As we noted in a previous post, after more than four decades of service, the James Skitt Matthews building in Vanier Park has reached its full capacity and we are preparing to move to a larger space where we can continue to serve the public for many years to come. Part of this preparation involves inventorying the holdings and housing or rehousing them as needed to ensure they can safely travel. One challenging side effect of this work is that when records are housed in sturdy, supportive containers, they take up more room. That’s a problem when the vault is already full. The solution is kind of like playing Tetris. This post gives you an idea of how we play the game, every day.

Retro Tetris. Retrieved from https://www.freepik.com/premium-vector/brick-retro-tetris-game_3786227.htm

Our oversize bound volumes that do not fit into a standard archival quality storage box are stored unboxed, side by side on open shelves. When these volumes are housed in sturdy new storage boxes, the space they occupy almost doubles! To maximize the use of our space we try to consolidate volumes depending on their type and size. Once we decide which types of boxes are best suited for the specific volumes, and how many will be used, we often find ourselves reorganizing the volumes and shelving itself in order to optimize the box distribution, often at a new location.

A good example of this game of archival Tetris is the housing of City Engineer’s reports that date from 1906 to 1959. We were faced with five shelves of bound volumes of a similar depth and height but ranging in width from 1.5” to 7.5”.

Unboxed City Engineer’s reports on their original shelving bay. Photo by Paola Merkins

To house them properly, we decided to use a clamshell-style box that comes in 3” and 5” depths and a two-piece 8″ depth flat box. The deeper two-piece box has a bottom and lid which makes its outer dimensions a little bigger than the two shallower clamshell boxes. While the shallower boxes can sit on a shelf side by side, the deeper boxes have to be combined with the shallow ones in order to fit side by side.

Only one deep box fits on a shelf, but it can be combined with two shallower boxes. Photos by Heather Gordon

This bay had 20 volumes that needed 8” deep boxes, and because these deep boxes are not usually stacked on top of one another (to make retrieval for researchers more efficient), we could only return eight of the 20 large volumes, when boxed, to this bay. Not the best use of available space.

Fortunately, the Board of Works minute books, a series consisting mostly of a large number of narrower bound volumes and located on a bay across the aisle from the City Engineer’s reports, were ready to be housed as well. By using these two bays we calculated that we would be able to accommodate most of the volumes in roughly the same location, only needing additional space for a few large volumes.

Unboxed Board of Works minute books on their original shelving bay. Photo by Paola Merkins

We began the relocation with the City Engineer’s reports. Because we knew we needed additional space to store all the volumes, we identified a few shelves that would accommodate the overflow boxes and relocated them first.

The empty spaces on these two bays allowed us to relocate some of the larger the volumes first (right). Photo by Paola Merkins

With the large volumes off the first bay, we were able to redistribute and add enough shelves to accommodate the large 8” boxes. Once the shelving was set up, the rehoused volumes were assigned new locations there.

Shelving on first bay now arranged to fit one large volume per shelf. Photo by Paola Merkins

By working on both bays at the same time we were able to create enough “swing” space to start filling in the empty shelves with the newly boxed volumes. We did this by alternating the pulls between bays and meticulously tracked the location of each volume throughout the process to ensure that it could be found at any time if requested by a researcher.

These two images depict how both bays were being worked at simultaneously. Photo by Paola Merkins

Eventually all the volumes from both bays were rehoused and our database updated to reflect their new locations.

City Engineer’s reports and Board of Works minute books in their new locations. Photo by Paola Merkins

Another kind of Tetris challenge is created as the holdings are inventoried and box contents more appropriately re-housed. This results in gaps on the shelves that quickly become the new home for newly-boxed bound volumes.

Rehoused volumes are seen here in shelving space that was created during the inventory process. Photo by Paola Merkins

And a key part of the game is staking out territory. Shelves in the vault are truly coveted real estate!

Reserved sign

We are now 64% finished boxing oversized bound volumes, and are starting work on housing rolled drawings. We will keep you updated as the conservation team tackles other challenges in the Pre-move project.

Florida has long played host to the production of films and television series, from seminal horror film Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954, parts of which were filmed in our very own Wakulla Springs!) to the current production of Bad Boys for Life (currently filming in Miami and slated for a 2020 release). The Richard Alan Nelson Collection contains documents detailing film production in various Florida cities, movie posters, motion picture companies, publicity stills of actors and actresses, and film law.

The collection even features a folder (7, in Box 922) of what the cinema scene looked like in Tallahassee at the time of Nelson’s dissertation work, the late 1970s. In a preserved volume of New Look, a local entertainment magazine, journalist Rick Oppenheim described local cinemas struggling to keep their doors open, paying “90% of their box office receipts (with house operations skimmed off the top) to a tight-fisted [film] distributor for the rental of a first-run film”, leading to cinemas holding on to blockbuster films like Star Wars (which were highly expensive to rent) for months on end, and less likely to gamble on new films which may hurt their bottom line.

For more information on this collection, please visit its finding aid. If you’d like to visit Special Collections and explore the documents in person, we welcome visitors Monday to Friday, 10 am to 6 pm.

