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Millenium Watch Institute collection
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Held at: University of Pennsylvania: Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts [Contact Us]3420 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6206
This is a finding aid. It is a description of archival material held at the University of Pennsylvania: Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts. Unless otherwise noted, the materials described below are physically available in their reading room, and not digitally available through the web.
Overview and metadata sections
The Millennium Watch Institute was founded in 1992 by independent scholar Ted Daniels, who earned his graduate degrees from the University of Pennsylvania in 1981 and 1985. In a 1997 interview with NewHeaven, NewEarth, Daniels explained the idea for creating the Millennium Watch Institute came to him while working at an internship at Folkways Records in 1987. "...it came to me with utter certainty that, as the calendar millennium approached, a lot of people were going to get worked up about the end of the world, and there ought to be a clearing house where people could go to receive factual information on what was happening."
Daniels began to collect ephemera from various end-of-the-world cults, anti-government militias, UFO societies, religious groups, and other related cults and movements in order to document the diversity of expectations surrounding the year 2000. He used the material to write Millennialism: An International Bibliography in 1992 and A Doomsday Reader: Prophets, Predictors and Hucksters of Salvation in 1997. Daniels also reviewed some of the 1200 printed and electronic sources the Institute collected in its newsletter, Millennium Prophecy Report.
When the year 2000 arrived and the predictions failed to materialize, the Millennium Watch Institute was no longer needed to document this movement.
The Millennium Watch Institute collection primarily contains publications, such as newsletters, bulletins, catalogues and journals. The collection contains a minimal amount of correspondence, press releases and audio tapes.
Gift of Ted Daniels, 1996 and 1997.
- Publisher
- University of Pennsylvania: Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts
- Finding Aid Date
- 2017
- Access Restrictions
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This collection is open for research use.
- Use Restrictions
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Copyright restrictions may exist. For most library holdings, the Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania do not hold copyright. It is the responsibility of the requester to seek permission from the holder of the copyright to reproduce material from the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts.