Dr Isao Ichige has donated a beautiful set of books, Nihon Bijutsu Zenshu (Japanese art: the complete works) – essentially a history of Japanese culture – to Stirling University.

This valuable set of books contains a comprehensive list of Japanese art objects in full colour and with detailed information for each item from throughout Japan’s long history.

Dr Ichige taught Japanese History and Archeology at Waseda University and its affiliated high school until his retirement in 2008. He is well-known in Japan for his NHK programmes (Japan’s equivalent to the BBC) about archeology and introducing his various discoveries at pre-historical excavations and sites across Japan.

Dr Ichige is a member of the Japan Scotland Association and life-long friend of its president, Dr Taeko Seki. He decided to donate the books when he learned about “Japan Week” at the University of Stirling.

The books are on display outside the Archives Reading Room in the Library.

We are looking forward to a talk by our researcher, Dr Janice Kinory, who will be exploring the relationship between commercial photographers in the late 19th century and the Roman ruins they photographed. She will be showcasing many of the beautiful slides from the HEIR database:

If you are a member of the Roman Discussion Forum, we look forward to seeing you at the Institute of Archaeology, Oxford next week, but if not, Janice will be blogging about her talk here in the near future (and no doubt there will be a paper forthcoming…)

While assisting with Special Collections & Archives instruction classes as part of my graduate assistantship, I have found the following quote from Michael Suarez, director of the Rare Book School, full of plenty of food for thought:

How is the way that your collections are mediated telling those who are in contact with them about their treasureful-ness? About the power of materiality that’s ritually taken out and placed in someone’s hands (or not)? … If we don’t understand our institutions as places of pilgrimage, as places of material embodiments that have profound effects on community, identity, and the expression of humanities, then we do not understand the vocation of the librarian … a high and noble vocation in which we are the custodians of a materiality that is absolutely intrinsic to the identity of our civilization (as cited in Overholt, 2013, p. 19-20).

If at first this seems like an overly lofty vision, I am happy to report that, as a graduate assistant, I have been lucky enough to catch glimpses of this lofty vision in action. Whether it’s watching students interact with 4,000 year old cuneiform tablets or discussing how a 21st-century artist’s book pushes the boundaries of what we think a “book” should be, I am in a privileged place  to help mediate what are many students’ first interactions with rare books and manuscripts.

For FSU Special Collections & Archives, instruction classes are an invaluable means of outreach. By taking materials out of the secured stacks and setting them up in a classroom setting, we are bringing them to students who might not know where we are located, what we have, and what we can offer. Most importantly, we want students to know we exist for them!

When we bring rare books and manuscripts to the classroom, we want to communicate the “treasureful-ness” of these items, many of which are one-of-a-kind. The value of the items means they must be handled with respect and care, and yes, this means rules (no pens, markers or highlighters, no food and drinks), but perhaps these rules can be thought of as part of the ritual of scholarship rather than an imposition designed to make people stay away. Along with the commitment to preservation comes the commitment to providing access, and one of the most exciting things about working in Special Collections & Archives is learning to find the balance between these seemingly polarized goals.

The description of Special Collections & Archives as a place of pilgrimage is an apt one. Students and scholars come to us from across campus, across the country, and sometimes from across oceans; they come from across disciplines. Sometimes they come in person, sometimes they call us, and sometimes they come digitally. During instruction classes, we get to come to them. No matter how simple or complicated their information needs are, Special Collections & Archives has the awesome privilege of putting our unique and distinctive materials in their hands and on their screens.

Katherine Hoarn is a graduate assistant in Special Collections & Archives. She is working on her Master of Library and Information Science degree at Florida State University.

Sources

Overholt, J. (2013). Five theses on the future of special collections. RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, & Cultural Heritage, 14(1), 15-20.

Klee Wyck from the archive!

Continuing our introduction of all members of the Commonwealth Games Mascot family, this week we have Klee Wyck!

A large Orca – also known as as a killer whale – Klee Wyck was the proud mascot of the XV Commonwealth Games for 1994 in Victoria, Canada. Seen as intelligent, sociable and graceful, these native animals were regarded as the perfect symbol for the ‘Friendly Games’.

‘Klee Wyck’ was the name given to this mascot in the Nuu-chan Nulth language, which roughly translates to ‘Laughing One’ in english.