Every new film that tells a story about Emily Dickinson seems to stir up a new round of questions about her life and writing. In 2016 it was A Quiet Passion, directed by Terence Davies and starring Cynthia Nixon as the adult Dickinson; in 2019 it’s Wild Nights with Emily (2018) directed by Madeleine Olnek with Molly Shannon playing Dickinson. While we normally steer clear of debates about the accuracy and merits of fictional portrayals of Dickinson, a recent interview with Molly Shannon calls for some clarification of the facts.

In this televised interview that aired in early April 2019, Molly Shannon makes the following claim around the 1:05 mark:

It’s really cool … there were these erasures found in her work through spectrographic technology where they can find all this stuff about great historical figures…

While a single interview on a morning talk show may not seem like much, we want to correct the record to state that none of the Emily Dickinson manuscripts held at Amherst College have undergone any sort of analysis via “spectrographic technology” or any kind of imaging beyond a visible-spectrum flatbed scanner.

Amherst College launched Amherst College Digital Collections in the fall of 2012 and made full-color scans of all of our Dickinson manuscripts freely available online in early January 2013.

At that time, our goal was to make these manuscript images as widely accessible as possible. People interested in Dickinson’s life and poetry no longer had to trust the word of scholars with the resources and expertise to visit the special collections at Amherst and Harvard; they could see the manuscripts for themselves.

The first facsimile of a Dickinson manuscript we have been able to locate is the “Fac-simile of ‘Renunciation,’ by Emily Dickinson” that appeared at the front of Poems: Second Series edited by Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson and published by Roberts Brothers of Boston in 1891.

Prior to the widespread adoption of digital photography in the early 21st century, producing photographic facsimiles of important manuscripts was far more difficult. Ralph Franklin’s 1981 two-volume set The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson was a major achievement of editorial scholarship and facsimile publication.

The reproductive technologies of the time made it cost-prohibitive to publish the facsimile images in full color, but these black and white images were a great leap forward.

Today anyone with an internet connection can see a better quality image of this same manuscript via ACDC: https://acdc.amherst.edu/explore/asc:15595/asc:15597

Within ACDC, users can download their own copy of the image or use the built-in tools to zoom in and rotate the image. As much of an improvement as these color scans are, there is more work to be done. First, it’s important to recognize that these scans were created before Amherst College had established a formal Digital Programs department with dedicated imaging professionals. The Archives & Special Collections staff used a standard flatbed scanner that captures only visible-spectrum light to create 600dpi master files back in 2008-2009. These same master files are what is in ACDC today.

In the meantime, advances in imaging manuscripts have been going on all around us. Perhaps the most famous example of using new technology to recover a lost text is the Archimedes Palimpsest. As described on their website:

The Multispectral Imaging of the Archimedes palimpsest was undertaken by Keith Knox, of the Boeing Corporation based in Maui, William A. Christens-Barry of Equipoise Imaging LLC, and Roger Easton, Professor of Imaging Science at RIT. … To explain multispectral imaging, we must make a short digression into electromagnetic radiation…

Those interested in the science of multispectral imaging can find out much more on the Archimedes Palimpsest site, but the point is that such imaging is complex and requires carefully calibrated equipment to produce reliable results.

Perhaps no facility better captures the excitement of using new technologies to study the material culture of the past than the Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage at Yale University. This Yale news story about their work on their “Vinland Map” describes some of the imaging techniques and technologies that were not available just 10 or 15 years ago: Yale putting high-tech tests to its controversial Vinland Map.

We don’t mean to fault a Hollywood actress for not knowing the full details of the history of the digitization of Dickinson manuscripts; she is not a professional scholar of Dickinson or material culture. We do feel the need to state, for the public record, that none of Amherst’s Dickinson manuscripts have undergone multispectral imaging of the sort now available at Yale.

While Amherst does not have the capacity to do the sort of imaging done at the Yale IPCH, technical details of their processes are readily available online: https://digitalcollections.wordpress.amherst.edu/about/ As interest in the deeper physical features of Dickinson’s manuscripts gains public attention, we have begun exploring ways we might use the newest technologies to improve our scans to better serve the public.

The National Archives launched our newest exhibit, Rightfully Hers: American Women and the Vote, last week at the Lawrence O’Brien Gallery of the museum in Washington, DC.

Most Americans consider the ability to vote fundamental to the enjoyment of full citizenship. American women, however, were long denied that right. In 1920, American democracy dramatically expanded when the newly ratified 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibited the states from denying the vote on the basis of sex. This landmark voting rights victory was made possible by decades of suffragists’ persistent political engagement, and yet it is just one critical milestone in women’s battle for the vote.

In celebration of the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, Rightfully Hers: American Women and the Vote looks beyond suffrage parades and protests to the often overlooked story behind this landmark moment in American history. This fuller retelling of the struggle for women’s voting rights illustrates the dynamic involvement of American women across the spectrum of race, ethnicity and class to reveal what it really takes to win the vote for one half of the people.   

