This Friday in Jackson Library, the digital projects team will be hosting Vintage Viands, a taste-testing exhibit featuring recipes from the Martha Blakeney Hodges Special Collections and University Archives (SCUA) Home Economics Pamphlets Collection. In addition to the food,  SCUA will be displaying some of the actual pamphlets and there will also be laptops available so guests can view the digital collection.

Come early before the food is gone!

As we prepare for the Hosts and Champions exhibition, there is a family of mascots waiting to be introduced! Jocelyn, our Exhibition Assistant, presents a Scottish favourite…

Continuing from the introductions already given to Clyde and Wee Mannie, Mac the Scottish Terrier is the first from the mascots family to appear. Adored by children and adults alike Mac was bred in the highlands of Scotland and became an incredibly successful Scottish mascot for the Commonwealth Games 1986 in Edinburgh.

A giant Mac towers above

Unlike Wee Mannie, – who had been proposed as the original Scottish mascot in 1970, but was later dismissed – Mac is the first official mascot for the Commonwealth Games in Scotland that was made public. With a host of available merchandise and memorabilia Mac was reproduced as toys, pins, on tea towels, scarfs, ties and more, and has become an iconic image for the second Edinburgh Games.

A stand full of ‘Macs’

Mac and his memorabilia

Actively displaying the spirit of ‘The Friendly Games’ Mac sent ‘Macvalentines’ to each of the member countries of the Commonwealth Games Federation five months before the start of the event. Sending all participating athletes his love, each of the 25 countires received a valentines card graced with the lovely mascots face, and inside a description of his impeccable charater:

“typical of his breed, a real friend of the family, bright eyed, intelligent, courageous, energetic, and always willing to please…The Commonwealth Family will undoubtedly take him to their hearts in 1986″

A living Mac with an example of his valentines card

And indeed they did, with the famous terrier apppearing once again at the Opening Ceremony for the Glasgow 2014 Games and introducing each country in turn.

A Scottish terrier introduces Team Scotland at the opening ceremony

Stay tuned for more news from the mascot family next week!

The Institute of Archaeology holds some of the archives of archaeologist Martin Harrison, who was Professor of  the Archaeology of the Roman Empire at Oxford. He is perhaps best known for his excavations in Turkey, particularly his work at Sarachane and Amorium. So we were intrigured when we received an unexpected addition to his archive – this suitcase:

This is a serious suitcase – wooden structure, cloth covers inside and out, metal locks – but it has obviously seen better days. When we opened it we saw this:

– a small collection of maps and papers. But what you can’t get from this picture is the SMELL. The suitcase had been stored in damp conditions, and unfortunately it had developed mould and a lively colony of weevils:

Luckily we check all new acquisitions in the post-excavation area away from the archive before we let anything through the door, and fortunately most of the papers in the suitcase were published maps and photocopies which we did not need to retain.

Archiving – always something new!

In honor of the upcoming Global Divestment Day urging institutions to divest from fossil fuel companies and the work being done on the Amherst Campus in support of divestment from coal, I thought we should take a moment to look back at an earlier time that Amherst divested its investment holdings on ethical grounds. I’m referring, of course, to the international campaign to pressure the South African government to dismantle its apartheid system in the 1970s and 80s (although Amherst also divested from Sudan in 2006 on ethical grounds).

Picketers outside the fall Board of Trustees meeting, 1977

The first official action on South Africa by the trustees was at their fall 1977 meeting. Following some years of talks, debates and student organizing, a petition was presented to the Trustees at this meeting demanding that the college seek “corporate withdrawal from South Africa.” During the meeting around 70 students picketed Alumni House, while two spokesmen were invited to speak at the meeting.

During the meeting, the Trustees adopted a “Trustee Statement Concerning Investment in South Africa,” which referenced the ethical investment policy adopted by the college in 1972 and decided that the college would not divest outright, but would use its shareholder power to attempt to change the practices of companies that operated in South Africa. They were following what were known as the Sullivan principles.

