Image courtesy of Time.com

“In the fall of 1934, Gertrude Stein arrived in America to much buzz about “Gertrude Stein.” Her photo appeared on the cover of Time magazine following the blockbuster success of her accessible and witty The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933). Journalists and a film crew waited at the dock to document Stein’s arrival. Her name appeared in lights in Times Square. Receptions were held in her honor. She enjoyed tea at the White House with Eleanor Roosevelt and dinner in Beverly Hills with Charlie Chaplin. She received the key to her hometown city of San Francisco. Fans and skeptics filled lecture halls across the United States to hear her Lectures in America. A two-month lecture tour turned into seven. Everywhere she went Gertrude Stein made headline news.”

Kirsch, Sharon J. “Gertrude Stein Delivers.” Rhetoric Review, vol. 31, no. 3, 2012, pp. 254–270.

One of Stein’s stops on her “Lectures in America” tour was Amherst College.

From the Amherst Student, January 7, 1935:

Stein gave her lecture on January 9, 1935, as reported in The Amherst Student for January 10, 1935:

Sharon Kirsch describes Stein’s tour of the United States as a public relations triumph — Stein achieved a tremendous degree of celebrity and name recognition even though the majority of those who attended her public lectures had likely never read any of her work. Stein herself later commented on that celebrity in Everybody’s Autobiography (1937):

“It was very nice being a celebrity a real celebrity who can decide who they want to meet and say so and they come or do not come as you want them. I never imagined that would happen to me to be a celebrity like that but it did and when it did I liked it.”

In addition to the coverage in The Amherst Student, we hold other traces of Stein’s visit in the Archives & Special Collections. We hold three letters and a postcard from Stein to Amherst President Stanley King; Stein and Alice B. Toklas both inscribed a copy of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (New York, 1933) for King upon their visit:

Since the arrival of Ted Baird’s diaries in the Archives, we now regularly consult them to see if he commented on campus events. Gertrude Stein’s visit, and the dinner at President King’s home afterward, are recorded in this brief entry from January 9, 1935:

Fortunately, Baird’s handwriting is more legible than Stein’s. Anyone interested in attempting to decipher the letters Stein sent to Stanley King is welcome to visit the Archives & Special Collections to see what other details from her visit can be recovered.

Henry Thacker Burleigh (1866–1949), was an African-American classical composer, arranger, and singer known for his rich baritone voice. He is also noted for being a key contributor in the development and dissemination of the African-American spiritual.  And through his published musical arrangements, set in a western classical style, Burleigh played a significant role in introducing African-American spirituals into the standard repertoire of the concert and recital hall.

On April 2, 1944 Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia welcomed Burleigh to City Hall to perform on the Mayor’s weekly program Talk to the People over WNYC. The Mayor introduced Burleigh:

We have a distinguished visitor here in the office today, an old friend of mine, Harry Thacker Burleigh, famed American composer. To him is due in a great measure the credit of a place among musical classics of spirituals which have become recognized as typically American. It is his arrangement of ‘Deep River’ which is now sung all over the world, and of the spiritual, ‘Were You There?’ – you remember that, ‘Were You There When They Crucified Our Lord’ – that have brought these spirituals to the front wherever music is appreciated, and everyone knows ‘Little Mother of Mine,’ made famous by John McCormack, all over the world.

Maestro Burleigh was born in 1866 and came to New York in 1892. He has sung at St. George’s Church here in Manhattan. For 49 consecutive years, on Palm Sunday, he has sung the immortal “The Palms’ by Faure, at St. George’s Church. Maestro Burleigh, won’t you close this program by singing ‘The Palms’ for us?

As you will hear, Burleigh graciously obliged. 

Burleigh played a significant role in the development of American art song, composing more than 200 works in the genre. He was also the first African-American composer celebrated for his concert songs as well as for his adaptations of African-American spirituals. He died at age 82 in 1949. More than 2,000 people paid their respects at his funeral. 

 Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives.

Theo Hardeen in 1916.
(J. Willis Sayre Collection of Theatrical Photographs/Wikimedia Commons)

On July 3, 1939, Theo Hardeen, the sibling and heir to the secrets of the great escape artist Harry Houdini, came to the WNYC studio. In a scripted interview, Hardeen talked about working closely with his brother but said he would take Houdini’s secrets to the grave. It was a statement that was not entirely true. While he reportedly burned most of Houdini’s papers, the illusionist’s library of magic and spiritualism was left to the Library of Congress. In this brief interview, Hardeen reveals little, only outlining the basic principles of magic. Following Harry Houdini’s death in 1926, Hardeen toured the vaudeville circuit performing many of his and his brother’s escape routines. His appearance on WNYC’s The Voice of the Theatre is mainly due to his role in Olsen and Johnson’s Broadway musical review Hellzapoppin.Hardeen was born Ferencz Deszo Weisz in Hungary on March 4, 1876. He was Harry Houdini’s younger sibling and was first called Deshi, then Dash. Immigration officers in New York City changed the Weisz family name to Weiss and Ferencz’s became Theodore. Later he changed it once more and became Theodore Hardeen. So named, Hardeen became established as an escape artist in his own right and the heir to his brother’s secrets.

Hardeen poster Triangle Poster Printing Co., circa 1931.
(Library of Congress)

According to the Library of Congress, Hardeen actively promoted himself as the heir to his brother’s magic, and always remained ‘the brother of Houdini.’ Although he was commonly referred to as ‘the handcuff king,’ Theo Hardeen could never quite compete with the dramatic and creative efforts of his older sibling. After entertaining troops during World War II, he died in 1945.The Voice of the Theatre was launched on June 12, 1939. The program was a short-lived experiment by the League of New York Theatres for promoting their productions with short interviews, show gossip and news. Based on newspaper radio listings, it appears to have continued through the end of September 1939. This broadcast, however, is the only known surviving example of the show. Along with the interview are general theater announcements and personnel changes on productions as well as a touch of gossip about Lillian Hellman’s new house and Katherine Hepburn’s limousine, driver, and bodyguard. 

Show host Ezra McIntosh in 1931.
(WNYC Archive Collections)

In this broadcast the genial host Ezra McIntosh also answers a series of listener questions followed by “a brief memory picture” of music from Babes in Toyland and several other plays. McIntosh began his career with  NBC in the early 1930s. His tenure at WNYC appears to have been brief, although he can be heard introducing the distinguished guests at the dedication ceremony for WNYC’s WPA murals in August 1939. McIntosh also spent time with WKNY in Kingston, New York, and WWNC in Ashville, North Carolina. In 1947 he reportedly directed an NBC program starring the blind pianist Alec Templeton.

An undated poster for a Theo Hardeen performance.
(Library of Congress)

The following blog post was written by Joseph, Special Collections & Archives Scholar-in-Residence and Guest Curator of our latest exhibit A Century of Mystery and Intrigue.

I really enjoyed putting together the exhibit last summer on pirates, so I started thinking about a possible new exhibit topic. The original idea I came up with was related to trains, which then became the mystery genre. I believed that Special Collections & Archives would have extensive material related to it. Also, the mystery genre could open up other possibilities, such as the videos on the multi-media screen and a scavenger hunt, which has a fun prize.

In doing research, I discovered that Special Collections & Archives did indeed have many different materials to exhibit. I found books such as The Secret of the Everglades by Bessie Marchant, Inspector French and the Starvel Tragedy by Freeman Wills Croft, The Hardy Boys by Frank W. Dixon, and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes book The Hound of the Baskervilles. I also found press books such as the one for Murders in the Rue Morgue.

In this exhibit, there are many different subjects, among which are young detectives, classic detective novels, mystery in cinema, and mystery comic books. There is also a scavenger hunt featured in the exhibit as well as small clips from mystery movies.

I read lots of mystery books on my own time, and a couple of my favorite series are The Hardy Boys and Encyclopedia Brown. I also watch some detective movies. Two of my favorites are Batman: Mystery of the Batwoman and Batman: The Mask of the Phantasm. 

I have received lots of help and guidance from the Special Collections team, as well as lots of support for my ideas, and I couldn’t have done this exhibit without them. I hope you enjoy the exhibit!

A Century of Mystery and Intrigue is now on display in the Special Collections Exhibit Room. It can be viewed Monday-Thursday from 10am-6pm and Friday from 10am-5:30pm. It will be open through Fall 2019.

During the summer of 2019 Lorna Keddie, a graduate of the University of Stirling in Heritage and Tourism undertook a traineeship in the University Archives funded by the Musicians’ Union. Here she writes about her work improving access to this unique resource.

For the past six weeks, I’ve been delving deep into the Musicians’ Union archives to begin the project of digitising the Musician, the magazine of the Musicians’ Union. This project intends to further improve access to this collection for researchers who use the resource for a variety of projects and members of the public, who use the resource to research their family history.

The Musician was first published and distributed to members of the Musicians’ Union in October 1950; consequently, this is where my journey digitising this resource began. At the start of the project I began arranging each issue into numerical order and selecting the best copies of each issue, which was quite challenging in the case of the early magazines as time hasn’t been the kindest to them. Once the best were selected I could begin prepping for digitisation; involving numbering individual pages with a unique reference and cataloguing the titles of articles and names of authors. Once all the preparation was complete I could begin the all-important task of scanning!

While cataloguing the contents of the Musician, I gained a real sense of the hard work and energy the Union exerted to ensure musicians were granted fair pay and working conditions and were protected from threats to the profession including, “Talkies” (films with sound), service bands, recorded music and pirate radio stations. I found it extremely fascinating to see the changes in the contents, style and layout of the magazine throughout the decades and the reflection of the problems and threats musicians’ faced included on the covers.

In addition to digitising the first 25 years of the Musician, I prepared and digitised leaflets and promotional materials produced by the Union dating from 1906 to 2016. Furthermore, I numbered and arranged a selection Union Membership cards dating from 1916 to the present day, including a few familiar names, for example, the members of rock Band Status Quo. I found it remarkable the Union was still using a stamp system to pay membership fees and only moved towards a system that involved paying by direct debit in the early 1990s.

In the final week of my traineeship I began the process of preparing the next 25 years of the Musician for digitisation; to open up this resource even further in the future!

Lorna Keddie

The Digital Projects Priorities Team met on 7 August 2019 and approved the following projects for 2019-2020:

New projects:

Grant-funded digitization:

• Women Who Answered the Call: Digitizing the Oral Histories of Women who Served in the U.S. Military and the American Red Cross:
  Digitize and preserve at-risk audiovisual materials (303 audiocasettes, 6 open-reel audiotapes, and 1 VHS videotape) that are part of the Women Veterans Historical Project. Funded via a CLIR Recordings at Risk Grant (Beth Ann Koelsch and David Gwynn)

• Public Domain Cello Scores and Journals: The project would include the digitization of public domain scores and a set of journals from the Cello Music Collection (Stacey Krim).
• UNCG Dance Theses, 1951-1978:
  This proposal seeks to digitize a collection of Dance theses created by UNCG students between 1951 and 1978. These unique materials exist only in physical copies at this time, and they were not included in a previous retrospective thesis and dissertation digitization project due to considerations including size and accompanying materials (Anna Craft).
• Poetas sin Fronteras: Poets Without Borders, the Scrapbooks of Dr. Ramiro Lagos:
  The proposed project is to digitize a series of scrapbooks and photograph albums documenting the life and career of Dr. Ramiro Lagos, a professor emeritus of poetry in the Romance Languages Department at UNCG, to facilitate access online and to return some of the physical items back to the donor (Patrick Dollar).
• Digitizing of Home Economics Material in UNCG LIbrary Stacks:
  Digitize pre-1923 home economics items, ranging from cookbooks to books about household arithmetic, which are housed in the stacks (Callie Coward and Erica Rau).

Faculty research projects:

• Civil Rights Oral Histories:
  Pilot project to make available interviews conducted by Matthew Barr (Media Studies) as part of a documentary project using OHMS (Oral History Metadata Synchronizer) and the Omeka platform. This will serve as a proof of concept for an upcoming grant application that will involve collaboration between the University Libraries and Media Studies.

Community outreach projects:

• Temple Emmanuel Project:
  Support Temple Emmanuel in a grant application to digitize newsletters by providing set-up support and hosting for the materials.

Continuing/ongoing projects:

Grant-funded digitization:

• People Not Property: NC Slave Deeds Project:
  Year 2 of an NHPRC-funded project to digitize and transcrive scale deeds from 26 North Carolina counties. Collaborative endeavor between the UNCG University Libraries, North Carolina Division of Archives and Records, and North Carolina Registers of Deeds among others.

Library-funded digitization:

• North Carolina Runaway Slaves Ads Project, Phase 2
• Graduate, Summer Session, and Extension Bulletins

Faculty research projects:

• Oral Contraceptive Ads:
  Support digitization and hosting of a research project for Dr, Heather Adams (English) via a UNCG Libraries Digital Partners Grant.
• Well-Crafted NC:
  Support digitization and hosting a of a project by Erin Lawrimore, Richard Cox, David Gwynn (all UNCG Libraries) and Dr. Erick Byrd (Marketing, Entrepreneurship, Hospitality & Tourism) supported by a P2 Grant from the UNCG Office of Community Engagement.
• PRIDE! of the Community:
  Support continuation of a project by Stacey Krim, Partick Dollar, and David Gwynn (UNCG Libraries), initially funded through an NEH grant to document the Triad’s LGBTQ+ community
• TriadHistory.org:
  Continue efforts to expand web presence and community events via a collaborative local history collective of Triad cultural heritage institutions. UNCG representatives are David Gwynn (chair) and Erin Lawrimore.

Community outreach projects:

• Junior League Reports:
  Continue digitization of archival material documenting Greensboro history.

Infrastructure projects:

• Islandora Migration:
  Complete migration of digital content to a new platform,

In 1987 Toni Morrison came to WNYC to talk about her most recent work, Beloved.

In 1998 Peter Fonda talked about his life and family in, Don’t Tell Dad.

The 1938-1939 WNYC City Council programs were the first time in history that the proceedings of an entire legislative session were broadcast to the electorate. Letters to the station called the broadcasts instructive, entertaining, exciting, and a step forward in good government. A WNYC postcard survey determined that a million New Yorkers tuned each week to hear the New York Council session. A bevy of civics groups endorsed the broadcasts with the Women’s City Club calling them, “the best education for citizenship.” The Times gushed it was, “one of the best shows in the city, appealing in equal degree to the studio audience in City Hall and the radio audience over WNYC.”[1]

The previous Aldermanic meetings generally had ten to twenty people in the visitor’s gallery. The newly broadcast City Council meetings were now generating “500 to 600 persons who waited patiently in line for admission to the overcrowded councilmanic chamber.”[2] The city’s paper of record reported:

At times the Council broadcasts became so amusing that people left their radios and flocked to City Hall to see the fun. Borough President James J. Lyons of the Bronx even suggested formally that the proceedings be put on permanent records for their amusement value.[3]

That notion was echoed by comedian Eddie Cantor, who quipped to Mayor La Guardia that he was interested in getting recordings of an unusually long and embarrassing meeting to use during his act. The entertainer stipulated, however, that he reserved the right not to use anything too funny. The Mayor responded:

1938 Telegram from Mayor La Guardia to Comedian Eddie Cantor regarding copies of WNYC City Council broadcasts.
(Courtesy of NYC Municipal Archives)

The Council broadcasts began in a somewhat unexpected way. On January 1, 1938, the newly adopted City charter brought the City Council into existence, and WNYC broadcast the opening ceremonies. “The discussion became so interesting, however, that I ordered the continuation of the broadcast,” wrote WNYC Director Seymour N. Siegel.[4] The Council was scheduled to recess in June, but particular circumstances required an extension through July. WNYC asked listeners over the air if they wanted the meetings to be broadcast for the extra month. The announcement, made just once, generated 1,337 letters asking for the continuation. Station management reported, “In an analysis of these letters by a survey group connected with a prominent eastern university, it was determined that over 80% of the writers believed the Council broadcasts to be among the most important educational features on the air.”[5] Upon reflection years later, one observer described it as “the logical extension of the modern method of reporting a legislative session.”

Overnight in the City of New York, thousands of housewives, business people and others who listened to the radio during the day, had the welcome relief of an interesting, useful radio broadcast of their own government in action to take the place of the usual soap opera which pervaded the air at that hour. No Hooper rating is available, but judging from the thousands of letters and postcards which deluged Station WNYC when the Democratic majority threatened to cut off the broadcasts, it is fair to say that several hundred thousand citizens listened in daily. In fact, the city received several lucrative offers from private sponsors for the exclusive privilege of broadcasting the Council sessions.[6]

The broadcasts continued “gavel-to-gavel,” without editing or censorship, for two years. Then, without explanation or justification, Democrats, in opposition to the Republican La Guardia administration, pushed through a resolution prohibiting broadcast equipment on the chamber floor and put the kibosh on the freewheeling transmission.  

On the day of the vote (January 16, 1940) WNYC’s Chief Engineer Isaac Brimberg arrived at the City Council Chamber with his equipment and was politely, but firmly, refused entry by the legislative body’s sergeant-at-arms. The stormy two-hour debate that followed, no doubt, would have been great radio. Instead WNYC broadcast a luncheon for Finnish war relief from the Hotel Commodore. It was a poor substitute, and little solace for our civic-minded listeners.

Yet during the debate, the Democratic majority refused to explain why they opposed the broadcast of Council proceedings. Only Councilman Walter R. Hart of Brooklyn provided a clue.

If the old Board of Aldermen had taken 135 years to make fools of themselves, the Council had accomplished the same result in two years…I tuned in on a couple of those broadcasts last year and what I heard made me blush. And when a former Alderman blushes — that’s something.[7]

New York City Council President Newbold Morris.
(WNYC Archive Collections)

Council President Newbold Morris meanwhile displayed a stack of letters from citizens lauding the Council broadcasts as “educational,” “entertaining,” and demanding that they continue. He read one from a WNYC listener stating, “If the councilmen are ashamed of themselves, all they have to do is to shut up.” [8] Days earlier, Morris argued, “If we had broadcasting equipment in Congress and the Legislature, in a very short time. I think you would have a new Congress and Legislature.”[9] The Council President’s effort to keep the broadcasts was valiant, but sadly, unsuccessful. Thus, this pre-C-SPAN experiment in radio vérité came to an end.

You can listen to a rare surviving example of a council debate from March 8, 1938 above: The NYC Council debate on a resolution to investigate WNYC. Some of the accents are classic!

And why, you may ask, did they want to investigate WNYC? Please see: Communist Propaganda or Capitalist Commercial? A 1930s WNYC Broadcast is Mired in Controversy.

_______________________________________________

[1] “Council to Debate Broadcasts Today,” The New York Times, January 16, 1940, pg. 25. 

[2] Belous, Charles, Faith in Fusion, Vantage Press, 1951, pg. 57.

[3] “City Radio May Lose Most Popular Program; Council Democrats Move to End Broadcasts,” The New York Times, January 5, 1940, pg. 16.  

[4] Goldman, Ralph M., The Future Catches Up, iUniverse, 2002, p. 29.

[5] WNYC Masterwork Bulletin, January 1939. pg. 2.

[6] Ibid., Belous, pgs. 56-57.

[7] “WNYC Broadcasts Banned by Council,” The New York Times, January 17, 1940, pg. 27.

[8] “Council Tories Ban Radio Broadcasts of Proceedings,” Daily Worker, January 17, 1940, pg. 4. 

[9] “Penalties Urged in the Wagner Act,” The New York Times, January 14, 1940, pg. 7.

Audio courtesy of the New York City Municipal Archives.

With the appointment of Doriot Anthony Dwyer as principal flutist in 1952, the Boston Symphony Orchestra began its tenure as a progressive model for the incorporation and advancement of professional female musicians.  Dwyer’s designation as first chair marked the true beginning of gender integration for the Symphony.  Later that same year, the BSO became the first American orchestra to utilize blind auditions as part of its selection process, and the number of women chosen for permanent positions began to grow.

In this January 1973 episode of WQXR’s The Listening Room, host Robert Sherman sits down with Olga Koussevitzky, wife of the late BSO conductor Serge Koussevitzky, and three Boston Symphony Orchestra members, Marylou Speaker, Darlene Gray, and Virginia Eskin, to discuss the progress made since Dwyer’s debut, as well as the obstacles that remain.  Ms. Speaker’s piano accompanist, Elizabeth Wright, joins the conversation and sums up the newest wave of issues facing professional female musicians:

“I feel that many people, not many, but some people look, if they see… women on the stage, they feel that the recital can’t possibly be as good—it’s going to be inferior—and so you have to, again, work twice as hard to convince them.”

The guests treat listeners to in-studio performances, recount their professional experiences—from remembering to take off their noisy high heels before a blind audition, to pushing back against the normalized assumption that men need paying jobs more than women—and offer up insightful perspectives on both the discrimination they encounter and their determination to persevere.

In the decades following this broadcast, the gender gap within American orchestras has been significantly reduced, thanks to revised institutional practices and the tenacity of female musicians like Speaker, Gray, Eskin, and Wright.  However, challenges to parity between men and women in the field of professional musicianship are ever-present.  Unsurprisingly, the women of the Boston Symphony Orchestra have, once again, emerged as leaders in confronting contemporary issues such as section integration and equal pay.  Robert Sherman’s closing remarks from this 1973 episode continue to echo through the efforts of the current generation of female BSO members: “We’ve come a long way, but we have a long way yet to go.”

With the appointment of Doriot Anthony Dwyer as principal flutist in 1952, the Boston Symphony Orchestra began its tenure as a progressive model for the incorporation and advancement of professional female musicians.  Dwyer’s designation as first chair marked the true beginning of gender integration for the Symphony.  Later that same year, the BSO became the first American orchestra to utilize blind auditions as part of its selection process, and the number of women chosen for permanent positions began to grow.

In this January 1973 episode of WQXR’s The Listening Room, host Robert Sherman sits down with Olga Koussevitzky, wife of the late BSO conductor Serge Koussevitzky, and three Boston Symphony Orchestra members, Marylou Speaker, Darlene Gray, and Virginia Eskin, to discuss the progress made since Dwyer’s debut, as well as the obstacles that remain.  Ms. Speaker’s piano accompanist, Elizabeth Wright, joins the conversation and sums up the newest wave of issues facing professional female musicians:

“I feel that many people, not many, but some people look, if they see… women on the stage, they feel that the recital can’t possibly be as good—it’s going to be inferior—and so you have to, again, work twice as hard to convince them.”

The guests treat listeners to in-studio performances, recount their professional experiences—from remembering to take off their noisy high heels before a blind audition, to pushing back against the normalized assumption that men need paying jobs more than women—and offer up insightful perspectives on both the discrimination they encounter and their determination to persevere.

In the decades following this broadcast, the gender gap within American orchestras has been significantly reduced, thanks to revised institutional practices and the tenacity of female musicians like Speaker, Gray, Eskin, and Wright.  However, challenges to parity between men and women in the field of professional musicianship are ever-present.  Unsurprisingly, the women of the Boston Symphony Orchestra have, once again, emerged as leaders in confronting contemporary issues such as section integration and equal pay.  Robert Sherman’s closing remarks from this 1973 episode continue to echo through the efforts of the current generation of female BSO members: “We’ve come a long way, but we have a long way yet to go.”

WNYC archives id: 80101

Commemorative stamp issued in 1963.
U.S. Post Office Dept.

In May 1932, Amelia Earhart became the first woman to pilot a nonstop solo transatlantic flight. Returning to New York on June 20th, she was roundly hailed at a succession of events around the city. Among the stops, of course, was City Hall. It was her second trip to the famous seat of municipal government. The first was in 1928 when she when she flew across the Atlantic as a passenger aboard the Friendship as the first woman passenger to cross the Atlantic Ocean in a plane. The craft, piloted by Wilmer “Bill” Stultz and Luis “Slim” Gordon, landed in South Wales.

This time, she flew solo to Europe facing the darkness and storms alone from Newfoundland to Northern Ireland in her single engine Lockheed. The day-long tributes to her feat began in New York harbor aboard the Macom, the city’s yacht for welcoming visiting dignitaries, and then proceeded to an open touring car in the Battery for a massive ticker-tape parade up Broadway.

Disembarking at City Hall before a crowd of some 5,000 well-wishers, Earhart joined Mayor Walker, Charles L. Lawrence of the Aeronautical Chamber of Commerce, and other officials on the steps of City Hall. There, WNYC’s Tommy Cowan (lower right of top photo) manned the public address system. Before a battery of microphones, Mayor Walker welcomed the aviatrix to the city.  In a somewhat tortured attempt at wit Walker spoke of the “aeronautical We” which, because of Earhart’s recent achievement, now included women. He was referring to Charles Lindbergh‘s book “We” (meaning Lindbergh and his plane) and the story of his solo flight to Europe five years earlier. The Mayor then pinned a gold medal to the lapel of Earhart’s coat, an honor that the City reserves for distinguished visitors. The modest pilot thanked the Mayor and said her trip was “just a personal gesture.” 

Thousands gathered at City Hall June 20, 1932 to see Amelia Earhart after her historic solo flight. In center are official cars entering City Hall Plaza where she was welcomed by Mayor Walker.
(AP Photo)

As I reprocess our Buildings and Grounds Collection, I occasionally find mislabeled images, like a photo of Williston Hall labeled Appleton Hall. Sometimes there are items with an incorrect description, like a set of postcards in a folder titled “Photographs”.

But sometimes I find things that are just unidentifiable. This item was in a folder of photographs!

I’m not sure exactly what this object is. My first guess was a tobacco cloth of some sort, designed to be rolled up. It might have been made from poorly-tanned leather that stiffened over time.

The back side has a cord to tie it closed, but it’s not strong. The cord is thin, with a gold-colored metallic finish, similar to the elastic cord found around a gift box. This suggests that the cord was decorative.

My current guess is that this was a cover for a small booklet, like a banquet menu or an event program. The three fragments fit together somewhat like a dust jacket for a standard book. In addition, there are discoloration marks that match across all three pieces, which helped to align them.

This looks familiar…

I recognized the image as one I’d seen before, and checked the usual suspects for published building pictures: Stanley King’s Consecrated Eminence (1951), Claude M. Fuess’s Amherst: The Story of A New England College (1935), and William S. Tyler’s two editions of A History of Amherst College (1873, 1895).

I found the image in Tyler’s second edition, A history of Amherst College during the administrations of its first five presidents : from 1821 to 1891.

Mystery numbers

Looking more closely at the copied image, I noticed something (else) odd. In the published image, the panels above the three doorways are blank. But in the purple printed copy, something was written on those panels!

I read these as the numbers 10, 32, and 3. If you see something different, leave a comment! As to what they mean? Your guess is literally as good as mine. A team season record? A date with unusual formatting?

What else do we know?

• This object probably dates between 1895 and 1905.
  • We know the earliest possible date because of its publication in Tyler’s history (1895).
  • We know the latest likely date because in 1905, College Hall was renovated and a new front portico with columns was added. Though it’s possible that the older image was reused after 1905, I don’t think it’s very likely. The added portico, as seen in the photograph below, dramatically changed the look of the building.

Do you know what this mystery object is?

Or maybe what those numbers refer to?

Post a comment or send us a note if you know anything about this object or something like it. We’d love to know more.

The Wild West has been a source for literary inspiration as long as people have lived and settled there. Special Collections and Archives hosts a variety of Wild West stories across popular mediums, including dime novels and small books.

First published in 1860, dime novels became a popular source of media for young audiences and adults alike (Cassidy, 2011). Dime novels provided cheap entertainment and were popular among Civil War soldiers as well as children, although there was quickly a rising moral panic about the contents of these inexpensive texts corrupting America’s youth. Filled with tales of cowboys, Native Americans, gold, and adventure, the dime novels were exciting and sometimes scandalous material churned out at an impressive rate. Margaret Cassidy cites an 1896 copycat train robbery by young men with a collection of “blood and thunder” dime novels stashed away in their den in her speech “Pernicious Stuff”. This robbery and other crimes like it pulled the same moral panic that video games inspired nearly a century later, as violent and dangerous media that confuses their parents and corrupts the youth.

Dime novels were often set in the heyday of Manifest Destiny, as the American government pushed settlements west, spearheaded by cavalry, wagon trains, and cowboys. Antagonists were created from individuals who stood as barriers this aim: train robbers, Native Americans. In this manner, dime novels seem to follow the narrow point of view of white men, however women are occasionally given the spotlight, as in “Fred Fearnot and the Ranch Girl Owner; And How She Held Her Own.” by Hal Standish, published in 1918.

Perusing these dime novels also allows readers to view ads and propaganda statements that reflected their times, including wartime rationing during World War I, as well as advertisements for other dime novels, as included in these 1918 dime novel advertisements. (For more information on the Dime Novels Collection, click this link.)

The Western remained to be a popular setting for stories for decades to come. The Robert M. Ervin Jr. Collection contains a wide variety of comic books, serials, and monograph that covers a multitude of genres including science fiction, fantasy, and Westerns. The Ervin Collection contains multiple Better Little Books, petite texts containing stories and illustrations involving popular characters, such as the Lone Ranger, Roy Rogers, and Gene Aughtry. These tiny tomes cost about fifteen cents and were popular with young readers.

References:
“Pernicious Stuff” Nineteenth Century Media, the Children Who Loved Them, and the Adults Who Worried about Them. (2011). ETC: A Review of General Semantics, 68(3), 304–315. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=hus&AN=64432725&site=eds-live&scope=site

Finding aid: https://archives.lib.fsu.edu/repositories/10/resources/1169

We’ve been in FULL SWING with the first phase of moving our collections into their new, climate-controlled stacks. It’s involved copious sweat, a few tears, and minimal blood, but our art and architecture folios are now on designated shelving, and our Rhode Island collections are settling into their new homes.

We couldn’t have done it without tireless and meticulous help from a fantastic team from William B. Meyer. Phase two of our moving will begin in a couple of weeks – stay tuned for updates!

A new set of photographs are now available in DigiNole: FSU’s Digital Repository. The photographs were taken from events at Heritage Day 2004, during which a statue celebrating integration was unveiled on campus. The digitized materials also include a program and newspaper clippings.

Notable people depicted in the photographs include Doby Flowers, FSU’s first African American homecoming princess, and her brother Fred Flowers, the first black athlete to wear an FSU uniform. Other alumni from the first decade of integrated classes (1962-1982) were also in attendance, as were several FSU presidents and former Tallahassee Mayor John Marks III.

You can explore all these materials in the University Records of the Office of the Associate Vice President of University Relations.

I don’t remember recording this speech. But there is the cassette, with my handwriting on it from some 36 years ago. It was a New York City conference of the Socialist Party USA on September 3, 1983.

WNYC Reporter Andrea Bernstein posted a segment and synopsis of the speech three years ago on this site, which you can revisit here: SANDERS. 

I thought, however, that it would be useful, now that he is again running for the Democratic nomination for the presidency, to post the entire audio recording so that listeners may appreciate the full context, nuance, and texture of his delivery at that gathering. 

As we gear up for Fall semester, Special Collections & Archives will be taking some time to complete projects and prepare for the coming school year. This includes the Special Collections Reading Center in Strozier Library, the Pepper Library Reading Room, and the Heritage Museum. However, we will still be available to researchers! We will be by appointment only August 5th through August 15th.

Available appointment times are from 10-12pm and from 1-4pm, Monday through Friday. To complete an Appointment Request form, please click here. In order to ensure that we can fulfill your request, please request appointments at least 24 hours in advance, and keep in mind that you must request your desired materials ahead of time as well.

Finally, please note that Special Collections & Archives will be completely closed Friday, August 16, 2019 for a division retreat. This closure will include the Pepper Library and Heritage Museum spaces.

Ina VanStan (1901-1989) was a Professor of Clothing and Textiles at Florida State University. Her studies focused on a variety of fabrics pre-Colombian Peru, as well as other cultural artifacts from that time.

The Ina VanStan Printing Plates contain twenty-three printing plates of various sizes depicting fabric patterns from Van Stan’s studies of Peruvian fabrics. The printing plates were used for producing images for VanStan’s scholarly publications. The collection’s finding aid offer’s access to VanStan’s relevant publications on artifacts such as dolls, fabric fragments, and feather ornaments; it provides a springboard for those interested in further study of ancient Peruvian culture.

Those interested in related materials to VanStan’s studies can find images of artifacts in the Carter Collection in FSU’s Museum of Fine Arts (MoFA).

Satirist Paul Krassner passed away this past Sunday. In 2004 WNYC host Steve Post spoke with Krassner, whom he described as “a kind of counter-cultural renaissance man.” Writer, publisher editor, activist, psychedelic explorer, and concert violinist, Krassner considered himself an investigative satirist. People magazine called him the father of the underground press, while the FBI deemed him “a raving, unconfined nut.”  This program was first broadcast on June 5, 2004 as a No Show special. 

Note: Due to licensing considerations, we had to remove the commercial music used in this program. The interview, however, is faithful to the original broadcast.

A new digital exhibit is now available, featuring information and documents that expand on the items currently on display in at the Heritage Museum in Dodd Hall. The exhibit is titled A University in Transition: The Long Path to Integration and focuses on the role of institutional racism in delaying state university integration. It also highlights acts of resistance by students, such as John Boardman, who was expelled for his active involvement with the black Inter-Civic council during and after the Tallahassee Bus Boycott.

African American students, faculty, staff, and alumni also tell their story during the 40th anniversary of integration, for which a statue was commissioned featuring the first black graduate, athlete, and homecoming queen. The exhibit concludes with a spotlight on FSU’s first black administrator, Dr. Bob E. Leach, whose speeches inspired students for over a decade (1978-1988) and who served as a model of leadership for the university.

The exhibit also aligns with the goals of FSU’s recently established Civil Rights Institute. The interdisciplinary institute will sponsor events, speakers, publications, education, and research on civil rights and social justice. Its collections will be housed in Strozier Library and include historical African American newspapers, the Tallahassee Civil Rights Oral History collection, microfilm editions of NAACP and ACLU organizational records and the Emmett Till archives.

For more information, check out the library’s Civil Rights LibGuide.

The digital exhibit is available here: https://universityintransition.omeka.net/exhibits/show/a-university-in-transition/introduction

Pride season is in
full swing in the city, including here at the City of Vancouver Archives! As a
community partner for this year’s Pride, we have had an exciting month of
sharing our LGBTQ2+ holdings at events and through new initiatives. 

First, thanks to support from the Vancouver Pride Society, we had a booth at East Side Pride on June 22nd. There, we shared just some of the 5,400 digitized photographs in the BC Gay and Lesbian Archives (BCGLA) collection, as well as information on our other LGBTQ2+ holdings. We loved meeting and hearing stories from the many community members who visited us!

We were also thrilled with the initial results of our photo identification initiative, which we launched at East Side Pride. The identification of people in photographs is an important part of completing the historical record, and has been the focus of many archives projects. Library and Archives Canada’s Project Naming, for instance, has had immense success since the early 2000s in identifying Indigenous people in archival photographs. Here at the City of Vancouver Archives, we’re reaching out to members of the LGBTQ2+ community for help in identifying people in the BCGLA collection. Of the more than 5,400 images that have been digitized, over 1,000 depict people who are currently unidentified. Identifying them will help to strengthen the collection, deepen knowledge and understanding of LGBTQ2+ history in this province, and ensure that community members’ voices and stories are heard and preserved for the future.

At East Side Pride,
we started this photo identification project on a small scale, with binders of
photographs. As they flipped through the images, community members at the booth
recognized themselves and their friends, and one person even found a photo that
they had taken in the 1990s! By the end of the day, we had learned about eighty
people depicted in our selection of photographs. 

We would also like to thank everyone who came out to East Side Pride and visited our booth. We’re so grateful to all those who shared their stories, looked at our photographs on display, and helped with identification. Your contributions will help us ensure that LGBTQ2+ histories are properly represented within the collection.

We will be attending more Pride-related events this summer, including the Vancouver Pride Week Launch and Flag Raising Event at City Hall on July 29th and the Sunset Beach Festival on August 4th. Due to the success of the identification project at East Side Pride, we will have even more photographs to share at these events! Stop by our booth to look at images of past protests, celebrations, community events, social gatherings, parades, and more – and to let us know if you recognize anyone in these photos. We look forward to meeting you there. 

If you can’t make it to the Pride events, there are other ways to access our holdings.  For example, over 5,400 images from the BCGLA collection are now available online. All of these can be accessed through our online database at any time. Check out our last blog post for more information on the photograph series and its contents. You can also visit us in person at the Archives. Find our address and hours on the City of Vancouver website.

As part of our photo identification project, we are currently in the process of implementing an online mechanism for comments. This will allow LGBTQ2+ community members to share their knowledge about materials from our online database. As we wait for the introduction of this tool, you can view the photographs online, and if you see anyone you know or have any comments, make a note of any names, dates, or locations you recognize and send us an email at archives@vancouver.ca. 

Stay tuned on our Twitter for any updates regarding the BCGLA and our involvement with Pride. Or, send us an email to sign up for our BCGLA photo identification email list and get additional information regarding upcoming events and the future of this project.

On May 25, 1961, President John F. Kennedy challenged the nation to land a man on the Moon before the end of the decade, striking a responsive chord with the American people. The Apollo program was created to meet this goal, and on July 20, 1969, astronauts of the Apollo 11 Mission became the first humans to land and set foot on the Moon. 

The Moon landing was a stunning achievement that commanded world attention, and thanks to newly discovered film holdings at the National Archives and a digitization partnership with filmmakers, an enriched perspective of the Apollo 11 mission is shown in the recently released documentary, Apollo 11.

The documentary features previously unseen large format film footage and more than 11,000 hours of uncatalogued audio recordings from the National Archives, allowing viewers to experience the perspectives of the astronauts, the Mission Control team, and the millions of spectators on the ground. The film showcases the days and hours in 1969 when American astronauts took “a giant leap for mankind” into the future.

National Archives staff in the Motion Picture, Sound, and Video Branch and the Motion Picture Preservation Lab, as well as staff in various other offices across the agency, were critical in enabling the access and digitization of these holdings. 

As part of our recent Archivist’s Achievement Awards ceremony, Todd Douglas Miller, director of the Apollo 11 documentary film, offered his thanks to National Archives staff for making this film possible:

My kudos extend to Dan Rooney, Chief of the Motion Picture, Sound, and Video Branch, and our teams at the National Archives for locating, identifying, and sharing this astounding footage. Their contributions to the Apollo 11 documentary underscore the importance of our mission. By preserving and making accessible these film reels, they have given the world an unprecedented and breathtaking glimpse of this historic milestone.

Learn more about the newly uncovered Apollo 11 holdings at the National Archives and how the partnership project enabled the digitization, preservation, and access of the records in this video:

We recently completed digitization of the newspaper from Leon High School here in Tallahassee. Started in the 1920s, the paper has gone through several name changes to end up at Leon High Life today. Our recent additions to the newspaper started in 1988 and bring us up to the end of Spring 2019. To write this update, I took a look at the newspapers published just at the end of the school year.

As a school publication, there are few to no issues published beyond the beginning of June. These papers are the last hurrah for the seniors, celebrating the next steps for those leaving, looking back at the year of academics and athletics.

They also used these issues to talk about what they’d loved and hated that year, making these issues time capsules to what the kids thought was cool at the time.

But they were also looking forward to their summer and looking at what would be on deck to go see, hear, and do for their last few months of freedom if they were Seniors or just looking forward to the break if there was more high school ahead of them.

You can explore the entire run of the Leon High Newspaper for a unique look at life in Tallahassee from a high schooler’s perspective from the 1920s up to 2019.

The Apollo 11 mission, commissioned by President Kennedy in 1961, sought to “perform a crewed lunar landing and return to earth” (nasa.gov). It was the first mission of its kind and dramatically changed the landscape of the Space Race in the 1960s and 1970s. The Space Race was an ongoing contest between the United States and the Soviet Union, where each country sought to outshine the other. With the Apollo 11 mission, however, the Space Race reached its apex, for on July 20, 1969, the Apollo 11 crew landed on the moon and planted the United States Flag on the lunar surface. 

To commemorate and memorialize this momentous occasion, the Claude Pepper Library will be hosting an exhibit on the Apollo 11 mission from July 16 to December 16, 2019. We will have on display numerous photographs, correspondence, and other materials related to the mission including a large photograph of Astronaut Buzz Aldrin standing next to the American flag planted on the moon’s surface. The exhibit will consist of three thematic parts: earlier space programs in Florida, materials relating to the Apollo 11 landing, and FSU’s reaction to the landing. Sample materials selected include photos of the crew with Florida governors and legislators, the poster for the mission, and additional correspondence about the impact of the mission on Florida’s cultural memory.

More importantly, the Apollo 11 mission strikes near to the hearts of many Floridians. Launched from Cape Kennedy in Cape Canaveral, the mission has become a major part of our cultural identity as Floridians and as Americans. Throughout the country this year, festivities and celebrations are occurring to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 launch. According to nasa.gov, almost 650 million people heard Armstrong utter those famous words “…one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” And these words have stayed with us, are woven into our cultural fabric. We should be proud of this achievement; on the 50th anniversary of the launch, let us celebrate this momentous occasion in American history.

The images in this post come from the Spessard Holland Collection. To learn more about this collection, please see its finding aid.

The exhibit is available in the Claude Pepper Library which is open Monday-Friday, 9am to 5pm.

Larry Coryell’s name is nearly synonymous with jazz fusion, and understandably so.  The late guitarist’s contributions to the development of the jazz-rock idiom were foundational, particularly his work in the 1960s with the Gary Burton Quartet and with the proto-fusion band The Free Spirits.  His own 1970 album, Spaces (Vanguard), is often cited as a watershed recording that defined the jazz fusion genre.

But Larry Coryell’s musical interests extended well beyond the intersection of mainstream jazz and rock and roll. In 1976, after the breakup of his dynamic fusion band, The Eleventh House, Coryell began shifting his creative focus away from jazz fusion to explore a larger, more eclectic stylistic palette. The work in his post-fusion career often synthesized the musical languages of an array of seemingly disparate cultures: Indian classical, blues, flamenco, Western classical, country western, and the dance forms of Latin America, as well as jazz and rock.  And his pared down, acoustic solo and small ensemble work of that time is considered by some to be his finest. Jazz critic David R. Adler wrote, “To hear Coryell at his best… was to really hear him, i.e., in more stripped-down and intimate settings. His duo collaborations and solo 6- and 12-string acoustic work remains some of the most inspired and imaginative in the annals of modern guitar.”¹

…one of the more astounding moments, I think, in our Listening Room. –WQXR’s Robert Sherman

On May 8th, 1985, Larry Coryell was a guest on WQXR’s program The Listening Room. Coryell treated host Robert Sherman and his radio audience to a live in-studio performance of his composition for solo guitar, “Improvisation on Bolero.”  Coryell, performing on an acoustic Ovation Adamas 12-string, transformed Maurice Ravel’s staple of the orchestral repertoire into a dazzling showpiece for unaccompanied guitar. The breadth of Larry Coryell’s diverse musical influences, his genius for blurring the boundaries between genres, and his legendary virtuosity are all on full display in his WQXR appearence. Robert Sherman called Coryell’s performance, “one of the more astounding moments, I think, in our Listening Room.”

Larry Coryell’s performance of “Improvisation on Bolero” and excerpts from his conversation with Robert Sherman are available in the media player at the top of this page.  The full episode of The Listening Room from May 8th, 1985 is available here.

¹Adler, David R., Jazz-Rock Icon Larry Coryell Dies at 73, The Village Voice, 23-February-2017

FSU Libraries continues to partner with local organizations to bring the history of our region online and available for research. Today’s new digital collection comes from a local high school, Godby High School. Opened in 1966, it officially became a school for grades 9-12 in 1968, graduating its first class in 1970. Much younger than the other high school we’ve partnered with in the past, Leon High School, Godby brings another perspective to student and family life in Tallahassee from the mid-1960s up to the 2018 yearbook.

You can explore more yearbooks from Godby High here. Yearbooks from 1969 to 2018 are available to browse and search.

This is a story about valuing the hard work that has come before us and thinking innovatively about how we can share that hard work in new ways, using new and emerging digital platforms.  Back in 2006, we launched a short feature on our website, which we called Today’s Document. We featured a particular document from the Archives, to provide a bit of history in a bite-sized chunk. These were documents that had been scanned by staff for education, exhibits, or researchers. The feature was popular with the staff and the public. We continue to run it on our intranet at the National Archives. 

In 2011, we started thinking about the usefulness of mobile apps and developed content based on our web feature for a Today’s Document Mobile App for iOS and Android.  We learned a great deal from creating those apps and we began looking at other platforms that might attract users to our content.

We launched Today’s Document on Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook later that same year.

We were thrilled that by 2013, Today’s Document was reaching over 100,000 followers on Tumblr.

Tumblr turned out to be the perfect platform for Today’s Document named to Time‘s top 30 Tumblrs for 2013.  We had Tumblr visiting the National Archives for a Federal Tumblr meetup in 2014. Today’s Document was featured in DigitalGov’s “Tumblr for Feds” Webinar and NARA’s Today’s Document staff attended the “Tumblr Goes to the White House” Q&A session at the White House in 2014.

While this was happening, our staff noticed that the documents that we turned into GIFs received the most attention. Our staff taught themselves the basics of GIF-making and away we went. Today’s Document was featured in DigitalGov’s “Essentials of Animated GIFs for Public Services” Webinar in 2015, the same year we went over 200,000 followers on Tumblr.

In 2016, Today’s Document was featured at DPLAfest’s “Advanced GIF Making Techniques” Webinar.

Here is Darren Cole, one of the driving staff behind Today’s Document, describing our work at that time:

Later in 2016,  we looked at yet another new platform, GIPHY, and we launched the National Archives GIPHY channel, using GIFs we had created for Today’s Document. 

Our GIPHY channel was featured in a DigitalGov blog post, as well as multiple news sources, including the New York Times, Washingtonian magazine, the Huffington Post, Popular Science, Endgadget, and more through 2016.

Today’s Document now has  over 50,000 Twitter followers and 36,000 Facebook followers.  We have been featured on Tumblr’s “Radar” over 28 times and currently have over 250,000 followers on the Tumblr platform.  The amazing number comes from our National Archives channel on GIPHY, which has reached over 1.2 billion views. 

Thanks to the innovative thinking of staff, we have provided access to our records to people around the world who may never come to archives.gov or the National Archives.   The staff combined their knowledge of new and emerging digital platforms with the rich content of the Archives. This has resulted in making access happen  in places and in numbers we have never seen before.  What will we think of next?