It has been some years since the Public Interest Declassification Board (the Board) updated our Wikipedia page.  In March 2016, the Members and staff received help from a technically savvy Management Information Systems intern, Jordan Sparks of Wayne State University.  Ms. Sparks took on the task of analyzing the Board’s make-up, including statutory history, researched the Boards activities, developed and coded content for a newly formatted Wikipedia page.  All in the space of one week!  We are grateful to Ms. Sparks for her dedication and hard work transforming the Wikipedia page into a user-friendly document for the public and those interested in classification and declassification policy.  We also appreciate the assistance provided by ISOO analyst YuJin Kim who kindly posted the page.

For more information about the PIDB’s activities, you may also visit the PIDB’s website: https://www.archives.gov/declassification/pidb/

Spring is in the air, the sun is out and that usually means it’s time to find a body of water to sit by and enjoy since we live in Florida. One of those places you could visit this spring and summer (or anytime really) would be the Edward Ball Wakulla Springs State Park.

This Florida State Park is home to plenty of wildlife including alligators, deer, birds, and of course the majestic manatee. There are guided water boat tours and a spring for swimming where the water is always a nice, cool temperature. Find more information about this beautiful state park here.

The park is named Edward Ball Wakulla Springs State Park, you might wonder, “who is Edward Ball?” According to the Florida State Parks website, he was a “financier” who “purchased the property in 1934 and developed it as an attraction focusing on wildlife preservation and the surrounding habitat.” The Lodge at Wakulla Springs was built in 1937 as a guest house on the 4,000 acres Ball purchased the same year. In the 1960s’ Ball donated land to Florida State University for a marine lab which is now the Edward Ball Marine Laboratory.

Now you could be wondering, “what does any of this have to do with Claude Pepper?” The former Florida Senator and Congressman Claude Pepper and Edward Ball were like the Cady Heron and Regina George of their time, publicly civil with one another, but deplored each other in reality. Pepper writes about his relationship with Ball in his autobiography, Pepper: Eyewitness To A Century.

Ed Ball was a financier who amassed a great amount of wealth and power due to his family connections. His brother-in-law Alfred I. duPont was one of the wealthiest men in the country in the early 20th century. After duPont’s death in 1935, Ball took over control of the duPont Trust and emerged as a wealthy political dominant force in Florida in the 1940s’. Ball never ran for political office himself, but backed and tried to defeat political candidates running for office. One of those candidates he tried to defeat in the 1944 Florida Senate election and eventually succeeded in defeating was Claude Pepper in the now infamous 1950 Florida Senate election.

The history of these two men is long and extensive and I encourage any reader of this blog entry to read more on the subject. A great place to start would be Tracy E. Danese’s book, Claude Pepper & Ed Ball: Politics, Purpose, and Power published by the University Press of Florida in 2000. These two men played a great role in shaping the political history and future of Florida. I hope this blog gave you a brief summary of their relationship and intrigued you to read more about it.

*UPDATE – Our annotations are best viewed using Google Chrome as your web browser with a Genius extension*

Some of the Internet’s finest developments revolve around hip hop. One of my favorite examples is the discovery of the date of Ice Cube’s “Good Day” (January 20th, 1992). Better still is the website-cum-app WhoSampled, one of the web’s finest wikis, which allows users to “discover… direct connections” between sampled songs and the songs that sampled them. The greatest, and most ambitious, is undoubtedly Genius (formerly Rap Genius), which began as a means to annotate rap lyrics, but has expanded its mission to annotating the Internet… all of it. Indeed, we will use Genius to annotate this very page, by clicking here. 

In a way, it’s not surprising that hip hop should be such an inspiration to the Internet. Coming of age at roughly the same time, both developed a pronounced hypertextuality, a willful indifference to copyright law, and an affinity for the artful diss, on street corners and in “comments” sections everywhere.

One could argue that New York’s Master Builder Robert Moses, too, shares some affinities with hip hop. Moses composed Swinburnian poetry in his Yale days, so he’s been known to spit a rhyme or two, and as befitting a man who ruled his Triborough fiefdom from beneath a bridge, he had a trollish gift for verbose insults. That gift is on full display in this speech, entitled “The Critics Build Nothing,” given at a 1959 New York Builders Association luncheon. When it comes to his critics, Robert Moses asks, a full 29 years before Public Enemy, that we “Don’t Believe the Hype.”

One wonders what would have happened had Moses spent his days trading dozens in the South Bronx, rather than razing its neighborhoods for yet another super-highway. We’ll sadly never know. But, in tribute to this imagined B.o.B Moses, we give his speech the full “Genius” annotation treatment. Below is a transcription of his November 1959 address. To see our annotations, or to add your own, simply add “genius.it/” to the front of this page’s url. Or just click here.

Haters to the left. Annotations to the right.

“The Critics Build Nothing”

(This transcript was created using the free open-source software Gentle. Punctuation and additional edits were added to their computer-generated script.)

Bradford N. Clark (Chairman, New York Building Congress):

we are indeed fortunate today to have gilmore clark introduce his long-time friend, commissioner moses. gil clarke, as an eminent engineer, educator, and planner, has contributed greatly to the satisfaction of the needs of his fellow men. for these accomplishments, he has been the recipient of tributes and honors too numerous for individual mention. his name and that of his firm clarke-rapuano have been associated with almost every major construction project in the metropolitan area over many years. he is a man of action. ladies and gentlemen it is my privilege to introduce to you, gilmore clarke. [applause]

Gilmore Clarke (Architect, Clarke-Rapuano):

mister chairman,  commissioner moses, honored guests and members and friends of the building congress. if there is anyone who needs no introduction to a new york audience, it is robert moses. his many magnificent accomplishments in this city, in this state, and elsewhere in the united states, indeed beyond these continental limits, are well known. his name is and always will be linked inseparably with eminently distinguished projects, including power dams that harness great rivers, bridges that span wide waterways, networks of expressways and parkways that are the vital arteries of our vast metropolitan area, spacious parks and playgrounds of all sizes and variety, housing, cultural centers, worlds fairs. and a myriad of other enterprises.

i should like to tell you briefly something about robert moses in the role of the artist. dr. l. p. jacks, erstwhile principal of manchester college, oxford, said these words. i quote: “art is the name we give to the wisest way of doing whatever needs to be done. do anything as wisely as it can be done and you stand at the growing point where all the fine arts begin. there are some people who seem to think that in order to promote the fine arts, you must turn your back on the common work of the world as it goes on for example in a great city and betake yourself to another sort of society where the mysteries of art can be studied without disturbance by the toil and din and turmoil of industrial civilization.

“i suggest another method of looking at the matter. i would suggest that we take the toil of the world as it stands, the toil of business, the toil of industry, the toil of the professions. that we find out the wisest way of doing all that. that we accept it and close with it and make the best of it, lifting to the highest level of excellence it is capable of reaching, and i venture to the say we will have taken the most effective steps we could toward a revival of the fine arts, not excepting the finest of them all. art has always grown out of the common work of the world out of the effort to close that work with all the excellence it can bear.” bob, this you have done, you have closed your work with all the excellence it can bear. every project you have sponsored and directed has been done superbly well. consequently, i opine, you belong in the ranks of the artist, for you have dated in making effective a revival of the fine arts and added to that you are the greatest public works administrator this country has ever known. the bard of stratford expressed eloquently my predicament that this moment. he said, “i have not skill enough your worth to sing for we who now behold these present days have eyes to wonder but lack tongues to praise.” gentlemen, i take pleasure in presenting the honorable robert moses.

Robert Moses:

bradford clark, gilmore clarke, ladies and gentlemen. if as i hope you have followed with interest our moving picture of st. lawrence and niagara power, i want to point the morrow. licensing on our two frontiers was fought over by extremists for many years with great bitterness, recriminations, random charges, and fantastic claims, all admirably calculated to befuddle the public, obscure the real issues, and postpone the inevitable conclusion for the public authority was the only logical and acceptable answer. i started on this work as a junior assistant to governor smith almost forty years ago. i have been in the middle of it as head of the state park system for thirty five years. five years ago governor dewey made me chairman of the power authority which has enabled me with the aid of my fellow trustees, commissioners, staff, and consultants to coordinate major improvements on the saint lawrence and niagara rivers. at both messena and niagara i made the statement that our purpose was to live up to a fast schedule. that we aim to be respected rather than to be popular but that perhaps some day we might achieve both. i think we are now well liked on the saint lawrence and perhaps some day we will be on the niagara. nobody escapes grossly prejudiced and unfair attack, who has taken the solemn oath of office to follow, in work like that of the power authority, a middle course between the left-wingers who want government to do everything including challenging and driving out private business, and the old fashioned tycoons who still demand that the state giveaway its basic legally inalienable natural resources to utility companies with a record too recent to forget.

No doubt some of you would think that i was ducking if i said nothing about the so called title one housing program, in which so many of your people are engaged. the purpose of title one – which was lost sight of because the air was full of old vegetables, rotten eggs and dead cats – is to attract private capital to the pitfalls of slum clearance. our official committee here in new york works gratis. it is able to show that this city is undeniably first and foremost in the entire country in actual achievement, and yet we have been vilified by snarling critics at home, and without reliable political support or full citizen understanding.

nobody can tear down ancient rat infested rookeries without first moving people. we have not been heartless in the process. we may at times have been clumsy, but we’ve steadily improved our techniques. I admit freely that one test of democracy is concern for the individual subject to inconvenience, discomfort, and hardship, but our categorical imperative is action to clear the slums and we can’t let minorities dictate that the century old chore will be put off another generation or finally abandoned.

the left-wingers have no monopoly of hatred of injustice. if i did not believe the people at least potentially way ahead of many of their present leaders, if i did not think that given time they can see through demagoguery, i would despair of democracy. i’ve been through these disturbances before and they don’t bother me too much. perhaps it’s the long view or the applause of conscience or the hide of a black rhinoceros that helps me to maintain balance in such situations. occasionally too, i lift up mine eyes unto hills from whence cometh my help. at the end of these periodic uproars some odd blessings appear, comingly disguised but still recognizable. among other things we learned to be grateful for friendships which have proven durable.  

in our unprotected public service you must always be ready to quit when the elected officials no longer want you, or when there is no further opportunity to get results. you must accept most of the rules of the game no matter how brutal and unfair, always reminding yourself that you can retire to other fields, more interesting, productive, and i may add, more restful. those who have large objectives simply can’t brood over their enemies. it’s not nobility. unlike some of the tuscarora indians we forget where the hatchet is buried. Fame is not for little bureaucrats. we must get our fun out of our work. the most i can possibly expect is to be remembered for their a short time as the “archie moore” of public works. [noise]

you can put this in your pipe and smoke it. the professional vomiters and mud throwers, jealous and unhappy chairmen and secretaries of moribund civic societies, with their excited maggoty brains, the rattlesnake element in the press hot after sensational disclosures, the junior bloodhounds, and unlicensed sleuths, in other words those who under the guise of civic righteousness and news fit or unfit to print, habitually and constantly malign new york, are doing our city no good. Stephen Vincent Benet in one of his prophetic poems told about a new variety of termites who eat away the granite, steel, aluminum, and glass of our big buildings. we also have two legged termites, busily disemboweling and undermining our city. we are told by the planners and pundits that cities like new york are too large for comfort and government. the real trouble there so if they’re too big for most of those who try to interpret them.

