Becker Library Archives & Rare Books Division

Hours: Monday - Friday, 9:00 am - 5:00 pm or by appointment

Contact Archives & Rare Books at (314) 362-4236 or arb@wusm.wustl.edu

Room 702, Becker Library
MSC 8132-13-01, 660 South Euclid Avenue, St. Louis, MO 63110-1010

No events currently scheduled.

Archives & Rare Books Posts

Did you know there used to be a Barnes medical school in St. Louis?

When St. Louisans hear the name Barnes today, the century-old Barnes Hospital (now Barnes-Jewish Hospital) on Washington University’s medical campus might come to mind. But, before Barnes Hospital came into existence in 1914, St. Louisans would have known Barnes to be the largest medical school in downtown St. Louis.

Mary Allen Wilkes

In 2015, the Heinz Nixdorf Museum in Paderborn, Germany, opened an exhibition honoring women in computing. In addition to pioneers like Ada Lovelace, the museum recognized the contributions of Mary Allen Wilkes, whose work at MIT and Washington University was essential to the development of the Laboratory Instrument Computer (LINC) then on display at the  [Read more]

Oppenheimer: Washington University’s connections to an American Prometheus – Part 1

Christopher Nolan’s Academy Award winning 2023 film Oppenheimer is based on Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s 2005 biography of theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. The movie cleverly compresses several decades of Oppenheimer’s life around his leadership in building the first atomic bomb and his subsequent political blacklisting during the McCarthy era. Although none are  [Read more]