This is a snapshot of a variety of data points we are tracking to measure how we are doing.  I am especially interested in trends as we focus more and more on digital access.  Is the investment paying off in terms of numbers of eyeballs on our content?  What impact does online access have on onsite visits?  Are our efforts around social media paying off?  Are we finding the people where they are?  And making it easy for them to discover our content?  And what difference has having a Wikipedian-in-Residence had?! You be the judge.

Crunching the numbers.

“Lancaster, Pennsylvania – Hamilton Watches.” Record Group 69: Records of the Works Progress Administration, 1922- 1944. National Archives, ARC ID 518443

Percentage of online users visiting archives.gov via mobile device in FY11: 4.6

Percentage of online users visiting archives.gov via mobile device in FY12: 10.2

Number of visits to all NARA facilities in FY11: 3,048,906

Number of visits to all NARA facilities so far in FY 12: 2,807,685

Number of visits Archives.gov in FY 11: 18,372,040 (so far in FY 12: 23,138,185)

Number of researcher visits to all NARA facilities in FY 11: 129,435

Number of written requests answered by all NARA offices in FY 11: 1,300,803

• Number of written requests (includes fax, letter, email) received by all NARA archival offices in FY

… [ Read all ]

“Is the Feminine Mystique a Mistake?” is the question posed at the beginning of this 1966 edition of Maincurrents, hosted by Lee Graham.

The panelists are Candy Jones, at that time known for her work as a model and as a “fashion and grooming expert”; Marlene Sanders, then one of the few female TV news correspondents; Gloria Steinem, described by the (female) host as “a very pretty freelance writer”; Peter Wyden, editor of The Ladies Home Journal; and Max Sapan, an ad agency executive. 

The place of women can fall into one of three categories, Ms. Graham suggests: The Betty Friedan school, in which every woman should get a job; the Demi-Feminine Movement, which advocates that women maintain their domestic presence but do part-time community service (“preferably unpaid”) as well; and the Freudian school, which states that a woman’s place is in the home.  Wyden contends that the lumping of all women together this way isn’t helpful. He sees the discontent of women in today’s society as “the restlessness of the native.” Men don’t suffer from this as much because they don’t have as much free time, whereas stay-at-home wives “get hysterical.” Sapan claims “the core of the problem lies with the woman herself. The woman does not know that she’s a woman.” This provokes a mix of laughter and disbelief from the women. Jones does agree that all women are different and that if a woman doesn’t want to work she shouldn’t have to. She, however, has been working since age 16. Sanders complains of working women being made to feel guilty for leaving their children and neglecting the housework. Steinem agrees that perhaps an unintended consequence of The Feminine Mystique is making many women who don’t want to work feel like they must. She quotes Simone de Beauvoir to the effect that if one does not have a métier, work is not particularly meaningful. She then suggests that Betty Friedan is “old-fashioned,” and that the taboo against women working is “not as big a problem as before.” However, when it’s suggested that the influence of The Feminine Mystique is overrated, that it is being puffed up solely by the media, she refers to the enormous response the book’s publication has received, indicating that “it must be speaking to a problem which exists.” But what, Wyden complains, “does poor old Dad do when he’s hungry or thirsty or doesn’t have his laundry?”

In this fascinating historical snapshot of the early days of feminism, one can see the germs of truth that led to many a stereotype. The men are snide and condescending — one of them persistently uses the term “Dear Lady” instead of learning their names — while the women are earnest to the point of humorlessness. There is, however, a shared sense of acknowledging some groundswell, if not earthquake, and an agreement that change is underway in the fundamental and until recently unquestioned parameters of male-female relations. What’s perhaps most interesting in retrospect is seeing how what was then considered a right to be fought for (a woman entering the job force) is now more often considered a duty. Work is no longer viewed as the panacea to feelings of frustration, as it is portrayed here, but more often seen as yet another cause. 

Jones (1925-1990) went on to become a well-known late-night radio host along with her husband, Long John Nebel. Their program dealt with tales of UFOs and the paranormal. In later years she became known for her claims that the CIA had hypnotized her and sent her on secret missions, which they then wiped from her memory.

Sanders (b. 1931) continued to have a distinguished career in broadcast journalism. She was the first woman to cover the Vietnam War, the first woman to anchor a national news cast, and the first woman to be named vice president of ABC News. She is the mother of Jeffrey Toobin, the well-known CNN legal analyst.

