Am 5. und 6. März 2016 findet der inzwischen 8. Tag der Archive statt. Die bundesweite Veranstaltung unter Federführung des Verbandes deutscher Archivarinnen und Archivare (VdA) will einen Rahmen bieten, um in der breiten Öffentlichkeit auf die Bedeutung archivischer Arbeit hinzuweisen. Sie wird wie in den Vorjahren unter einem (nicht verpflichtenden) Motto stehen. 2016 lautet es: “Mobilität im Wandel”.
Even in his eighties Frank Lloyd Wright had a wicked sense of humor. In 1953 the infamous architect was awarded a Gold Medal in Architecture at the American Academy and the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Another giant of architecture, Ralph Walker, presents the award and his speech begins like a bit of a roast. “Certainly you are neither a shy cowslip to be gathered casually on a lower pasture in Wisconsin, nor have you been a recluse cloistered in a garden high on Taliesin. On the contrary you have built not one but many Amazonian mousetraps and the world has beaten their well-worn and widening path in merited appreciation.”
The emboldened Wright does not hesitate to fire back, “Ladies and Gentleman I had no idea how outrageously inadequate this introduction by Mr. Ralph Walker would be.” He goes on to describe the feeling of winning awards, “I think it casts a shadow on my native arrogance and for a moment I feel coming on this disease, which is recommended so highly, of humility.” Despite all this good natured ribbing, Walker presents the award with glowing admiration and Wright accepts with all the modesty he can possibly muster.
Ralph Walker is credited with designing New York City’s first sky scraper, The Barclay-Vesey Telephone Building (now known as the Verizon Building) on 140 West Street, as well as many other art deco masterpieces. The awards were hosted by poet, writer and librarian Archibald MacLeish who you hear at the beginning and end of the recording.
Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.
WNYC archives id: 150189 Municipal archives id: LT3423
In this digital world we are increasingly creating, storing, and publishing material entirely in electronic forms. While this is great for the trees and other resources used in making paper, it introduces new challenges in the process of collecting and preserving materials.
The preservation needs of paper are pretty well understood. Guidelines for ideal environments (heat and humidity) and practices (handling and storage) have been in constant refinement for hundreds of years. The libraries, archives, and information science communities only began thinking about preservation for digital material comparatively recently. This first post of a three part series on digital preservation will take a look at the challenges unique to preserving digital materials, and why we must approach digital preservation differently than physical preservation.
Old hardware stored at the Claude Pepper Library.
What might be surprising to many is the relative fragility of digital assets. Estimates put the average operation life of conventional digital storage media at five years. These failures occur in more than just the physical components: magnetic media are sensitive to anything generating a magnetic field from batteries to the sun! Optical discs can suffer from manufacturing errors or material degradation making them unreadable. Additionally, once damaged, a digital resource is often completely lost. Physical material might be salvaged through conservation. Recovering digital assets after damage is much more difficult.
Complicating the practice of digital preservation is the fact that digital materials are meaningless without the correct hardware and software environments to render them. Consider a printed book. The information conveyed by a book is encoded with ink marks made on paper. So long as the rules of the encoding language (that is, the language it is written in) and the marks on the paper persist, the information in the book can be recalled. The ink won’t independently leave the paper and reorganize into different patterns and structures.
This is exactly what happens to digital information. The long strings of characters encoding digital assets is only intelligible to a narrow band of both software and specific hardware configurations. Many of us have likely encountered the situation of being unable to open an old file in a newer version of software. Software developers are constantly adding and removing features to their products, often with little attention to backwards compatibility. Merely storing the digital encoding (or bitstream) is meaningless without also storing instructions on how to rebuild it back into an understandable, rendered product.
These extra considerations compound when you consider the speed of technological advances, and the new behaviors and interactive experiences we’re building and sharing with our machines and networks. Even identifying what behaviors and functions of digital assets are important to intellectual understanding of the resource is a quagmire. Those of us thinking about digital preservation have ceded a pretty large head-start, and the race is constantly accelerating.
In the next posting of this blog series, I’ll cover some strategies currently being used by the digital preservation community. I’ll finish this series with a post what you can do yourself to safe-guard your digital works and memories.
At 4:30 on Monday, February 29, 2016, in the Rare Books Room of the Coates Library, Professor Judy Giesberg will draw back the curtain on the daily private life of Emilie Davis, an African-American living in Philadelphia during the Civil War. “The Memorable Days” website is the product of Dr Giesberg’s digital history project, which turned the contents of three years of personal diaries into a publicly accessible website. The students in Dr. Lauren Turek’s public history course (HIST-3392 “History, Memory, and Interpretation”) will be particularly interested in learning the details of transcribing, digitizing, and organizing these primary sources, and everyone in attendance, including the students in HIST-1360, Dr. Salvucci’s survey course “U.S. History through Reconstruction,” is likely to gain fascinating insights into the quotidian activities of a woman of color living in the North during 1863, 1864, and 1865, the span of years her diaries cover.
Dr. Geisberg earned her B.A. in history here at Trinity in 1988, went on to do her master’s and Ph.D. work at Boston College, and now teaches history at Villanova, specializing in the U.S. Civil War and in women’s history.
Virgil Hawkins, J. Raymond Henderson, and C.K. Steele, circa 1955. From 00/MSS 2006-013.
Reverend Charles Kenzie (C.K.) Steele Sr. arrived in Tallahassee during a significant time in its history. After graduating from the School of Religion at Morehouse College in 1938, and serving congregations in Montgomery, Alabama, and Atlanta, Georgia, Steele came to Tallahassee in 1952 as the newly-appointed pastor of Bethel Missionary Baptist Church. Reverend Steele later rose to local and national prominence as a civil rights activist during the Tallahassee Bus Boycott of 1956.
Presumably inspired by the 1953 bus boycott in Baton Rouge, Louisiana (led by Reverend T.J. Jemison, a friend of Steele’s), and the better-known 1955 bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, involving Dr. Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks, Florida A&M University (FAMU) students began boycotting Tallahassee city buses in late May 1956, after two black students were arrested for sitting in bus seats reserved for white passengers. A subsequent crossburning at the residence of the two students galvanized the FAMU student body and inspired them to action. The boycott quickly drew in community members as well, and an Inter-Civic Council was created to organize and maintain the boycott. Reverend Steele was elected as its president. Steele recognized the need for a local organization to take charge, for if a national organization like the NAACP were involved, the boycott would be vulnerable to charges of “outside agitation.” Steele was not just a figurehead, but endured many personal hazards while executing the boycott. He was arrested four times in a single day while operating a carpool for black people boycotting the bus, on charges of operating a transportation system without a franchise. He also endured the firebombing of his home (near the present-day site of Bethel Missionary Baptist Church). However, the boycott successfully brought attention to the segregation policies of the city bus system, and catalyzed the eventual integration of the buses two years later.