The Victoria 1994 Games were unique in that they marked the return of South Africa after a thirty year absence following the end of apartheid. This was also the last time that Hong Kong participated in the Games before the transfer of sovereignty from Britian to China was complete.

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Much has been written about letters sent during World War II – movies and books chronicle the stories of undelivered correspondence found decades later, letters between young lovers parted by an ocean, advice from mothers and fathers to their sons. Last fall, Heritage Protocol and University Archives were excited to acquire a collection of letters and photographs sent by FSCW student Frances Isaac to her deployed fiance, Herbert Dotter. From 1944 through ’47, Frances “Frannie” Isaac sent hundreds of letters to her fiance who was stationed in Liberia during WWII.

Frances started school at FSCW in 1943, and worked as an attache for the press in the Florida Legislator. She was an introvert, and often expressed in her letters that she preferred the solitude of studying in the library to gossiping with her classmates. In a letter from 1944, Frances wrote that she felt “pretty disgusted with the girls,” describing how her peers would gather at the gates of campus to talk to young military personnel. Many of the letters document the mundane, recounting what she ate for dinner that night, the new dresses she’d bought, difficult homework assignments. In some letters, she would talk about the multiple health ailments she faced, like a pulled tooth she had in 1946.

The binding theme throughout all of the letters, however, was the future of their relationship. In earlier letters, Frances would gush with love for Herbert, soliloquies filled with plans for their marriage and how she felt when she thought about him. But by 1947, her letters had become increasingly antagonistic until she eventually called things off. In a letter from March 1947, Frances compared their relationship to that with her father, explaining that the unconditional love Herbert showed her reminded her of the way her father treated her: “I can’t marry you – it would be like marrying my own father.” A few letters later, with a returned engagement ring, Frances tells Herbert about how she met someone new: “we’re like two lost souls adrift in an ocean who understand the fears hopes, frustration and desires of the other.”

Unfortunately, we only have half of the narrative from this epic love story. Not much is known about Frances Isaac after she graduated from FSCW. Herbert Dotter eventually married someone else, and passed away at the age of 92 in 2009.

To see more photographs, ephemera, and artifacts related to the history of Florida State, check out the FSU Heritage Protocol Digital Collections or like the Heritage Protocol Facebook page.

*This is not to say that I don’t believe Feminists cannot celebrate Valentine’s Day, because it is most certainly your right (as it is anyone’s) to celebrate or not celebrate what you wish. These books simply came up when I searched key words related to this February holiday. 

–Brandi Russell, Trinity Student, Class of 2015 

A long time ago I had a boyfriend who used to unconsciously signal that he was about to deliver unwelcome news by saying, “ya gotta love this…” As it turned out, I didn’t gotta, and his “love” was a hollow thing. A more solid love – in this case, a father’s love for his daughter – is this post’s Valentine offering.

The “valentine” (as I think of it) came to us in 2007 as part of a generous gift from Bruce Gimelson of letters and photographs relating to Henry Ward Beecher, Class of 1834. To reduce a huge life to a few sentences, Beecher (1813-1887) was a wildly popular preacher at the Plymouth Church in Brooklyn (1847-1887), a rebellious son of Calvinism, an eloquent anti-slavery advocate, and the 50-year husband of Eunice Bullard, by whom he had 11 children, 7 of whom died early.

The Beechers had a troubled marriage and Henry was rumored to have had several affairs, the first as early as his ministry in Indiana during the 1840s. According to Debby Applegate’s superb biography of Beecher, The Most Famous Man in America, the minister may also have been the father of Violet Beach, who is on paper the daughter of Moses Sperry Beach, publisher of the newspaper “The Sun” and son of the founder, Moses Yale Beach, of the Associated Press. Applegate’s biography considers the affair between Henry and Moses’ wife Chloe and the likelihood that Henry was Violet’s father. While we might wish for DNA evidence, what we have in this case is photographic and manuscript evidence. Among the former is this:

Violet Beach, ca. 1890

Henry Ward Beecher, ca. 1845

Henry Ward Beecher & Violet Beach, ca. 1875

In addition to the convincing documentation of the relationship between Chloe Beach and Beecher that Applegate assembles in her biography, we also have evidence of Beecher’s attachment to Violet Beach in 12 letters that were part of Gimelson’s gift. In 8 of the letters, Beecher signs off as “grandpa,” which he means “in spirit”; in the other 4 letters, he is “Henry Ward Beecher,” safer still. But in a letter signed with his full name in the spring of 1885, Beecher refers twice to a “daughter” and writes with good-humored outrage as a protective father whose child has been slighted. Surely this energetic letter soothed Violet’s wounded heart and made her laugh too. What more could Beecher do, what more could Violet ask? Maybe it doesn’t matter whether he was her “real” father or not.