Following a packed open meeting held by the Board of Trustees and the South African Support Committee in February, the Board again took up the question of divestment in their spring and fall 1978 meetings, affirming their previous decision both times. Divestment was one of the major topics on campus in the academic year of 1977/78, it was front page news in a quarter of Amherst Student issues and by November 1978, President Ward was able to state regarding the previous two years, “there has not been a meeting of the board in that time when the investment in corporations doing business in South Africa has not been a matter for discussion.”

Divestment remained a hotly debated, much committeed, and frequently demanded subject in the following years, throughout a great deal of turmoil and change at the college. In June 1985, following the lead of Reverend Leon Sullivan, President Pouncey and the Board of Trustees issued a statement that Amherst College would divest from South Africa if it had not made “significant progress toward eliminating statutory apartheid” within two years and instructed the College’s investment managers to prepare for such an eventuality.

Students encircle the Alumni House in a silent vigil during the October 1985 Trustees meeting

Just four months later, in October of 1985, the Trustees made the unexpected decision to divest completely.

Ending apartheid in South Africa was a fraught and complicated topic, as President Ward said in a talk on divestment in Johnson Chapel in spring of 1978, it is not easy “for someone on either side to be confident about what actions one might take that would work toward betterment of the society.” Climate change and fossil fuel divestment are very different (some would say simpler) than the issues of institutionalized racial violence and inequality being addressed by the anti-apartheid movement, but we can hope for ongoing action and debate on campus that echos the passion, broad engagement, and thoughtful deliberation of this earlier era… and perhaps it will serve as inspiration the next time that Amherst has the opportunity to use its fiscal weight to leverage ethical change.

(For additional material on South African divestment at Amherst and much, much more, visit Archives and Special Collections for our upcoming “Race and Rebellion at Amherst College” exhibition planned for late February through June)

We’re now just under two weeks away from our big type event of the year, when Tobias Frere-Jones will be our guest speaker at an event to award our first ever Updike Prize for Student Type Design.

It should be a fantastic night, so put it on your calendar now: Thursday, February 19th at 6pm. You can get a sense of Tobias Frere-Jones’s engaging take on typographic history by visiting his terrific blog.

At 5:30 we’ll be offering a short tour of our latest exhibition, “Inhabited Alphabets,” which highlights some typographic oddities from our Updike Collection as well as our other collections including children’s books, Civil War items and more. The Washington Street entrance will be open starting at 5:15. The event is free and open to the public, but you’re welcome to RSVP on the Library’s website.

And that’s not all! If you’re a proper typographic enthusiast, you need a great typographic t-shirt, and we’ve got one for you:

Visit our Teespring campaign and order a t-shirt now. We’ve taken one of our favorite images from the current exhibition (from an 1838 Austin Letter Foundry specimen book) and turned it into a t-shirt that proclaims your typographic allegiance. Not only do you get a great shirt, but you also support Special Collections. The campaign runs through February 25th, so don’t delay. After that, they’re gone.

Thanks to Michael McDermott for once again designing the event poster featured at the top of this post. And thanks also to our event sponsor, Paperworks!

On a Sunday afternoon in the summer of 1962, a tourist venturing through Washington Square Park would find it packed with singers, banjo pickers, and guitar strummers all playing folk music. The park was generally “packed in so tight, you can’t even lay a guitar case down flat.” 

These “citybillies” were mostly students, transplanting a little piece of Tennessee to Greenwich Village. It was a good and cheap way to spend a Sunday afternoon, according to Major Wiley, and might even be a chance to meet a charming young lady or man.

Man singing and playing guitar, Washington Square Park, New York, New York, August 5, 1962. (Photo by Frederick Kelly/The New York Historical Society/Getty Images)

(getty images/Getty)

 A year before, performing in Washington Square Park required a permit – something that was not given out frequently to folksingers especially. Izzy Young, featured in the recording, says that “all music belongs to the city,” including folk. A protest was held and a song was written in response to defend the right to make music in Washington Square, declaring that “this square is your square, this square is my square.”

Included are other raw clips of music that might be heard in the park – anything from blues and bongos to Spanish guitar. The person who recorded these clips left a typewritten sheet of notes telling which ones to use in the final version. The first clip was labeled by the recorder as “solo guitar w. rich negro voice – blues” and the second recording was labeled “‘La Seine’ mandolin and voice – not too bad”.