In an address to Florida State University Black Studies students in 1978 on the topic of non-violent resistance, Steele touched on meeting with Dr. King in Montgomery, the origins of the 1956 Tallahassee bus boycott, human nature, and the power of love:
In late 1956, noted civil rights organizer Bayard Rustin phoned Steele to ask him to lead a conference of Southern civil rights leaders. Steele respectfully declined, and suggested that Dr. Martin Luther King would be a more fitting leader for the group. Steele helped organize the first meeting of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in January 1957. When King was called away from the meeting in response to church bombings in Montgomery, it was SCLC vice-president Steele who conducted that first conference.
C.K. Steele’s legacy in Tallahassee is evident in many ways. In 1979, shortly before his death the next year from bone cancer, Steele was awarded an honorary doctorate by Florida State University, the first African-American so honored by FSU. Appropriately, the current hub of the city bus system is named C.K. Steele Plaza, featuring a sculpture of Steele. Bethel Empowerment Foundation, Inc. , a sister organization to Steele’s former congregation at Bethel Missionary Baptist Church, has operated the Steele-Collins Charter Middle School since 1996, honoring both Reverend Steele and former Florida governor LeRoy Collins for their work in advancing civil rights in Tallahassee and beyond.
Tallahassee Civil Rights Oral History Collection (01/MSS 1990-001). Special Collections & Archives, Florida State University Libraries, Tallahassee, Florida. http://purl.fcla.edu/fsu/MSS_1990-001
Rory Grennan is Manuscript and Instruction Archivist at Florida State University Libraries Special Collections & Archives.
In a period when the film critic was becoming more and more integral and popular ideas about the image began to circulate in everyday discussion, silent films, and especially their stars, became increasingly interesting to the general public. Lindsay Anderson’s personal collection of film books houses a number of picture books from this era: collections of stills and glamour shots, occasionally accompanied by descriptions of films or brief histories. These books, besides providing context, stories, and interesting pictures, are a window to two worlds – that of silent cinema and that of its ‘70s revival – which speak to our own.
The biggest difference between these picture books and the few of this kind that were published before 1970 is the shift in intended audience. Older books, like the 1959 Classics of the Silent Screen, call on people’s memories. The introduction appeals to a certain generation, stating its aims as “a rich sampling of some of the highspots of the silent era… to bring back happy memories to those who remember the films and players and to stimulate interest and an eagerness to see them among those who are too young.” For later books, like The Heart of Hollywood or Hollywood Glamor Portraits, the aim becomes more to teach readers about the past and to create a kind of glamorous nostalgia.
Sometimes, the aim is more concrete, as in “ Grandma’s Scrapbook” of Silent Movie Stars , which covertly documents the worth of famous silent actors’ signed photos and teaches readers to distinguish between real and fake signatures while still providing a dizzying collage of artfully assembled glamour shots.
A selection of titles from Lindsay Anderson’s book collection.
Of course, there were a number of reasons for this revival of interest in Old Hollywood, whether more about the profit to be gained or the pure nostalgia involved. It has been argued that we are experiencing another such revival in the 21st century, but for a much different reason. Slideshows, articles, and “best of” lists from well-known companies like TCM or AFI have in many ways taken the place of these picture books. Widespread accessibility to the Internet means wider access to silent films which would otherwise be much more difficult to find. All the same, these books are an enjoyable window into the past, and a reminder that Old, Old Hollywood is not always so different from our own.
We here at Special Collections and Archives would like to wish George Washington a happy birthday. Though President’s Day was originally created to honor our nation’s first Commander in Chief, many states have since adapted it into a joint celebration which includes Abraham Lincoln’s and George Washington’s birthdays.
President’s day, federally known as Washington’s Day, originally fell on George Washington’s birthday, February 22 but in 1971 was moved to the 3rd Monday of February under the Uniform Monday Holiday Act. Montana, Minnesota, Utah and Colorado all recognize today as an official holiday honoring both Washington and Lincoln, whose birthday was on February 12th. With election season in full swing, we’d like to take the time to honor all of the United States’ presidents.
Portrait of Washington in his colonel’s uniform – The Story of WashingtonProfile of President Abraham Lincoln from the New York Herald Newspaper – April 15, 1965
The Adventures of Valentine Vaux, or, The Tricks of a Ventriloquist / by Timothy Portwine
This is another “penny dreadful” (you can read an earlier post about others in our collection). “Timothy Portwine” was actually the prolific Thomas Peckett Prest, who also wrote many parodies (or plagiarisms!) of Dickens’ works under the pseudonym “Bos.” Prest or his contemporary James Malcolm Rymer are usually credited with the authorship of The String of Pearls, or, The Barber of Fleet Street, in which the character Sweeney Todd had his first appearance. Valentine Vaux is a parody/plagiarism/lampoon of Henry Cockton’s The Life and Adventures of Valentine Vox, the Ventriloquist.
In my earlier post I referenced the Barry Ono Collection of Penny Dreadfuls held by the British Library. Since that time, a new resource has become available: researchers at Amherst, Mount Holyoke, Smith, or UMass Amherst now have access to a digitized version of that same collection via Nineteenth Century Collections Online(Amherst College log-in required).
Our copy of Valentine Vaux happens to have a great ownership inscription, in this case a kind of “borrower beware” statement:
The Oblate Sisters of Providence is the first successful Roman Catholic sisterhood in the world established by women of African descent. It was the work of a French-born Sulpician priest and four women, who were part of the Caribbean refugee colony which began arriving in Baltimore, Maryland in the late 18th century. The order founded the oldest continuously operating school for black Catholic children in the United States and is still educating children in Baltimore. A grant from the NHPRC helped the Oblate Sisters process and make available the historical photograph and scrapbook collection of approximately 16,000 photographs dating from the 1850s to 2003, including this touching image of orphans under their care.
Early 20th century photograph from the St. Frances Academy School, courtesy Oblate Sisters of Providence
Lena Horne
Lena Horne (1917–2010) was an American singer, dancer, actress, and civil rights activist. In a recording preserved by Pacifica Radio Archives with NHPRC support, Horne discusses her life and career, civil rights, Billie Holiday, Joe Lewis, Humphrey Bogart, and other people in her life. You can listen at https://soundcloud.com/pacificaradioarchives/lena-horne-1966-interview
Lena Horne publicity photo, c. 1950s
The Auburn Avenue Researcher Libraries
The Auburn Avenue Researcher Libraries in Atlanta received funds from the NHPRC to digitize and make Web-accessible eleven late 19th and mid-20th century manuscript collections that document the historical development of education for African Americans, primarily in the South, from the early 1860s to the early 1950s. One collection is the archives of Annie L. McPheeters, one of the first African American professional librarians in the Atlanta Public Library and an influential proponent of African American culture and history. Educated at Clark University in Atlanta, she earned a degree in English, with a minor in education in 1929. During the early part of her career, she served as city and county librarian at the Greenville Public Library, where she drove the bookmobile throughout the county’s rural areas, seeing first-hand the desire of many African Americans to learn and have access to books. In 1934 she took a job at the Auburn Branch of the Atlanta Public Library as an assistant librarian. She set out to remedy the branch’s problems of low library use by developing several initiatives, including the Adult Education Project, and launched the Negro History Collection. Two years later, she was promoted to full librarian, becoming one of the first African American professional librarians in the Atlanta Public Library. Her papers are housed in the Archives Division of the Auburn Avenue Research Library.