My dear Violet –
You are quite right in all you say about Will’s engagement, but you don’t go half far enough. It is a crime that cannot be excused, nor can language be found that will make it more odious. I am ready to stab him & poison her. Should such conduct go unpunished, the whole world might catch the infection & grow as wicked as they were before the flood. For is it not said that they were “marrying & giving in marriage” – until the flood came & swept them all away” & served them right too! I don’t know – I fear stabbing will be too good for Will. It will let him off too soon. Let’s see if we can’t think of some choice torment. What say you to letting him marry this outrageous sweetheart, & be compelled to live with her? And then, in about 25 years let them have some good for nothing fellow walk up & marry their daughter. Yes, that will be better.

But nourish your wrath. Don’t let it go out. I will send you a vocabulary of words, & a few oaths suited to this occasion – and you can copy them off & recite them morning & evening instead of the good prayers in the Episcopal Book – which are weak & cool affairs whereas you want damnatory & red hot petitions. Trust Providence, my dear. Read the Objurgatory Psalms. Begin with Psalm 137:7-9, Psalm 69: 22-28, Ps. 59: 10-17. But, above all, that choice Psalm 109.

I would suggest, also, that for a while I would let the New Testament alone – as it may somewhat interfere with the sentiments expressed in the psalms.

I will try to help you all I can, & will invent a few new oaths by the time the old [staple ones] get cool.

Yours in the bonds of an Everlasting hatred of all who get married to anyone’s daughter.

Henry Ward Beecher
Apr 8, 1885, three days after Easter

This letter sent me scurrying to find Psalm 109* and vowing to add “objurgatory” to my regular vocabulary.

96 Columbia Heights, Brooklyn

I wish I knew who the odious Will was. I wish I knew whether it was on account of the inexcusable little cur that Violet never married. Instead, she lived out her life in her family’s palatial apartment at 96 Columbia Heights, Brooklyn, and died in 1946 two days after Valentine’s Day.

******************************************************************

*Psalm 109 from the “New English Bible: the Old Testament,” Oxford University Press/Cambridge University Press, 1970.

In the 19th century, New York became a railway hub, and steam tugs aided in transporting rail freight down the river into Manhattan, guiding boxcar barges. By 1929, there were over 700 tugs working in busy New York Harbor. Towing has been largely a family business in the past and many of the tugboat captains you’ll hear in this episode work for McAllister Towing, founded in 1864 and still a leading name in New York tugboats. In fact, McAllister won last year’s Annual Great North River Tugboat Race, which took place at Pier 84. 

In this short piece, you’ll hear the sounds of the harbor, the toot of tugboats, and you’ll hear from the hard-working captains who head out into the harbor tirelessly time and time again. At the time of this recording, the tugboats in New York Harbor were running on diesel, and not steam as they first did. A tugboat can have a life of almost three quarters of a century, so it is possible that one of the McAllister tugboats heard in this episode may still be towing today. 

Below you can hear two clips from the raw tape of the Cinema Sounds interview with Brian McAllister. He describes what it is like to steer a tug and what tug captains do in the event of a disaster in the harbor. You can hear Brian speak more recently about the towing business in a 2005 interview published by the Ireland House Oral History Collection, Archives of Irish America at New York University.

“New York is a city of the sea. It’s strength and greatness come from the sea. And the sounds of the waterfront beat like a pulse in the sound of the city.”

This is New York Harbor in 1904. The steam tugboat Primrose with the Brooklyn Bridge in the background.(vanderbiltcupraces.com)

In nearly every case, “historical geodata” means a paper map. Digitizing that map gives us an image of a paper map. While an image can be useful, historical maps turned into actionable data are much more useful. Moving geodata from paper to electronic data can be complicated and involve many actions, including:

• Describe the map accurately, preferably using standard terms
• Digitize the map
• Georectify the digitized image (associate points in the image with their geocoordinates, for example, so that the image can be positioned on OpenStreetmap or Google Maps exactly where it belongs)
• Extract image features—such as polygons, text, or contour lines—as digital layers

Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, flagship building of the New York Public Library. Photographer Sue Bigelow.