there’s another type of critic like the guided tour american traveller who has read a book by doctor hassenpheffer and finds that everything is ordered better in post-war europe. look, he says , at swedish co-operative housing. well i’ve looked and being neither a jingo or a groveler, find much that is admirable on practically nothing we can use in view of fundamental differences in conditions in the two countries. these critics have no time for praise, no pride in our astonishing accomplishments, and the attractions the indomitable energies the visions and hopes which make new york what it truly is, the greatest metropolis in the world. god knows we have our manifest deficiencies. but if a tenth of the talent and energy hired to tout our expensive wares and fabled rialtos were spent on counting our blessings,we would confound the caricaturists who picture new york as only a place of wrath and tears and become the envy of gath and ashkelon.

my mail often takes its tone from whiners and bricks-throwers. nervousness and irritability are on the increase. so are stomach ulcers. maybe the youth problem is simply dramatic evidence of general malaise. it is indeed almost pathological. some of these belly-achers may need treatment to get back balance, a sense of fairness and the native humor which is always been the great american life saver. i hear more and more complaints about hard surface tennis courts, slides without cushions, weak coffee, half buttered sandwiches, under-beefed hot dogs. shuttering desiccated aristocrats curse us because gay ragamuffins splash in our fountains in the hot weather. women complain that the nearest playground is eight blocks, that is, sixteen hundred feet away. the fact that we increase the total number playgrounds from a hundred and seventeen almost eight hundred makes little impression. few mention the miles of new parkways and expressways, but a hole in the pavement, misplaced or illegible sign, or broken light will elicit howls of rage. speeders yell that they are the targets of speed traps and grafting cops. writers wax sarcastic about riveting noises at night, manufacturing topsoil out of sewage, failure to grasp relations between the city in the suburbs, the alleged preference of rubber over rails, the proportion of friendly not to say complementary letters is still large but declines. the anonymous grievous and threatening ones increase.

when those of us who for years have studied road accidents conclude that speed makes all the difference between major or minor accidents and therefore refuse to raise speed limits, we are ridiculed by critics who insist on faster travel and the right to kill innocent people.  for years the automobile industry blindly opposed gas taxes and modern highways and called us every name that was printable. by the time the folly of this position was realized, we were years behind in our road building. i won the general motors top highway award in the competition involving some forty two thousand contestants and nineteen fifty three for telling publicly what everybody in detroit already privately knew, namely that a car is no good without a road to run on.

at niagara we are expected to excavate out conduits, reservoirs, and  powerhouses without blasting of the slightest community disruption. solomon’s temple the good book says was fashioned with prefabricated and doubtless pre-stressed stone so that no sound of hammer, ax, or any tool of iron was heard in the building. somehow with all our modern gadgets we’ve lost the art of building noiselessly. a word of encouragement real or fancy that city hall and the critics shriek with delight, they think that they have driven a wedge between the mayor and the department head. out come the headlines: mayor appoints investigating committee, mayor slaps down zilch, commissioner blatz on way out, a scandal ridden bureau to be abolished, racketeers denounced, underworld link to be broken, and so forth. the final payoff, reputation, denouement, retraction or correction appears on one of the last pages with the dow jones stock averages, brazilian coffee exchange news, and death notices. [noise]

one of the favorite press gags at every state capital county seat and city hall is to needle a governor, comptroller, chairman of the board, supervisors, or mayor with the question “who is the chief executive anyway? you or your subordinate?” Then the top man is expected to fly into a rage beat his chest like tarzan and say “i am.” such questions was never got a rise on of abraham lincoln. he allowed he could get along with the eccentricities and even arrogance of his aides. if they contributed to his administration and the winning of the war. and he asked mildly where general grant got his cigars and his whiskey on the assumption that they might benefit the generals critics. at the height of one of these tea kettle tempests i was getting out of an elevator in the municipal building at a conference attended by a number of officials. i was one of the last ones off and heard a man say to the operator “who are those bozos?” the operator answered “commissioners, a dime a dozen.”

some of nicest signed letters i get are in longhand or marked “personal.” they are from prominent people who just can’t afford to come out and they open, so they thunder in the index. their testimony is offered incognito and in absentia. now and then one of them writes a letter that in spite of crudity, bad manners, rough tactics and so forth, my heart seems to be in the right place. these forthright communications remind me of senator royal s. copeland’s campaign for reelection in nineteen thirty four. his principal asset was a syndicated health column in the daily press and one day of the following colloquy appeared: “dear doctor copeland, my aunt emma has cold feet. what shall i do for them?” the reply was “there must be something the matter with your aunt’s circulation. see your local doctor.” of course the senator was triumphantly reelected.

i do not argue for immunity from criticism. that would be silly. i ask only for fair unbiased decent criticism consistent with loyalty to our town. criticism kept within the bounds of decency is a form of competition, it sharpens the wits. and is the very essence and hallmark of democracy. Criticism in the form of irresponsible sensationalism, rabble rousing, slander, and malice is a poison in the body politic. the public official who takes it lying down is a weakling and a coward and probably deserves what he gets. no one who does not love his city is fit to live in it. and no one who fouls his own nest can do it again good. our domestic snivelers are always apologizing because they live here. paul the apostle, the greatest of all missionaries boasted that he was a citizen of no mean city and everywhere boldly claimed the privileges and immunities of roman citizenship. the yahoos of the world would accept us more readily if we followed this precept. you think there is anything new in all this? we need not make absurd or sacrilegious comparisons in appealing to the muse of history.

i have no illusions of grandeur, no thirst for martyrdom and i’ve had too much fun to invite or beg for sympathy. as governor smith used to say let’s have a look at the record. they ostracize the leading citizens in greece. they  tired of hearing aristides called “the great.” they tossed out Baron Haussmann after seventeen years of service, which saved paris from rot and strangulation. mr. dooley sapiently remarked that the triumphal spanish american war arch at madison square was built out of temporary material so that the crowd could throw the bricks at admiral dewey when they got tired of him.

there is to be sure another possible approach to this problem, perhaps we should not be indignant about those smear their their neighbors and foul their own nest, perhaps we should become mellow or philosophical about them. I’m not positive myself that all skunks should be deflowered, dehydrated, desegregated, deceased or driven forth to their waste their sweetness on the desert air. Who am i to disturb the balance of nature? who knows what will happen when the polecat closes his pole? will he be freely accepted at lodges and lawn parties? suppose he suffers the fate of fellow who cured his halitosis and found he was still unpopular. maybe nature intended of their shall be at least one blankety-blank in every dozen.

we little bureaucrats to a level best, poor and inadequate though it may be, to accomplish something in our span of office. we have to rely a good deal on timing. as it says in ecclesiastes, there’s a time for every purpose under heaven – time to strike out, time to stick religiously to what we have, a time to devise novel expedients to fit new inventions, and a time to act as custodians to great traditions. there’s quite a gap between the veteran public official who naturally seeks to mop up his program in a neat orderly way, without frantic haste in the time remaining to him, and the critics who mull over his political and physical life expectancy and devoutly hope he won’t make it.

all progress calls for courage, determination, and a stomach for a fight. the question of method is always in dispute. there will always be people who say they agree with your purpose but don’t like the way you go at it. action is a rough business compared to thought. any persistent civil works administrator is bound to be tagged as ruthless inhuman and even sadistic. in the second war, we had two great supply chiefs, admiral moreell and general somervell. the admiral was as effective but less ruthless than the general. that is there was more mopping up to do after the general who had a marvelous company of trained dog robbers under him. there’s not to reason why. no civilian administrator possibly hope to have such crew. i often think of the general’s aid with wonderment not unmixed with envy.

the chesterfieldian ‘fortiter in re, suaviter in modo’ precept never appealed to me because in the rough and tumble of public building and administration i have never known it to work. the chesterfields are in their drawing rooms elegantly attired and nonchalant, sipping port and eating cake, while the battles rage in the marketplace and at the barricadoes. it should be noted in passing that the belted earl of chesterfield is remembered today only as the man whom samuel johnson wrote the most excoriating, shriveling letter in history.

i’ll make another assertion which may astonish some of you, there’s hardly an undertaking for which we get credit which we invented or discovered. wise men were living before agamemnon. we were called in to build because the progenitors had the idea, but lacked the support, the finances, the know-how, and in some instances, the guts and elbow grease to beat their way to the goal. these things are not done by easygoing people who thumb a ride through life. we were not selected because we were popular, or because our toughness was admired by everybody. we slap no backs and kiss no babies. we were given the chore “faute de mieux,” as the french say, “for lack of anything better.” our only claim is that we have produced. can you know imagine metropolitan new york choked, throttled, tripped, coffined, and confined without the bridges, tunnels, parkways, expressways, and throughways built to open it up by those who had to beat and hack down opposition? do you think the increase in values around the old slaughterhouses where the united nations was build occurred by accident? the riverside park and the henry hudson parkway were done by leprechauns? that the belt parkway dropped from heaven? that the park at jones beach rose like an exhalation? or that magic reclaimed our marshes and waterfront? do you go with the sour-bellies and say that if we had not done these things someone else would?

you are the builders. you will have little on which to use your skill and earn your living if the snarling critics and breast-beaters, wise-crackers, beatniks, and squares take over this town, which in spite of them is still today the envy of all the great cities of the world. if we are slipping, it is because or home detractors, cynics, and apologists are doing their damnedest to hurt us. if you want prosperity, look to your laurels. you have strong competitors in the hinterland and ruthless ones abroad. life is a battle. and those who tolerate foes of their own household will have no one to blame if prouder, stronger, and more constructive workers elsewhere elbow them aside.

that is what my canadian power opposite jim duncan said about communist china. those who have any understanding of world competition should listen to him respectfully. “wherever one travels or one’s travels take one in china, unbelievable activity of material progress are in evidence everywhere. Factories, the building trades, basic industries, operate around the clock on a 3 eight-hour shift basis every day of the year, excepting the days of national rejoicing, which are six in number. in the city of peking alone more building has taken place in the last seven years than since the beginning of the ching dynasty in sixteen forty-four. everywhere new factories are being constructed: public buildings, apartment houses, schools, universities arising from their foundation with amazing rapidity. railway lines are being laid down, airports and sewage systems are being built, more food is being grown, more goods are being produced, more children and young people are being educated, and the specter of starvation no longer stalks the land.”

this building congress has a great role to play in a free society. it represents united brains, skills, brawn, and a stomach for competition. you take risks. you asked for a good market and the fair chance of reward. i speak for those who employ you on public and quasi-public works and i can promise you a busy and prosperous if not uneventful future, given conditions which make it possible. the critics by and large build nothing. there will always be new problems in a spreading metropolis. problems are, in a very real sense, signs of growth, without them we would stagnate. some of them to be sure represent lags which have grown so aggravating that they can no longer be tolerated. none of these are beyond our powers to alleviate if not wholly solve if all of us are willing to make some sacrifices for the common good. we have the tools. we have the means. we have the men. give us respected leadership that will breathe confidence, not dismay, into the people of new york and give loyal support and we will rebuild this city.

