“Music should not be limited to people of talent,” Dr. Sigmund Spaeth argues at this 1952 Books and Authors Luncheon. He is here to plug his book, Opportunities in Music, a vocational manual for those who wish to make their living in the music industry even if they are not exceptionally gifted. Seated at the piano, he divides his talk into The Serious Side of Music and Fun with Music. For those contemplating a career, he counsels, “you must have something to sell.” The key is to treat whatever one’s musical skills are as a business, to “patent” this trademark ability and then “merchandise” it. The intent of his book is to “remove the glamour…which has been such a menace to musical careers.” As an example of an ordinary job in music, he mentions selling sheet music over the counter.

But this luncheon audience consists mostly of well-to-do ladies, so he quickly moves on to the second part of his presentation. Demystifying the art of music, he claims “we need today more bad musicians.” He claims anyone can play the piano in five minutes without a lesson. Indeed, he blames lessons and piano teachers in general for ruining the natural fun a piano effortlessly provides. Their misguided emphasis on scales and exercises “turns music into a drudgery!” He goes on to demonstrate how with the aid of only one chord, pounded over and over again, one can supply a melody by singing and “play” almost any popular song. There is something very can-do American and at the same time dazzlingly philistine about this approach. Spaeth is in the midst of elaborating on this non-technical technique when the recording, perhaps operated by a more conventionally-minded music lover, mysteriously stops.

Sigmund Spaeth (1885-1965) was known to many of this luncheon’s audience as The Tune Detective. His unparalleled knowledge of both the classical canon and popular song enabled him to trace almost any melody back to a common historical ancestor. He appeared first in vaudeville (wearing a deerstalker cap, short cape, and checked tweeds in imitation of Sherlock Holmes,) then for many years on the radio, showing how all music was essentially based on a set of simple principles (“patterns” he calls them in this talk, “the same as you would find on wallpaper.”) He also gained unlikely notoriety as a legal authority, debunking claims of stolen musical authorship. As the New York Times reported in its obituary:

The contention that brought Dr. Spaeth fame was that behind the tune of each popular song were roots reaching back to folk music and classics. He first displayed his talent and his remarkable memory for tunes in a 1928 plagiarism case involving “Yes, We Have No Bananas.” Dr. Spaeth, who was called to the stand as an expert witness, demonstrated by singing and tapping his feet that parts of the song could be found in the great chorus of Handel’s Messiah and in Michael Balfe’s “Bohemian Girl,” several Wagner operas, “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean,” “I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls,” and “Aunt Dinah’s Quilting Party.”

But there was more to Spaeth than this parlor trick of finding similarities in comically diverse samples of music. He was a relentless educator and advocate for all sorts of music, writing serious histories of what were then largely dismissed as “popular” songs, while also attempting to remove the forbidding sheen of scholarship that made the classical repertoire such an off-putting proposition. The website soundfountain.org describes a series of educational records Spaeth made for the Remington label with explicit instructions as to how they were to be used:

This is a special recording in the series Music Plus, selected by Sigmund Spaeth whose voice is heard in recorded comments on each number. These comments appear on additional bands towards the center on each side. For home use it is suggested that the music always be played first, after which Dr. Spaeth’s remarks can peruse a second hearing and be reviewed from time to time as desired. For schools, colleges, clubs and broadcasts the introductory material should naturally preface the playing of each selection, adding the printed backgrounds if needed. In order to simplify such public performances, an accurate timetable is appended, covering the Spaeth comments as well as the music itself.

Spaeth was also a passionate promoter of barbershop quartet singing. He organized musical groups for the blind and arranged to have records sent to servicemen overseas. The picture one gets from studying his life is of a nation far more adept at making and understanding music than we are now. He comes out of the era of when people gathered around the piano, when dances relied on the local accordion player. Yet radio, the very medium which brought him fame, was largely responsible for a shift away from this type of home-grown entertainment. One can hear, as Dr. Spaeth (who for all his pooh-poohing of scholarship had a Ph.D from Princeton) barks out a primitive one-chord version of Little Liza Jane, the echo of what even in 1952 must have sounded like a quaintly archaic reference to a bygone time. 

_________________________________________

Editor’s Note: Beginning in the fall of 1942 Sigmund Spaeth launched a program on WQXR sponsored by Columbia Records and called, Dr. Sigmund Spaeth and His Record Library. The thrice-weekly show had Spaeth illustrating his analysis of themes and forms on the piano before playing discs from his collection.

Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.

WNYC archives id: 150145Municipal archives id: LT2316

On Saturday, October 28, Amherst College was honored to host Massachusetts Congressman Joseph Kennedy III who delivered an address on the steps of Frost Library as part of a day-long celebration of the legacy of President John F. Kennedy. You can watch his speech and read more about the event here: JFK 100: Of Poetry & Politics.

President Kennedy’s visit to Amherst College on October 26, 1963 is well known; he gave an important, and frequently quoted, speech about the role of the artist in society before participating in the ground-breaking ceremony for the Robert Frost Library. We recently made more images of that event available through Amherst College Digital Collections:

Amherst College Photographer Records: JFK at Amherst
Kennedy Convocation Collection: Color Slides

Audio of Kennedy’s address is freely available through the Kennedy Library & Museum in Boston, and this small web exhibition includes scans of many documents held in the Archives.

What is less well known is that the Frost Library ground-breaking was not Kennedy’s first visit to Amherst College, nor was it his first contact with members of the Amherst Community. As I dug into our holdings to prepare an exhibition for the “Of Poetry & Politics” celebration, I turned up some interesting items, such as these two letters from then-Senator Kennedy to Karl Loewenstein:

German-born emigré political scientist, professor, lawyer, and government advisor, Karl Loewenstein had a long academic career, which began in Munich and continued at Yale (1933-1936) and Amherst (1936-1961) after his emigration to the United States.  He worked as an advisor for the Emergency Advisory Committee for Political Defense of the American Republics (1942-1944) and for the U.S. Office of Military Government for Germany (1945-1946). The Karl Loewenstein Papers are held by the Archives & Special Collections.

In addition to responding to Loewenstein’s letters, Senator Kennedy also reached out to Amherst College President Charles Cole:

Charles Woolsey Cole, Class of 1927, served as Professor of Economics at Amherst from 1935-1942 and as the twelfth College President from 1946-1960. In this letter, Senator Kennedy invites Cole to participate in a lunch with himself and “others in the academic, research and related fields” to give him advice on policy.

It is likely that Senator Kennedy met both Karl Loewenstein and President Cole when Kennedy spoke at Amherst College in May 1956. Senator Kennedy’s 1956 visit might have been forgotten were it not for this small piece that appeared in the Amherst Student:

I have not found any additional documents related to this visit anywhere in our holdings yet, but we will keep looking.

John F. Kennedy was the first President to invite a poet to participate in his inaugural celebration; Frost supported Kennedy during his campaign and he agreed to recite “The Gift Outright” at Kennedy’s request. Kennedy was unaware that Frost also composed a new poem – “Dedication” – as a preface to his earlier piece. Unfortunately, because of the inclement weather and difficulty reading the typescript, Frost did not read “Dedication” and recited “The Gift Outright” from memory. When asked to comment after Frost’s death in January 1963, Kennedy said:

“I’ve never taken the view the world of politics and the world of poetry are so far apart. I think politicians and poets share at least one thing, and that is their greatness depends upon the courage with which they face the challenges of life.”

But Robert Frost was not the only poet involved in the 1960 inaugural celebration:

Louise Bogan was a poet who frequently appeared in The New Republic, The Nation, Poetry, Scribner’s and The Atlantic Monthly. For thirty-eight years, she reviewed poetry for The New Yorker. Here, the President thanks her for her participation and asks her for any further suggestions she might have for “contributions the national government might make to the arts in America.” The Louise Bogan Papers are held by the Archives & Special Collections.

Kennedy’s connections to Amherst faculty continued into his Presidency, as seen in this letter to Amherst Professor Willard Thorp:

Willard Thorp, Amherst Class of 1920, was a pioneer statistician, economist, domestic and foreign policy advisor, international development expert, and private business consultant. He served as Assistant Secretary of State for Economic Affairs from 1946-1952, he played a critical role in the design and implementation of the Marshall Plan and later held a number of United Nations appointments. Thorp taught Economics at Amherst from 1927-1935 and from 1952 until his retirement in 1965. In this letter, Kennedy thanks him for his work on cultural exchange with Japan. The Willard L. and Clarice Brows Thorp Papers are held in the Archives.

The invitation to President Kennedy to speak at Amherst College for the ground-breaking of Robert Frost Library was sent by John J. McCloy. Here is the President’s letter formally accepting the invitation:

John J. McCloy graduated from Amherst College in 1916 and served on the Board of Trustees from 1947-1989. He thought of himself as a public servant and in his speeches often emphasized the importance of public service. Among his many influential posts, he served as Assistant Secretary of War from 1941 – 1945. He was an advisor to President Kennedy, acted as Chairman of the Coordinating Committee of the US on Cuban Missile Crisis, and was a member of the Warren Commission charged with investigating President Kennedy’s assassination.