Wyden (1923-1998) went on to write several non-fiction books, notably Bay of Pigs: The Untold Story (1980), which won the Overseas Press Club Book Award, and Conquering Schizophrenia: A Father, His Son and a Medical Breakthrough (1998) about his attempt to care for his son Jeffrey, who suffered from mental illness. Another son, Ron Wyden, became senator from Oregon in 1996.

Steinem (b.1934) began her career as a journalist but quickly transcended that label to become one of the leaders of the women’s liberation movement. She first made a splash by writing an article about getting hired as a Playboy Bunny. Her 1969 article “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation,” defined, for many, the path the Women’s Movement was to take in the coming years.  In 1972 she co-founded Ms. magazine. Since then she has become a political as well as a social commentator, not confining her causes to questions of gender but branching out into speaking against the death penalty, economic injustice, and racism. She claims her agenda, as quoted in the website womenshistory.about.com:

…really is a revolution. Sex and race, because they are easy and visible differences, have been the primary ways of organizing human beings into superior and inferior groups and into the cheap labor in which this system still depends. We are talking about a society in which there will be no roles other than those chosen or those earned. We are really talking about humanism.

 

Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.

Second in a series about the BC Sugar records

While continuing to process our BC Sugar fonds, I had the pleasure of finding some cookbooks and they inspired me to try some historical recipes. Read on to see how they turned out.

“Great dessert ideas…try Rogers on ice cream!” Reference code: AM1592-S7-F1-: 2011-092.1557

Cookbooks are a favourite resource for social and cultural historians as well as scholars of gender studies and women’s studies. But the list of academics that use cookbooks as sources does not end there. Studying literature can be enriched by knowing what people were eating and cooking at various times. Other fields such as agricultural studies, economic botany and many branches of biology all have an interest in what people ate and what they grew to cook and eat. The first cookbook published in Canada was La cuisinière bourgeoise, published in Quebec City in 1825 (Driver, 2008). Our BC Sugar fonds includes several cookbooks, many of which were published by BC Sugar for consumers of their products.

2012 recreation of the above ad. Thank you Jill and Mandy! Photo by Jeffery Chong.

I am the highly suggestible type, so I brought ice cream and Rogers Golden Syrup in to work and sampled the combination with a couple of volunteers. We dressed up in our most inspiring knitwear and had a little photo shoot!

Recreation in progress. Photo by Heather Gordon.

Cooking trends come and go and in the time of television celebrity cooks and food blogs this happens rapidly. Creating and selling new food products can involve educating the public as to how to use new products. When BC Sugar first introduced Rogers’ Golden Syrup in the early 20^th century, consumers did not know what to do with it. Advertisements and the distribution of recipes remedied this. My Mom still enjoys Rogers’ Golden Syrup on her pancakes (check out the advertisement we featured in our Youtube video blog post). Mandy grew up enjoying it on her ice cream. The day we took this photo it was a pure sweet nostalgia Thursday for Mandy. A new treat for Jill and me!

The Rogers Golden Syrup cookbook in the palm of my hand. Photo by Jeffery Chong. Reference code : AM1592-S14. 845-A-4, folder 15.

Golden Chews recipe. p. 3.

Getting the ingredients out for making Golden Chews. For the ½ cup chopped nuts I used walnuts. Photo by Cindy McLellan.

There are many more creative ideas in the cookbooks published by BC Sugar than the advertisements that suggest using Rogers Golden Syrup on pancakes or ice cream. Looking through the selection of cookbooks and deciding what to make, I was drawn to this cute little book! I made the first recipe in it. I was inspired by the note at the bottom that reads: “Note: These make a tasty addition to any tea table.” In a modern cookbook I can see these being promoted as a healthy energy food; bran does not generally get used in fancy dessert baking anymore. Once I got started baking I realized that the recipe contains no mention of how long to bake these treats. Google results for ‘medium oven’ vary from 350˚ to 375˚. I tried 350˚ for 25 minutes and ended up baking them for 40 minutes. Waiting for them to cool completely meant that I cut them into squares and rolled in icing sugar early Monday morning! I failed to neatly score the square before cutting (the only part of the recipe I failed to follow). My tasters found the powdered sugar to be a little messy. But overall these chewy treats were a hit in the office; they were all gone before the end of the day!

