Guide to the Charles Trinkaus Slide Collection
RG 12.1.9

Summary Information

Repository

Sarah Lawrence College Archives

Creator

Trinkaus, Charles Edward, 1911-1999

Title

Charles Trinkaus Slide Collection

ID

RG 12.1.9

Date [inclusive]

1950s

Extent

0.25 linear feet 2 slide pages

Language

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Administrative Information

Publication Information

Sarah Lawrence College Archives 2012

Conditions Governing Access note

The collection is open without restriction. All photographs must credit Sarah Lawrence College and Charles Trinkaus as the photographer when published or reprinted.

Acquisition note

The collection was donated to the Sarah Lawrence College Archives in September 2012 by Pauline Watts '70, widow of Charles Trinkaus as accession #2012-037.

Existence and Location of Copies note

Scans of the slides are also available and are listed in the finding aid.

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Biographical note

A native of Brooklyn, N.Y., Charles Edward Trinkaus was born on October 25, 1911. His parents were children of German-American immigrants who came to America in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The sister of his paternal grandfather, John Philip Trinkaus, was the mother of John Philip Sousa.

After graduating in 1929 from Southside High School (Rockville Centre, Long Island), Trinkaus began studies at Wesleyan University (Middletown, Conn.), where he was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa and from which he received a bachelor’s degree in history in June 1933. That same year, he began graduate studies in history at Columbia University, where he pursued his interests in medieval history (major) and modern European history (minor). In June of 1940, he was awarded the Ph.D. degree from Columbia. His dissertation, directed by Professor Lynn Thorndike, was published in 1940 under the title Adversity’s Noblemen: The Italian Humanists on Happiness. The book was reissued in 1965.

Trinkaus began his tenure at Sarah Lawrence College in 1936, where he served as a faculty member until 1970. While at Sarah Lawrence, Trinkaus played a significant role in the College’s summer program in Florence (Italy). His affiliation with the program began in 1958; he became director of the program in 1966. Trinkaus was very involved in faculty committee work and served on all of the principle committees of the College. He rendered some of his most important service in an effort to restructure the SLC curriculum.

From 1970 until his retirement in 1982, Trinkaus taught at the University of Michigan. In his New York Times obituary (Sept. 25, 1999), in addition to being recognized as a past president of the Renaissance Society of America and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he was called one of the scholars in the 1940s and 1950s who “launched the wonderful flowering of Renaissance historical scholarship in North America.” A colleague at Ann Arbor, quoted in the same obituary, said of Trinkaus: “What set him and the tradition of Renaissance studies he represented apart from the scholarly tradition that followed was a deep belief that past writers and their texts could not be understood without careful historical study. He, therefore, had little patience for the post-modernists and deconstructionists who preached that texts had to be separated from their pasts.”

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Scope and Contents note

The Charles Trinkaus Slide Collection consists of 38 color 35mm slides of the Sarah Lawrence College campus and Florence, Italy from the 1950s to approximately 1970. The slides were found by Trinkaus's widow, Pauline Watts '70 in the summer 2012.

The slides were all taken by Trinkaus while he was a faculty member at Sarah Lawrence and cover subjects such as dance performances in 1956, images of flora on campus, the Wisteria Arbor, and buildings such as Westlands and the Teahaus. There are several slides of an American Kestrel (named "Hank" by Trinkaus) who lived in the Teahaus chimney while it was Trinkaus's office. These images of the kestrel are both inside and outside the Teahaus. There is one image of Trinkaus himself in Florence likely in the early 1960s. Along with this are two slides of the Torre di Bellosguardo in Florence, Italy. Trinkaus helped establish the Summer Program in Florence prior to taking over the study abroad programming at SLC.

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Arrangement note

The collection is arranged by artificially created slide number (i.e. CTSC).

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Related Materials

See also

For more about Charles Trinkaus, see: Charles Trinkaus’s Oral History from 1996 in the Oral History Collection; Faculty Trustee Bio File in the Trustees Collection; correspondence in the Harold Taylor Papers; and the Charles Trinkaus Papers.

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Controlled Access Headings

Genre(s)

• Color slides

Subject(s)

• American kestrel
• Dancers
• Sarah Lawrence College

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Collection Inventory