Archives & Special Collections
A&SC at Hillman Library
3960 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15260
Phone: 412-648-8190
Email: ULS-Archives&SpecialCollections@pitt.edu
This LibGuide was created by Maureen Jones, Fall 2016 HAA Exhibit Design Intern, and overseen by Special Collections staff member Margaret McGill.
Title page from Follies of the Year, [1868].
Presented by the University of Pittsburgh
Special Collections Department
Fall 2016-Spring 2017
There is a story that the Scottish gardener who worked for Louis XIV, the King of France, at the Palace of Versailles during the 17th century, placed 'étiquettes,' or labels, along designated pathways directing the courtiers and visitors to the palace grounds where to walk. The king later decreed that all members of his court must observe the étiquettes, and it is this word that has evolved to describe the correct rules of social behavior in human society.
Etiquette is a dynamic and ever-changing system of codified rules of appropriate human behavior, which includes civil discourse, polite conversation, fashion, manners, and humor and wit. This exhibit has been curated by the Special Collections Department and features works of etiquette from the Darlington, Nesbitt, and Picchi collections written from the 16th century to the present and is arranged as follows: a sampler of Italian and English works, an American sampler, a children’s literature sampler, an etiquette sampler for adults, and a sampler of women writers of etiquette.
Eleanor Roosevelt, as pictured on the cover of her Book of Common Sense Etiquette.
This exhibit has been curated by the Special Collections Department and features works of etiquette from the Darlington, Nesbitt, and Picchi collections written from the 16th century to the present.
We would like to thank the University Library Systems’ Archives Service Center, the Digital Research Library, and the Web Services departments for their generous assistance in preparing this exhibit. All materials from the collections are available for research in the Reading Room upon request to the Special Collections Department, 363 Hillman Library, University of Pittsburgh.