Bradford Clark:

On behalf of the congress, commissioner, many, many thanks.

Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.

WNYC archives id: 150533
Municipal archives id: LT8865

This is a long overdue post about a terrific gift we received in early January.

Big thanks to Akira Yoshino and Taro Yumiba (and others) who sent in a cache of great 20th-century Japanese type specimen books and ephemera. If you’re interested in taking a look, stop in during our open hours, or set up an appointment to visit.

I have the honor to be co-hosting DPLAfest 2016 in Washington, D.C., next week, April 14-15, 2016. Along with the Smithsonian Institution and the Library of Congress, we will host DPLA’s third annual series of interactive workshops, hackathons, and discussions.

The National Archives plays a major role in this year’s DPLAfest. Together with DPLA’s Executive Director Dan Cohen and representatives from other host organizations, I will be welcoming members of the public to DPLAfest 2016 as we kick off this year’s event.

Various staff from across the National Archives will be presenting on innovative projects throughout the event, including sessions on Making, Finding & Using Animated GIFs,  Digital Collections in the K-12 Classroom, as well as Transcription Projects at the National Archives.

With our colleagues at Historypin, we will provide a presentation on APIs, Apps, and Audiences. The National Archives and Historypin have been working together on a project to digitize World War I content and increase the creative reuse and impact of these collections. Based on the information gathered, we are creating a mobile app to deliver World War I content to museums, teachers, and coders. This presentation will provide an opportunity to share more about the process we followed and the app we’ve built, as well as to engage with the digital humanities communities and experts in the field.

Staff from the National Archives, the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian will also serve on the panel discussion: “Opportunities and Challenges in Collaboration.” We are proud of the innovative work we are doing at NARA, and we are eager to share it with the community.

DPLAfest 2016 will appeal to anyone interested in libraries, technology, eBooks, education, creative reuse of cultural materials, law, open access, and genealogy research. DPLAfest brings together librarians, archivists, museum professionals, developers, technologists, publishers, authors, teachers, students, and many others to celebrate DPLA and its community of creative professionals.

You can keep up to date about DPLAfest 2016 by subscribing to its news list, bookmarking the DPLAfest 2016 homepage, keeping tabs on news and blog feed, or follow #DPLAfest on Twitter and Facebook.

“I’m a librettist and proud of it,” Abe Burrows tells a seminar sponsored by the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers. The well-known script doctor, director, and, yes, librettist, says he is still asked by people when is he going to write a “serious” play. This 1962 talk is his answer, an impassioned plea for the Broadway musical to be taken seriously as “a tremendous, fresh, almost new American art form…the American opera.”

Burrows was no stranger to facing an audience. Before going behind the scenes he had been a show biz performer in radio and nightclubs. His schtick here is irresistible, the streetwise, borscht belt comic delivery masking thoughts of a serious dramatic craftsman. Emphasizing the importance of what he does, Burrows proclaims, “the libretto is not the most important part of the musical show…but it is.” Though ceding true artistry to the many great composers he has worked with—there are stories about Frank Loesser, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, and many more—Burrows insists that without a strong libretto a show can’t succeed. Part of the reason a show’s book is regarded as of secondary importance stems from it being seen as merely the spoken intervals between songs. In fact, the libretto is “a complete collaboration” with the composer, ideally resulting in a “unity of feeling” that defines the entire production.

During question time he rejects the artificial distinction between character songs and plot songs, arguing that the song has no “role” within the production, to advance the action, say, or shine a light on the singer’s motives. Indeed, so passionately does he argue for a deep underlying unity to everything in the production that for a moment he lets his kid-from-Noo-Yawk  manner slip and rejects the concept of “purpose ” in art, saying, “It’s a teleological term. I’m here…and maybe a purpose comes out of my being here.” The whole talk is a similar mix of penetrating moments, anecdotes, and sage advice. When asked about high comedy and low comedy he warns the audience of would-be show writers there are only two types of comedy, “funny and unfunny. High comedy means no laughs.”

Abe Burrows (1910-1985) had already helped create the hit radio show Duffy’s Tavern and recorded many classic “gag” songs such as “The Girl With the Three Blue Eyes,” when he collaborated with Frank Loesser on the ground-breaking 1950 Broadway musical Guys and Dolls. For the next several decades he was one of the most sought after librettists and directors, as well as being rumored to be the uncredited “doctor” for many an ailing show during out-of-town tryouts. The fresh eye and above-mentioned commitment to the musical expressing a single organic idea is illustrated in this anecdote from his obituary in the New York Times:

“In 1961, How to Succeed, another Loesser-Burrows collaboration, became a phenomenal success on Broadway. Mr. Burrows recalled: ‘When we were working on How to Succeed, Frankie kept saying, ‘I gotta have a ballad.’ So one day he said, ‘I’ve got it.’ It was I Believe in You and it was a nice song. But I started to think. And I said, ‘Frankie, you’re going to kill me, but how would you feel if the fella sings it to himself? ‘You know, it’s a story of a guy climbing up, a real egotist.’ And Frankie looked at me and he says, ‘Damn it,’ and he got very angry with me because I was taking away his ballad. He wanted it to be a love song.’  Mr. Burrows said Mr. Loesser, whose flashes of anger never lasted very long, then ‘gradually began to get a look on his face that was almost like a smile’ – and, grumbling, accepted the idea that was to set the whole tone of the musical.”

But the man we hear in this talk, funny, avuncular, wise, is only half the story. Burrows was involved in left-wing politics, “sang” before the HUAC Committee, and was a member of the Executive Council of the Dramatists Guild.  In a 1955 self-described “rambling discourse” he painted a much harsher picture of the theatrical world he inhabited:

“Playwrights are the products of their culture. They reflect every strength and weakness of the culture, both as artists and as human beings. This is a confused age we live in and the dramas depicting it are bound to be just as confused. This is an age that equates value with success. In fact, it values only success and, in turn, success is largely valued in terms of money. In striving for this monetary success, all of us are scrambling in a huge market place. Our playwrights are right smack in the middle of that marketplace, too. And that is a deadly spot for a man who is trying to give insight into his world.”

Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.

WNYC archives id: 150275
Municipal archives id: LT9483

Everyone enters a field of work for one reason or another. For me, pursuing a Masters of Library and Information Studies began from a desire to be an archivist, a type of information professional that is largely underrated, misunderstood, or even unheard of by the public. The mystery regarding the profession drew me in initially. Popular culture depicts archives as dark and secluded repositories with strict access restrictions guarded by a gatekeeper, hesitant to divulge any of the archives’ secrets. Think of the less-than-helpful associate in the Jedi Archives who turns Obi-Wan away in Star Wars Episode II; she might as well have shushed him while she was at it!

The reality of archives is quite the opposite. In all of my experiences, archivists are more than happy to help you in your research and want to share the collections as much as possible with the public. That’s why they collect it all. In order to do so, however, they must establish order. 

In a job where creating order out of disorder is a top priority, the profession tends to attract many an OCD history buff. There’s something viscerally satisfying about organizing a dusty old mess of papers into a neat collection of documents in acid-free folders, legibly labeled for ready accessibility.

Many steps go into creating this order, however. After gaining legal custody of the documents, the archivist has to “gain intellectual control,” which is a sophisticated way of saying “learn exactly what kind of stuff is in the collection.” In order to do this, one must comb through the contents, which could take a very long time depending on how many linear feet the collection is, and create an inventory. The collection I’ve been “gaining intellectual control” of is called the Douglas and Jeannette Windham Papers, which contains the papers and publications of Douglas and Jeannette Windham, a distinguished FSU alumni couple. I’ve listed the materials that are in the collection, including personal papers, correspondence, academic articles, photographs, and professional reports. Once intellectual control is established, I can work with the archivist to determine a plan for order and begin to folder the contents into acid-free folders. A.K.A. the fun part! The kind of fun that is on par with labeling the shelves of your pantry, or color-coding your closet. (Yes, this is how I live).

The ordering continues when the boxes are stored in the stacks which are kept under strict environmental regulations in order to best preserve the archival materials from accelerated deterioration. The last step of creating order in the archives is to write the online finding aid so potential researchers can get an understanding of what is in the collection. This helps the collections get used more, which is, after all, the whole point in the first place! And there you have it: archives de-mystified.

Today is Incorporation Day, marking 130 years since the City was officially incorporated. The City of Vancouver is 130 years old!

Tillicum the otter, mascot for the Vancouver Centennial Commission’s celebrations. Identifier 2011-010.2218.

We’re pleased to announce that we’ve recently been given funding from the B.C. History Digitization Program to digitize photographs and some graphics from the Vancouver Centennial Commission fonds. The Centennial Commission was formed in 1979 and was responsible for organizing Vancouver’s Centennial celebrations in 1986.

1980s-style bike racks, a Vancouver Legacies project. Identifier CVA 775-3.

In addition to that project, we will be digitizing photographs from the City’s Legacy Program. This program was designed to enhance civic infrastructure (for example, by painting and lighting the Burrard Bridge) and to embellish the City with public art, amenities and signage.

Totem pole carving in progress. A Vancouver Legacies project. Identifier CVA 775-9.1.

We’ll be making these available as quickly as we can, releasing them in batches as they are ready, so that you can use them as soon as possible. Watch this space—we’ll let you know!

Just a reminder: Special Collections has open hours every Tuesday from 10:00 – 1:00, and every Wednesday from 3:00 – 7:00. You can stop by to browse a selection of items set up in the Reading Room, or you can request items related to a topic of interest. (Have you been wanting to look at children’s books illustrated with woodcuts, or diagrams of early 20th century plumbing systems? This is a great opportunity!)

Images above, clockwise from upper left: “Sheet metal shoe for advertising” from Metal Worker, Plumber, and Steam Fitter (October 22, 1915); Kutroff, Pickhardt, and Co. advertisement with fabric samples from Textile Colorist (47.561, September 1925); “United States Weather Bureau” from Peerless Paris and Its Marvelous Universal Exhibition (Philadelphia: Universal Expo Publishing Company, 1900); “Sea Urchins and Starfish” from Research Design in Nature (Chicago: John Gilbert Wilkins, 1931).

We’re located on the 3rd floor of the Providence Public Library, at the top of the marble staircase. We’re also open by appointment; just give us a call or send us an email!

Following the lamentable events in the town of Amherst last night, and as the community awaits an estimate of the damages and the full list of casualties, we felt that it would be appropriate to take a look back at the history of Emily Dickinson related violence in Amherst.

The earliest destruction associated with Emily Dickinson is, alas, confined mainly to conjecture. Following a series of mysterious nocturnal fires in the town of Amherst in the late 1870s and early 1880s, rumors began spreading of sightings of a white clad figure in connection with the blazes. The complete destruction of the college’s Walker Hall on the night of March 29, 1882, one of this series of fires, was linked with Dickinson some decades later. In a deathbed confession, mathematics instructor Fred A. Gaylord revealed that he had been maintaining a passionate correspondence with a mysterious and poetical local lady with dreadful penmanship; days before the blaze he had threatened to publish her letters if she continued to refuse to meet him in person. Her letters were, of course, completely destroyed in the conflagration.

Burned out shell of Walker Hall, 1882

Some fifty years later, in 1925,  Amherst College students were holding their annual declamation contest in the College Grove. Unrest began during the event when factions supporting Arthur J. White, who recited Wordsworth, and Elmer P. Hurst, reading Emily Dickinson, began to deride one another’s literary discernment. Violence erupted after the judges unanimously chose White. The brawl quickly spread through the crowd leaving a large portion of the student body nursing injuries to body and dignity.

President Olds remonstrated the students the following day and officially banned both Dickinson and Wordsworth from campus.

President Olds addressing students in front of College hall

In April of 1956, as news of Millicent Todd Bingham’s donation of her Emily Dickinson manuscripts to Amherst College spread throughout the town, a large group of passionate supporters of Amherst’s Jones Library gathered on the town common. Already nettled by the donation of Martha Dickinson Bianchi’s manuscripts to Harvard, this latest news was unbearable insult to the loyal library patrons who felt that Dickinson’s works belonged at the public library. Torches were lit and as the angry mob grew, groups of torch bearing citizens roamed the campus terrorizing undergraduates and professors alike. Late in the evening the mob reconvened in the town common and burned both institutions of higher learning in effigy while chanting, “Emily for the People! Emily for the People!”

In 1989, the renowned expert in early photographic portraiture, G. D. Anderson, offered a rare opportunity for the public to bring possible daguerreotypes of Emily Dickinson to him for assessment. Much to his astonishment, 126 individuals attended the event, held in the Masonic Lodge in Amherst. In order to keep the crowd amused during the long wait for individual consultations, Anderson made the short-sighted suggestion that attendees form small groups to discuss the merit of the images they had brought. Tragically, all 126 daguerreotypes were destroyed in the resulting melee. Following the incident, Anderson removed himself entirely from public life and is rumored to now be a llama farmer in northern Vermont.

In 2008, in a carefully hushed incident, Amherst College Physics Professor Dr. Johanna Ehrikson pursued her Emily Dickinson research to the near annihilation of the planet. Dr. Ehrikson was exploring the hypothesis that Emily Dickinson had embedded the Theory Of Everything (TOE) in her written works (specifically the fascicle books). Intending to publish the TOE in a paper jointly authored by herself and Dickinson, Dr. Ehrikson fed Dickinson’s works into a secret algorithm to begin the process of decoding. To her astonishment, the overwhelming weight of the profundity of Dickinson’s poetry caused a very small black hole to form. It was only the quick action of student assistant Emma Rahlsten, who recognized the danger and quickly hit the kill switch, that stopped the black hole before it became large enough to be self-sustaining. The black hole evaporated, life on earth continued as we know it, and Professor Ehrikson decided to pursue other avenues to tenure.

Most recently, as I’m sure we’re all aware, was the pub fight at the 2011 Emily Dickinson International Society conference. A heated debate between opposing camps of scholars on the meaning of Dickinson’s dash lengths escalated to nose tweaking and ear pulling and quickly developed into an all-out brawl that caused significant property damage to the now defunct Groan & Quail and changed the course of a number of scholarly inquiries.

All of us at the Amherst College Archives and Special Collections offer our sympathies to those affected by last night’s incident and our sincere hope that we can finally all come together and stop the violence.

Edit: Happy April Fools Day!

With gratitude for the research assistance of Dr. Theresa J. Brandt and Margaret Dakin.

Thanks to funding from the British Columbia History Digitization Program, we’ve recently completed a project to digitize over 2100 maps and plans and made them available online for you to use and re-use. We’ve tried to digitize these maps with enough resolution to support future types of re-use and processing, including optical character recognition and feature extraction.

These maps and plans hold quite a variety of information. We have put a small selection of images on flickr as a sample.

Want to see how the city was reshaped? You can see the before and after of a section of Point Grey in 1925, before it was part of the City of Vancouver.

Plan of government subdivision at Point Grey, B.C. Reference code AM1594-: MAP 359.

Here’s a plan for an airport built out into the sea at Spanish Banks, with a proposed airfield and mooring mast for airships (this was before the Hindenburg disaster), a 20,000-seat stadium, night lights, winter gardens, swimming pool, and a children’s protected swimming channel.

Vancouver airport plan, 1928. Detail from reference code AM1594-: MAP 377-: 1972-568.2.

Here’s a 1969 plan for Jericho Park which includes an ice palace, miniature train and tennis.

A preliminary proposal for development of Jericho Park, 1969. Reference code AM1594-: MAP 965.

This one shows Cable TV service areas in 1964:

Cablevision : Vancouver, B.C., Canada, September, 1964. Reference code AM1519-: PAM 1964-185

We have a number of plans that show the development of Vancouver’s water works. This one shows proposed extensions and improvements, including reservoirs in Stanley Park and Little Mountain. Here’s a detail of one section. Note that False Creek still extends well past Main Street at this time, and the City of Vancouver does not go further south than 16th Avenue.

General plan of proposed extension & improvements, circa 1907. Reference code COV-S371—: LEG1153.092

This map shows which businesses were operating on False Creek and where, in 1952. This image is a detail from the Main Street end of the Creek.

False Creek development survey occupation plan, September 1952. Reference code AM738-F1-: MAP 913.

You can see how the City used land in 1984.

City of Vancouver Land Use 1984, published by City of Vancouver Planning Department. Reference code PUB-: PD 1984.

From the Leon Ladner fonds, this map shows Shaughnessy Heights in 1912 and is annotated with the names of the property owners. Here’s a small portion:

Map of Shaughnessy Heights, 1912. Detail of reference code AM641-S8-: LEG1363.01.

We’ve digitized some of the non-map materials that go with the maps. For example, on the other side of a map of Greater Vancouver in 1911, there is “What the man who comes to Vancouver wants to know”, listing hotels and room rates, the first-class (and merely good) restaurants, tea rooms, clubs, theatres and the baseball schedule for the Vancouver Beavers.

“What the man who comes to Vancouver wants to know”, 1911. Reference code AM1594-: MAP 749-: LEG1277.7.

In the coming weeks, we will make the maps available as TIF files, as we have for our other maps. Please let us know how you are using these maps and plans!

This digitization project was made possible by funding from the British Columbia History Digitization Program at the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, University of British Columbia.

The Federal Music Project (FMP), was one of several programs under the Works Progress Administration (WPA) aimed at finding employment for thousands of Americans in the arts. The FMP primarily produced symphonic and orchestral music, however, the project also employed musicians and researchers involved in regional and marginalized forms of music such as Western, Creole, Mexican Orquesta típica and so called “Negro spirituals.” 

The WNYC and Municipal Archives contain several FMP recordings of African American choral groups singing spirituals and other traditional songs. Through the cracks and pops come expressive vocal arrangements and breakout solo performances. Click on the listen button to hear a mixtape, featuring highlights from these recordings. This is just a cross section of the variety of genres, intricate harmonies and emotional intensity that set these songs apart from other FMP productions.

Though the program created a platform for marginalized performers, they were subjected to the same discrimination typical of Jim Crow America. Music groups were segregated along racial and ethnic lines despite playing to large, integrated audiences. Most were subjected to discriminatory practices, such as unequal wage classifications and performing stereotypical music associated with the idealized antebellum south and minstrelsy.

The spiritual, originally used as a form of slave resistance, echoes the singers’ contemporary struggles. The announcer introduces Sit Down Servant, by the Juanita Hall Choir (Program No. 4), as “…the story of an old colored woman who’s not allowed to sit down in this world, but looks forward to her golden chair in the next.”

Since most of the arrangements hail from the spiritual tradition, Christian faith is the predominant subject matter. An unusual exception, however, is an arrangement of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be…” soliloquy, by the Los Angeles Colored Chorus (Program No. 79), in which the performers sing a harmonic backdrop for a spoken word recitation of the famous monologue.

An unidentified Los Angeles based choral group.

(New Deal Network/National Archives and Records Administration)

The recordings frequently invoke modern forms of popular music such as swing and blues. These genres are most apparent in Program No. 79 in which the standard Swing Low, Sweet Chariot is reinterpreted as a “swing spiritual” in The Chariots’ Done Come and Swing Low. This program contains another swing spiritual Someone Stole Gabriel’s Horn and finishes with W.C. Handy’s St. Louis Blues.

Announcers, speaking as if to an all-white audience, emphasize the otherness of each group when introducing a song. In a recording of the Negro Melody Singers (Program No. 4) the announcer suggests, “You may never have witnessed the Negro folk dance but the lively music of Shortenin’ Bread will give you a vivid picture of the gaiety of such a dance!” The intention seems to be ethnographic study, evident on Program No. 16, as the Negro Melody Singers perform a series of vendor street cries heard in neighborhoods across the east coast. In Program No. 52 the announcer describes the song Dark Water as a “modern spiritual with negroid characteristics”, espousing essentialist attitudes towards African Americans at this time. 

In spite of the WPA’s tokenism of marginalized artists, the Federal Music Project helped propel the careers of some performers, most notably the musical theater actress Juanita Hall. Furthermore, historian, David Woolner points out that the WPA,

“…hired and featured the work of hundreds of African American artists; and from the New Deal’s educational programs, which taught over 1 million illiterate blacks to read and write and which increased the number of African American children attending primary school.” (African Americans and the New Deal: A Look Back in History)

In his book Sounds of the New Deal, Peter Gough sums up the conflicted legacy that these recordings leave:

“These events—and the growing Anglo fascination with jazz, blues, and the spirituals—did not directly translate into improved economic situations for black people living in the United States. African Americans suffered disproportionately during the Great Depression, as black unemployment remained nearly twice as high as that of whites. Yet, the decades-long upsurge in violence against African Americans dropped significantly by the mid-1930s and into the 1940s, and the influence of the Ku Klux Klan, which had expanded alarmingly during the 1910s and 1920s, also began to wane. Further, while the ideas of the Harlem Renaissance or New Negro movement failed to eradicate negative racial stereotypes, there did emerge during the 1930s a growing public awareness of African Americans and an increased interest in their culture—though often predicated on romanticized notions of the Old South of the nineteenth century.”

