New in Special Collections: Pioneering Journalist Jane Howard Perkins

Jane Howard Perkins in Egypt, ca. 1940.

In celebration of Women’s History Month, Special Collections is highlighting its collections of trailblazing and pioneering women.

Jane Howard Perkins (1912-2011) was a resident of Old Field, Setauket, NY. She studied archaeology at Radcliffe (Harvard) and participated in early excavations at Chichen Itza, a complex of Mayan ruins on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. In the late 1930s, she traveled on Pan Am’s maiden trans-Pacific flight while working for the Honolulu Advertiser, interviewed Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, and gave an eyewitness account of the Japanese bombing of China.

In December 2017, Special Collections received from Leighton Coleman III an album containing photographs of Jane Perkins Howard and family members including her father, famed news editor Roy Howard Wilson (1883-1964). R. Howard was chair­man of the executive committee of the Scripps‐Howard News­papers, one of the largest newspaper empires in the United States and was an editor of The New York World‐Tele­gram and The Sun. The album also contains newspaper clippings and ephemeral material, ca. 1922 to 1958 that document travels to Italy, Spain, Egypt, Israel, Greece, and Japan.

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Kristen Nyitray

Associate Librarian; Director, Special Collections and University Archives; and University Archivist at Stony Brook University Libraries

Contact her for research assistance with rare books, manuscript collections, historical maps, and SBU history. E-mail: kristen.nyitray@stonybrook.edu.

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