsthand accounts of the Revolutionary War in Fairfield, and early printed currency

• A collection of propaganda posters and ephemera from World War I and World War II

• A collection of ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian artifacts, including papyrus fragments and cuneiform tablets

• Four incunabula (books printed before 1501)

• John James Audubon’s Birds of America, the Bien edition (1858)