In his Convocation address, the President describes the invitation he received from McCloy thus:

“The powers of the Presidency are often described. Its limitations should occasionally be remembered, and, therefore, when the Chairman of our Disarmament Advisory Committee — who has labored so long and hard, Governor Stevenson’s assistant during the very difficult days at the United Nations, during the Cuban crisis, a public servant of so many years – asks or invites the President of the United States, there is only one response.” 

The John J. McCloy Papers are one of the most heavily used collections held in the Archives.

Today’s guest blog post comes from T.J. Stiles, author of Custer’s Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America.

I could not have written my last book, Custer’s Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America—nor have won the Pulitzer Prize for it—without the National Archives. But the reason may not be obvious.

George Armstrong Custer’s death at the Little Bighorn on June 25, 1876, forever associates him with the western frontier. But the frontier that truly defined him, the one I refer to in my subtitle, was a frontier in time. He spent his life embroiled in the changes that gave rise to the modern United States, particularly through a career in the Army, which played a key role in creating the nation we know today.

Combat draws most of the attention in Custer’s life, from his starring role in the Civil War, to his controversial attack on Southern Cheyennes at the Washita, to his disastrous last day. Yet I also wanted to understand how Custer functioned within the institution of the Army. There are plenty of sources about battles, but the information I needed on Custer as middle manager could be found only in the National Archives.

In August 1863, for example, only a month after he emerged as a national hero at the head of his cavalry brigade at Gettysburg, he endured a series of reprimands from his division commander, Brig. Gen. Judson Kilpatrick. Custer provoked Kilpatrick by going outside of the chain of command to communicate directly with Maj. Gen. Alfred Pleasonton, chief of the Cavalry Corps of the Army of the Potomac. He also held an unauthorized parley with a Confederate colonel, who sent an embarrassing account of the meeting to a newspaper. I discovered these conflicts—small moments that presaged greater trouble to come—in a volume of the 3rd Cavalry Division’s Letters Sent, August 1863–June 1865, in Record Group 393.

A decade later, this kind of conflict appeared again when Custer led the cavalry detachment in the military escort for a survey party of the Northern Pacific Railroad in the Dakota and Montana territories. The expedition’s commander, Col. David S. Stanley, wrote to his wife of his disdain for Custer. At one point Stanley ordered his arrest, and Custer talked dangerously of arresting Stanley in turn—possibly a mutiny—for his superior’s drunkenness. This has always appeared as a kind of personal spat. But a deeper dive into military records reveals that he had developed a nasty reputation within the Army as a problem officer.

When I scrolled through Microfilm Publication M1495 (Special Files of Headquarters, Division of the Missouri, Relating to Military Operations and Administration), I found a brawl between Custer and Department of Dakota headquarters in St. Paul. He demanded more resources for marching his men from Yankton to Fort Rice, the staging point for the Northern Pacific expedition, and complained of other matters. “Custer’s request for wagons is absurd,” General Alfred Terry wrote to his adjutant, O.D. Greene. “He can have made no calculations.” Greene wired back that Custer had sent him “a telegram of ten pages . . . principally fault finding and making unnecessary difficulties in regard to the march. . . . I report it extremely difficult to get along with the present Commander [i.e., Custer].”

Interestingly, another officer investigated and largely backed Custer. But Custer’s reputation within the Army was so bad that his superiors assumed the worst about him. This otherwise pointless squabble tells us that his inability to get along with the chain of command—a problem that first appeared in those August 1863 reprimands—had grown worse over the years. His feud with Stanley reflected his difficulties with the institution of the Army, a personal quirk yet also an echo of the nation’s troubles in adapting to a more organizational future.

In my introduction, I wrote that I was trying to change the camera angle on Custer’s life. I was still interested in the episodes that had been written about so well before, but I wanted to find new significance in them. Thanks to the riches of the National Archives, I could place his high-profile battles and expeditions in a new context, to understand a man and a nation struggling into a new era.

T.J. Stiles received the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for History for Custer’s Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America (Alfred A. Knopf), as well as the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Biography and the 2009 National Book Award for Nonfiction for The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt

Established in 1966 by former Florida Supreme Court Justice B.K. Roberts, Florida State University’s College of Law has contributed many notable individuals to the law community, such as current Florida House of Representatives Majority Leader Adam Hasner and current Senior Judge for the United States Air Force, W. Thomas Cumbie. A scrapbook documenting the planning of the school is located in Special Collections & Archives.

In October, Florida State University honored Talbot “Sandy” D’Alemberte, Florida State University President Emeritus, former Dean of the Florida State University Law School, and former President of the American Bar Association through the dedication of a window at the Heritage Museum in Dodd Hall.  Featured are the highlights of D’Alemberte’s career, celebrating his service to the community and the university. Florida State University’s College of Law,  College of Medicine, the State Capitol, and his childhood home in Tallahassee can be seen within the window. During his tenure, D’Alemberte was responsible for envisioning and completing the Village Green for the College of Law, with its cluster of historic buildings and rotunda, the design inspired by Thomas Jefferson’s plan at the University of Virginia.

At the unveiling, current Florida State University President, John Thrasher, spoke of his friend:

“Sandy has helped shape Florida State’s identity as a university that not only educates students, but develops good citizens who contribute to society in meaningful ways. He has spent his whole life trying to make this world a better place.”

The exhibit created for the unveiling of the window is still on display within the Heritage Museum. The exhibit and the window are open to the public for viewing, Monday through Thursday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. EST.

The article documenting the unveiling of the window can be found by clicking here.

The National Archives released 2,891 records on Thursday related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy that are subject to the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 (JFK Act). These records are available for download online.

The President has also ordered that all remaining records governed by section 5 of the JFK Act be released, and thus additional records will be released subject to redactions recommended by the executive offices and agencies. NARA will process these records for release as soon as possible on a rolling basis.

Based on requests from executive offices and agencies the President has allowed the temporary withholding of certain information that would harm national security, law enforcement, or foreign affairs. The President also ordered agencies to re-review their proposed redactions and  only redact information in the rarest of circumstances where its withholding “is made necessary by an identifiable harm to military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or conduct of foreign relations; and the identifiable harm is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in disclosure.” These instructions will allow the National Archives to release as much information as possible by the end of the temporary certification period on April 26, 2018.

Following the release yesterday, our website saw nearly 44,000 active users, and our ten most active pages were related to the release of these additional documents.

Snapshot of simultaneous users on archives.gov at 8:00 p.m. 10/26/17

The National Archives previously released 3,810 related records on July 24, 2017, including 441 records previously withheld in their entirety and 3,369 records previously withheld in part. More information about this release is available online.

In addition, the National Archives is also releasing to the public the unclassified electronic records of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), including 52,387 emails and 16,627 files from the ARRB drives.

The National Archives established the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection in November 1992, and it consists of approximately five million pages of records. The vast majority of the collection has been publicly available without any restrictions since the late 1990s.

Find more information in these online resources:

• JFK Assassination Records Processing Project — Background and FAQs
• Documenting the Death of a President
• JFK Assassination Records Review Board
• The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection
• The work of the Kennedy Assassination Records Collection
• JFK Assassination Records FAQs
• Warren Commission Report

Those of you who read PPL’s Facebook have already heard, but we wanted to make it blog-official:

We’re pleased to announce the recipient of PPL’s 2018 Creative Fellowship–Becky Davis, an interdisciplinary artist living in Wakefield, RI. You can see some of her past work and read her artist’s statement on her website. We love the ways in which history informs her work, which is intelligent, challenging, and accessible.

During her Fellowship, Becky will create new work related to the topic of hair as part of our 2018 HairBrained exhibition and program series. We think she has a lot to add to the conversation, and are extremely excited to see what she creates!

Wallingford Riegger working on a composition, date unknown.
(unknown/Wikimedia Commons)

We have just listened to a concert featuring the world premiere of Riegger’s Sinfonietta. But what about the other composers on the program? It turns out that William Richards, Walter Scotson, Gerald Wilfring Gore, John H. McCurdy, Edwin Farell, and others are all pseudonyms for Riegger himself. Riegger reflects on his method of composition, saying the music comes by “fits and starts, mostly starts.” In the case of the Sinfonietta he took a bunch of these starts, “good beginnings that went nowhere and up and finished them.” Having had a unique career, alternating between the classical and modernist styles, he compares himself to Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. “A large part of my thinking is old-fashioned,” he confesses. But then there is the demon in him that composes in the twelve tone scale as well. The interviewer notes that while he used to be referred to as the Dean of American Music now that title is more often bestowed on Aaron Copeland. Reigger, in his seventies, does not seem miffed, mildly observing, “Doesn’t matter what a person is called, it’s what he does.” One leaves with the impression of a still-working artist, approaching the end of his career, at peace with his achievement.

The career of Wallingford Riegger (1885-1961) illustrates the danger of pigeonholing creative artists. An early success as both a cellist and conductor, he studied in Germany and began composing during the Twenties. While he did come under the influence of Arnold Schoenberg via Schoenberg’s American student Adolph Weiss, there is evidence that he had already sought out his own path before encountering the twelve tone system. As music critic Kyle Gann notes in Arts Journal:

Riegger wrote an astonishing Study in Sonority in 1928, more radical to my ears than anything Schoenberg had yet done, and attractive Third and Fourth Symphonies and a Piano Concerto all in a 12-tone idiom, and also a beautifully retro Canon and Fugue in old-fashioned D minor. 

In the 1930’s Riegger started composing dance for music for Martha Graham as well as Jose Limon, Doris Humphrey and Hanya Holmes. New Dance, by choreographed by Humphrey, is considered by some to be first genuinely modern dance. Performances of his orchestral work were rare, but he did find appreciation within the classical music community. As the website Pytheas Music summarizes:

American composer Wallingford Riegger was a proponent of none of the major twentieth century “schools” of composition, and until the very end of his long career he received little more than cursory notice from the American musical establishment. Nevertheless, his 75 completed compositions have proved a source of enrichment to several generations of musicians who are drawn to Riegger’s unique brand of modernism.

Some of this neglect may have been due to Riegger’s relationship with the Communist Party. He refused to answer questions about his alleged membership before the HUAC Committee. He found more acceptance towards the end of his life, as this performance and interview attest to. Baker’s Biographical Dictionary, cited on the Bach Cantatas website, tells how:

…after a long period of neglect on the part of the public and the critics, Riegger began to receive recognition. Several dance works, cast in more strictly neoromantic idioms, brought popular success as did his 3rd Symphony, which won a Naumburg Foundation Recording Award and was the choice of the New York Music Critics’ Circle in 1948. … In 1958, Leonard Bernstein honored him by conducting his Music for Orchestra with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra.

It’s a stretch, but one could whimsically relate Riegger’s efforts to bridge the harsh relations between the camps of classicism and modernism to his unusual death. Coming upon two fighting dogs, the composer tripped over their leashes and received a head injury which proved fatal. 

Note: This interview was conducted on November 16, 1960 and broadcast on April 13, 1961.

Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.

WNYC archives id: 150257Municipal archives id: LT9101

Paul Dirac was an English theoretical physicist who provided remarkable insight towards the development of quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics. His discoveries led to him now being famously known as the father of modern physics and a Nobel Prize Winner. These discoveries constitute his own formula, known as the Dirac Equation, to describe the behavior of fermions, which are subatomic particles, and predicted the existence of antimatter, which are corresponding particles of ordinary matter.

His contribution to the study of physics and society is commemorated on this day, the day of his death, in 1984 at the age of 82. On October 19th, the day before the anniversary of his death, several librarians and students from the physics department go out and clean his headstone at Roselawn Cemetery and plant flowers to honor the man who spent his last decade at Florida State University teaching physics students and conducting further research.

The FSU Special Collections & Archives houses The Paul A.M. Dirac Papers that consists of correspondence, books, manuscripts of scientific papers, calculations, photographs, framed certificates, and realia. A window is even dedicated to Paul Dirac within the Heritage Museum located in Dodd Hall, to remember his work and honor his footprint within physics.

Can There Be a New York, The Beautiful? is the topic of this 1968 broadcast. Irving M. Levine, the host of New York Tomorrow, questions Ada Louise Huxtable about a wide range of subjects from downtown skyscrapers to outer borough housing projects to the relationship between social environment and bricks-and-mortar construction. Huxtable, an architecture critic for The New York Times, gives a lucid overview of the state of urban planning during this fraught time in the city’s history.

Huxtable’s initial response to the program’s ostensible question is, “No, nor should there be.” Beauty is not some preconceived notion relating to manufacturing a simulacrum of the past but rather creating responses that reflect and enhance “the vitality…the tremendous mixture” of New York today. She lauds the new attitude that has come in with the Lindsay administration, pointing out that the Planning Commission can now influence construction and, in some cases, halt the razing of old buildings. In the past, the use of such municipal power was thought to be impossible. As an example, she points to the recent zoning and bonus provisions that have led to more theaters being built on the first floors of the very office towers that had threatened to overrun the Theater District.

On the other hand, there are many “tragedies,” as she succinctly calls them. The constant building of banks, crowding out more useful businesses. The deadly architectural influence of corporate America, which she scathingly refers to as the “great visual illiterate,” and the urgent need for subsidized lower- and middle-class housing so that neighborhoods can be maintained and a sense of community fostered.

Huxtable’s take is not all gloom-and-doom, but what optimism she shows, mostly relating to the young, idealistic generation of designers and planners now entering the field, is tempered by a clear-eyed view of the bottom-line profit motive that drives a city’s growth. Her prescription for moving forward? One must either “develop an extreme cynicism or preserve an extreme naïveté.” One senses from her measured responses and long subsequent career that she was able to accomplish the even more difficult feat of maintaining both these attitudes.

For six decades, Ada Louise Huxtable (1921-2013) gave readers, first of The New York Times, later of The Wall Street Journal, the sense that they had a stake and a say in the architecture of New York City, a business which, in the past, seemed to be transacted literally over their heads. Her indictment of soulless office towers and championing of supposedly “dated” gems from the past opened up this hitherto elitist domain to the eyes of ordinary citizens. As the New York Times recounted in its obituary:

At a time when architects were still in thrall to blank-slate urban renewal, Ms. Huxtable championed preservation — not because old buildings were quaint, or even necessarily historical landmarks, but because they contributed vitally to the cityscape. She was appalled at how profit dictated planning and led developers to squeeze the most floor area onto the least amount of land with the fewest public amenities.

An essential element in this was Huxtable’s stylistic approach, which managed to combine scholarship, passion, and a journalistic flair for engagement. Architecture does not appear at first glance to be a “sexy” beat for a reporter, but she made it one, and in doing so acquired an outsized influence both in the popular media and in city government. As Alexandra Lange noted in The Nation:

Big mouth? Yes, if volume is measured in circulation. By making the case for architecture criticism as an essential beat for a metropolitan newspaper, by turning buildings into news and serving on the Times’s editorial board, Huxtable enjoyed a career that epitomized the argument she would repeatedly make in print: architecture is “the art we cannot afford to ignore.” Her irreverent tone, her lean, pointed prose and her willingness to follow the story wherever it led her—to politics and money, to urban history and feats of engineering—made her a critic admired by colleagues who agreed about little else. She approached buildings as a journalist, adapting her style and method to the occasion, and without ever losing sight of her core constituency: the public, who would use the urban fabric, tattered or rehabilitated, long after she was gone.

Like most critics, Huxtable is perhaps best-remembered for her negative reviews. (“Doctors’ offices are where Danish modern went to die.”) Her thundering condemnation of the destruction of Penn Station is a classic and is considered by many to have given birth to the preservation movement. (“We will probably be judged not by the monuments we build but by those we have destroyed.”) But she was also deeply appreciative of what architecture could provide. Of the CBS Building, 51 West 52nd Street, by Eero Saarinen, she wrote,

“It is not, like so much of today’s large-scale construction, a handy commercial package, a shiny wraparound envelope, a packing case, a box of cards, a trick with mirrors. It does not look like a cigar lighter, a vending machine, a nutmeg grater. It is a building, in the true, classic sense: a complete design in which technology, function and aesthetics are conceived and executed integrally for its purpose.”

Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.

WNYC archives id: 150908Municipal archives id: T5941 T5942

We are pleased to announce that after a significant transfer of records from the Revenue Services Department, the Archives can now make available property tax records up to 2005.

Map of assessment wards in the Municipality of Point Grey, with proposed changes, ~1927. Reference code: AM1594 : MAP 360

Unlike the majority of our previous holdings, these records are microfilm of tax statements (sometimes referred to as the tax roll), rather than assessments. However, the tax statements include the assessment information acquired from the BC Assessment Authority, one of the source data sets for the calculation of property taxes.

We have an almost-complete set of tax statements for the years 1976 to 2005 (1991 has yet to make its way to us), and the records include a variety of indexes that provide entry points to the records, which are organised by Tax account number.

Below you can see a sample statement (with owner’s name and address redacted):

Over the years, the statements become a little more complex as provincial grant programs and assessment averaging information are included, but the basics remain the same. The statements include:

• assessed values of land and improvements;
• Legal land description of the assessed property;
• current civic address at the time of billing;
• name and address of the registered property owner;
• school, transit and other non-City levies that the City collects on behalf of other agencies;
• non-tax City levies, such as Local Improvement and water rates charges;
• information on tax reductions under various grant programs;
• pre-payments made by the owner; and
• interest charged on late or missing payments for previous billings.