Listen here:

Founders Online, a tool for seamless searching across the papers of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton, launched in 2013. Since then, the tool has grown to a fully searchable online database of over 165,000 documents, including thousands of documents that have not yet appeared in the published volumes.

The site has had nearly 750,000 unique visitors—an average of over 42,000 people each month.

We continue to hear remarkable stories about how researchers are using the site and the surprising items they’ve found. Here are some unique uses of the content found on Founders Online:

• Founders Online is cited in Harvard’s Arnoldia magazine article, “The Pawpaw, a Forgotten North American Fruit Tree”.
• The Philadelphia Museum of Art used Founders Online to conduct research for their catalogue of American silver in their collection.
• Users can also search Founders Online for Oaths of Allegiance during the Revolutionary War. One noteworthy oath is the one taken by Alexander Hamilton when he was Washington’s Aide-de-camp.

• Gates Thomas, a composer and associate professor at Berklee College of Music, has written a cantata based on George Washington’s Revolutionary War letters found in Founders Online. You can hear the cantata in this “With Good Reason” radio broadcast at about the 26:00 mark.

 What have you found in Founders Online?

We are currently preparing our Hosts & Champions exhibition for a touring programme that will visit a variety of locations around Scotland in 2015 and 2016. In this article Jocelyn Grant, one of our Exhibition Assistants, provides an update on some of the material she has discovered while researching our Commonwealth Games Scotland Archive.

For each of the consecutive Commonwealth Games that comes to pass there are many items and ideas that cross between countries as the process of organising such a large event becomes more established, and each new host has more examples and materials to learn from and improve upon. Those ideas, items and events that are carried on are usually some of the things most clearly remembered by those who visit the Games. These include some obvious contenders such as the opening and closing ceremonies, the Queen’s Baton Relay, the creation of unique medals, the design of a new baton and so on. However there are many things that are created during the Games that we do not always have the opportunity to see and enjoy, let alone compare and contrast against every one that has come before! However, I am in the happy situation of being able to help.

As I investigate the Commonwealth Games Scotland Archive I have the happy job of going through materials from – the great majority of – past Games in preparation for our touring exhibition (#HostsandChampions and #Legacy2014) and directly seeing how things have progressed and changed. Among my many trawls through the minutes, mascots, medals and uniforms that make up this archive I have come across a great number of newsletters/bulletins that provide wonderful information on the progress of preparations, and the opinions and thoughts of the people involved. While many of these newsletters are made directly available to the public – materials that will no doubt make a re-appearance on this blog – there are several unique series that are designed to serve the Athletes’ Village and its inhabitants.

The Once & Future Voice

“It will be designed on the Olympic model, both in general construction and its stern definition of the amateur. But the Games will be very different, free from both the excessive stimulus and the babel of the international stadium. They should be merrier and less stern, and will substitute the stimulus of novel adventure for the pressure of international rivalry”. The Commonwealth Games: The First 60 Years 1930-1990. 10. Cleve Dheensaw

For those of you that went to see some of the sports and events on offer in Glasgow this past July/August, I think you will understand how this desire for the Commonwealth Games to be ‘merrier and less stern’ is a sentiment that has very enthusiastically been carried through! This desire for a friendly, jovial and participatory atmosphere is not only encouraged among the host’s people but among the athletes, and this is wonderfully highlighted through the Village newsletters that appear across the years. Variously titled Village Courier, Village Daily Bulletins, Village NewZ  (note the ‘Z’ for late 90’s cool), Village View, Village Voice (with more yet to be discovered); these publications promote events locally and within the Village while highlighting interesting information about competitors and organisers.

Edinburgh 1970

While the minutes of previous Commonwealth Game’s committees have yet to reveal the exact moment of inspiration that produced these publications, the earliest examples I have discovered appear to have a very utilitarian objective. The Village Daily Bulletin is a series of single or double A4 sheets produced for the Edinburgh 1970 Games that provide useful information on the practical elements of the Village.