From November 5-7, 2014, I attended a meeting of 54 people from three continents at the New York Public Library called Moving Historical Geodata to the Web. This meeting, including expenses for attendees, was funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. We were the only archives and the only Canadian institution represented.

This was not the kind of meeting where participants give presentations and then go home. It was a mix of presentations, discussions and collaborative brainstorming designed to produce long-term working relationships, projects and infrastructure.

Screenshot from NYPL’s Building Inspector application

Our host, Matt Knutzen, Geospatial Librarian and Curator for NYPL, explained the inspiration for this meeting. In 2001, NYPL started digitizing maps and has since digitized thousands. They always wanted them to be more than just images, and to be usable by the public. NYPL Labs has worked with Topomancy LLC to create Map Warper, an award-winning web application which allows anyone to georectify images of maps and extract some features. NYPL Labs also created Building Inspector, an application which allows the public to contribute “bite-sized” quality inspection and correction of map features which have been extracted by machine. Realizing that other institutions also wanted to make their maps actionable in some way, they organized this meeting to organize the community.

Participants work as developers, librarians, researchers, institutional administrators, conservators, educators, artists, geospatial specialists, visualization and public access professionals, bringing diverse perspectives to the group. Lightning talks showed us some of the projects they were involved in and gave an indication of where there might be overlap and gaps.

Here’s a sample of the projects mentioned in these talks:

The National Library of Scotland has, among other things:

• over 91,000 digitized maps online, with hundreds georeferenced
• a viewer which allows comparison of maps side by side
• Visualizing Urban Geographies, which provides mapping tools for historians

Screenshot of side-by-side comparison viewer on National Library of Scotland’s site

The University of Virginia created Map Scholar, an online application that allows georeferencing, annotation, image processing and curation of geospatial data.

Stanford University developed Orbis, an interactive mapping application of transportation (“the circulatory system of human movement”) in the Roman Empire. It would be wonderful to create an Orbis of other times and places.

Screenshot of Orbis

Shift (creators of Historypin), based in London, created Mapping Emotions in Victorian London, a crowd-sourced project to annotate a map with emotions from Victorian fiction.

The University of Portsmouth and the Great Britain Historical GIS Project have created Old Maps Online with technological development from Klokan Technologies. Scans of maps in repositories around the world can be found and viewed.

Screenshot of Old Maps Online looking at London

OpenStreetMap has a new OpenHistoricalMap project to make georectified historical maps available in different time layers.

MIT Libraries, Princeton University and Stanford University have collaborated on GeoBlacklight, a project which improves searching and sharing of structured geospatial data and is also useful with scanned map images.

The Library of Congress, working with Topomancy LLC, has created a digital gazetteer (geographical dictionary), drawing on information from over 100 different databases.

Screenshot from Library of Congress gazetteer

Wikimedia Finland is starting to make archival maps available through Wikimaps and would like to contribute to the OpenHistoricalMap project and work toward a seamless online historical experience which would include georeferencing and a gazetteer.

Having reviewed the current state of the relevant technology, we broke into groups to discuss issues. This gave us some useful ideas, including:

• One big vision, an ambitious common goal, roughly summarized as “the sum total of human geography, rasterized, vectorized, made available to everyone, everywhere for free”.
• We also recognized that there are many different types of users of geographic data (not just academic researchers), so it needs to be available in different, flexible ways.
• Tools to automatically extract information from scans are either rudimentary or do not exist: much of this work is being done by hand.
• It is important to continue to preserve the original paper map and to build digital preservation into our work.
• It would be useful to adapt Tim Berners-Lee’s 5-star system for publishing data to create a similar system for publishing geodata

Five stars of open data, summarized. Photograph by W3C consortium.
Mug available in W3C shop on Café Press.

We also realized we need to find more ways to collaborate on the large projects. The next step was for everyone to identify people they could collaborate with, and discuss how that could happen. Many specific plans were made for collaboration on digitization, software development on Github, gazetteer development, and more.