With this transfer of City records, the CVA’s holdings of property tax records now include:

City of Vancouver (incorporated 1886-present, with significant additions 1911 and 1929):

• 1887-1890 and 1929-1977 Property tax assessments: series COV-S435
• 1971: Real property tax roll: series COV-S434
• 1978-1990 and 1992-2005: Property tax statements: series COV-S289

Municipality of South Vancouver (incorporated 1892-1929, included Point Grey 1892-1908):

• 1893-1895 and 1913-1927: Property tax assessments: series COV-SV-S221
• 1895-1896: Property tax rolls: series COV-SV-S222

Municipality of Point Grey (incorporated 1908-1928)

• 1910: Property tax assessments: series COV-PG-S248

Assessments for property in the region but not incorporated:

• 1880-1898: New Westminster Assessment District assessments: AM619
• 1896-1913: Vancouver Assessment District assessments: AM619

As a result of this transfer, we’ve taken the opportunity to update and revise our Property Tax Records Finding Aid, which lists and describes all the record series we have in our holdings relating to assessment and levying of property taxes going back to before the incorporation of the City.

You can download a copy of our new Property Tax Records Finding Aid from the Archives’ website or view it in the Archives’ Reading Room.

For researchers unable to come to the Archives to view these records, it is possible to have Archives staff conduct searches on your behalf. The charge for this service is $25.00 per property per year searched. Please contact the Archives by phone at 604-736-8561 or email archives@vancouver.ca to order tax records searches.

Washington, DC is home to some of the most fantastic museums in the world. Museums where visitors see one of a kind objects, are transported around the world through expositions, and participate in unique programming. The National Archives is one of those museums.  Here, visitors contemplate our democracy while examining the signed Constitution of the United States, travel the world as they view records documenting our interactions with other nations, and become inspired and engaged through programming for everyone pre-K to adults.

Four years ago, the National Archives, in partnership with the National Archives Foundation, began a sleepover program for young museum goers. Designed for children 8-12 years old and their accompanying adults, these sleepovers are inspiring the next generation of historians, stewards of our nations records, and advocates for the work of the Archives. The themes for the sleepovers change, offering a glimpse into the diversity of holdings in the Archives and an opportunity for participants to come back again and again.

This past weekend, 120 participants from across the country embarked on this year’s space themed sleepover in commemoration of the JFK centennial. These participants got the “star” treatment right from the start as they paused to look through a telescope set up at the museum’s entrance.  After getting checked in, and being welcomed by both the Archivist of the United States and the Executive Director of the National Archives Foundation during orientation, sleepover goers set out to see if they were suited for space.  Hands-on activities throughout the museum engaged participants and ignited imaginations. A few examples of activities include making mission patches, putting together astronaut John Glenn’s genealogy scrap book, dressing like a space explorer, and training like an astronaut using neutral buoyancy. NARA also collaborated with the National Air and Space Museum who brought over telescopes, meteorites, and astronaut underwear, with Catherine Kruchten who taught participants how to engineer their own rockets, and astronaut George Zamka who shared experiences of his time in space. If you would like to see some of his experiences in space, look in the holdings of the National Archives. At the end of the night, everyone slept in the Rotunda next to the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.

With Archives Sleepovers, participants not only see one of a kind objects, but sleep next to them. They are transported not only around the world but out of the world as they encounter the universe of space exploration. The unique programming that happens here could not happen anyplace else. Each one of the billions of records in the holdings of the National Archives unlocks a piece of what it means to be an American and adds to the stories told here.

Each amazing sleepover experience would not be possible without ideas, planning, creating, and enacting of many interns, volunteers and staff.  Each person involved in the process helps to make the Archives sleepovers a success from A to Zzzzzzz.  If you are interested in joining us, the next sleepover is set to blast off on February 24, 2018.

We do quite a bit of patron-driven digitization in the Digital Library Center. A lot of it is for researchers who are unable to visit Tallahassee and we like to share these materials in DigiNole as often as possible because, as our manuscript archivist notes, if one researcher needed one, there is probably another one out there too! These sorts of requests have gotten large parts of the Admiral Leigh papers online and are the reason we’re currently working on the Sir Leon Radzinowicz papers as well. However, this one might be one of my recent favorites.

Anulus nuptialis: De amore sponsi celestis dyalogus incipit, cuiu s titulus est iste is a 1450 bound manuscript. Written in a humanistic hand by a single scribe on parchment with initials in red with gold, blue with gold and green with gold ornament, it is an unrecorded text in the form of a dialogue between Mother Scolastica and Symona and Felix, all brides of Christ, written by nuns in a convent. Ph.D. student, Rachel Duke,  here at FSU is working with this volume for her dissertation and needed high-quality reference images of the object for her work. We’re happy to be able to share out this incredibly unique work with everyone else now. I asked Rachel to share some information about the work to help people understand what it’s about. It somehow got even cooler:

It’s a dialogue, which you can see pretty clearly from the images, between Felix, Symona, and their mother Scolastica. Their lines are marked “Fe,” “Sy,” and “Ma” (for Mater). Symona and Felix are twin sisters and the biological offspring of the mother of the convent. This is during a time where a father would die and the widow and her daughters would all enter the convent.

I’m writing my dissertation about how the text demonstrates the rise of some humanist leanings in northern Italy in the 15th century, even in convent communities. Most convent literature doesn’t just have a dialogue between women, and the dialogue found here is so kind and understanding. Felix and Symona express their doubts about their ability to live up to the hefty role of brides of Christ, and Mater Scolastica repeatedly reminds them that they can find the strength within themselves to succeed in this life. It really is quite encouraging and loving. While I have a pretty good guess as to which convent this is related to (and have presented on those inklings at conferences), we don’t have a definitive answer to who these people were. Scriptoria were fairly common within convents, so there is the possibility that it was composed and even copied within a convent.

The text is in Italianate Latin, and in an extremely legible humanist hand. We can see many different colors of ink in the margins and in the decorations: (Brown, pink, purple, green, etc.). There are some locations where a space for a larger initial should have been left but the scribe likely forgot, and the letter has been squeezed in right next to it.

The book has gold brushed edges, something you can’t see in the images but is beautiful to behold in person. It is perfectly sized to fit in your hands comfortably, a little larger than the length of my hands in person.

We don’t have an exact date or location because someone has excised any information that could help us track down provenance. If you look on the first decorated folio, you can even see where someone attempted to wash out what was probably a library stamp. The colophon has an excision (actual rectangle CUT OUT from the text identifying the target audience). It is very frustrating.

We purchased this book from Laurence Claiborne Witten II, who was a pretty famous bookseller of the middle of the 20th century. He was famously involved in the sale of a likely forgery! Anulus Nuptialis might be a good starting point for a study into somewhat dubious antiquarian book sales.

Be sure to check this volume out! Even if the language isn’t familiar, the object itself is lovely to page through online.

Amherst College’s records are filled with names that would seem unusual today, like Preserved Smith (grandfather – 1828, grandson – 1901), or Heman Humphrey (2nd college president, 1823-1845). It’s less common to come across a name that stands out because it sounds modern to our ears. I was surprised when I found letters to a Crystal Thompson, curator of the Zoological Collection—written in 1923.

At first, I thought that the name might be an example of a name’s gender association changing, as with the name Leslie¹, because the first letter, from Feb. 20, 1923, was addressed, “Dear Sir.”

Instructions for fixing a troublesome paper cutter, from Milton Bradley Company

However, the second letter (sent Mar. 13, 1923) was addressed to Miss Thompson. Now I was very curious.

This following letter, to Miss Crystal Thompson, reports the successful return and repair of the troublesome paper cutter.

Here was someone even more unusual—a woman working as curator of Amherst’s natural history collections. These letters are in the Department of Biology collection, with others concerning laboratory and museum supplies and material orders.

The Amherst College Biographical Record, which lists alumnae/i, college administration, and faculty, had no listing for Crystal Thompson, but the Amherst College Catalog for 1919 shows Crystal Thompson, M.A. as Curator of the Zoological Collection (as well as one Harriet Oakes Rogers, B.S., as Curator in the Chemistry Laboratory).

With a bit more research in the Board of Trustees’ Minutes, I found that Crystal Thompson had come to Amherst from the University of Michigan.  Their online yearbooks and other digital collections revealed that she had received her B.S. in 1909, her M.A. in 1910, and worked as an assistant in the Zoology Museum from 1911-1919. She co-authored several publications on regional reptiles and snakes, and their archives (via the Bentley Historical Library Image Bank, which is a digital library like our own Amherst College Digital Collections site, ACDC), has this 1918 photograph.

Crystal Thompson, in woods of North Carolina, 1918. Image HS14930. University of Michigan Library Digital Collections.

She worked here at Amherst from 1919-1927, then returned to Michigan to be the curator of visual education when they opened a new museum building. She spent the rest of her career at Michigan, retiring in 1958.

There’s a lot that remains unknown about women employed here at Amherst College, especially before the 1940s. The first woman hired to teach was Madeleine Utter, as an interim French instructor just for the 1918-1919 academic year. Crystal Thompson was hired as curator the next year, along with Harriet Rogers for the Chemistry Laboratory.