Grace Marilynn James, M.D.
Grace Marilynn James, M.D., (1923-1989) spent her life caring for the African American community of Louisville, Kentucky, who often had little access to regular health care. She was the first African American woman on the staff of Louisville Children’s Hospital and on the faculty at the University of Louisville School of Medicine, and served as a role model and advocate for African Americans considering a career in medicine. The National Library of Medicine includes Dr. James in their special online exhibition “Changing the Face of Medicine: Celebrating America’s Women Physicians.” The University of Louisville holds Dr. James’s papers, and they were processed through a grant from the NHPRC. A finding aid is available through the Kentucky Digital Library.
Dr. Grace M. James, c. 1953, with a young patient. Photo courtesy David James, National Library of Medicine
Thomas “Blind Tom” Wiggins
Thomas “Blind Tom” Wiggins (1849 – 1908) was an African-American musical prodigy. Born into slavery, he began composing music at age five, and he was hired out at the age of eight years to concert promoter Perry Oliver, who toured him extensively in the US, performing as often as four times a day. He was called the “human mockingbird” and was said to be able to reproduce songs after hearing them a single time. During the 19th century, he was one of the best-known American performing pianists, performing at the White House for President Buchanan in 1860. Geneva Handy Southall began researching “Blind Tom” during her Ph.D. studies, and she later wrote three books: Blind Tom: the Post-Civil War Enslavement of a Black Musical Genius (1979), The Continuing Enslavement of Blind Tom: the Black Pianist-Composer (1983), and Blind Tom, the Black Pianist Composer: Continually Enslaved (1999). She spent more than 30 years researching Blind Tom’s life and music and also made the first recording of his music. She was inducted into the Black Musicians Hall of Fame in 1988 and was a former board member of the National Association of Negro Musicians. The NHPRC funded the preservation of Dr. Southall’s papers at Emory University. A documentary on “Blind Tom,” with contributions by Dr. Southall, is online at http://vimeo.com/56242237
Arabella Chapman
One of our favorite collections was truly hidden. The Arabella Chapman Project is a great example of how archives connect with the classroom to harness the power of the crowd and make historical records vibrant. It all started with an NHPRC grant to the Clements Library at the University of Michigan to create finding aids for over 1,600 “hidden” collections. Among the records were photograph albums which had originally belonged to Arabella Chapman (1859-1927), an African American woman from Albany, New York. The albums were assembled from 1878 to 1900 using portraits taken from the 1860s to the turn of the century. The photos include Arabella, her family, friends, and admirers, and copies of pictures of well-known public figures–including Lincoln, Douglass, and others.
Arabella Chapman tintype, c. 1865. Clements Library, University of Michigan
During fall semester 2014, University of Michigan Professor Martha Jones’s African American Women’s History class embarked on a detailed examination of the albums to try to learn what they could about Arabella, her family and friends, and the role of photography in African American life in the late 19th century. Last spring, the students launched a website devoted to the Chapman albums. The Arabella Chapman Project includes scans of the album pages, genealogical information, maps, texts on the history of photograph albums, a portal for crowdsourcing more information, and more. They’ve published a series of questions and mysteries behind the images. And they’re using social media to reach out to a broader audience and to show how all black lives matter.
The Arabella Chapman Project is a fascinating approach to teaching history through historical records, and they are looking for your help. Recognize someone? Know something? Join the crowd in adding more layers to this piece of the American Story.
FSU Heritage Protocol & University Archives, a division of Special Collections & Archives received a donation from The Pride Student Union in June 2013. The donation included over five decades of history from this student organization. The history between FSU and Pride is a story of a brittle, sometimes broken relationship, but the passing of their records from Pride to Heritage Protocol & University Archives documents how much the relationship has massively improved.
HPUA_2013-0607 Pride Student Union Collection
Before the records were relocated to Heritage Protocol & University Archives, they were “sitting idle & unorganized in four file cabinets,” said former Pride Student Union Secretary Jason Miller. Now the fifty plus years of history is in its final stages of processing (archives jargon for arranging, organizing and sorting a collection) and is almost ready for public viewing.
As the processor of this collection, along with former Graduate Assistants Rebecca Bramlett (until July 2015) and Katherine Hoarn (until August 2015), I can tell you that not only has it been a complete joy to organize and arrange this history, but it has also been an educational and eye-opening experience.
This is the history of not only The Pride Student Union, which had undergone eight name changes since their formation in the late 1960s, but the history of FSU. As Jason Miller stated in a 2013 article with FSUNews news editor Blair Stokes,
“What it comes down to is making sure students at Florida State know that our history is part of Florida State’s history. Even though we aren’t the majority, we’ve always been here. Our history needs to be preserved and understood for future generations to appreciate.”
Appreciation, scholarship, stewardship and respect for the history of this student organization and their records is the way I’ve approached organizing and processing this collection. The Pride Student Union Collection contains administrative records, correspondence, events, legislation, activism, photographs, promotional materials, newspaper, journal and magazine clippings produced and collected by the student organization since the late 1960s. The collection is arranged chronologically and includes issues that affected the student organization, local LGBTQ+ organizations and the LGBTQ+ community in Florida and throughout the United States.
I cannot say enough how much of a joy and honor processing this collection has been and how much I’ve learned both professionally and personally from this experience.
In our great enthusiasm for all things Valentine’s Day, we’d like to offer you this sensible yet romantic 19th century medical meditation on the nature of love.
It’s drawn from an 1851 edition of Buchan’s Domestic Medicine: Or the Family Physician. (I’m pleased that this volume contains an entire section on “The Passions”.)
Love is perhaps the strongest of all the passions: at least, when it becomes violent, it is less subject to the control either of the understanding or will than any of the rest. Fear, anger, and several other passions, are necessary for the preservation of the individual, but love is necessary for the continuation of the species itself. It was therefore proper that this passion should be deeply rooted in the human breast.
Though love be a strong passion, it is seldom so rapid in its progress as several of the others. Few persons fall desperately in love all at once. We would therefore advise every one, before he tampers with this passion, to consider well the probability of his being able to obtain the object of his love. When that is not likely, he should avoid every occasion of increasing it. He ought immediately to fly the company of the beloved object; to apply his mind attentively to business or study; to take every kind of amusement; and, above all, to endeavor, if possible, to find another object which may engage his affections, and which it may be in his power to obtain.
When love becomes a disease, it is not easily cured. Its consequences, in this case, are often so violent, that even the possession of the beloved object will not always remove them. It is therefore of the greatest importance early to guard against its influence; but when the passion has already taken too deep hold of the mind to admit of being eradicated, the beloved object ought if possible to be obtained; nor should this be deferred for every trifling cause. Those who have the disposal of young persons in marriage are too ready to trifle with the passion of love; such, for the most sordid considerations, frequently sacrifice the future health, peace or happiness of those committed to their care.
Every day, we celebrate the remarkable contributions of African Americans to the American Story. The National Archives contains millions of records related to the interactions of African Americans with the Federal government—from the Emancipation Proclamation to the millions of historical records ranging from the Census to military service.
The National Archives grant program, our National Historical Publications and Records Commission, extends the reach of the agency and connects to thousands of collections across the country at state and local governments, colleges and universities, historical societies, and other nonprofit organizations. Over the past 50 years, the NHPRC has awarded grants to projects to document black lives.
Following emancipation, the quest for equal rights is documented in the early 20th century records such as Booker T. Washington Papers and a microfilm edition of the W.E.B. Dubois Papers to the latter decades with the papers of such civil rights leaders as Clarence Mitchell, Ted Berry, the archives of Mary McLeod Bethune and the National Council of Negro Women, and the Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. Archives from the history of Boston Desegregation (some of which are now part of the National Archives DocsTeach site) to the preservation of film interviews from the landmark PBS series “Eyes on the Prize” are but some of the many collections of interest for students of American civil rights history.
The Members of the Public Interest Declassification Board (PIDB) congratulate Mr. John W. Ficklin on his January 2016 retirement from government service, completing his forty-three year tenure at the White House as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Records and Access Management at the National Security Council. In his capacity as Senior Director, Mr. Ficklin was responsible for declassification of White House records as well as other information and records management duties. He remained a keen partner of the PIDB in its undertaking to promote public access to an accurate and thorough documentation of significant national security decisions and activities.
Mr. William Leary, Acting Chair of the PIDB and previous Senior Director for Records and Access Management, credits Mr. Ficklin, in 1984, with initially transforming the mainly paper-based White House records management infrastructure to a restructured electronic / digital system of information governance. Of his many accomplishments during his tenure, Mr. Flicklin has overseen the release of over 2,500 previously classified President Daily Briefs from the administrations of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. Mr. Ficklin chaired the Interagency Security Classification Panel (ISCAP), as well as supported the establishment of the National Declassification Center (NDC) and the processing of its 360 million page backlog of records.
More recently, Mr. Ficklin dedicated much of his efforts to the President’s transparency and open government initiatives, including the advancement of two key commitments in the Open Government National Action Plans, transforming the security classification system and streamlining declassification. He chaired the interagency Classification Reform Committee (CRC), a White House-led Steering Committee dedicated to advancing modernization efforts for classification and declassification. Among its many accomplishments was to initiate the successful piloting by the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Archives of technological tools to automate decision-support in declassification review. The CRC continues to meet under the direction of Mr. John P. Fitzpatrick, former Director of the Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO). Mr. Fitzpatrick assumed Mr. Ficklin’s previous role as Senior Director for Records and Access Management at the NSC.
Mr. Ficklin’s distinguished career, as well as his family’s historic service at the White House, were the subjects of a moving article in last Sunday’s Washington Post. You can read the article here.
The PIDB thanks Mr. Ficklin for his service to the country and its citizens. The members are grateful for the many years of cooperation they have had working with Mr. Ficklin and wish him a rewarding and well-deserved retirement.
A mixed bag is the best way to describe this 1949 recording of WNYC’s Tenth Annual Music Festival. Ostensibly featuring jazz, the program also includes healthy doses of blues, ragtime, and the just plain odd. First up is jazz clarinetist Tony Parenti. Although a fine player of Dixieland and swing, here he is presented as an exemplar of ragtime, playing Joplin’s Maple Leaf Rag as well as Blues in Ragtime and High Society. He is followed by the blues in the person of Huddie Ledbetter.
“Leadbelly,” still in strong voice despite his death only a few months later from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, belts out Good Morning Blues and several other songs. Sadly, his guitar is barely audible. The French-born jazz critic Charles Delaunay is brought in to introduce pianist Joe Sullivan, who is asked about “the Chicago sound.” In what becomes a recurring and amusing motif, Sullivan mumbles that he would rather play than talk, launching into Honeysuckle Rose and then his most famous original composition, the all-too-prophetically-entitled Gin Mill Blues.
Wellman Brodie and Gus Aiken come on next. They also seem reluctant to talk about their time in Chicago, instead teaming up with vocalist Ann Lewis who sings Fish Out of Water and Jailhouse Blues. There is then a weirdly extended segment with John “Knocky” Carter, a marginal musical figure but at the time a Professor of English at Columbia University. The interviewer tries to tie in Carter’s love of jazz with his thesis on the Elizabethan pamphleteer and dramatist Robert Greene! When that fails he quizzes him about his work on the Edwardian satirist H. H. Munro (Saki.) “Knocky” deflects these questions, claiming to be “a jazz musician at heart,” and plays rather tame versions of The Grace and Beauty Rag and Kansas City Stomp.
Ruby Smith is an odd figure in the history of blues. She was Bessie Smith’s niece by marriage and actually became, before the term existed, an “impersonator,” once pretending to be her famous aunt onstage and channeling the distinctive Bessie Smith sound in recordings. Here, she continues what is almost a novelty act, singing Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out and Backwater Blues in the style of Bessie, before frankly admitting that she’d, “Like to do ‘Ruby,’ now.” She then sings a much more swinging tune, Hit That Jive, Jack.
Next up is Johnny Windhurst, a much-admired but rarely recorded cornet player. Windhurst had a great reputation in the jazz world but seems not to have relished the musician’s life, preferring to live with his mother in Poughkeepsie, only touring occasionally. He died at the age of fifty-four. He also refuses to say much, letting his horn do the talking in Somebody Loves Me and I May Be Wrong.
By now we seem to be squarely in the mainstream of 1949 jazz, but then out of left field comes Brownie McGhee, the blues singer and guitarist inextricably linked with harmonica genius Sonny Terry. He also brushes aside the interviewer’s questions, leading all the musicians who have stuck around in a rendition of The Boogie Blues. As the music fades, the announcer tells listeners we will “take a jump from swing to serious” as a program of “American choral music” follows. In fact, we have been listening to the very music this era will be remembered by.
Huddie Ledbetter (1888-1949) had a storied two-part career, spending the first part of his life as an itinerant musician, farm laborer, and sometimes-convict. Discovered by Alan Lomax and brought East, he then became the darling of the left, performing in clubs as well as political rallies and union meetings. His influence on the subsequent folk music revival cannot be overestimated. As the website for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame (to which he was inducted in 1988) notes:
His keening, high-pitched vocals and powerful, percussive guitar playing commanded attention, and he became known as “the King of the Twelve-String Guitar.” … Ironically, the Weavers sold 2 million copies of their recording of Lead Belly’s “Goodnight, Irene” shortly after his death. “It’s one more case of black music being made famous by white people,” Pete Seeger, one of the Weavers, said in 1988…. “It’s a pure tragedy he didn’t live another six months, because all his dreams as a performer would have come true.”
