Index
- Announcements
- Exhibition Connection: Jonathan Bulkley's Diary
- Featured Upcoming Programs: Fiona Davis tickets - last call!
- Recommended Reading: Nickel and Dimed 
- Recommended Reading: Children's Books about the Labor Movement 
- Special Collections: Edgar Spinning's Ledger 
- Community Corner: The World in Maps at Beinecke Library 
- Shop for Books Online

The Digital Digest is a collaborative e-newsletter by Pequot Library staff, and managed by our Marketing and Communications department. Questions and feedback can be sent to  [email protected].

Announcements

Library Hours
Monday - Friday: 10am - 6pm
New! Thursday: Open until 8 p.m.
Saturday: 10am - 2pm
Sunday: closed

Exhibition Connection

Labor Day became an official federal holiday in 1894 (the same year in which Pequot Library opened) and grew out of the late nineteenth-century labor movement. In our Lure of the Garden exhibition, you'll find a journal from Jonathan Bulkley, an important member of the Southport/Mill River community in the early 19th century. He was a sea captain, farmer, landowner, and a member of the Connecticut State Legislature. His journals, which he kept from 1802 when he was sixteen years old to six months before his death in 1859, provide an invaluable window into life in Mill River at a crucial stage in the town's commercial and social development in the decades preceding the labor movement.  

We're hiring for multiple positions! Click here to view our available job postings.

Upcoming Programs

Literary Luncheon with Fiona Davis
September 16 at noon

Twenty seats remain! Nab your spot today for our Literary Luncheon. We'll celebrate Fiona Davis' latest book, The Magnolia Palace, a book filled with intrigue that's set at the Frick Collection in Manhattan.

Click here to see our full calendar of events.

More For Adults

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
by Barbara Ehrenreich

In the late nineties, Barbara Ehrenreich had heard the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, which promised that a job?any job?can be the ticket to a better life. Feeling skeptical, she left her home, took the cheapest lodgings she could find, and accepted whatever jobs she was offered. Nickel and Dimed reveals low-rent America in all its tenacity, anxiety, and surprising generosity?a land of Big Boxes, fast food, and a thousand desperate stratagems for survival. 

>> Check me out

Looking for something special? Sign up for an Adult Book Bundle to receive a curated box of two books and a cozy refreshment, especially for you.

For Children And Teens

Brave Girl: Clara and the Shirtwaist Makers' Strike of 1909
by Michelle Markel 

When Ukrainian immigrant Clara Lemlich arrived in America, she couldn't speak English. She went to night school, studied English nonstop, and helped support her family by sewing in a shirtwaist factory. Clara never quit, and she never accepted that girls should be treated poorly and paid little. Fed up with the mistreatment of her fellow laborers, Clara led the largest walkout of women workers the country had seen. Based on a true story. 

>> Check me out

City of Grit and Gold
by Maud Macrory Powell

Chicago, 1886: striking workers clash with police, and illness and injury lurk around every corner. Twelve-year-old Addie finds herself torn between her gruff Papa—who owns a hat shop and thinks the workers should be content with their American lives—and her beloved Uncle Chaim—who is active in the protests for the eight-hour day. Set in a Jewish neighborhood of Chicago during the days surrounding the Haymarket Affair, this novel vividly portrays one immigrant family’s experience and depicts the timeless conflict between the haves and the have-nots.

>> Check me out

Special Collections

This ledger from our Special Collections is primarily a record of a short-lived cooperative organization called “The Sovereigns of Industry,” of which Edgar Spinning of Bridgeport was Secretary. After the organization disbanded, Spinning used blank pages to record his purchases of novelty-variety seeds and his successes and failures in cultivation. 

The Order of the Sovereigns of Industry was started in 1874 as an American mutualist movement for urban workers. It attracted 60 members from eight states and the District of Columbia, including 21 women. The Order attempted to remedy social problems through consumer cooperatives, and they drew inspiration from the farmer's-centric Order of the Patrons of Husbandry (i.e. the National Grange), which had been formed in response to powerful railroad monopolies of the day. However, an 1878 depression hampered the Order's efforts and created a cash flow crisis. The Order dissolved in 1880.

Ledger from Edgar Spinning
Pequot Library Special Collections

Community Corner

The World in Maps 1400 - 1600
The Beinecke Library at Yale University
On view through January 8, 2023

This exhibition presents many of the most historically significant manuscript maps from the late medieval and early modern period from the Beinecke Library’s vast collection, with a focus on portolan charts: large, colorful charts that showed the shoreline of the Mediterranean, and were used by sailors to navigate from port to port. These maps were crucial to the expansion of European trade in the fiftieth and sixteenth centuries.  

Thank you to our donors!

Celie Campbell, Hebe Dowling Murphy, Jill Kelly, Peg and Nelson North,
Thomas Taglieri

Pequot Book Sales Online

Shop Used Books Online!

Did you know that you can shop a range of new, used, and collectable books through our online storefront? Click the link below to see what's new!

>> Click Here