Track List

1. Way Over in Beulah Land – Juanita Hall Choir
2. Raise a Ruckus Tonight – Los Angeles Colored Chorus
3. Joshua Fit The Battle of Jericho – Los Angeles Colored Chorus
4. To Be or Not To Be – Los Angeles Colored Chorus
5. Ezekiel Saw the Wheel – Negro Melody Singers
6. In That Great Gettin’ Up Morning – Negro Art Singers
7. Steal Away – Los Angeles Colored Chorus
8. Hallelujah Chorus (Handel’s Messiah) – Los Angeles Colored Chorus
9. This Train and Same Train – Negro Melody Singers
10. Dark Water – Los Angeles Negro Choir
11. The Chariots’ Done Come and Swing Low – Los Angeles Colored Chorus
12. Joe Brown’s Coal Mine – Negro melody Singers
13. Little David – Los Angeles Negro Choir
14. Street vendor cries – Negro Melody Singers
15. Scandalize My Name – Juanita Hall Choir
16. Sit Down Servant – Juanita Hall Choir
17. Four and Twenty Elders – Los Angeles Negro Choir
18. Someone Stole Gabriel’s Horn – Los Angeles Colored Chorus
19. Go Down Moses – Los Angeles Negro Choir
20. I Been in the Storm So Long – Negro Melody Singers
21. Poor Mourner’s Got a Home at Last – Los Angeles Negro Choir
22. St. Louis Blues – Los Angeles Colored Chorus

This spring one of the treasures of our Archives and Special Collections is setting off on a journey to Paris where it will feature in a major new exhibition on the life of the Emperor Napoleon. The volume is a British military signal book which contained detailed instructions for the garrison guarding Napoleon during his exile on the island of St Helena.

The signal book is a well-travelled volume. It was first used by Colonel Mark Wilks, Governor General of St Helena in 1815. This piece of Napoleonic memorabilia passed through the hands of a number of collectors until it was purchased at auction in New York by the family of Burt Eddy Taylor in 1928. In 1969 Mr Taylor donated his collection of Napoleonic material, including the signal book, to the new university library at Stirling. Now, in 2016 it sets sail again, for the Musée de l’Armée in Paris.

Our signal book being checked by the Emperor before its departure for Paris.

The signal book will feature in Napoléon à Sainte-Hélène. La Conquête de la Mémoire, a major new exhibition looking at Napoleon’s period of exile on the mid-Atlantic island which opens on 6 April 2016. Our small, scruffy volume will take its place alongside an extensive range of items from collections across Europe which have been brought together to tell the story of Napoleon’s captivity on St Helena.

Detail from inside cover of the signal book.

The signal book highlights the lengths the to which the British went to ensure Napoleon did not escape from the island. The inside covers illustrate the flags and signals which were to be used for communication including those for raising the alarm if Napoleon was missing. To limit the chance of rescue by his supporters a garrison of 1,300 troops was placed on the tiny island. In addition four Royal Navy ships patrolled offshore. Within the pages of the book further detailed instructions were laid out in the event of Napoleon’s absence:

‘the Signal Officers of the different posts are strictly enjoined to lose no time in communicating the intelligence personally to the places nearest them where troops may be stationed to the end that patroles may be immediately sent out in every direction to insure the impracticability of any person escaping from the island.’

The procedures put in place evidently worked. Napoleon remained on the island until his death in May 1821.

Napoléon à Sainte-Hélène. La Conquête de la Mémoire

Musée de l’Armée, Paris

6^th April – 24^th July 2016

Readers will be unsurprised to learn that a fine source of historical bad children is the 1864 book Frank and Rufus; or, Obedience and Disobedience. (I was hoping for an old-fashioned version of Goofus and Gallant, but alas, it’s not really like that at all.) Its author, Catharine M. Trowbridge, also wrote the 1867 book Charles Norwood; or, Erring and Repenting, which sounds to me like Frank and Rufus was so good that she wrote the same thing again, but with a different main character.

Anyway, one of the stars of this book is the young Rufus Dean. He’s a sweet boy with lots of friends, although his impish constitution sometimes leads him down misguided paths.

Here’s Rufus slyly pocketing a dime and a half-dime that his mother left on the windowsill. Why would such a sweet boy do such a thing, taking what Trowbridge calls “a very formidable step in the downward path”? The author explains that “he had repeatedly yielded, when tempted, to disobedience and deceit; and in this way, had greatly weakened his moral power to resist temptation.”

What happens to a boy with weakened moral power? I didn’t  read all 280 pages to find the details, but I can tell you that Rufus becomes a drunk and disgraces his family name, and that his sister, when grown, even refuses to name her first-born son after him, as the name Rufus is “tarnished”. Frank, on the other hand, having learned obedience, becomes someone whose “fellow citizens honored and trusted him” and whose “faithful and judicious mother found in him the support and joy of her old age.”

Take note, dear readers: don’t steal 15 cents, or the situation may snowball until your mother looks wan, your sister hates you, and you’re forced to seek “relief in the stimulus of the wine-cup”.

Fleur and Evita; Two Strong Women Go Head-to-Head

“I’m not an author,” Fleur Cowles protests, at this 1952 Book and Authors Luncheon. The sole reason for writing Bloody Precedent, a memoir of her trip to Argentina, is to recount her meeting with Eva Perón, wife of that country’s dictator Juan Perón. Despite some rather striking similarities shared by these two ambitious, self-confident women, they did not hit it off. Cowles, then wife of the newspaper and magazine magnate Gardner Cowles, “loathed” Evita who, in turn, spoke to her “like a minion.” Much is made of Evita wearing a “colossal” diamond orchid which, Cowles sneers, must be worth “a quarter-million dollars.” (This from a woman who, in later life, owned a large residence in one of London’s most prestigious addresses, an Elizabethan farmhouse, and a castle in Spain.)

The actual encounter between the two seems to have been short, though Cowles claims Evita “let her hair down” because she had no real friends to talk to. Instead of gossip, we are treated to an analysis of the current political situation in Argentina, a country which troubled the US government because Eva Perón’s obvious support of labor unions and her interest in aiding the poor smacked of socialism. This is seen when Cowles, after painting the couple as typical South American despots, confusingly calls Evita “the John L. Lewis of Argentina.” Much is made of her being the power behind the throne and the “Petticoat Curtain” which supposedly shrouds the country. At the end, there is gruesome speculation about Evita’s cancer and what her death would mean to her husband’s grip on power.

Fleur Cowles (1908-2009) went to great lengths to hide her modest beginnings in New York City and New Jersey. A career woman almost before the term existed, she had made her way in the world of advertising before a third marriage to Cowles, owner of, among other publications, the Des Moines Register and Look Magazine, vaulted her into high society, which quickly became her natural element. She helped Cowles redesign and expand the appeal of Look (which competed with Life as the nation’s top magazine) but her greatest achievement was the short-lived Flair. A frankly elitist magazine, combining art and fashion, giving the reader a taste of the publisher’s upper-class interests, the preview issue, as the New York Times reports:

“…boasted a two-layer cover. The outside was embossed with a basket-weave pattern and punctuated with a hole, through which could be seen a picture of a man and woman embracing. The inside cover showed the couple as part of a wall layered with a collage of shredded posters. A spring issue featured the rose, a flower Ms. Cowles painted and extolled until her death. The issue was suffused with a rose fragrance, some four decades before scent strips became ubiquitous. Housed within it, bound as a booklet, was a tribute to the rose by Katherine Anne Porter. The magazine itself had a rose named after it — Flair rose — and there is a Fleur Cowles rose as well. Flair published stories and articles by W. H. Auden, Jean Cocteau, Simone de Beauvoir, Angus Wilson, Tennessee Williams, Ogden Nash and Clare Boothe Luce, among others. Salvador Dalí, Saul Steinberg, Lucian Freud, Rufino Tamayo and even Winston Churchill were among the contributing artists.”

The magazine was, to some extent, a success, doubling its readership in one year, although it also met with a fair amount of what now could be seen as sexist ridicule. But Flair lost a tremendous amount of money. After her husband shut down publication, Cowles moved on, marrying timber tycoon Tom Montague Meyer and becoming a legendary London hostess.

Eva Perón (1919-1952) remains a controversial figure. Although the civil rights abuses and trampling of democracy under the Peróns are well-documented, so too is her genuine interest in reaching past that country’s entrenched elite and attempting to empower previously ignored sections of society. As the website history.co.uk recounts: 

“In 1947, she set up the Maria Eva Duarte De Perón Welfare Foundation, which distributed money, food and medicines to those most in need. The money came from ‘contributions’, not always willingly given, from businesses and unions. The result was very popular with the poor masses, but far less popular with the elite. Evita further angered the elite with her active campaign for female suffrage. Suffrage for women was enacted in 1947, largely due to the energy and soul that Evita poured into the campaign. … She died from cancer on 26 July 1952, aged just 32. Public grief was intense, and unprecedented in Argentina. Her precise role in Argentinian politics is still hotly debated, and her supporters and enemies battle it out to write her legacy. There is no doubt, however, that she was a remarkable woman who made her mark on history.”

Viewed from a historical perspective, these two women would seem to have had much in common: a rise from humble beginnings, power wielded through a compliant spouse, resistance met because of their sex. Perhaps, though, as this talk would indicate, each diva required her own separate stage. 

Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.

WNYC archives id: 150529
Municipal archives id: LT2317

The azaleas and dogwoods are in bloom, thunderstorms have started rolling through in the afternoon, and sunbathers and hammock dwellers have returned to their regular spots on Landis Green, which can only mean one thing: spring has arrived in Tallahassee! While the weather and native plant life hasn’t changed much in the past 70 years, fashion sure has. Take a look at some FSCW Easter styles, which in true southern fashion was all about white shoes and big hats.

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.

In the first post in this digital preservation series, I shared some of the unique challenges digital material brings to the preservation game. In this one we will look at some of the technologies and tools digital stewards employ to protect our digital assets.

How can you tell when a computer file has been corrupted? If you try to open it funny, glitchy things might happen. How can you test whether a digital file is uncorrupted? This requires a bit more thought. Digital files are at their base-level a long string of 1’s and 0’s. This is called the file’s bitstream. Preservationists could compare one bitstream to an earlier copy of it, but this requires a lot of processing power for large files, with no guarantee that your comparison copy isn’t also corrupted.

This is where checksums can help us out. Checksums are character strings generated by a class of algorithms called hash functions or cryptographic hashes. You can try one out here: http://md5checksum.com/. Hash functions are used to encrypt lots of things. Passwords submitted to websites are hashed in your browser. Kind of like this:

Hash functions can also be applied to the bitstream of a file. Due to the nature of the various algorithms used even a single change in a one or zero will produce a drastically different checksum. If at the beginning of the preservation process a digital steward produces a checksum for the bitstream, she can now test for data integrity by rerunning the hash and comparing that output to the original checksum.

Now that we can test for unwanted changes in computer files, how can we ensure we always have a valid copy of it? A system called LOCKSS can help with this. LOCKSS stands for Lots Of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe. Similar to the idea of backing up personal files, LOCKSS will duplicate the files given to it and then distribute copies of files across several servers. The idea is to spread the system out over many servers in diverse geographic areas to minimize the risk of a single disaster (natural or otherwise) compromising the entire system. These distributed copies are then regularly hashed, and the checksums compared to test the validity of the files. If a checksum comparision fails, that server can delete it’s failing copy of the file, and ask the other servers for a new one.