Finally, each participant made a pitch for a specific project or idea, large or small, which could be worked on, and participants voted with stickers on which ones they thought were feasible, which they thought would have the greatest impact and which they would commit to working on. Top-voted ideas are here. A sample of these ideas are:

• United (States|Kingdom) of (Sanborn|Goad). Sanborn Fire Insurance maps exist of the entire United States, held by various institutions; some other countries are shown in Goad’s maps. We should locate them, describe and scan them all.
• Map CAPTCHA. Create a CAPTCHA-like way for the public to contribute to verifying map data.
• Build a reliable and automated feature extractor.
• Contribute data to OpenHistoricalMaps.

This meeting was a great success, as it brought together a community of interest and created several plans of action. We are pleased to be able to contribute to some of these initiatives.

Historical geodata is a valuable resource and we have already digitized and made available some key maps in our holdings. In 2015, we intend to make more historical geodata available, and make it useful in different ways. We will be announcing these projects as they are completed.

In this March 1, 1988 talk, Harrison Salisbury, a giant of 20th century journalism, explains that a newsperson’s obligation is to report an event “to convey the essence of what happened and why it’s significant.” “This may sound simple,” says Salisbury, a former World War II correspondent for United Press International who then went on to have a distinguished career with The New York Times, “but it is an extremely hard task.”

Salisbury says the parable of “Rashomon,” the classic Japanese film of people who recount multiple conflicting versions of a murder they think they have witnessed, parallels the travails that a journalist encounters on a routine basis. As an example, he describes his first reporting assignment in his home state of Minnesota, covering what he initially thought was a simple automobile accident but which turned out to have as many versions as there were witnesses. Later, his editors killed a story he wrote in the early 1930’s about the unemployed in the Twin Cities because local politicians and business leaders insisted that the Depression hadn’t come to their towns. “People see what they want to see.” The listener can almost hear Salisbury’s shoulders shrug. “It’s a living phenomenon that can’t be stopped.”

His most profound encounter with multiple versions of the truth came during his coverage of the United States air attacks on North Vietnam. Salisbury — reporting from Hanoi during the Christmas of 1966 — described bombs that leveled dwellings and killed civilians. His account did not coincide with the story that was being touted by President Lyndon Johnson and the Pentagon; they insisted that the bombing was “surgical,” only hitting steel and concrete targets of military value. Salisbury, who huddled with North Vietnamese civilians in bomb shelters, knew otherwise, and filed accounts that made trouble for the powerful, who then launched ad hominem attacks against him. But it was later revealed that the information he presented regarding the scope of the bombing damage turned out to have been independently and immediately verified as accurate by the Central Intelligence Agency.

Winner of multiple George Polk Awards, Salisbury insisted that a journalist’s true job is to bear witness. This often requires being confrontational and getting “brickbats rather than bouquets” from those who come under the journalist’s lens. He ironically describes reporters who perceived themselves as having friendly relationships with Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. Salisbury says these leaders were all master manipulators capable of swaying journalists to write favorably of them. Salisbury confessed that he was not immune from Presidential blandishments. Thus, he actually found himself more comfortable covering Presidents Harry Truman and Richard Nixon: neither made any bones about their dislike of the press, which made it easier for the journalist to keep a professional distance.

“To be uppity, to be contradictory,” Salisbury says, “is the essence of the American system” of press freedom. Salisbury reached such a conclusion during the years 1949 through 1954, when he reported from the Soviet Union as Moscow Bureau Chief for The Times. The Soviet government press conferences were attended by dozens of Russian “journalists” who asked no questions and took no notes as Communist officials delivered policy statements and offered statistics. The Russian reporters didn’t need to gather facts: the stories had already been prepared and delivered to their offices in officially approved manuscripts.

Salisbury, who later won the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Soviet Union, said all dispatches from the American press during the late Stalin and early Khrushchev years were subjected to relentless censorship. He tells of using subtle techniques with mixed results to get information past the censors.

Journalists in this country have often been challenged for making Americans uncomfortable, too. When Salisbury was seen taking notes by Barry Goldwater supporters at a campaign rally, they demanded that he stop writing what the candidate was saying. “It was as if I would do damage by revealing what he said.” He notes that such an attitude is widely held in this nation. But Salisbury maintains that for America to continue as a healthy society, it’s important that the media be willing to accept criticism by those it covers. “The turbulent mix of ideas brought forth by the press is our strength.”