British Commonwealth Games 1970 Newsletter

Adorned with nothing more than a logo banner at the top, these newsletters were made available to all members of the Village for practical purposes.

Brisbane 1982

With a leap, skip and hop the next Village news I came across is from Brisbane 1982, the Village Courier, and already the differences between the two publications could not be greater. Placing a huge emphasis on photography this publication is presented much like a newspaper, with a column lay-out and regular segments. The regular segments include the ‘Village in Pictures’ – a middle-spread featuring photographs of people in and around the Village – cartoon sketches and interviews that highlight the work of administrators and organiser.

Village Courier
September 22, 1982

Village Courier
October 1, 1982

Edinburgh 1986

The introduction of cartoon sketches in the Brisbane Village Courier is carried forward, with large caricatures of athletes in the Edinburgh 1986 Village View and the Game’s mascots beginning to make an appearance.

Village View
3rd August 1986

Allan Wells and Daley Thomson

Auckland 1990

Next we have the Village NewZ publication of Auckland 1990 which presents some of the best examples of engagement with people in the Village, containing many personal stories of competitors and staff, and the activities and work they were engaged in within the Village (and their personal lives). Some of my favourite stories in this series include:

Blues’ News

20 January 1990, CG/2/14/2/1/5

“Amongst the array of equipment for the NZ police’s biggest operation are telepagers…However, some very senior officers, found the technology a bit overwhelming and tried to engage the cool American voice at the other end in conversation. They may not have had a very enlightening experience but have certainly got the message now on how to work the pagers”.

Small Talk

31 January 1990, CG/2/14/2/1/16.

“At least six of the big boys have been too much for the Village beds, which have been crushed to the floor.

Village house manager Kris Hope-Cross is not naming teams but said wightlifters had been the major culprits behind the bed collapses…Village staff have no stronger beds available, so they have to send in the standard versions and hope for the best.”

Finally we have the past year’s publication, the Village Voice. Being able to view and directly observe the changes that have been made to the newsletters across the years it is not difficult to see the many elements that have been re-interpreted for the Glasgow 2014 Village Voice. There is still a section on entertainment for the Villagers, interviews with staff and competitors, a photographic record of daily events in the Village, a discussion of results and the opportunity to share your thoughts with the paper (although this is more regularly done via text, email and twitter, rather than by letter).

Village Voice
Thursday 31 July 2014

I will no doubt come across more of these as I investigate the archive, however we currently only have one of the series for this past Commonwealth Games 2014! If anyone does have any copies of any of the Village newsletters, or any stories about their experience of the games – in the Village or otherwise – please get in touch!

Before the Beatles invaded America and vocal groups dominated the pop charts, much of top 40 music was written by men sitting in an office building in Midtown Manhattan. 

In the 1950s and early 1960s, the Brill Building was a songwriting mecca, and it came to symbolize an entire industry that focused on factory-like efficiency in pop music composition. The history of the building and its neighborhood goes back to the Tin Pan Alley days of the late 19th century, when a small group of New York publishers wrote most of the popular music in the United States.  Scott Joplin, Jerome Kern, and Cole Porter all wrote for Tin Pan Alley publishers.  Later, Carol King, Paul Simon, and even Lou Reed did stints for music publishers, working as professional songwriters before launching their own careers.

CIRCA 1959: Singer songwriters Carole King (center) and Paul Simon talk between takes in a New York, New York recording studio, circa 1959.

(Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images/Getty)

The short 1961 Banker’s Trust piece above, originally meant as an ad-heavy filler for local radio, only tells part of the Brill Building’s story.  We also found the raw interview tapes, and those offer a more detailed picture of the state of the music industry at the time. Some of the more notable people on the raw tapes include Harry Fenster, who penned “It’s All Over But the Crying,” made famous by Hank Williams Jr.; Frank Davis, composer of “Mama Get Your Hammer, There’s a Fly on Papa’s Head.”; Harry Woods, who wrote “Try a Little Tenderness“; and Walter Bishop, who wrote songs for Frank Sinatra and Billie Holiday.

The Brill Building at 1619 Broadway, New York City (Photo by Mel Finkelstein/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images)

(New York Daily News / Getty Images/Getty)

Bishop tells us how in the 1930s, a good song could stay on the charts for several years. But by the time of the interview, a hit single may last only a few weeks. He blames the advent of television, people’s subsequent short attention spans, and perhaps most importantly, the recent popularity of “vocal driven music”.

The cult of personality surrounding pop front men in the 1960s was pushing composers and instrumental music to the background and performers to the front. The trend culminated in the oft-cited watershed moment of the Beatles appearing on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1964, only three years after these interviews. “The British Invasion and the rock revolution that followed produced some great work but also undermined the importance of the Brill Building Sound’s inspired professionalism. Instead, the replacements were hero worship and superstar egocentricity of monstrous proportions,” Steven Rosen would later write, These newly discovered interviews give us a sense of how these professional composers knew what was coming as they lament the closing chapter of that “Brill Building Sound”.

The Brill Building, built in 1931 as the Alan E. Lefcourt Building.

(Jazz Guy/Flickr)

We’re pleased to announce the availability of our first group of the Florida Flambeau, the student newspaper at FSU. The issues from 1915-1930 are now available in the FSU Digital Library (FSUDL).

Each issue is fully text searchable using Advanced Search in the FSUDL as well as browsable by year and month. We hope to continue to grow this collection over the following years. A larger collection of the Florida Flambeau is currently available in the Internet Archive as well.

One of the most difficult tasks in archiving (as in archaeology) is deciding what to retain, and what to dispose of (or put on the spoilheap). Similar underlying principles govern both disciplines.

Firstly, the research agenda: what is the archive for? Who will be using it? How significant is the material within the framework of a) what we think we know about the past and b) what future researchers might want to know about the past?

Second, the pragmatic agenda: is there space for this material? If it is kept, will this take up space and prevent us from retaining more important material (measured against criteria 1 above)? How much will it cost to conserve this material?

In archiving as in archaeology, the rule-of-thumb should be the same: if in doubt, keep!

All this ‘what is the point of an archaeological archive’ angst has been provoked by these:

Christopher Hawkes’ original box files. The contents – letters, documents etc – have been catalogued and been placed into acid-free archival storage boxes. We don’t want to continue using the original boxes for storage because they are not acid free, and their internal spring mechanisms will damage the contents.

Normal archival practice would be to discard these boxes. But the archaeologists in us think of the history of objects, and the story these box files have to tell. The labels on the outside are written in Christopher Hawkes’ own distinctive handwriting. These labels represent how Hawkes thought about and partitioned his research. These were the boxes which formed part of his research environment: a physical embodiment of his ideas and framework for thinking and retrieving information.

Some of the boxes may have older histories: this one, re-used by Hawkes, was made in Germany. Did it once hold part of Paul Jacobsthal’s archive?

On the other hand, these boxes take up a lot of valuable space. What would you do – would you keep them?

Ben Fiedler ’17 and Blair Kamin ’79 in the common room of Mayo-Smith House (formerly Chi Psi Lodge), January 2015. (Photo by Janna Joassainte’17/Amherst College, Office of Communications)

Leave me alone, I’m on deadline!

During the college’s Interterm session that just ended, I enjoyed participating in a one-week class that made extensive use of the College Archives. “The Houses of Amherst College” was an intensive architectural appraisal of the thirteen former fraternity houses on campus. It was led by Blair Kamin ’79, the award-winning architecture critic for the Chicago Tribune. Blair is in the process of writing a comprehensive architectural guide to Amherst College, to be published in 2018 as part of the Campus Guide series by Princeton Architectural Press. All of the students in the class (including myself) wrote a brief essay on one of the houses, which will provide material for the published guide.

Seligman House, formerly Theta Delta Chi. Putnam and Cox, architects, 1921.

The class provided the students with an opportunity to learn about some of the buildings we walk by (and, for some of us, live in) every day, and to appreciate them from an architectural point of view. This means carefully seeing the buildings in a new way and asking hard questions: not just “What is its predominant style?” and “What do you call that kind of pillar?” but more searching questions like “Is this building ‘successful’?,” “Have subsequent renovations retained a sense of aesthetic integrity?” and “How does the building contribute to, or detract from, the built environment of Amherst College?” These are some of the questions architecture critics wrestle with every day. Hence the class also gave us a taste of what it’s like to think and write like an architectural journalist.

Seelye House, formerly Psi Upsilon. Putnam & Cox, architects, 1913.

The Amherst campus is a beautiful educational setting — exquisitely beautiful, in my opinion, at certain times of the year. And it is also quite historic, reflecting the influences of many notable architects and landscape designers such as McKim, Mead and White, Frederick Law Olmsted, Benjamin Thompson and Edward Larrabee Barnes. In the 19th century, like most colleges, Amherst had to rely on upper-class students to find their own living arrangements. This they did, almost assuredly with great pleasure, mainly by living in fraternity houses. This arrangement allowed upperclassmen to enjoy more autonomy away from the often oppressive rules and oversight of the college administration.

Porter House, formerly Delta Upsilon Delta. Allen Cox, architect, 1916.

The fraternity houses were usually impressive large residences, and without exception they could be described as “homey” or indeed “palatial” in comparison to the cookie-cutter boxy sameness of institutional dormitories. Alumni fraternity brothers raised large amounts of money to erect these houses — even in the worst economic times — as a token of love and brotherhood as well as a showpiece announcing their exclusivity, success and refinement.

Plimpton House, formerly Delta Kappa Epsilon. Allen Cox, architect, 1916.

Beginning in the early 20th century and lasting several decades, Amherst’s fraternities embarked on a house-building spree that produced many of the fraternity houses that still grace the campus — and which serve, since the abolishing of fraternity houses in 1984, as college residence halls. The building program was fueled in no small part by competition among the fraternities — if one house had by far the most comfortable, luxurious, impressive furnishings, then all the others would be at a disadvantage in attracting the kind of men they wanted to join their ranks. So from 1913 to 1940, the frats built.

Newport House, formerly Phi Delta Sigma. Allen Cox, architect, 1913.

Many of the houses shared the same architect, Allen Cox of the Boston firm of Putnam and Cox. Not surprisingly, therefore, they show different permutations of the same elements from several architectural traditions — neo-Georgian, neo-Classical and Colonial Revival — that were popular in the early 20th century.

Mayo-Smith House, formerly Delta Chi Psi. Herbert Wheeler, architect, 1923.

The sameness was broken by Herbert Wheeler in his design for Chi Psi Lodge in 1923 (above), a lovely work of Tudor/Renaissance Revival that is one of the first college houses to greet visitors arriving at the college from the west.

In 1929, a skillful neo-Classical facelift was pulled off at Calvin Coolidge’s former fraternity house, Phi Gamma Delta:

Marsh House, formerly Phi Gamma Delta. Robert Cutler, builder, ca. 1835; significant renovation by Karl S. Putnam, architect, 1929.

The rest of the houses are pictured below. Undeniably, all of these buildings raise up the architectural quality of the Amherst campus. The college has recognized this fact by embarking on a renovation campaign in recent years to save them from the predations of decades of hard use by the fraternities, and to adapt them to the much-changed social and technological needs of the modern-day college. But five former fraternity houses have still not undergone renovations. Clearly the funds to preserve them will be money well spent!

Tyler House, formerly Delta Tau Delta and Kappa Theta fraternity. J.D. Leland, architect, 1932.

Lipton House, formerly Phi Chi Phi fraternity, then Hamilton House. Allen Cox, architect, 1918.

Humphries House, formerly Alpha Theta Xi fraternity. Architect unknown, 1891; reconstructed facade, C.H. Sherwood, architect, 1940.

Hitchcock House, formerly Alpha Delta Phi fraternity. Maurice B. Biscoe of Andrews, Jones, Biscoe, and Whitmore, architect, 1928.

Garman House, formerly Beta Theta Pi fraternity and Boltwood House. Allen Cox, architect, 1916.

Drew House, formerly Phi Alpha Psi/Phi Kappa Psi fraternity. Built 1866; remodeled by Allen Cox, architect, 1922.