Golden Chews on the shelf waiting to be taste tested by Archives staff. Photo by Cindy McLellan.

(Click to enlarge) Two pages from The Great West Cook Book (1908). The Archivist made Peanut Candy. Reference code : pending. pp. 10-11.

Ingredients on the boil waiting for the candy to be ‘done’ so it can be poured over the peanuts. Photo by Cindy McLellan.

My second recipe choice was drawn from The Great West Cook Book, published in 1908 by BC Sugar. Modern cookbooks have the ingredients listed, attractive photos, detailed instructions, and sometimes helpful Youtube videos. The recipes in old cookbooks are not at all arranged as we are accustomed. In this cookbook, each recipe is presented in paragraph form and the steps that would be obvious to the experienced cook are left out. I suppose they assume filling in these little details would be insulting. There were two key items missing from this recipe; the quantity of peanuts to use and any indicator of what would constitute the candy being ‘done!’ I cooked it to hard crack stage and this may have been too much. Everyone agreed that the candy was delicious but it did stick to ones teeth! 

Peanut Candy ready to be sampled! Photo by Cindy McLellan.

(Click to enlarge) The BC Sugar fonds includes several marketing reports from the Daily Province for BC Sugar. These date from the mid to late-1930s. The above is a sample page from one such report. Reference code: pending. (1935).

BC Sugar had a relationship with the Daily Province and their Modern Kitchen and Household Service Department. The company contributed to the demonstration kitchen and had recipes featured and published in the newspaper. In addition to the fascinating reports in the BC Sugar fonds about the Daily Province’s Demonstration Kitchen, the Archives has a copy of The Province cook book: tested recipes from the Province modern kitchen published in 1939.

(Click to enlarge) The United Farm Women of Alberta Cook Book includes an advertisement for BC Sugar. Reference code : pending. pp. 18-19.

The BC Sugar fonds includes more cookbooks than just the ones they published. This copy of the United Farm Women of Alberta Cook Book is only one example.

The world has changed since 1908, when the following recipe for ginger wine was published in The Great West Cook Book. In 1908, a person could go to the General Store to purchase the required 12 lbs of raisins for this recipe but in 2012, a supplier on the internet might be your best bet for a deal on bulk raisins!

(Click to enlarge) Excerpt from The Great West Cook Book (1908). Reference code : pending. pp. 30-31.

As mentioned in my first post about these records, the BC Sugar Co. Ltd. fonds is a large accession of records that will be made available in stages. Phase one, focusing on the Vancouver-specific business records, is currently being arranged, described and properly housed. Please follow our blog for announcements about the availability of these records.

In the meantime, please let us know if you make any of the recipes shown in this post. We’d love to hear how they turn out!

As a cataloging librarian, one of the questions I’m often asked about my job is “do you have to read a lot of the book (thesis, script, video…) when you catalog it?” The answer is usually “no” because most published materials have helpful indexes, tables of contents, blurbs, or external reviews to help sort out the subject matter. (Most librarians will tell you that a very long “to read someday” list is an occupational hazard, because we don’t have time to read all the cool things we see every day.) Cataloging unpublished manuscripts is a little different, requiring more skimming and historical detective work (of the type I discussed in a blog post from last year). Last week I cataloged an unpublished manuscript that was entirely hand-written. Deciphering that much handwriting was a first for me, and fascinating!

Rev. Royal Merriman Cole graduated from Amherst College in 1866 at the age of 27.¹ In the summer of 1868 he graduated from Bangor Theological Seminary, married Eliza Cobleigh (who had attended Mt. Holyoke Seminary), was ordained by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, and set sail from New York on August 15. They arrived in Erzroom (Erzurum), Turkey, on Sept. 30, 1868. Cole wrote in an 1873 letter to an Amherst professor: “I was able to take hold of the language with great earnestness, and have, I feel, succeeded beyond my best expectations. In six months I preached my first regular sermon…written in full, in the Armenian character. From that time on I have used simple notes and have now come to speak with about as much freedom, I think, as I should in English. Of course I have not so wide a range of words.” The Cole family lived in Erzurum from 1868 to 1898, and in Bitlis (also in Turkey, about 190 miles further southeast, near Lake Van) from 1899 until he retired in 1907. They returned to America on furloughs (of about one year in length) during 1875, 1889, and 1898.