Salisbury died at the age of 86 in 1993. In addition to his newspaper achievements, which included founding The New York Times Op-Ed page in 1973, he wrote 29 books on world events including the Nazi siege of Leningrad, Mao Zedong’s long march to revolutionary victory in China, the Vietnam War, and the protest at Tiananmen Square.

___________________________________

Note: Harrison Salisbury’s 46-minute talk is followed by short interviews with American journalists Edwin Diamond of New York Magazine and Richard C. Hottelet of CBS News. In this 12-minute segment, the two journalists discuss their own encounters with the “Rashomon” effect.

This program originally aired on WNYC on June 13, 1993.

Initially launched in 1921, the first Cutter OAK of the US Coast Guard serviced the harbor’s aids to navigation. This included maintaining the buoys and lighthouses in the New York Harbor. By 1962, when this episode of New York: A Portrait in Sound aired, the Cutter Oak managed the same responsibilities from the ocean surrounding the NY area, all the way up the Hudson River to Albany, at times. The OAK worked seven days a week in good, and especially in bad, weather.

In 2002, the present day Cutter OAK was launched, where it continues to service waters surrounding the southeast borders of the United States, as well as areas around the Bahamas, Cuba, Haiti, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Before pre-recorded music became widely commercially available, a song plugger’s job was to entice customers to buy the sheet music, often by sitting down at department store pianos and playing the latest hits. Many musicians and composers started their careers as pluggers, some of the more notable people including George Gershwin, Ron Roker, and Lil Hardin Armstrong. Song pluggers have come a long way since the early Tin Pan Alley days; by 1962 their duties were adapted, and their job mostly involved pitching to publishers, who were always looking for the next big hit.

This change in a song plugger’s responsibilities caused unease in some. In the words of Redd Evans, music publisher: “We’ve become slaves to the taste of children. This is a very bad thing because pretty soon we’ll start wearing knee breeches again and this is something I want to try to avoid.”

In the background you can hear J. Fred Coots, American songwriter, plugging his biggest hit, Santa Claus is Comin’ To Town.

“At the Fencers Club and half a dozen salons throughout the city, you can always hear the ringing clash of foils, the courtly language, and the dancing footsteps.”

This episode of New York: A Portrait in Sound looks into the sophisticated sport of fencing. Listen as champions, such as Dr. Daniel Bukantz, 4 times national champion, describe what it’s like to be a fencer.

Since 1881, the Red Cross has been around to offer emergency assistance and relief to those affected by disasters. The Red Cross was on the scene during the Great Blizzard of 1888, the sinking of the steamship General Slocum in 1904, and the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire in 1911.

This episode of New York: A Portrait in Sound focuses on the flooding of the mid-Atlantic states, brought by the Ash Wednesday Storm of 1962. Testimonials from survivors describe how much they lost from the storm, and how the Red Cross provided shelter when all they had was gone.

In 1962, the Delacorte Theater officially opened in the heart of Central Park as a place for free performances for the public. This episode of New York: A Portrait in Sound takes a look into Shakespeare in the Park, a festival that has turned into a long-running and beloved summer tradition.

Joseph Papp, founder of The Public Theater and director of that year’s show The Merchant of Venice, describes the beauty of these events: how people of all colors, backgrounds, and economic levels congregate to enjoy Shakespeare. One actress describes how “often we found with the tragedies in particular, you start with the daylight and the play usually deepens in its tragic nature as it moves along, so that as the night falls, the drama gets more and more complicated and moving towards its final conclusion.”

Celebrating its 53rd Anniversary this year, the Delacorte Theater still calls itself home for Shakespeare in the Park.

Exterior of New York Shakespeare Festival at Delacorte Theatre in Central Park, 1968.

(George E Joseph/New York Public Library)

This image from our lantern slide collection is labelled “PALACES OF MECHATTA: ON EDGE OF SYRIAN DESERT, CARVING” “SYRIA (6th AD) “XEm”

The monumental unfinished palace of Qasr Mshatta was discovered and excavated in 1840, and lies about 30km south of Amman in Jordan. It probably dates to the mid 8th century. The huge intricately carved southern facade, illustrated in this image, was given as a gift to Kaiser Wilhelm II and transported to Berlin in 1903. A significant proportion of the carvings have been reconstructed and are now on display at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, having suffered damage from bombing during WWII.