Digital preservation is a rapidly developing field. New challenges requiring new solutions arise every day. In the third and final post in this digital preservation series, I’ll discuss activities you can undertake to protect your personal digital heritage.

Here at the WNYC Archives, we’re often handed mysteries – two-sided 16-inch slates with utterly unique silent spiral etchings, scans of reticent catalog cards referring back to them, and the nonce codes and illegible scrawl from 50 – 80 years past written on their custom green and cream WNYC labels. Maybe an insert, if we’re lucky. It’s our job to turn all this into something that people can make use of, by A) digitizing these recordings and making them available in house and online, and B) providing a more accurate and more thorough catalog record for each of the 1 to 121 minute recordings we’ve painstakingly shifted from one type of disc to another. If there’s little in the way of a paper trail and a speaker greets us cold, it can be a bit of a puzzle.

I’d like to invite you to help us solve one of these puzzles. I’ve already taken care of part A. Together we’ll get a start on part B. We’re going to find out just who is speaking, who he or she is speaking to, and what the heck that person is talking about. We’re going to examine the first 45 seconds or so of the recording, bit by bit, phrase by phrase. We’ll start though, with what little written record remains. 

This is the OCR’d text from a copy of the original library catalog card:

T “p
7967 Conr/urers . _ „
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Caribbean Conjurers of the future? Probably not. Truth be told it’s a little clearer with the naked eye: As you might have guessed from the title of this blog piece, “Dr CRRIBELL” is “Dr. Campbell.” And “6/b/su” is somehow 6/6/58. Hopefully that gives you some hints, but you can typically tell a lot more from the recording itself, so let’s have a listen. Take your time to reflect on what you’ve heard and we’ll reconvene after each clip.

Whoa, easy Engels! Let’s ignore for a moment the possibly revolutionary sentiment of the phrase itself and instead concentrate on the more prosodic aspects of this clip – her tone and accent in particular. It’s calm, measured, and undeniably Australian. It’s not the Bahbie-thick Australian of a Dundee Paul Hogan, or Bond-villain Rupert Murdoch, but neither is it the placeless Australian laureate of a Cate Blanchett or Nick Cave. Come to think of it though, maybe there is a mite of R.P. dignity behind it, is there not? Perhaps it was learned in London, or cropped from the affectations of New York’s cultural and intellectual upper crust.

It is clearly a woman speaking, so we should consider the limited number of options available to women in late 1950s New York (and whether they will be reappraised), but we’ll table that for now. Whether her voice is “maternal,” “feminine,” or what-you-will is subjective, but I think there’s an undeniable presbyphonic dip in pitch that comes with age. I’d say she’s somewhere in the 50-65 range.

Some people temper their political opinions as they advance in years. Others don’t. Based on her rather subdued tone I’d suspect that if she is planning an insurrection, it’s more of a Fabian sort than a Marxist one. And her speech can’t have been that revolutionary, it did air on WNYC after all, still at the time closely allied to the municipal government. Nevertheless, it’s quite an introduction, and it hints that the speech with call some of those “values and attitudes” into question.

So we have a well-traveled, if not cosmopolitan, late middle-aged woman, originally from Australia, giving a speech on an as-yet-unknown subject to two audiences: one as-yet-unknown – the assembled crowd (can you hear the “room” reverb?); and a known audience – WNYC listeners (like you!). As sharp as her words are on paper, the edge has been rounded by her age, temperament, and (probably) a learned pragmatism in life and in politics.

I think we were wise to note the tone ahead of content in the first snippet, but let’s reverse the process for this second one.

“For one thing” is the sort of phrase that keeps a speech’s steady pace, but is otherwise basically meaningless. We can safely ignore it. What’s interesting is the use of two phrases which on their own imply something close to certainty – it will…, I believe – now nested to imply doubt, a reasonable acceptance of uncertainty. I think it’s telling. “It will” is pure force; “I believe” tempers it, opens it up. “I believe” becomes at once a hedge, an implicit statement of a belief in autonomy and human agency, and an explicit statement of, well, belief. It’s not the cold, dead conviction one gets from ideologues, for whom it is less a question of belief than of truth or falsehood. For a Marxist, for instance, the coming rise of consumerism would be closer to a certainty – small degrees on history’s established arc, any “belief” to the contrary an easily dispelled example of false consciousness. The same might be said of a rabid capitalist, communism’s uncomfortable obverse. Our speaker seems to be saying “this is what I expect of the future, but I’m not sure. Other people believe other things.” Or as one of my favorite professors was fond of saying, “reasonable people can disagree.”

The topic of the speech is coming into focus, and in just the first 11 seconds. Efficient, she is. Her speech will apparently be about the coming shift to a more consumer-minded future. Whether this is good, bad, bad-then-good, good-then-bad, or vanilla-bean-neutral is yet to be seen.  She strikes me as someone who will leave such value judgments to the side though, tacit, if anything.

Pausing to take stock, we can feel more confident in her pragmatism and we know that the speech will have an economic focus, on a coming consumer culture. We also can be confident that her beliefs, while strong, are not set in stone, and are open to light of evidence.

I think it’s time to mention briefly the limitations placed on women with professional aspirations in late-1950s America. There isn’t space to elaborate here, other than to say they were often severe, unfair and unfortunate, and as much as she pushed hard to get where she is at the time of this record – a “Dr.” – those limitations undoubtedly pushed back. From this clip we can tell that she is enough of an authority on the subject of consumerism to be asked to speak about it by a person or persons for whom the traditional definition of the word “authority” might be a more literal fit – a man or men in a position of power in the municipal or state government, or a university, less likely a businessman. There is of course a chance that one of the prominent women’s groups of the time – League of Women Voters, Women’s City Club, etc. – or perhaps an Eleanor Roosevelt, noted consumer advocate, might have brought our speaker in, but I wonder how often they drew crowds as obviously captive as this crowd seems to be. I’d suspect not as often.

So we now know that our speaker is likely a trained specialist in the topic of consumerism, a Ph.D holding economist, speaking at the behest of powers that be to a group likely not there to see her specifically, more likely required to listen to her speech for their edification.

Disappointment. In two senses.

Most obviously in the fact that the values and attitudes to be reappraised do not involve greater opportunities for women. But it’s a retrospective disappointment, and maybe we’re reading too much into it – she is speaking at the behest of others, which probably constrains her rhetorical options. You can’t blame her for having missed the social and economic advances made by women as they have transpired in the present day, but you can’t help but wish she hadn’t, especially for the benefit of her in-person audience – young women, probably college aged. Perhaps our speaker, reflecting on her own difficult path to achievement, likely met with that time’s biases and aggressive sexism, was reasonably pessimistic. It’s hard to say. 

The other disappointment – for the archivist, the listener, the detective – is that as the mystery is revealed, the narrative is constrained – the listener’s inherent interest in the subject starts to matter more and more, the story less and less. Sure, anything could happen, but we can’t deny that some things are more likely than others – particularly in a prepared speech, as opposed to, say, a debate, a talk radio tête–à–tête, or even a Q&A sesh. Each new word, new phrase, new paragraph reveals progressively less new information. Authors have written of chasing the “incipit” for a book’s length, where no word … is [in]significant. Can a speech, especially one as muted as this, be expected to do the same? It is asking a lot. Still, for those on the hunt for information on the role of women in an incipient consumer society in 1950s New York, this will probably be a veritable gold mine.

From this snippet we can tell our speaker, in spite of having opened up a challenge to the era’s values and attitudes, has actually retained a few in her prediction. Though she’s unwittingly missed a prime target, it’s unclear just how wide of the mark she is in general. I think it’s reasonable to agree that she is at least partially correct in seeing a rise in consumerism, even if she isn’t as prescient about the socioeconomic place of women in the future.

Again a hedge, this time against the implicit assumption that the assembled women’s primary economic role will be “homemaker.” In fact it could be read as code, though that might be generous. But I’d imagine some members of her audience read it as exactly that, while others let it slip right through. It is a mistake to imagine passive listeners and I think it’s important to recall that the audience isn’t us. It isn’t even 1958 WNYC listeners, though many undoubtedly heard it. It’s a group of young women, probably navigating their first few years of adulthood in 1950s New York. A prediction in this atmosphere isn’t really a pure prediction, it can also be a call to action, an invitation for these women to reflect on their agency in creating their own future. From that perspective, her accuracy or lack-thereof is beside the point. 

In this section we can reaffirm her faith in agency and her faith in her audience, even if one does get the sense she still has a point to make about the homemaker’s role in the coming consumer society… 

…And there it is. Our late middle-aged female Australian economist is speaking in front of a group of young women, asking them, in so many words, to reflect on their place as homemakers (and maybe more) in a society in which the way money is spent on consumer goods will grant them a power not wholly appreciated in 1950s America. The rest of the speech will elaborate on this theme. 

I think at this point there is more than enough information to start trawling the web. Using a popular search engine (and a depersonalizing “&pws=0” tag), a search of “consumer economists New York 1958 Australian” yields this excellent capsule biography as 2nd result on the 2nd page. It would have been first if we’d added the name “Campbell,” which we knew from the catalog card, but where’s the fun in that? It is through this short bio that we can test our interpretations, and you can move on to listen to the rest of the recording, while I dutifully complete our catalog entry of this speech on “the Consumer in the Future” by the Australian-American economist, professor, and civil servant, Persia Campbell.

Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.

WNYC archives id: 150239
Municipal archives id: LT7967

The Archives will be closed for the long weekend and open again on Tuesday.

Two girls looking at rabbit on table, Pacific National Exhibition, 1952, detail. Reference code AM281-S8-: CVA 180-1765.

Since 2010, we have made significant accomplishments in open government at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). We have published 3 plans and accomplished more than 120 commitments. NARA commitments are even featured in the U.S. National Action Plan on Open Government.  But we still need to do more and we need to hear your ideas on how we can improve.

Please join me for a webinar with other NARA executives on Tuesday, March 29 from 2:00 – 3:00 PM Eastern Time. We will provide an overview of the agency’s next Open Government Plan and related topics and seek your ideas, suggestions, and feedback on what we can improve.

Register for the webinar today.  

Do you have ideas on how to improve the researcher experience?  Do you have suggestions for better ways for NARA to collaborate, encourage public participation, or innovate? How can we provide greater transparency to our records or our processes? Let us know!

Learn more about our efforts by reviewing our previous Open Government Plan and visiting Archives.gov/open.

Share your suggestions or questions in advance and during the webinar on History Hub, our pilot collaborative platform, or email opengov@nara.gov. You’ll also be able to make suggestions by chat or phone during the webinar, but we’d love to have your contributions on History Hub.