Brownie McGhee (1915-1996) was a multi-faceted performer. Although chiefly remembered for his partnership with Sonny Terry (the two toured for forty-five years but during the last fifteen did not speak), his more lasting contributions may have been in the field of rhythm and blues. The website allmusic.com points out:
Together, McGhee and Terry worked for decades in an acoustic folk-blues bag, singing ancient ditties like “John Henry” and “Pick a Bale of Cotton” for appreciative audiences worldwide. But McGhee was capable of a great deal more. Throughout the immediate postwar era, he cut electric blues and R&B on the New York scene, even enjoying a huge R&B hit in 1948 with “My Fault”…McGhee didn’t limit his talents to concert settings. He appeared on Broadway for three years in a production of playwright Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1955, and later put in a stint in the Langston Hughes play Simply Heaven. Films (Angel Heart, Buck and the Preacher) and an episode of the TV sitcom Family Ties also benefited from his dignified presence.
Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.
WNYC archives id: 72582, 150187 Municipal archives id: LT3177, LT5361
This week’s Bad Children of History come from a treasure trove of misbehavior: Gelett Burgess’s 1909 book Blue Goops and Red: A Manual of Polite Deportment for Children who would be Good, Showing How & How Not to Behave Everywhere. (This book is also a treasure trove of illustrations with a flippable half-page that changes the scene–I’m certain there’s a name for these, but I don’t know what it is.)
Each two-page spread of Burgess’s book has a rhyme about an occasion in which one could behave or misbehave, facing an illustration showing (blue) goops with poor deportment, and then, after one flips the half-page, (red) goops behaving properly. Here’s a topical example:
Oh, isn’t it a pity,
When valentines are pretty,
To send the horrid, comic ones to me?
But often in the city
Some children think they’re witty,
And so I get the kind I hate to see!
Two notes here: one, are the goops actually children? They look sort of like… gingerbread people, although their parents seem to be definitively human. Two, I think it behooves the narrator to consider why children send him or her insulting valentines, but I suppose that’s beside the point.
Here’s the half-page flipping feature I mentioned earlier. Look at those bad goops jeering over a so-called valentine of an old maid while their overly-indulgent parents look on! Wait… wait… look at those nice goops with their tidy envelopes and their relaxed human parents!
Blue Goops and Red also has some absolutely fantastic end-papers. Look at these! Goops galore!
If you haven’t made it to the Providence Public Library to see Scott Kelley‘s nautical paintings inspired by our Nicholson Whaling Collection, I recommend you hightail it over here! The paintings are truly stunning, and we’re taking down the exhibit this Friday morning, February 12th.
Scott’s paintings are on display on the 3rd floor of the library, in the cases outside of Special Collections, and can be viewed during the library’s open hours today and tomorrow.
Encuentros entre líneas: Los archivos de Tito Caula http://www.el-nacional.com/ 10/02/2016
La editorial española La Fábrica publicó el primer libro sobre un fotógrafo venezolano como parte de su Biblioteca Latinoamericana. La obra del artista argentino-venezolano salió por fin a la luz luego de años de trabajo
Las sillas de la librería Lugar Común estaban ya todas llenas a las 10:50 de la mañana. La mayoría guardadas solo por un bolso mientras sus dueños paseaban entre los libros saludando a los presentes. Una vez más, el lugar estaba a tope. Todos esperaban las palabras de Sandra Caula y Diana López que presentarían el libro Tito Caula sobre el reconocido fotógrafo.
“Este trabajo comenzó a pensarse hace 10 años”, inició diciendo la directora del Archivo Fotografía Urbana. Diana López estuvo a cargo no solo del evento del pasado sábado 30, sino que fue la cabeza de la coordinación de este enorme proyecto. El archivo, nos cuenta, reunió primero unas 1000 fotos que servirían a la editorial La Fábrica (España) para armar la colección que publicarían como PhotoBolsillo.
Tito Caula retrató la ciudad. Fue capaz de crear imágenes que narraban una Venezuela llena de cambios, de progresos, fruto del desarrollo descontrolado de los años 60 y 70. Caula fue un retratista, un reportero y también fue maestro; sin embargo, “no existía, era apenas una referencia, porque no era autor, porque no escribía”. Así hablaban de él sus discípulos ahí presentes, reunidos como quien celebra al padrino de una promoción de egresados. Porque Caula les enseñó a todos ellos.
Sandra Caula, promotora cultural y –más importante en ese día– la hija del fotógrafo, tomó la batuta y leyó algo que describiría el trabajo de su padre. Narra: “Fueron Vasco Szinetar y William Niño Araque quienes se acercaron a nosotras y se propusieron reunir, desde nuestros archivos en casa, la mayor cantidad de fotos”. Así arrancaron el proyecto que en el 2015 vio la luz. Su trabajo fue expuesto en Foto España donde fue seleccionado entre las 10 mejores exhibiciones y de ahí pasó a formar parte de la Colección.
La alianza entre el Archivo de Fotografía Urbana y La Fábrica quiere dar a conocer la obra de diferentes fotógrafos venezolanos como parte de una colección dedicada al PhotoBolsillo. Este es el séptimo libro de su biblioteca pero es apenas la primera publicación de las cuatro que se tienen planificadas sobre venezolanos. Por ahora se espera el próximo sobre Alfredo Cortina.
Tito Caula, el libro, reúne 63 imágenes de aquellas recogidas por el Archivo, tomadas entre 1945 y 1978. Lorena González Inneco –docente, ensayista y curadora– Vasco Szinetar –fotógrafo, artista, editor y curador– escriben el prólogo. Las fotografías dibujan el panorama social y político de la Venezuela que Caula convirtió en su hogar, y con el pasar de los años, se transformaron en un símbolo de nuestra historia contemporánea.
El sábado volvió a reunirse Caula con su familia. Con sus hijas, sí, y con un enorme grupo de fotógrafos que le recuerda con el respeto que merece ser uno de los grandes “retratistas” de nuestra ciudad. Esa mañana no dejó nunca de entrar gente a saludarle.
Especialistas exigen aprobación de Ley General de Archivos http://eleconomista.com.mx/ 10/02/2016
Especialistas urgieron al Senado de la República a aprobar una Ley General de Archivos al advertir que es el primer eslabón para el acceso a la información, derecho que ni siquiera las investigaciones en materia de seguridad pueden sesgar.
Jesús Peña Palacios, representante adjunto en México del Alto Comisionado de las Naciones Unidas para los Derechos Humanos, dijo que la utilización de información para fines de investigación criminal no debe ser un obstáculo para el acceso a archivos que contiene violaciones graves a los derechos humanos; en todo caso, agregó, se deberán tomar las medidas que permitan proteger los datos de las víctimas.
En su participación en el seminario “Ley General de Archivos: La preservación de la memoria colectiva y el derecho a la verdad en México”, que se llevó a cabo en el Senado, recomendó maximizar el acceso público a los archivos históricos, particularmente a aquellos que contienen información sobre violaciones graves a los derechos humanos.
Lourdes Morales Canales, de la Red por la Rendición de Cuentas, expuso en el que el proyecto de Ley General de Archivos que prevalece en el Senado tiene varios puntos preocupantes. Lo que alarma, expuso, es que el Consejo General de Archivos lo presida el Secretario de Gobernación.
La directora general del Archivo General de la Nación, Mercedes de Vega Armijo, externó que la información debe ser accesible, inteligible, auténtica, segura e íntegra, ya sea pública o reservada.
España pierde uno de los grandes archivos históricos del siglo XX
http://cultura.elpais.com/ 10/02/2016
La Fundación Castañé dona a la universidad de Harvard una parte de su legado. Su presidente lo ofreció a Cultura pero no hubo acuerdo para que se quedara en Madrid
23 de marzo de 1945, antes de cruzar el Rhin. El mariscal Montgomery (derecha), con los generales Ridgeway, Simpson y Dempsey.
Más de 2.700 documentos sobre los conflictos del siglo XX han sido donados por la Fundación José María Castañé a la Universidad de Harvard. Cartas, telegramas, informes, fotografías de Hitler, Stalin, Churchill, Franco, De Gaulle… Papeles que desvelan aspectos cruciales de la Rusia de los zares y la posterior revolución, las dos guerras mundiales, el Holocausto, la bomba atómica, el desembarco de Normandía, el plan Marshall… Uno de los legados privados más importantes de Europa que será custodiado por la Haughton Library de Boston, tras formalizarsedo su entrega el año pasado sin ninguna contraprestación económica.
Todo se podía haber quedado perfectamente en España. Pero los contactos entre la fundación y el Gobierno del PP para darle un asilo y un cuidado públicos no prosperaron. Las conversaciones a primer nivel con el ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte en tiempos de José Ignacio Wert, que visitó personalmente el archivo, quedaron en nada.
Lo que no parecía recomendable para España resulta perfectamente válido para Harvard. De hecho, tres universidades estadounidenses mostraron su interés por los contenidos de la Fundación Castañé: Princeton, Yale y la institución que finalmente se ha quedado con los documentos. No se trata de todos los fondos de la misma pero sí una buena parte: alrededor del 60%. Otra, la del periodo de la Segunda República, la Guerra Civil y el primer periodo de la dictadura de Franco, ha quedado en manos de la Residencia de Estudiantes y en la propia sede de la institución, en Madrid. Para Leslie A. Morris, encargada de la Haughton Library de Harvard, “el legado tendrá un impacto significativo en el desarrollo de nuestras colecciones y en la comunidad investigadora internacional, que dispondrán de un acceso fácil a estos importantes documentos”. Harvard mostró un interés inmediato por el contenido de la Fundación Castañé: “Por su gran fortaleza en los conflictos del siglo y muy particularmente la segunda guerra mundial”, añade Morris, encargada de firmar el acuerdo en Madrid.
Una catarsis global
En sus 20 años de funcionamiento, la Fundación ha recopilado todo tipo de materiales referentes a ese periodo de catarsis global. Inició su andadura con la donación personal que depositó su fundador, José María Castañé, empresario aficionado a la historia contemporánea, que a lo largo de su vida ha reunido una impagable colección con manuscritos de Franco, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Churchill o De Gaulle, y con documentos que arrojan luz sobre el funcionamiento de los campos de concentración, diversas matanzas orquestadas por regímenes totalitarios, operaciones como el desembarco de Normandía o el proceso de Núremberg.
En sus bases fundacionales, la Fundación Castañé refleja que su propósito es presentar los acontecimientos trágicos del siglo XX mediante el testimonio de varios objetos que formaron parte de la historia misma, y mediante los mismos, promover los valores de la paz entre los jóvenes y las generaciones futuras. José María Castañé indica que el acuerdo se ha hecho de acuerdo con la legislación española: “Lo único que queríamos era que quedara en manos de una institución de primer orden que garantizara su conservación en las mejores condiciones y su difusión a nivel científico y social sin ninguna compensación económica a cambio”.
Aparte de la donación, Harvard y la Fundación Castañé han alcanzado un acuerdo de colaboración. La sede madrileña retiene una importante cantidad de su fondo. “Pero entre ambas instituciones nos aliaremos para promover el uso de estos materiales a un público global”.
Las conversaciones encaminadas a suscitar el interés por parte del Gobierno español tuvieron lugar en la etapa de José Ignacio Wert como ministro de Educación, Cultura y Deporte. Fue él quien, según fuentes del Ministerio, quiso buscar un lugar adecuado para los documentos. Tras algunos informes de la abogacía del Estado que encontraron trabas administrativas, los contactos se enfriaron. A eso se sumó la propuesta de Castañé de que el conjunto documental fuera a parar al archivo del Museo Nacional Reina Sofía. Al parecer, el Gobierno prefería que formara parte del depósito que existe en Salamanca, muy volcado en la historia del pasado siglo. A partir de entonces, la negociación decayó, aunque desde el Ministerio de Cultura aseguran que en ningún momento hubo ruptura por su parte.
Objetivo Que los participantes conozcan el uso de OJS como herramienta de código abierto para la administración y gestión del proceso editorial. Reducir tiempos y esfuerzos en la gestión de su revista, mediante el manejo simple y unificado del proceso editorial para ayudarle a difundir y compartir rápidamente los contenidos de investigación. Perfil de […]
Braun Research Library Collection, Autry Museum; 811 B955gp, 1895.
“The Purple Cow” by Gelett Burgess is a short nonsense poem that is reminiscent of both the Dada-ist spirit of ridicule and Shel Silverstein’s whimsical verses, but predates both. In this particular version at the Braun Research Library, the title poem takes the center spread, accompanied throughout the booklet by similar poems.
I never saw a purple cow/ I never hope to see one/ But I can tell you, anyhow/ I’d rather see than be one!
The combination of rhyming nonsense and printed illustrations celebrates a light-hearted humor that made Burgess and his works famous in San Francisco at the turn of the century. Originally printed in the 1895 magazine, The Lark, “The Purple Cow” gained a local popularity that Burgess had not anticipated. He later came to resent its popularity, attempting in vain to write works that would surpass it, and even threatening those fans that continued to quote it.
For full images of the complete work, please visit the Internet Archive.
Despite these efforts to deflect attention from this particular publication, “The Purple Cow” always remained Burgess’ most famous work, inspiring modern titles, brand names, and even school mascots.
The Williams College mascot, Ephelia the Purple Cow.
Still, Burgess continued to produce works in the same humorous spirit as “The Purple Cow.” For example, the Braun also houses a short-lived print pamphlet called Le Petit Journal des Refusées, a compilation of works by women who had been rejected “by less large-hearted and appreciative editors.”
With “The Purple Cow” and his many other publications, Burgess helped usher in the spirit of 20th century modernity into America and onto the bohemian streets of San Francisco in a silly way that can make even the most serious scholar chuckle.
“Love is only chatter, friends are all that matter.”
This isn’t quite a moot question, as producer Ben Park early on notes, if obliquely, the story-making qualities of the week’s program on shock therapy.