In an article of 1908, P. Siméon Vailhé described the site as: ‘this fairytale palace, pearl of the Syrian desert, before the facade was taken to Berlin’. He also added that ‘the legendary palace of Mechatta has been measured, drawn and photographed to the last detail’, and noted that the 24 extremely good, large format photographs allowed the facade to be studied as it was when it was still in place.

HEIR, the Historic Environment Image Resource, contains many evocative images which provoke a debate about how and why ancient sites have changed, whether changes are beneficial or destructive, and how the treatment of material culture in the past and present represents a complex interplay of political, social and cultural attitudes. Change is inevitable, and the value of a resource such as HEIR is the opportunity it gives to study lost views of the past, as Simeon Vailhe noted.

P. Siméon Vailhé (1908) Chronique byzantine et médiévale de Palestine (Vizantijsky Vremennik, xiv p462-482)

Nelson Mandela’s walk to freedom came after more than 27 years in prison, most of them at the notorious Robben Island in Cape Town harbor. As pictured above, Mandela walked some seventy yards from the car that had driven him from prison gates to the steps of Cape Town’s Victorian City Hall. There he thanked the African National Congress and his supporters at home and abroad and told the excited crowd of some 50,000 that apartheid has no future.

The veteran ANC leader said that the negotiations on dismantling the white supremacist policy and its infrastructure will mean an end to the white monopoly on political power and will address “the overwhelming demand of our people for a democratic nonracial and unitary South Africa.” Mandela closed by referring to his remarks made at trial in 1964:

“I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the idea of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”

This semester, the Special Collections & Archives Graduate Assistants are delving into the world of rare books!

The Special Collections & Archives at Florida State University has an impressive collection of rare books–from Sumerian cuneiform tablets (created in approximately 2000 BCE) to the Grove Press Collection (published in the 20th century) and almost everything in between.  Some areas of particular collecting strength include the French Revolution and Napoleonic era, early English Bibles, poetry about childhood, and the history of Florida.

Students and researchers can always access the materials held by Special Collections & Archives in the Special Collections Research Center Reading Room.  But students can also engage with rare books and archival materials from Special Collections & Archives as part of a classroom visit.  An instruction session is a unique opportunity for students to analyze rare books and manuscripts in the classroom setting.  With the background knowledge they’ve gained in class, students are able to learn from and interact with primary source materials.

Part of the Graduate Assistants’ job this semester has been to assist Katie McCormick, Associate Dean for Special Collections & Archives, with preparing for the different class instruction sessions in Special Collections & Archives.  Before a classroom visit takes place, there are meetings with the class instructor to discuss the goals for the

session.  This helps us determine what materials from the collection might best serve the instructor’s focus.  While sometimes the professor knows exactly what materials he or she wants to see, because of our knowledge of the collection, the Special Collections staff are often able to suggest additional items in the collection that might complement the themes the instructor wishes to stress.

One of the great things about assisting with classroom instruction has been this opportunity to discover different aspects of the collection.  With each class I assist, I learn new things about the rare volumes held in Special Collections & Archives.

In preparing for a graduate class on “Renaissance Observation,” I discovered the 1584 volume of the Cosmographia by Peter Apian.  Peter Apian (1495-1552) was a German mathematics professor and printer.  His Cosmographia is one example of the popular Renaissance genre of cosmography.  In the sixteenth century, cosmography combined areas as diverse as astronomy, natural history, and geography.  Written in Latin, Peter Apian’s Cosmographia is an exploration of sixteenth century astronomy.  One unique aspect of Apian’s Cosmographia is its mathematical focus.  The 1584 edition held by Special Collections contains moving diagrams that help to illustrate his astronomical concepts.  In the illustration pictured below, the images of the zodiac are used to map the night sky.

Other examples of the Renaissance cosmography genre held by Special Collections include Sebastian Munster’s 1550 edition of Cosmographia.  First published in 1544, Munster’s Cosmographia is counted as the first German description and categorizations of the world.  Munster’s Cosmographia focuses on geography, the customs of different cultures, and the history of animals and plants.  Its detailed illustrations are considered particularly important.

You can find these volumes (and many others) in the Special Collections Research Center weekdays, from 10:00 am – 6:00 pm.

Rebecca L. Bramlett is a graduate assistant in the Special Collections & Archives Division.  She is working on her Master of Library and Information Science at Florida State University.