As World War 1 was underway, there may have been a relative shortage of male candidates available, creating opportunity for these women at Amherst. Thompson’s arrival could also have resulted from the hiring of Professor Otto Glaser (who had been at the University of Michigan) as Chair of the Biology Department in 1918.

From around 1914 or so, the secretary to the President and other administrative positions are listed in the college catalogs, and names like Gertrude and Esther begin to appear. A systematic listing has not been created, but the catalogs are always available for anyone who is curious.

1. In 1900, Leslie was the 91st most popular boy’s name, while in 1997 (the last year it was within the top 1000, it was 881. As a girl’s name, Leslie was 646 in 1900, jumped sharply in the 1940s to the top 200, and remained there (hitting 56 in 1981) until 2010, when it began falling in popularity. You can search for any name at “Popular Baby Names.” Social Security Administration, 2017.

On October 19, 2017 the FOIA Advisory Committee will meet in the William G. McGowan Theater. The three subcommittees will each present their ideas to the full Committee and the public for how to improve the administration of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and improve FOIA processes.

As I blogged about last June, the FOIA Advisory Committee is charged with looking broadly at the challenges that agency FOIA programs are starting to face in light of an ever-increasing volume of born-electronic records, and chart a course for how FOIA should operate now and in the future. The Committee is chaired and staffed by the FOIA Ombudsman’s office located within the National Archives, the Office of Government Information Services (OGIS), and includes twenty members with FOIA expertise from inside and outside of government who represent a wide range of interests and perspectives.

David S. Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, gives welcoming remarks during the FOIA Advisory Committee Meeting at the National Archives in Washington, DC, on July 21, 2016. Photo by Brogan Jackson.

At the Committee’s first two quarterly meeting, members discussed the greatest challenges in the administration of FOIA and determined in October 2016 to focus its efforts on three areas: increasing proactive disclosures; improving searches for records; and maximizing efficiencies and resources. To carry out its work, the Committee organized itself into three subcommittees, each of which is co-chaired by a government and a non-government member. Over the last year, these subcommittees have studied the issues and worked collaboratively to begin to develop recommendations to address key problems in the administration of FOIA.

One of the central themes that has emerged as the Committee work has progressed is the undeniable close relationship between a strong records management program and an effective FOIA office; and this relationship will only become even stronger as the volume of electronic records continues to grow. During the last Committee meeting in July 2017,  Chief Records Officer Laurence Brewer spoke to the Committee about recent changes to federal records management policy and the steps the National Archives is taking to help transition federal agencies to an electronic recordkeeping environment and speed up the adoption of modern electronic recordkeeping practices. At the upcoming meeting, the National Archives former Director of Litigation, Jason R. Baron, will also address how the transition to electronic recordkeeping impacts an agency’s FOIA program.

I look forward to hearing about the subcommittees’ work, and to receiving the Committee’s final recommendations at the end of its term. Please join me for the October 19 FOIA Advisory Committee meeting in person and register using Eventbrite. The meeting will also be livestreamed via the National Archives YouTube Channel if you are unable to attend in person.

We’re just over a week away from this year’s Updike Prize award ceremony, and we’re excited to welcome our featured speaker, Nina Stössinger, to Providence. If you want to get a head start and read a short article by Nina, try this one. Or maybe check out this interview with her and then follow her on Twitter.

But whatever you do, be sure to join us on Monday, October 23rd, at the RISD Metcalf Auditorium and hear from Nina in person!

The College of Nursing at Florida State University has a significant history. Recently, Heritage & University Archives received a new accession from the College that illustrates when the College played a key role in being prepared for a nuclear catastrophe on American soil.

The newspaper clipping presented is from the spring of 1961, describing a “disaster drill” in an event of a plane crash and was given to the College by alumna Judith Butler White. White writes that this article describes the beginning of the implementation of the “worst-case scenario” preparation instated by President John F. Kennedy during the Cold War and that the Florida State University nursing students were part of this preparation plan. She recalls that a “Radiation Sign” and a “Location of Campus Assignment” in case of a nuclear disaster, was always hanging on her door in her room in Dorman Hall.

In October 1962, President Kennedy was informed by aircraft spies that Soviet nuclear missiles were placed within Cuba, sparking the Cuban Missile Crisis. Not only were crisis plans in an event of a nuclear disaster methodically and rapidly developed, the nursing students in the state of Florida were being trained within their programs for emergency care in an event of a nuclear attack within Florida.

Although most of America views the Cuban Missile Crisis as a tragedy that never occurred, White stated that the reality of a nuclear attack was very much a possibility and the State of Florida would have actual drills for its nursing students to aid the masses of victims if such a crisis did occur. In the article, it refers to nursing students collaborating in a “disaster drill” for a plane crash, when in reality they were being prepped for the first nuclear war that the world had ever experienced.

Please check out our extensive materials related the College of Nursing at Heritage & University Archives. Also, portions of the College of Nursing collection are available in DigiNole: FSU’s Digital Repository.

The 1964 National Book Awards ceremony, hosted by former quiz show personality (now Rutgers University president) Mason Gross, kicks off with the prize for Poetry being awarded to John Crowe Ransom. Ransom, grumbling about the five hundred word limit imposed on recipients, delivers a rather ornate and florid defense of lyric poetry, seeing it as “a homage to external nature, despite the griefs it causes us, and to human nature, despite its hateful and treacherous tendencies…” Valery and Bergson are then cited in an argument for the poet’s seeming immorality. The Devil, after all, must exist, or the job of temptation would fall to God. As if reveling in this excuse to behave badly, Ransom notes he has exceeded his five hundred word limit.

The prize for History goes to William H. McNeil, for The Rise of the West, still a much-respected work in the field.  The winner for Science, Philosophy, and Religion goes to Christopher Tunnard and Boris Pushkarev for Man-Made America: Chaos or Control? which warns of creeping urban blight and suburban sameness. The Art and Letters award goes to Aileen Ward for John Keats: The Making of a Poet. In her acceptance speech, she graciously recommends a rival biography of Keats published in the same year, Walter Jackson Bate’s magisterial John Keats.

The Prize for Fiction goes to John Updike for The Centaur. Updike, just days short of his 32’nd birthday, sounds strikingly young and endearingly nervous, a far cry from the self-assured media smoothie of later years. He makes a plea for “accuracy or lifelikeness” in fiction, which he admits sounds strange coming from the author of a book about Greek gods and goddesses appearing in rural Pennsylvania. But this, he insists, was reality for him. “…each of us who claims to be writers should strive, I think, to discover or invent the verbal texture that most closely duplicates the tone of life as it arrives on his nerves.” He goes on to describe the current writer’s condition as being one of isolation, both from other writers and from those of the past. “The writer now makes his marks on paper blanker than it has ever been.”

The second part of the ceremony is reserved for a paper delivered by the distinguished physicist and Nobel laureate I. I. Rabi. Entitled Science and the Other Culture, it makes the by a now familiar plea for a cessation of hostilities, both real and imagined, between science and the humanities. Rabi doesn’t do his cause much good by first reading a nasty description of scientists in academia by former University of Chicago president Robert Hutchins and then responding in kind. He goes on to envision a future shaped by what he sees as the three most important scientific achievements of the age: weapons of mass destruction, the great advances in communication, and the challenges posed by automation. Poets, scholars, and other representatives of the humanities “missed the bus” in the 18’th century when the Industrial Revolution was changing the face of the earth. Rather than sneer at and retreat from scientific advances they should have plunged in and tried to integrate the new earning with the old. He makes a plea that in this upcoming revolution, which he predicts will be just as earth-shaking as the last, such notables as the members of this group do not make a similar mistake. One senses a great deal of sincerity in this request. Rabi was a man of striking moral and ethical principles. He refused to work on the Manhattan Project and never patented any of his discoveries. One also senses a fair degree of exasperation.

The official part of the ceremony concludes with the reading of a telegram from President Johnson.

John Crowe Ransom (1888-1974) is best remembered now as a founding member of the literary group known as the Fugitives (later called the Southern Agrarians) and for his championing of the New Criticism. Both in his poetry and later critical writings, he extols virtues associated with a long ago and perhaps non-existent past. As Richard Gray observes on the Poetry Foundation website:

…the thesis that nearly all of Ransom’s writing sets out to prove, in one way or another, is that only in a traditional and rural society—the kind of society that is epitomized for Ransom by the antebellum South—can the human being achieve the completeness that comes from exercising the sensibility and the reason with equal ease.”

John Updike (1932-2009) was a prodigious talent, writing short stories, novels, poetry, casual humor pieces, and, in its quiet, unassuming way, probably the most far-ranging and penetrating critical oeuvre in American 20’th century literature. Updike’s closing plea in this speech, that the writer make something “useful and beautiful and, in a word, good,” dovetails neatly with the assessment handed down by the magazine he was forever associated with. In its obituary notice of Updike, Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker writes:

Updike’s great subject was the American attempt to fill the gap left by faith with the materials produced by mass culture. He documented how the death of a credible religious belief has been offset by sex and adultery and movies and sports and Toyotas and family love and family obligation. For Updike, this effort was blessed, and very nearly successful.