I’d argue there probably isn’t a better contemporary candidate than Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon and Far from the Tree, careful masterpieces on the delicate subjects of depression and parent-child relationships, respectively. His own mother’s planned suicide was a defining moment in his life, as it likely was for the daughters of this episode’s subject, a suicidal mother of two in the throes of postpartum depression, about to undergo shock therapy. Solomon seems perfectly suited to it – brilliant, astute, sympathetic – coming disposed with an empathy at once learned and natural. But the past is a foreign country; Chicago is another city; and the difference in religious, social, and gender-based mores may be too wide a chasm for any to pass, to say nothing of the impossibility of understanding the unique experiences of motherhood, something no man can truly share, even the wisest. Perhaps his version would be too colored by his story as well, blurring what is his and what was hers; his work is frequently laced with memoir.
So we’ve safely ruled out our finest modern candidate. “What now?” you may ask
Now, we turn to the original source. In this episode of It’s Your Life, producer Ben Park tells us that “essentially this is her story, told by her during the two months she spent in the mental hospital.” Except that it isn’t her story, at least not exactly. For one, she only once tells her story in a way that feels uncoached, and though that telling is harrowing, it is but one passage in a larger story. We see her filtered through the descriptions of producer Park, her psychiatrist, her 12-year-old daughter, and her husband before we meet her and reach the story’s early peak, and her nadir – a dark, tearful description of the depth of her depression. Though the depression is hers and hers alone, it is defined by her relationships with those around her, by her fears of her deficiencies as a mother. And what happens to one person’s life can and usually does have serious effects on the lives of others, especially in the hold of the parent-child bond.
What perhaps would ideally be a nuanced hours-long study on the wide effects of postpartum depression is in fact a 30-minute program focused on the procedure of shock therapy, a program produced by the Chicago Industrial Health Organization. The series It’s Your Life was in most ways highly commendable, but it was relentless in its brightsiding. It is ironic then that some of its most pronounced efforts at manufacturing cheerful endings have darkened considerably over time, with the leading questions and spoonfed answers more salient to us now than to them then. Reporter Don Herbert is at his best with the 12-year-old daughter. This not surprising from the future children’s television stalwart Mr. Wizard. But the gentle coaxing appropriate to young children feels slightly more disturbing focused on a woman made impressionable post-shock treatment. What was meant as the second act’s feel-good moment carries a far different tone in the light of the present day, at least to my ears.
Shock therapy was then a fairly common treatment, but is now more of a desperate measure, one that comes into play when other measures are failing or immediate effects are required. This brief biased piece though humanizes an increasingly cartoonish or maligned procedure, and tells a story we can’t but change in the telling.
Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.
WNYC archives id: 150108 Municipal archives id: LT1948
Junta elimina 4,3 millones de expedientes judiciales antiguos desde 2012 para liberar espacio en los archivos
http://www.20minutos.es/ 09/02/2016
La Administración autonómica ha eliminado durante los últimos cuatro años 4,3 millones de expedientes judiciales antiguos y sin valor, guardados en 83.207 cajas, con el objetivo de liberar espacio en los archivos de los juzgados y tribunales de la comunidad. Los trabajos han sido dirigidos por la Junta de Expurgo, órgano integrado por el Tribunal Superior de Justicia de Andalucía (TSJA) y la Consejería de Justicia e Interior.
El titular de este departamento, Emilio de Llera, ha informado este martes al Consejo de Gobierno del desarrollo del plan y ha anunciado una nueva destrucción selectiva de 23.464 cajas con cerca de 1,3 millones de documentos. Tanto la llevada a cabo hasta ahora como la prevista afectan a documentación judicial sin valor correspondiente a diligencias previas y juicios de faltas de entre 1945 y 1998.
De Llera ha destacado que los 4,3 millones de expedientes destruidos suponen para la Administración de Justicia un ahorro de 157.000 euros, derivado de tener que mantener la custodia de esos documentos. En este sentido, el consejero ha señalado que esta iniciativa profundiza en las políticas de la Junta para el impulso de una Justicia digital y sin papeles, que contribuye a la protección del medio ambiente y ahorra costes y tiempo.
El proyecto se enmarca también en la definición de un modelo único de tratamiento y gestión documental para el control y acceso al material desde su creación hasta su eliminación o conservación por interés judicial o histórico.
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As the University Librarian at Duke one of my favorite duties was talking people into donating their personal collections to the University Library. My staff had great intelligence about who we should go after to strengthen the collections, so I was always armed with rationale(s) for the fit at Duke.
The passing of Robin Chandler Duke on Saturday reminded of those encounters with donors. Robin was the widow of Angier Biddle Duke, Chief of Protocol in the Kennedy White House and Ambassador to El Salvador, Spain, Denmark, and Morocco from the Truman through the Johnson Administrations. And one of THE DUKES—the family of the founder of the university.
President of India, Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, shakes hands with First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy upon his departure from the White House, following a state dinner in his honor; President John F. Kennedy stands at center left. US Chief of Protocol, Angier Biddle Duke, stands at right (back to camera); Robin Chandler Duke (wife of Ambassador Duke) stands at far left. North Portico, White House, Washington, D.C. June 3, 1963. Robert Knudsen. White House Photographs. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston. National Archives and Records Administration
We already had the Ambassador’s personal papers in our holdings, so Robin’s were a logical quest.
I remember my first visit to her apartment at River House in New York City, sitting in her sunroom overlooking the East River. Grace, beauty, charm, wit, and intelligence are my memories of that first encounter. She assumed, I think, that I was most interested in whatever of the Ambassador’s papers she still had, and was surprised about how much I knew about her own career.
Robin was a newspaper and television journalist, vice president for public relations at Pepsi-Cola, active in organizations supporting abortion rights and legal equality for women. The best part of that first visit was seeing evidence of “documentation.” She saved everything! And her life and letters complemented her husband’s ambassadorial life, contributed to the burgeoning women’s studies collection, and her Pepsi years added to the strength of the one of the best advertising collections in the country.
That first visit led to a deed of gift and the beginning of a relationship that was punctuated by regular deliveries of boxes of her papers and photographs as she continued to sort through her collection. Whenever I was in New York, I would stop for a quick visit to catch up. And when I made the move to the New York Public Library, she was among the special guests invited to a reception hosted by another “Dukie,” Ellie Elliot.
A while ago I wrote about my afternoon with Lauren Bacall and now Robin Chandler Duke. One lucky guy to have spent time with two extraordinary women!
Van por carpetazo para 75 presos de Maduro http://www.razon.com.mx/ 05/02/2016
La enmienda contempla la liberación de los reos vinculados a las protestas antigubernamentales de 2014; piden excarcelar al opositor Leopoldo López
La Asamblea Nacional de de Venezuela, con mayoría opositora presentó un proyecto de ley que contempla la amnistía de las personas encarceladas o investigadas a raíz de las protestas antigubernamentales ocurridas en febrero de 2014.
De aprobarse la ley se beneficiaría a las personas que se encuentran recluidas en las prisiones estatales acusadas de incitación a la violencia, o daños agravados entre los que figura el líder opositor Leopoldo López.
Una vez que entre en vigencia la ley de amnistía todas las autoridades judiciales, administrativas, militares y policiales se verán obligadas a finalizar las investigaciones relacionadas con los hechos vinculados a las protestas de 2014 en los estados de Táchira, Mérida, Santa Fe y Caracas.