 Agenda:

• Introduction – David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States
• Open Government Plan Process – Pamela Wright, Chief Innovation Officer
• Innovation – Pamela Wright, Chief Innovation Officer
• Research Services – Ann Cummings, Access Coordinator
• Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) – Gary M. Stern, General Counsel and Chief FOIA Officer
• Declassification – Sheryl Shenberger, Director of the National Declassification Center
• Records Management – Laurence Brewer, Acting Chief Records Officer for the U.S. Government, and Director, Records Management Operations Program
• Ideas, Comments, and Suggestions – Participants of the webinar are asked to share their thoughts on what NARA should do to strengthen open government.

For our current exhibit, What’s Past is Pixels, we faced a challenge. How do we represent our digital library in a physical space? To some extent, we could easily do so with pulling the physical objects we’ve digitized and talk about the challenges and decisions we made when translating them online. We could visualize the metadata created, highlight digital representations through screens and screenshots. What I could not wrap my head around, and what of course was on my list to figure out, was representing what the digital library was in some visual form…

As an exhibit planning group, we decided on the words representing the main functions of the digital library: discovery, scholarship and engagement. We also as a group decided on the raw ingredients that made those functions go: materials, community and system. My colleague working on the visualization with me originally suggested some sort of web visual, which would show the interconnectedness of the ingredients and functions. However, while that solved one problem (showing how the digital library works), it didn’t quite show how it worked in the bigger context of DigiNole, the platform that also held the Research Repository.

I kept playing around with the idea of engines, which eventually led me to the final graphic of cogs and functionality as the motion moving the cogs. The digital library was only one engine of DigiNole so the Research Repository could be represented as a part of the greater machine in which the digital library moved. From there, I assigned each ingredient to a cog of the machine and then named the movements after the different functionality we wanted to highlight. It was clean, simple and did its job in illustrating a highly conceptual idea in a straightforward manner for the exhibit without lots of text and using vocabulary that our intended audience (non-librarians) wouldn’t understand. Hopefully it succeeded!

What’s Past is Pixels: Developing the FSU Digital Library is located in the Strozier Library Exhibit Room and is open 10am to 6pm, Monday through Thursday, 10am to 5:30pm Friday. It will be held until April 8, 2016.

We’re making a start on cleaning, digitizing and recording a beautiful cabinet of lantern slides which used to form part of the Ashmolean Lantern Slide Lending Library. It’s a big job, and one we couldn’t do without the help of our new student volunteers – Bridget, Amy, Alice and Ed.

Almost as soon as he had started cleaning a set of slides, Ed came across this and drew it to our attention:

It’s a colour image of a fresco from the famous Bronze Age site at Knossos in Crete, excavated by Sir Arthur Evans from 1900 onwards. Colour images are a rarity in our lantern slide collection, not least because it was difficult and expensive to achieve a colour image before the introduction of Kodachrome in 1935. It is probable that the wealthy Evans was responsible for commissioning this expensive image. The colour slide was created using the Sanger Shepherd method. Red, yellow and blue filters were used and the results amalgamated to create the final colour. Sanger Shepherd and Company Ltd were active from 1900 to 1927, so Evans was using cutting-edge technology.

The next slide in the slide box shows some of the processes for creating the right mix of colours, with an outline drawing of the same fresco indicating how the colour filters should be set – an interesting find for historians of photography:

The image itself, known as ‘The Captain of the Blacks’, is highly contentious. When Sir Arthur Evans began excavations at Knossos he was heavily influenced by his reading of Classical authors in his interpretation of the site and its frescoes. When he came across this fresco, it was damaged. The lead runner has survived, but only the legs of two following runners and a tiny part of the back of the head of the second runner were visible. This was enough for Evans to construct a narrative of African enlistment in Minoan armies, as he argued in his publication of the site (Evans 1926, p756).

We’ve found a dozen more Sanger Shepherd colour images in this box. Who knows what we will find as we keep going through the collection?

Evans, A. 1926. The palace of Minos : a comparative account of the successive stages of the early Cretan civilization as illustrated by the discoveries at Knossos vol II (London, Macmillan)

Why should women be educated? What sounds like an odd question today was very seriously considered by Dwight D. Eisenhower and other speakers at a luncheon fundraiser for Barnard College, held at the Waldorf-Astoria on October 19th, 1961. Eisenhower, who was the President of Columbia University for the brief interim between his career as a General and his tenure as POTUS, speaks about his belief in the need for an educated populace to solve the major problems of the time (read: communism). With all of the deleterious effects of “the pressure groups of labor, of the agricultural community, of the people who hate this or like that” on public discourse, what role can women play in a sensible approach to self-government? Mostly, according to Eisenhower, as good mothers to the nation’s children.

Although Eisenhower is quick to say he doesn’t “want for a moment to decry the importance of the woman doctor, the lawyer, the social worker, the teacher” or even the woman scientist, he speaks mostly to the “inescapable duty of the mother” to prepare her children to be informed citizens. In this respect, he argues, “to make a distinction between men’s and women’s education is as silly as the value of it is obvious.” Furthermore, women have to be educated to be able to vote.

Eisenhower is introduced by then-President of Columbia Grayson Kirk and by Millicent Carey McIntosh, who was the chief administrator at Barnard from 1947-1962–first as Dean of the College and later as the President. McIntosh was known for her insistence that women could engage in both professional careers and family life and lived out this conviction as one of the first married heads of a Seven Sisters college. She also undertook massive fundraising campaigns during her tenure, resulting in the construction of two new buildings on campus (Lehman and Reid Hall) and the addition of the Minor Latham Playhouse to Milbank Hall. McIntosh was well-liked on Barnard’s campus (where she was referred to as “Mrs. Mac”) as well as across the street at Columbia. (Barnard is affiliated with Columbia University; the two institutions are financially and legally separate but share many resources and have cross-listed undergraduate courses.)

(President McIntosh at the Reid Hall construction site, August 1960. Courtesy of the Barnard Archives and Special Collections./Barnard Archives and Special Collections)

As an archivist at Barnard, I was excited to hear about this recording from WNYC Assistant Archivist Ana Marie, and I wanted to see what other materials we had at Barnard that might contextualize it. An article about the luncheon in the Barnard’s student newspaper, the Bulletin, glosses over Eisenhower’s remarks about child rearing and focuses more extensively on McIntosh’s speech. While the WNYC recording cuts off after Eisenhower’s speech, I was able to listen to the complete recording we have in our audio collections, including the introductory remarks of Vice Chairman of the Barnard Board of Trustees Francis T. P. Plimpton, as well the extended remarks of McIntosh after Eisenhower finished. McIntosh speaks about funding structures, citing the 1961 figure that only 1.3% of corporate donations given for higher education went to women’s colleges, even though the vast majority of private colleges at the time were single-sex. She also notes shortages in candidate pools–in both feminized professions like librarianship and nursing as well as fields such as electronics engineering. In McIntosh’s words, it is important to think of college education “not as something nice for the girls, but as something that is so basic to our culture and to our future that we will all rethink our patterns.” 

Martha Tenney is the Digital Archivist at Barnard College. For more information on our collections, including the papers of Millicent C. McIntosh, see archives.barnard.edu.

Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.

WNYC archives id: 150267

Municipal archives id: LT9442

At over 22,000 rare books and over 65 linear feet of manuscript materials, The John MacKay Shaw Childhood in Poetry Collection is easily the largest single collection in FSU Special Collections & Archives. It serves as a living testament to its creator, John MacKay Shaw (May 15, 1897-March 15, 1984), an AT&T business executive, philanthropist, writer, and bibliophile. While the original 5,000+ volumes in Shaw’s book collection focused on 18th and 19th century British and American poetry written about childhood and/or for children, it has expanded to contain volumes on biography, bibliography, collecting, writing, and publishing. The collection contains works by major authors and illustrators — Robert Louis Stevenson, Edward Lear, Kate Greenaway, Thomas Bewick, and Lewis Carroll, to name a few — and can serve research interests as diverse as publishers’ bindings, Victorian serials, sacred hymns, and World War I.

The books of the Shaw Collection are wonderfully complimented by the John MacKay Shaw manuscript collection (01/MSS 2008-006). This collection includes Shaw’s personal correspondence (including letters from Dr. Seuss!), lectures, and photographs, as well as administrative information about the development of the Shaw Collection at FSU Libraries. Among the literary materials in the manuscript collection can be found Shaw’s meticulous notes and source materials for his five-volume bibliography on Childhood in Poetry. It is these bibliographic notes that give us window into the world of a twentieth-century book collector.

Shaw’s bibliographic notes are organized by author, with a listing and description of every book by that author in the collection. There are also notes on where each volume was purchased and for how much (invaluable information to anyone studying the provenance of books in the collection), sometimes accompanied by the delightful anecdotes of a true bibliophile. Under the file for John Ruskin, Shaw remarks of the 1885 edition of Dame Wiggins of Lee, and Her Seven Wonderful Cats illustrated by Kate Greenaway:

“This has been for me a most illusive book. Although not an expensive one… it has seemed that I either bid low or my order gets to the bookseller just after someone else has bought it. Now I have a copy, and an almost perfect one it is.”

In a digital world, where online auction sites and search engines have revolutionized the world of book selling and collecting, Shaw’s notes tell of the struggles and triumphs of a collector in this golden age of bibliophilia. Shaw’s manuscripts add rich layers of meaning to the books in his collection, and both will live on for generations to come.

Thanks to our Digital Projects Manager and some very speedy scanning technicians, we’ve uploaded our first big batch of Rhode Island photographs to the Providence Public Library’s digital library!

These photos, from our Rhode Island Photograph Collection, show places from Glocester to Newport (with plenty of Providence); there are Vanderbilts and tradesmen, Ida Lewis and her dog, and people testing out early airplanes.

The images can be browsed, or can be searched by creator, subject, keyword, or date. Stay tuned for many more images of Rhode Island’s past as we continue with our digitization process!

Modern Germany is the subject of Kay Boyle’s talk at this 1960 meeting of the Book and Author Luncheon. Although ostensibly here to promote her new novel, Generation Without Farewell, Boyle rather refreshingly lauds another writer, the little-known Theodor Plievier, calling him “Germany’s greatest post-war writer,” as well as offering quotes on the current state of German society from Otto Frank (father of Anne Frank) and Carlo Schmid of the Social Democratic Party. The title of Boyle’s book comes from a play by Wolfgang Borchert, an anti-war writer Boyle was deeply influenced by.

As this list reveals, Boyle had an intimate and complex relationship with German culture and a strong personal interest in the country’s fate. That is what she dwells on, speaking of Germans who were under twenty when the war began and who are now in positions of authority. They have great feelings of condemnation, resentment, and betrayal for those who came before. She frankly admits that the protagonist of her novel is based on a real German and talks about his current job and opinions. “The past is acknowledged by the writing of books,” she proclaims, going on to lament that “we have not heard enough from the creative artists of Germany.” Again quoting, this time George Steiner, she complains of  “a terrible stillness at the heart…the death of the German language.” It is unclear if she is out of touch with the literary generation about to make its mark not just on German but world literature or if her personal connection to works of the immediate post-war period blind her to the burgeoning talents of those authors who will shatter the abovementioned silence. This is, after all,  one year after the publication of both Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum and Heinrich Boll’s Billiards at Half Past Nine. However her lack of self-promotion, at this blatantly commercial event, is refreshing.