Isidor Isaac Rabi (1998-1988) was a brilliant physicist but also, as his contribution to these proceedings shows, deeply committed to the advancement of a cohesive, morally aware culture. A government insider, he was a strong voice for arms reduction and international control of atomic energy. Regarded by many as the conscience of the scientific community, he seemed utterly uninterested in personal gain. In his New York Times obituary he is quoted as recalling:

In the late 1930’s, I and my friends sat around and talked about what we’d do if we had a million dollars. I thought and thought and finally I said, ‘I think I’d buy a new hat.’

Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.

WNYC archives id: 150015Municipal archives id: T53 and T54

One of our brilliant student workers just finished describing a born-digital collection for the University Archives. We’ll let her tell you more!

My name is Meg Barrett, and I’m a junior studying Art History and French. I started working as a Special Collections & Archives assistant last summer. So far, I’ve had the opportunity to work on some really interesting projects. Most recently, I finished creating the metadata for the Deep-C Consortium papers.

The Deep-C (Deep Sea to Coast Connectivity in the Eastern Gulf of Mexico) Consortium was a four-year, interdisciplinary study of deep sea to coast connectivity in the northeastern Gulf of Mexico. The study, which began in 2011, investigated the environmental consequences of petroleum hydrocarbon release in the deep Gulf on living marine resources and ecosystem health. Deep-C examined the geomorphologic, hydrologic, and biogeochemical settings that influence the distribution and fate of the oil and dispersants released during the Deepwater Horizon (DwH) accident, and used the resulting data for model studies that support improved responses to possible future incidents. You can still visit the study’s website for more information as well.

As somebody who enjoys studying arts and languages, the idea of going through the Deep-C files, which are focused on scientific research, felt very out of my comfort zone. However, as I began sorting through the posters, images, and graphs from the study, I found the information presented so interesting. I really enjoyed the project, and I’m happy to have had the chance to work on it!

If you missed out on #AskAnArchivist Day, be sure to check out all the questions we answered! While #AskAnArchivist happens only one day a year, you can always contact our archivists and librarians by emailing  lib-specialcollections@fsu.edu or calling the Research Center at 850-644-3271.

 “An adult Ian Fleming,” is how Helen MacInnes, acclaimed author of international spy thrillers, is introduced to the audience at this 1964 Book and Author Luncheon. She is here to promote her recently published novel The Venetian Affair, but first considers the objection that she has not, in fact, been a Resistance fighter during World War II or engaged in counter-espionage against the Soviet Union, both subjects she has treated in her fiction. “Does a novelist have to commit a murder before he can portray a murderer?” she asks. She relies on instinct, “fully alive and responsive,” and creative imagination to supply what experience cannot. This she combines, however, with rigorous research. “There is no room for imagination in composing a factual background.” She then plunges into the real-life inspiration for The Venetian Affair, detailing Soviet and East German agents’ methodical forgeries of supposed US State Department documents as part of a master plan to discredit our reputation abroad. The talk quickly becomes a dire warning about the evils of communism, which MacInnes equates with the rise of Nazism, a phenomenon she witnessed first-hand with her husband, classics scholar and MI6 spy Gilbert Highet, in pre-War Europe. By the end of the talk the book is forgotten as she counsels against any form of humanitarian aid to the USSR which must first wake from the delusions of its “political religion.”  

Helen MacInnes (1907-1985) turned out bestselling novels of international intrigue with an almost clockwork regularity (one every two years) many of which were then made into movies. Her early work dealt with the fight against Fascism. As the New York Times reported in its obituary: 

On their honeymoon in Bavaria, the Highets were disturbed by the activities of the Nazis, and Miss MacInnes kept a diary filled with examples of Nazi violence and the Hitler menace. A few years later she fashioned her notes into the novel ”Above Suspicion,” the story of a young British couple who sought a British anti-Nazi agent in Germany in the summer of 1939 while seemingly on a vacation. An immediate best seller, the book was made into a 1943 motion picture starring Joan Crawford and Fred MacMurray. 

Another novel in the same vein, Assignment Brittany (1942), was reported to be required reading for agents being sent into France to work with French Resistance fighters.  

After World War II, MacInnes (who along with her husband had moved to the United States) turned her attention to the Cold War. As can be heard in this presentation, these are hardly escapist works, rather a blatantly political call to arms very much capturing the spirit of the times. Looking over MacInnes’ career, crime and espionage writer Ken Salikoff, writing for the website Jungle Red Writers, judges: 

The sweet spot for Helen MacInnes’ writing career was the 1960s — the height of the Cold War —during which she produced what is arguably her best work.  The Venetian Affair (1963), The Double Image (1966) and The Salzburg Connection (1968) are all about the legacy of World War II and the lingering fallout from the Nazis’ failed attempt to conquer the world.  In these novels, World War II still casts a giant noirish shadow over the decades following the collapse of Nazi Germany in 1945.  The first two novels take place in sunny locations—Venice, Paris and Mykonos—but there is a pervasive chill that blows through these stories, like the one that runs through the obviously more coldly climacteric Alpine setting of the third novel. 

As noted in the introduction, MacInnes is more in the black-and-white tradition of Ian Fleming rather than the later more ambiguous and nuanced world-view of John Le Carré. This increasingly “retro” stance gained her both admirers and detractors. As a 1974 profile in People Magazine noted: 

…she hotly defends her political moralizing: “With Snare [of the Hunter] some critics said, ‘There goes old Helen MacInnes, beating the same dead horse again.’ But I hear a great silence from those same people when poor Willy Brandt has to resign because a supposedly bona fide East German refugee turns out to be a spy. …” While her good-versus-evil themes have put off some critics, they have also won MacInnes her share of professional admirers. Says one former counterintelligence officer, “She’s very perceptive about us types. She has a gift for understanding that we’re not just machines. Prick us and we bleed like hell.” 

With this formula, MacInnes retained her audience to the very end. The week she died, her most recent novel, Ride a Pale Horse, made its first appearance on the New York Times Bestseller List.

Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.

WNYC archives id: 150523Municipal archives id: RT159

The Friends of the Vancouver City Archives with the support of Famous Artists, is hosting the Hugh Pickett Gala, Monday, October 16, 2017, at the Sylvia Hotel. It will be an evening filled with live music, bubbly and hors d’oeuvres, a silent auction, and illustrated presentations. Funds raised at this event will go towards the processing and digitization of  long-time Vancouver impresario Hugh Pickett’s records. The records were recently donated to the City of Vancouver Archives by Gordon Boyd, Hugh’s life partner.

Hugh Pickett at home. Reference code pending

The Hugh Pickett fonds is vast and colourful, filled with theatre programmes, scrapbooks, event files and photographs emanating from Hugh’s long and rich career in the entertainment industry. The event files include documentation from an array of touring artists and entertainers ranging from pop singers to comedians, circuses to dance companies, classical and opera performers to country artists. Many of the photographs are of early Theatre Under the Stars (TUTS) productions, as Hugh was one of the creators of TUTS. Although not directly related to Hugh’s career, there are rare Spitfire Fund scrapbooks included in the fonds from when his mother was involved with the fund in Vancouver.

Some of the Theatre Under the Stars programs. Photo by Heather Gordon

With a successful fundraising effort, we anticipate being able to make the records available to the public in mid to late 2018 and to have a portion of the photographic materials digitized and available online (as rights permit).

A small portion of the 1000+ photos in the fonds. Photo by Heather Gordon

Tickets are $50 per person, purchased via Eventbrite. The gala runs from 7:00 – 9:00 PM, on Monday, October 16 at the Sylvia Hotel (1154 Gilford Street).

Dress code – dress cool, for as Hugh would say, “Tuxedos are for waiters.”

Hugh with material promoting some of his shows. Reference code pending

FSU Special Collections & Archives will be participating in #AskAnArchivist Day again this year! We’ll be taking over the FSU Libraries Twitter account (@FSULibrary) from 10am to 2pm on Wednesday, October 4, 2017, to answer all your questions about our materials, what we do and why we do it.

Not sure what #AskAnArchivist day is? —On October 4, archivists around the country will take to Twitter to answer your questions about any and all things archives. This day-long event, sponsored by the Society of American Archivists, will give you the opportunity to
connect directly with archivists in your community—and around the country—to ask questions, get information, or just satisfy your curiosity. You can take a look at how FSU participated for last year’s event on Storify.

So, if you have a question for us, tweet at the @FSULIbrary handle and make sure to use the hashtag #AskAnArchivist with your question. Or, if you have more general questions about archives around the country, ask your question with that hashtag and you’ll get answers from lots of archives and museums that will be participating around the country.

We look forward to hearing your questions!

This week we’re taking a quick visual trip back to Amherst in the 1990s:

Click to view slideshow.