El indulto pleno será aplicado a favor de todo preso o investigado por delitos de cualquier naturaleza relacionados con causas políticas. Las personas favorecidas por esta ley podrán solicitar, personalmente o a través de sus abogados, la eliminación de los registros o antecedentes que posean en sus archivos además de que podrán pedir una copia de la decisión judicial definitiva.
Cuando el proceso de votación haya culminado con un fallo positivo, la Asamblea Nacional tendrá un lapso de diez días para crear una Comisión Especial para la Reconciliación Nacional, la cual estará integrada por cinco diputados que verificarán el cumplimiento de la norma y harán un seguimiento.
Los inculpados que estén privados de su libertad tendrán derecho a que se les conceda de inmediato la libertad bajo medida cautelar.
El debate sobre la aprobación de la ley inició ayer en el Congreso venezolano con el apoyo de la mayoría opositora y el rechazo de la bancada chavista, quienes aseguraron que de ser aprobada será bloqueada por el presidente Nicolás Maduro.
La enmienda también contempla la liberación de todos los presos que actualmente se encuentran bajo arresto domiciliario.
“Esta ley se trabajó por mucho tiempo, los mejores abogados de nuestro país participaron en este proyecto (…) y tengo la responsabilidad de compartirla con todos los familiares de presos políticos, perseguidos políticos y todas las personas que quieran leerla y contar conmigo la cuenta regresiva de la libertad”, afirmó la esposa del líder opositor, Leopoldo López. El presidente de Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, aseguró que no permitirá que la oposición ocupe el “poder”.
In celebration of the New York Academy of Medicine’s #ColorOurCollections campaign this week, many museums, libraries, and archives hopped on the adult coloring bandwagon and created coloring books to share on Twitter. We’ve been participating by posting various images throughout the week for people to color, from Rosie the Riveter to the Faulkner murals.
Now we have a coloring book as well! We’ve chosen some of our favorite patents from our holdings for you to color:
Mittan: A Retrospective is the photographic exhibit currently on display in the Special Collections and Archives gallery space in Strozier Library. The works of J. Barry Mittan candidly capture the student experience at Florida State University in the 1960s and 1970s. As a student and photographer for numerous campus publications, including the Tally-Ho yearbook and Florida Flambeau newspaper, Mittan often photographed students at official university-sponsored events and spontaneous student gatherings alike. Through his documentation of sporting events, Greek life, protests, concerts, study sessions, socials, and so on, he was able to construct a comprehensive view of FSU student life in which individuals banded together to share a common voice in an age of social change. Mittan’s unique perspective as a student informed his photographic purpose to see the individuals among the crowd.
Please join us for a closing reception celebrating the photographic works of J. Barry Mittan tonight from 5-7pm! The reception will be held in the Special Collections Gallery on the first floor of Strozier Library. The exhibit closes on February 8th.
It is 1958 and Guinea, the first of the former French African colonies to gain independence, has just become the eighty-second UN member. In this 1958 broadcast of International Interview, Telli is questioned by journalists from the Agence France-Presse, the Tel Aviv newspaper Maariv, and the World-Union Press. Telli is first asked why of the previously existing eighteen French colonies only Guinea has so far voted for independence. There is “no cultural reason,” he argues. It was merely “an organizational explanation.” Guinea met the French government’s stringent criteria qualifying it for independence. He claims that there is “no difference between yes and no.” Independence is inevitable for the African colonies. Only external “regressive forces” have delayed other territories from breaking away as Guinea did.
Asked about a recently announced “union” between Guinea and Ghana, Telli downplays the significance, emphasizing that both countries will maintain their sovereignty, casting it more as a loose alliance enabling the two nations, and eventually other African states, to work together. Guinea’s ongoing relationship with France is then discussed. Telli assures the French journalist that future dealings will be smooth as long so they are established on a basis of “strict equality.” Guinea has made a great many concessions to France in return for being granted its independence. Now it is up to France to treat the new nation with respect. Finally he is questioned about the recent All-African Peoples’ Conference held in Accra. Telli stresses the themes of independence and unity, seeing the conference as a way to “set up the necessary tactics” to facilitate the remainder of the continent throwing off the yoke of colonialism.
We are at the dawn of African nationalism. Telli represents the state–educated class groomed by the French to be high level bureaucrats. Instead he is trying to transform his country into a stable, independent nation. His initial confidence, displayed here, and his terrible subsequent fate, can be seen as mirroring the path of much of Africa itself during the second half of the twentieth century.
Diallo Telli (1925-1977) was trained as a lawyer, working as a district attorney, magistrate, and eventually chief of the Office of the High Commissioner in Dakar, making him the highest-ranking African in the French colonial government. Upon Guinea’s independence, he was appointed Ambassador to the United Nations before becoming in 1964 Secretary General for the newly formed Organization of African Unity. Guinea had been ruled since its independence by Sékou Touré. Although Telli was recognized as a skillful diplomat, there was never any doubt whose policy he was carrying out. As the World Heritage Encyclopedia notes:
“The job was extremely challenging for him, as he expressed it involved negotiating a common viewpoint among the many leaders of African states, each of whom had divergent opinions. In an article published in the Fall of 1965, Telli acknowledged the difficulties and disputes but asserted that the organization had a flexible enough structure to deal with these problems, and asked what would have happened if there had been no OUA. At times Telli was criticized for his outspokenness. Some criticized him for pushing Sékou Touré’s views too strongly. In July 1968 it was reported that he was unlikely to be appointed for a second term since he had not shown neutrality.”
In 1972, Telli returned to Guinea and was appointed Minister of Justice. By then Touré’s rule had gone from despotism to one of outright paranoia. It did not help that Telli was of the Fula people while his president was a Mandinka. In 1976 Telli was arrested on what were widely perceived as trumped-up charges that he and other Fula were plotting to overthrow the government. Though there seems to have been some semblance of a trial, no announcement of his fate was made. It was not until 1979 that the newspaper The Afro-American reported:
“In reply to a question the President reminded his listeners that Diallo Telli had been condemned to death and as such was no longer within his sphere of influence or comment. ‘All those condemned to death are dead,’ he is reported as having said.”
Word eventually leaked out that at the infamous Camp Boiro Telli and the other accused conspirators were tortured, forced to sign confessions, and then subjected to the “black diet,” deprived of food and water until they starved to death. The Organization of African Unity, which Telli helped found and headed for eight years, did not acknowledge his disappearance.
Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.
WNYC archives id: 150242 Municipal archives id: LT8307
Am 5. und 6. März 2016 findet der inzwischen 8. Tag der Archive statt. Die bundesweite Veranstaltung unter Federführung des Verbandes deutscher Archivarinnen und Archivare (VdA) will einen Rahmen bieten, um in der breiten Öffentlichkeit auf die Bedeutung archivischer Arbeit hinzuweisen. Sie wird wie in den Vorjahren unter einem (nicht verpflichtenden) Motto stehen. 2016 lautet es: “Mobilität im Wandel”.
Virgil Hawkins, J. Raymond Henderson, and C.K. Steele, circa 1955. From 00/MSS 2006-013.
Freedman and Southern Society Project