Closely identified with the expatriate world of the Twenties and Thirties, Kay Boyle (1902-1992) was a prolific and, for many years, popular novelist, short story writer, and poet. By the time of this performance, however, her literary career was in decline. Her emphasis on social justice and professed left-wing views did not play well in Cold War America. Neither did her flamboyant personal life. William Pritchard, reviewing her biography in the New York Times, notes:

“…she acted on the un-Socratic premise that first impressions were the only ones of value. She never hesitated to follow the dictates of impulse, leaving her first husband to bear a child with the consumptive and dying poet Ernest Walsh and leaving her children in the care of others as her convenience dictated. Something similarly headlong may be observed in her literary productions, as she used, in her biographer’s terms, ‘her fiction to tell the truth about her life, to rationalize it, to mirror it.’ Ms. Mellen is more than once moved to wonder how this woman so full of “sensitivity” could perceive so little about her own daughters, three of whom at one time or another attempted suicide. The fact that Boyle preferred to live her life rather than examine it, eventually, her biographer says, ‘diminished her as an artist” and always “diminished her as a mother.’ Yet except for her championing of Huey Newton and the Black Panthers, Boyle had few regrets about her decisions. The writer Grace Paley, who got to know her late in her life, observed that people with full sex lives don’t have regrets.”

Boyle experienced something of a renaissance in the 1960’s, when her concerns once again were in sympathy with the spirit of the times. The Independent newspaper, in its obituary, tells how:

“In 1963, during her husband’s last illness, she became English Professor at San Francisco State University, a post which she held until 1979. In her late sixties she was imprisoned for demonstrating against the Vietnam war, an experience she described in a memorable essay published in the collection Words That Must Somehow Be Said (1985). She was also active in the civil-rights movement, and worked indefatigably against censorship and torture through PEN and Amnesty International.”

But fairly or not, most of the writing she is remembered for today centers on that glamorous between-the-wars period. The Los Angeles Times neatly captured her two public sides in its remembrance:

“Kay Boyle, the elegant novelist and expatriate who chatted and sipped coffee in Paris with such titans as James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and William Carlos Williams, is dead at 90….’I probably write to express a feeling of guilt,’ Miss Boyle said in a 1949 interview. ‘I feel guilty for every act of oppression that has been committed in our time.'”

Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.

WNYC archives id: 150253
Municipal archives id: LT9000

Occasionally, a researcher’s inquiry will lead to a surprising find in our collections or turn up a previously unrealized cache of rare publications.  Last week, just such an inquiry led me to four rather rare publications by Josiah Warren, often called “The First American Anarchist.”

Born in Boston in 1798, Warren was a musician and inventor in Cincinnati, Ohio before crossing paths with Welsh industrialist and social reformer Robert Owen in 1824.  Warren and his family lived and participated in Owen’s experimental utopian socialist society of New Harmony, Indiana for two years before ultimately rejecting Owen’s cooperative social philosophy.

Warren, concluding that society must preserve the autonomy of all individuals, founded his own social philosophy based on the “sovereignty of the individual.”  Warren’s theory called for self-government and individual responsibility as essential elements for an equitable society, as well as a system of “equitable commerce.”

Warren defined equitable commerce as a barter system where the cost of goods should be equal to the labor exerted to produce those goods, rather than the subjective worth of goods.  Instead of using cash for the purchase of goods, Warren advocated for the exchange of equitable money or “labor for labor” notes.

In 1833, Warren wrote and printed “The Peaceful Revolutionist,” asserted to be the first anarchist periodical.  Warren’s objective to have total control over the printing of his publications, led to his invention in the early 1830s of the first printing press to print onto a continuous roll of paper, known as the “speed press.”  Warren also cast his own type to use in the printing of his periodicals and pamphlets.

In the early 1850s, with his philosophy of individualist anarchism and in collaboration with fellow anarchist Stephen Pearl Andrews, Warren established a new society on Long Island, NY named Modern Times.  Although Warren’s Modern Times community quickly dissolved, Warren continued to publish numerous pamphlets espousing his philosophy.  Four of these pamphlets are held in the Archives & Special Collections at Amherst College.

All of these pamphlets can be found in our Library Catalog and are available for research in the Archives & Special Collections:

Warren, Josiah. Response to the Call of the National Labor Union for Essays on the following Subjects : 1. The Specie Basis Fallacy : 2. Strikes : 3. Co-operation : [etc.] / by the Author of “True Civilization”. Boston, 1871.   AC call number: File HD8072 .W31

Warren, Josiah. The Principle of Equivalents : A Subject of Immediate and Serious Interest to Both Sexes and All Classes of All Nations. Long Island, NY?, 1861.   AC call number: File HB201.P75

Warren, Josiah. Political Platform for the Coming Party. Boston, 1871.  AC call number: File E671.P65

Warren, Josiah. Periodical Letter on the Principles and Progress of the Equity Movement. v. 1, no. 8 (March 1855).   AC call number: File HN1.P47

Resources:

Bailie, William. Josiah Warren: The First American Anarchist, A Sociological Study. New York, Arno Press, 1972.

Butler, Ann. “Josiah Warren, Peaceful Revolutionist.” Thesis. Ball State University, 1978.

Warren, Josiah, and Crispin Sartwell. The Practical Anarchist: Writings of Josiah Warren. New York: Fordham UP, 2011.

Wikipedia: Josiah Warren. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josiah_Warren.

Today’s impeccable science is drawn from the 1851 Buchan’s Domestic Medicine: or The Family Physician, a book that is a fantastic mix of sound advice, terrifying recommendations, gruesome descriptions of 19th century afflictions, and fanciful language.

The book’s segment on sleep and clothing appears near the beginning of the book, as proper attention to both (alongside aliment, air, and exercise) is a crucial element of good health. Buchan begins by counseling readers that “too little sleep weakens the nerves, exhausts the spirits, and occasions diseases; and too much renders the mind dull, the body gross, and disposes it to apoplexies, lethargies, and such like.”

Who wants weak nerves and a gross body? Not me! Probably not you! Thus, take note: “For adults six or seven hours is certainly sufficient,” counsels Buchan, “and no one ought to exceed eight.” And if one does sleep more than eight hours? “The indolent custom of lolling abed for nine or ten hours not only makes the sleep less refreshing, but relaxes the nerves, and greatly weakens the constitution.”

Ok, so less sleep is better, as long as it’s not too little sleep. But when should we sleep?

Nature points out night as the proper season for sleep. Nothing more certainly destroys the constitution than night-watching. It is great pity that a practice so destructive to health should be so much in fashion. How quickly the want of rest in due season will blast the most blooming complexion, or ruin the best constitution, is evident from the ghastly countenances of those who, as the phrase is, turn day into night, and night into day.

Oof, who wants a ghastly countenance? Definitely not me! I should sleep at night! And I should arise early in the morning, at least according to Buchan, for “surely the fore-part of the day is fitter both for business and amusement. I hardly ever knew an early riser who did not enjoy a good state of health.”

These recommendations, mind you, sound solid to me, so I’m inclined to heed Buchan’s following suggestions on clothing. He derides the corset, disparages the too-tight shoe, and scorns young men who wear flannel.

Flannel indeed is now worn by almost every young fellow. This custom is extremely preposterous. It not only makes them weak and effeminate, but renders flannel less useful at a time of life when it becomes more necessary. No young person ought to wear flannel, unless… some… disease renders it necessary.

Well! Avoid flannel! And while you’re at it, remember these wise words: “Finery is only the affectation of dress, and very often covers a great deal of dirt.”

A new exhibit, titled Postcard Views: Classic Vancouver Postcards in Drawings and Paintings, is now showing at the City of Vancouver Archives’ Gallery. The exhibit is by Robert Sandilands, a retired Vancouver architect with long standing interests in the histories of art, photography, Vancouver and, more recently, postcards.

Marine Building by Night (c.1940) – 2016.  Photo:C.Hagemoen

Inspired by the “Golden Age” of vintage picture postcards (ca. 1905-1940), Sandilands uses postcards, mainly from his collection, as “interesting models” for the creation of drawings and paintings. Sandilands believes that these postcards “can be viewed as miniature icons deserving of a larger representation… both for their material qualities as ink or photographic emulsion on card as well as their pictorial ambition”.

View of the gallery. Photo: C. Hagemoen

The exhibition includes 10 works based on 12 original vintage postcards of classic views of Vancouver, plus a digital slideshow of 58 vintage post cards representing the same selection of views.

The 10 original works are comprised of one, two or three drawings or paintings; with each format selected to suit the particular subject and composition. For Sandilands, the technique used for each work attempts to relate to the characteristics of the particular printing technique used to produce the original postcard.

If one compares the two post cards views of Prospect Point in the exhibit as an example, the first colour-lithographic postcard is rendered in oil pastel producing a more matte and textured effect similar to the original lithographic print. In contrast, the other post card view of Prospect Point,  a hand-coloured glossy “real photograph”, is executed with a smoother ink and paint technique with varnish for a glossier effect.

(L-R) Looking West from Prospect Point (c.1935) – 2013; and a portion of City Lights (c.1935) – 2015. Photo: C. Hagemoen

The way the works are displayed in the gallery reflects the location of the actual views outside the gallery.  According to Sandilands, “the sequence of the works on display forms a kind of a shorthand virtual panoramic tour of False Creek/English Bay/Burrard Inlet/Coal Harbour and relates to the view out the windows of the Archives building!”

Sunset English Bay (c.1908) – 2013.   Photo: C.Hagemoen

What inspired the use vintage postcards as artistic subjects? Robert Sandilands, explains how the Postcard Views project evolved:

I first encountered the Burrard Bridge card about 20 years ago…it was reproduced in a local magazine… I was impressed by this powerful little image and saw in it a possibility for making interesting pictures which would have a broad appeal. The three [Burrard Bridge] drawings in the show were based on that tiny reproduction.

Vintage “Golden Age” postcards, including the Burrard Bridge card that started it all. Photo: C.Hagemoen

Then I started collecting other post cards, looking for subjects that would have the same sort of pictorial potential and that I felt I could satisfactorily “re-present”. In the process I learned more about the history and production of postcards and the history of the views involved all of which made the postcards more interesting.

Sandilands notes that “none of the [postcard views] could be reproduced today – they are views of times past.” He adds, however, that “the essential beauty of the views endures.”

The exhibit runs from February 29th to July 15th 2016 in the Archives Gallery (Monday to Friday, 9 AM to 5 PM). An opening reception, with the artist in attendance, will be held March 16^th – 6:00 to 8:00 pm.

Promotional card for exhibit. Courtesy: Robert Sandilands