Cole begins his narrative in ‘Interior Turkey Reminiscences: Forty Years in Kourdistan (Armenia)’ with their return journey after their first furlough in 1875. He notes that they were concerned about prospects of war in Turkey – “the political sky that way is lowering, and the future for that storm-tossed land, should the old ‘Eastern question’ be re-opened, seems ominous indeed.” But the home secretary of the ABCFM assured them that “it will blow over by the time you get there.” This turned out to be far from the case, and so the Coles were eyewitnesses on the eastern front of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878. The first half of ‘Reminiscences’ consists of Cole’s diary entries from May 1877 to May 1878, during which time Erzurum was attacked, besieged, and eventually surrendered to the Russians. Cole spent much of this time trying to provide famine relief and volunteering in the hospitals.

“June 26th (1877) …We have worked hard today to secure from the Government “red tape” orders so we can enter into active work for these poor soldier boys. For, grateful as the Government and others at the place might be, to think that we Christians were desireous of doing something to alleviate the sufferings of their needy soldiers, yet, from long experience, we knew better than to enter upon such responsible work without the formal, written endorsement from the powers that be…”

July 1st (1877) – [Their wedding anniversary. Eliza Cole and the children were staying for several months in Trebizond (Trabzon), on the coast of the Black Sea, which was safer.] “…I am glad to have the dear ones away from these exciting times and the bad air incident to so much sickness in the place. I have worked four long hours among the suffering ones to-day and I have found some desperate cases…”

Disease was a constant threat, and every member of the family was struck with typhoid or other illness during the following months. They buried two children and several missionary and medical friends.

“Nov. 24th, Saturday (1877), Oh, my God, what means this havoc of death in our home! Five weeks ago, and we were weeping over our Charlie because he was not, and now we stand distracted over a much more stunning blow dealt out to us…”

The second half of the manuscript summarizes various episodes from their life in Bitlis in the 1880s and 1890s. Some of Eliza Cole’s diary entries are also transcribed, including some from October 1895, when a massacre of Armenians occurred in Bitlis.

It appears that the original diaries are now located in Toronto at the private, non-profit Zoryan Institute, as they note on their website: “In 1997, the Zoryan Institute acquired the much sought after Cole Collection. This collection consists of some 9,100 densely hand-written pages, plus 900 photographs.”

‘Reminiscences’ was never published, although Cole went so far as to request a foreword from James L. Barton, who published several books about missionary work in Turkey.

Cole’s overseas service is one example of a rich historical tradition at Amherst College, which was originally founded mainly to educate future Christian ministers, and whose motto still is Terras Irradient – literally, “that they may illumine the lands.” Not surprisingly, there are numerous other diaries, photographs, and letters documenting alumni missionary work in the Archives & Special Collections. Many of these sources are being explored this semester by students in the class “Collaborative Art: Practice and Theory of Working with a Community” taught by Wendy Ewald and Fazal Sheikh.

The entire manuscript is in the process of being digitized, and will be available later this semester through the Amherst College Digital Collections portal. (When it is up, maybe I will find the time to actually read it all – I’ve added it to my list.)

¹All of Cole’s biographical information is from the Archives & Special Collections alumni biographical files and class files.

On December 11, 1991, Salman Rushdie “quietly ventured outside Britain and emerged” [1] to speak at a Columbia University dinner celebrating the 200th anniversary of the First Amendment. The thunderous applause that greets Mr Rushdie’s unexpected appearance sets the tone for his speech.

After being in hiding for one thousand days, Mr. Rushdie compares his existence to being inside a sinking balloon, where tough choices have to be made to keep it from dropping into the abyss. He peppers his speech with often bitter anecdotes and quotes from friends, opponents, and politicians. Mr. Rushdie enumerates differences between his ideal Islamic religion and what he calls “Actually Existing Islam.” Expressing several times that he refuses to “give in to despair,” one gets a sense of a man near the end of his rope, yet defiantly strong in his convictions.

[1] “A Conversation: Bollinger & Rushdie”, Columbia Magazine, Fall 2003

Article about the political rally

Framed letter from LBJ to Reverend Black

Entries from November 4, 1961 from the Lyndon B. Johnson Daily Diary Collection provide the background information that ties the newspaper article on the plaque to LBJ’s presence at the rally as well as to the letter.