Thank you for visiting the website of the Bentley Historical Library.
The Bentley Historical Library promotes learning, discovery, and scholarship by actively partnering with communities to build, preserve, and make accessible a record that reflects the unique and complex history of the state and University of Michigan. We are home to the archives of the University of Michigan as well as one of the largest collections of materials on the history of the state of Michigan (outside of the Archives of Michigan in Lansing, which collects the state’s official records). Our holdings contain everything from hand-written documents recording life in the Michigan territory in the early 19th century to digital files created by the University of Michigan Athletics department in the twenty-first century. While visiting the library is the best way to use most of our collections, many of our materials are also available digitally. These include digitized photographs in the Image Bank, digitized and born-digital archival collections, archived websites, and our digital media archives of audiovisual materials.
Ultimately, the Bentley is a repository of people’s stories, told from a variety of perspectives. In our collections you will find diaries of University presidents, letters of suffragists, photos of U-M students enjoying campus life, and meeting minutes of civil rights organizations from the twentieth century. While the breadth and depth of our collections is significant, the collection also contains silences because some individuals and communities’ stories were not included in the archives. I want to acknowledge both the power of the archives to connect people with stories that are meaningful to them, as well as the ways in which archives have not always lived up to their aspirations to document the full scope of society.
As the Bentley looks to the future, we are proceeding thoughtfully to ensure our holdings are representative of the communities that make up the University and the state of Michigan. We are creating an environment where individuals from all backgrounds feel welcome and comfortable in pursuing their research, and we are seeking to create authentic partnerships based on shared power with individuals, organizations, and communities that have often been excluded from the archives to ensure their stories are available for future generations.
We invite you to explore our website. Here, you will find resources to help you get started on your research journey into the University of Michigan and the state of Michigan, two great intertwined institutions. We are open to the public Tuesday through Saturday, and invite researchers of all kinds to use our collections, whether you are writing your next scholarly monograph, writing a paper for a class, or researching the history of your family.
So take a look around; browse our social media feeds, and feel free to reach out to our reference staff to get started on your research journey.