In our ongoing work to preserve the photographic materials in our collection, we’re preparing many of our slide collections for frozen storage. Freezing color slides both slows the fading of the dyes and stabilizes the underlying acetate film. The original slides will still be accessible to researchers with a few days of advanced notice, but we’re making basic scans of all of the sheets of slides to make it easier for researchers to find images without needing to remove any materials from the freezer. All of the images above come from slides of campus scenes taken by Amherst’s Office of Public Affairs in the 1990s.

Enjoy this little trip back in time and rest assured that these images will last long into the future!

Just a reminder that proposals for the library’s 2018 Creative Fellowship are due by 5 p.m. this Sunday, October 1st! Read the full call for proposals here.

Nikita Khrushchev bids New York farewell. In this 1959 recording of a brief airport ceremony, the Soviet Premier is addressed by Mayor Wagner’s representative, Russell W. Patterson, who gives him a book about the city to peruse while he flies to the West Coast, as well as flowers for Mrs. Khrushchev. Khrushchev, in his remarks, is polite but noticeably more blunt, pronouncing that “The conviction we found was the leaders of this city and especially its people do not want war.” He regrets he was not permitted to meet ordinary citizens. Being an old miner, he finds it “pleasing to be surrounded by working men.” But he was told that such a meeting could be used for “provocation.” He points out that working people provide “the core of the city, creating its wealth.” He justifies his meeting with business leaders by pointing out that in a socialist state the Premier represents the “business world” of his country. Robert W. Dowling then thanks Khrushchev for permitting the many recent cultural exchanges including a visit by the Bolshoi Ballet. Khrushchev ignores him, returning to the subject of world tension, insisting that his proposals made to the UN General Assembly mark a real effort on the part of the Soviet Union towards “disarmament and peace.” Finally, Henry Cabot Lodge, who will accompany Khrushchev on his trip, thanks the police for their efforts to maintain security.

Khrushchev’s visit to the United States was not seen as a success for either side. Each party regarded the other with suspicion. No major initiatives resulted from his two days of talks with Eisenhower. His visit to New York was rushed, its major event being the address to the General Assembly, of which PBS.org reports:

…He ends his speech with a plea for universal disarmament: “Let us compete in who builds more homes, schools and hospitals for the people; produces more grain, milk, meat, clothing and other consumer goods; and not in who has more hydrogen bombs and rockets. This will be welcomed by all the peoples of the world.” After Khrushchev’s UN speech, Governor Nelson Rockefeller visits the Soviet premier at the Waldorf-Astoria to welcome him to New York. [In] early evening Khrushchev tours Manhattan with Lodge by car. He would later reflect on his unenthusiastic impressions of the Empire State Building: “If you’ve seen one skyscraper, you’ve seen them all.”

The trip is probably most remembered for the unlikely diplomatic incident over a proposed visit to Disneyland. It was argued that securing the site in advance would be too difficult. The Soviets were aware of this but, as Foreign Service officer Richard Townsend Davies remembers on The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training website:

…Khrushchev made great publicity about this, and he was attempting, in what I regard as typical Soviet fashion, to put the Americans on the defensive, and Henry Cabot Lodge – whom I had met and gotten to know a little bit during the few days when he visited Afghanistan and was a very nice man — in this kind of head-to-head confrontation with this very shrewd peasant, this very rough infighter, it took [Lodge] a while to figure out that he was being attacked, but he was, you know. Initially, he thought, well, he really wants to go to Disneyland. And maybe for all I know he did. However, my perception of it was that this had been worked out rather carefully, and it was a ploy. “Let’s say that you want to go to Disneyland. They of course will say, “No, it’s impossible,” and then you have already established your position as a demandeur, whose reasonable request, so far as the American people — the American people will say, why sure, of course, everybody wants to go to Disneyland…It’s a free country.”

However, his much-publicized travels to some extent demystified the Soviet Union’s leader who, in contrast to the more sinister Stalin, appeared accessible and down-to-earth. He ate a hot dog, met movie stars, and stayed with an Iowa farmer. Unfortunately, this thaw in the Cold War proved to be temporary. As politico.com recalls:

On returning to Moscow, Khrushchev insisted to his skeptical colleagues in the Politburo that Eisenhower was a reasonable man and that he could continue to deal with him through personal diplomacy. Another summit was set for the near future. Eisenhower also announced he would visit the Soviet Union in 1960. But it was not to be. On May 1, 1960, a Soviet surface-to-air missile shot down an American U-2 spy plane over Sverdlovsk, deep in Soviet territory, and the Soviets captured the pilot, Gary Powers.

Eisenhower initially denied knowledge of espionage flight, thus compounding the problem. The scheduled summit meeting in Paris was scrapped, as was Eisenhower’s planned visit to Moscow.

The following year saw Khrushchev’s famous shoe-banging performance at the United Nations, which for most Americans supplanted the more positive images of this visit. 

Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.

WNYC archives id: 150249Municipal archives id: LT8643

The purpose of the U.S. Open Government National Action Plan is to advance transparency, accountability, citizen participation, and technological innovation across government. Now, thanks to an effort supported by the General Services Administration, you have until October 2, 2017 – just a few more days – to share your ideas to advance open government and provide feedback on others’ suggestions using GitHub.

Github is a social coding platform that the federal government has adopted to gather public feedback on policies like the federal source code policy. The National Archives is using the site to allow the public to contribute to our current Agency Open Government Plan, and to foster discussion about our new Strategic Plan.

As the Archivist of the United States, one of my priorities has been to show how a small agency like the National Archives can not only contribute, but lead in fulfilling the vision of open government’s three principles: transparency, participation, and collaboration. Since 2010, the National Archives has made and delivered on close to two hundred specific commitments in our agency open government plans, and the National Archives has had responsibility for critical components of the U.S. Open Government National Action Plans, including leading work to modernize recordkeeping across the federal government and help agencies transition to a modern, electronic world.

There is always more to do, though. One of the commitments proposed by the National Archives for the Fourth U.S. Open Government National Action Plan is tightly aligned with the vision laid out in our new Strategic Plan to streamline digital access to our nation’s records and accelerate the adoption of electronic record-keeping practices by federal agencies. This proposed commitment requires NARA to no longer accept transfers of records to the National Archives in a non-digital format after December 31, 2022. In response to feedback the National Archives received on our Strategic Plan from staff and external commenters, we have updated the Plan to modified the language of this objective to recognize that NARA may need to accept a limited number of analog records after the deadline.

We are eager to hear from you! I hope you will take the opportunity to browse the ideas that have already been submitted and share your reactions. In addition to the commitment to streamline access to digital records, the National Archives has submitted several potential commitments involving the work of the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Ombudsman housed within the National Archives, the Office of Government Information Services (OGIS); these commitments include efforts to improve the efficiency of the FOIA process through the use of advisory opinions and to increase coordination between agency records management and FOIA offices.

We look forward to hearing your ideas and feedback, and to working with you to continue to drive forward open government.

Thanks to funding from the Friends of the Vancouver City Archives and the generous support of a private donor we are pleased to announce that over 6,800 photographs showing the 1976 Habitat Forum are now available online.

Habitat Forum compass rose painted on the Jericho Wharf by Lenore Barron and Frank York. Reference code: AM1671-: CVA 395-05267

Habitat Forum took place at Jericho Beach Park from May 27^th to June 11^th, 1976. It was a conference/exposition that happened in conjunction with the “official” U.N. Habitat conference. According to the Habitat Forum program, found in the Archives’ United Nations Conference on Human Settlements fonds, “Habitat  Forum is the collective name for the non-governmental activities related to Habitat: the United Nations Conference on Human Settlements.” Entry to the “official” UN Habitat conference was limited to government delegates, selected NGO officials and press. The Habitat Forum provided a space for members of the public to engage with the conference and monitor the U.N. sessions via closed circuit television remotely from the Forum site.

Habitat forum crowds in front of Hangar 3 with Bill Reid mural. Reference code: AM1671-: 2011-130.0208

The Habitat Forum program lists four main objectives for the conference:

• To increase public awareness around problems related to human settlements and the solutions required
• To build support and understanding around decisions and actions needed to manage these problems
• To co-ordinate the stance of NGO’s and public for presentation to official U.N. Habitat conference
• To encourage the U.N. to look to NGO’s and other organizations for expertise and input

In order to address these objectives, the staff and volunteers at Habitat Forum invited speakers, panelists, dance groups, performers and workshop leaders including: Mother Theresa, Buckminster Fuller, Pierre Trudeau and Margaret Trudeau.

Lead organizer Al Clapp with Margaret Trudeau at the Habitat Forum site. Reference code: AM1671-: 2011-130.0351

To better support the activities, participation and spirit of Habitat Forum the staff and volunteers, led by Al Clapp (pictured above), renovated and built an impressive site. A majority of the photographs show the construction, innovation, people and materials involved in this process. Most of the photographs were taken by Erol H. Baykal, crew member and Habitat Forum site photographer.

Habitat ID photo for Erol Baykal. Crew member ID photos were very useful for identifying individuals in the Habitat Forum photographs. Reference code: AM1671-: CVA 395-01087

Hangars and Habitat Forum site before construction. Reference code: AM1671-: 2011-130.0454

Habitat Forum general site plan. Reference code: AM1671-: CVA 395-05970

Habitat Forum staff and volunteers converted the five airplane hangars at Jericho Beach Park (former air force base) to an exhibition site for the Habitat Forum. They worked at the site from October 1975 until May of 1976 to prepare. Features of the purpose built site included: meeting rooms, theatres with custom bench seating, a stable, outdoor exhibitions, areas for food vendors including restaurants and snack bars, indoor exhibitions spaces, a bar, lounges, workshop space, wharf, stage and performance area, and more.

Here is a selection of photographs highlighting some of these features:

Custom built seating inside Hangar 5, the Plenary Hall. Reference code: AM1671-: 2011-130.0520

Blue dome, Habitat Forum outdoor exhibition. Reference code: AM1671-: CVA 395-07009

Maiden Japan, Japanese Food vendor. Reference code: AM1671-: 2011-130.1092

Habitat Forum bar in Hangar 7. Reference code: AM1671-: 2011-130.0656

Habitat Forum display about radioactivity, with human hair. Reference code: AM1671-: CVA 395-08351

Hannelore Evans, Habitat Forum banner designer and batik artist, in the banner studio with textiles. Reference code: AM1671-: CVA 395-06657

Habitat Forum drew big international crowds and was a chance to highlight the political and activist landscape of Vancouver and British Columbia. Various exhibitors, including vendors and local, national, and international organizations set up tables and engaged with visitors.

National Association of Friendship Centres and Indian Friendship Centre Association of B.C. table inside one of the Hangars at Habitat Forum. Reference code: AM1671-: CVA 395-07991

The Habitat Forum photographs are not only a rich resource for learning about the Habitat Forum, but they provide insight into the culture, style and political landscape of the 1970s. They also highlight local, national, and international personalities and depict unique views of Vancouver’s cityscape and Jericho Beach that have vastly changed since 1976. We hope you will enjoy looking through the images online. If you are interested to know more about the Habitat Forum and enjoyed these images, look for some of them to appear in Lindsay Brown’s new book Habitat ’76.

The new administration has required agencies to create strategic plans covering 2018-2022. Our updated Strategic Plan was circulated for public comment over the past couple of months. We asked for input and you gave it.  You can see the history of comments on our GitHub page.  With updates informed by those comments, we provided OMB our new Strategic Plan on September 11.

Photograph of Female Statue, The Future, Located near the Pennsylvania Avenue Entrance to the National Archives Building. “What is Past is Prologue” is written on the base of “Future.” National Archives Identifier 7657960

Some of the goals in the new plan include:

• By FY 2020, NARA will have policies and processes in place to support Federal agencies’ transition to fully electronic recordkeeping. We added this new objective under our Strategic Goal Connect with Customers based on comments from our customer Federal agencies who asked us to make a commitment to assist them in transitioning to a fully electronic environment.
• By December 31, 2022, NARA will, to the fullest extent possible, no longer accept transfers of permanent or temporary records in analog formats and will accept records only in electronic format and with appropriate metadata. We added the phrase “to the fullest extent possible” based on extensive feedback from both staff and external commenters. We modified the language of this objective to recognize that NARA may need to accept a limited number of analog records after the December 31, 2022 deadline.
• By FY 2020, NARA will have a career development program in place to support NARA’s transition to electronic records. We added this new objective under our Strategic Goal Build our Future through our People to make an express commitment to our staff that we will provide training and opportunities focused on electronic records and online access.

Your comments and suggestions have made our Strategic Plan a stronger document that describes a clearer vision for the future.  Check out the full plan at: https://usnationalarchives.github.io/strategic-plan/

“Power to the People!” Young Lords Puerto Rican activist Julio Roldan chanted from his holding cell in Manhattan’s infamous “Tombs” prison in 1970. A few hours later he was found dead, having hanged himself according to an official investigation, murdered by guards according to his supporters. In this press conference, civil rights attorney William vanden Heuvel answers questions and summarizes the findings of a committee appointed by Mayor Lindsay in the aftermath of Roldan’s death and the subsequent riot that eventually resulted in the closing of the facility. Calling the events “sad and tragic,” vanden Heuvel nevertheless maintains that evidence indicated Roldan did, in fact, commit suicide. He saves his wrath for the criminal justice system itself, which suffers from overcrowding and under-funding. The Manhattan House of Detention, as it is officially called, is operating at 151% capacity. Prisoners are doubled and tripled up. At Roldan’s arraignment, during which he yelled, “This is not justice! I have not seen my lawyer! You are doing this to me because I am a Puerto Rican!”, the judge, working straight through the day with no break, had less than two minutes to hear each case. The courtroom itself resembled “a crowded subway.”

Vanden Heuvel’s chief recommendation is the construction of a minimum security prison in Manhattan to both alleviate overcrowding and provide medical and psychiatric services for inmates who are either drug addicts or mentally ill. Indicating that the language of the report has been watered down, he urges that members of the City Planning Commission visit the Tombs or, if he had his way, be locked in a cell for a day. As an immediate fix, he presses for teams of lawyers and social workers to go from floor to floor in the jail, speaking directly to the prisoners, listening to their grievances, trying to give legal or humanitarian aid whenever possible. More Spanish-speaking personnel are also needed, considering the large Puerto Rican jail population. In addition, the prison guards are over-worked. Unless these conditions are addressed, he calls another riot “inevitable.”

Vanden Heuvel’s dire warnings proved all too true, though not perhaps in a way he could have foreseen. Mayor Lindsay had promised not to punish the leaders of the riot (they were holding five prison guards hostage) but after regaining control he had all the identified “troublemakers” shipped upstate…to the Attica Correctional Facility.

Julio Roldan’s case is still a matter of controversy. After a second examination of the body, the pathologist called in by Roldan’s family, Dr. David Spain, reversed his initial finding (reported in this press conference) of suicide, citing possible evidence of a beating. A grand jury empaneled to investigate charges of brutality against several guards after four other prisoners died in similar circumstances did not return an indictment. But, as the New York Times reported:

Mr. Vanden Heuvel…said the report of the grand jury was “neither complete nor useful in a public understanding of what happened” in the death of Mr. Moore. He said testimony presented to the jury was in conflict on several major points: on whether there had been “false official reports” and “the use of excessive force, including black jacks on prisoners.”

Roldan is still regarded as a martyr by the Puerto Rican nationalist movement. In a 2009 interview on Democracy Now! Juan Gonzalez, at one time the Young Lords Minister of Education, recalls the group taking over the First Spanish Methodist Church:

…when one of our members who had been arrested on a minor charge, Julio Roldan, was found hanged in his cell in the Tombs, and mysteriously hanged, because supposedly he should have had his belt removed before he was put into this particular wing. And this had been after a period when about, I think it was fifteen or sixteen blacks and Latinos had been found hanged in their cells in a variety of jails in New York City. It was a rash that many suspected were actually guards actually hanging black and Latino inmates. So we then did a second takeover or occupation of the People’s Church. This time it was an armed takeover of the church, and it lasted for several days, and demanding justice in the case of Julio Roldan. 

The fate of The Tombs itself was sealed by the negative publicity that came out after the riots. The New York City Legal Aid Society filed a suit on behalf of detained inmates. The trial revealed conditions which the judge found to be unconstitutional. The city closed the facility, although it is still argued if the treatment of inmates at their new address, Rikers Island, was any better.

This at times chaotic and refreshingly unscripted press conference, with Vanden Heuvel passionately calling for prison reform, complete with wailing police sirens in the background, provides a fascinating, if melancholy, portrait of New York City during one its most difficult times.

Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.

WNYC archives id: 151473Municipal archives id: T7687

Dr. George Fraser Black, a librarian for the New York Public Library and later the Associate Director of the Scottish National Museum of Antiquities in Edinburgh, was a distinguished researcher who was active in the late 1800s until his retirement in 1931. During this time, he researched and published on several topics, most notably Scottish history. His works include a history of Scottish Clans, several bibliographies on Scottish history, and an examination of the Romani language.

Much of Dr. Black’s research is devoted to looking at how modern Scotland formed and the influence of the Scottish people. A huge topic of interest within the realm of Scottish history was the poet Robert Burns. Among the materials are copies of Burns’s work, photo references, and images inspired by Burns’s poems.

Dr. Black compiled most of his research in a series of scrapbooks that included newspaper articles, photocopied book excerpts, and handwritten notes that he found relevant. The collection contains over 30 of these scrapbooks on a variety of topics from folklore to the history of Scottish Clans arranged alphabetically. Perhaps his most intriguing research involved witchcraft. Seven of the scrapbooks in the collection contains detailed information on trials, rumors, and myths surrounding witches and mythical creatures. These scrapbooks hold newspaper articles detailing witchcraft trials as late as the 1920s in the United States while also covering famous accounts from the Spanish Inquisition.

This collection is currently still being processed by the Special Collections & Archives team, but it will be available for the public to view soon.