This exhibit highlights hard-won victories that stemmed from the woman suffrage movement. But it also reminds modern-day citizens of their responsibilities and encourages all to be ‘election ready’ and exercise the right to vote. As home to some of the most important records from the woman suffrage story, including the 19th amendment, the National Archives is uniquely positioned to create a powerful educational experience that relates the fuller story of the struggle to make the vote a reality for all women.

Several years in the planning stages, Rightfully Hers includes more than 90 original records including documents, photographs, artifacts, and audio and video recordings that connect to important historic milestones in the women’s struggle to gain the vote. Exhibit curator Corrine Porter dedicated the past two years creating an exhibit that includes the artifacts and documents we believed would best tell this story.

The National Archives will also host a range of public and education programs, including lectures, panel discussions, and other special events centered on the 19th Amendment and powerful women and their roles in our nation and its history. For a full list of future scheduled events, see the National Archives Calendar of Events.

The exhibit is open daily from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. in the Lawrence F. O’Brien Gallery at the National Archives Museum in Washington, DC, through January 3, 2021. Admission is free.

For more information, visit https://museum.archives.gov/rightfully-hers-american-women-and-vote

Please note that the archives reading room will be closed from Monday 17 to Friday 28 June 2019. This closure is to facilitate the move of our services to a temporary location in the S corridor of the University Library for the duration of the Campus Central project building works.

The archives reading room will re-open in its new location in room S10 on Monday 1 July 2019.

If you require access to material from our collections during this closure period please contact us at archives@stir.ac.uk

The Campus Central project will create a newly refurbished Atrium space, a new three-storey building at the heart of the campus , and a landscaped, pedestrian-friendly Queen’s Court offering students, staff and visitors a host of new study and social spaces.

Building work on the Campus Central project is due to be completed in the 2020/21 academic year.

Have you taken a look at our current digital exhibition about Providence’s vacant spaces, or visited any of the locations on the tour to see the signs?

Exhibition curator Angela DiVeglia will be giving a talk on Wednesday, May 22nd in the lower level of the Bell Street Chapel from 6:00 – 7:30 pm. (Did you know that the park next to Bell Street Chapel used to be a convent?)

The evening will begin with a short presentation where Angela will show highlights from the exhibition, discuss her research and curatorial process, and answer questions from the audience. The second half of the event will consist of an optional interactive workshop with drawing and writing prompts to encourage audience members to engage with vacant and open spaces from their day-to-day lives or from their memories.

Learn more and register for the event here!

We are pleased to announce that additional records of the St. John’s Episcopal Church are now available online through DigiNole: FSU’d Digital Repository. These include records of baptisms, marriages, and burials at St. John’s throughout the 20th century, as well as early vestry minutes, detailing early church events such as establishing the site of the building and cemetery, selecting rectors, and historical practices such as renting seats in the pews. These supplement previously digitized records of church rites and the journals of Reverend W.H. Carter. Genealogists, St. John’s parishioners, and researchers of Tallahassee history will all find value in greater access to these materials.

St. John’s is the mother church of the Diocese of Florida. It was founded as a mission parish in 1829, and the church’s first building was erected in 1837. The Diocese was organized at St. John’s in 1838 and Francis Huger Rutledge, who became rector of St. John’s in 1845, was consecrated the first Bishop of Florida in 1851. The original church burned in 1879; a new church was built on the same site and consecrated in 1888, and it is still the parish’s principal place of worship.

The physical collection includes administrative records; member registries; meeting minutes of the Vestry and church circles; Bibles, Books of Common Prayer, hymnals, and other liturgical works; documentation of the history of St. John’s Church and the Episcopal Diocese of Florida; service bulletins and other periodicals; sermon transcripts; photographs; and motion pictures.

For more information about the collection, visit its finding aid. You can also explore the digitized materials from St. John’s in DigiNole: FSU’s Digital Repository.

The University of Stirling Archives is delighted to offer a six week trainee post funded by the Musicians’ Union to work on their extensive archive, improving access to this unique research resource.

Since its transfer to the University of Stirling Archives in 2009 the Musicians’ Union Archive has been one of our most used collections with researchers from around the UK (and further afield) using the collection for a wide variety of research projects. The archive also receives a large amount of enquiries from members of the public engaged in family history research whose relatives were professional musicians. In 2016 a new history of the Union was published which has generated further interest in the collection (Cloonan, M. & Williamson, J., Players’ Work Time – A Social History of the Musicians’ Union, Manchester University Press).

The Archive Trainee will work on a project to digitise The Musician, the magazine of the Musicians’ Union, which began publication in 1950. They will prepare the items for digitisation, carry out the digitisation of the material and assist in the publication and promotion of this new resource.

Application information:

• Please send a CV and supporting statement detailing why you are interested in the post and how it would benefit your future career to karl.magee@stir.ac.uk marking your email MU Trainee 2019
• Closing date for applications is 5 June 2019
• Interviews will be held during the week beginning 17 June 2019
• The timing of this project is flexible but we expect it to be completed during the summer of 2019
• The salary for this 6 week fixed term post is fixed to the University pay scale at Grade 4 SP 14 (£20,836)

Further information, including a full job description, is available here.

To discuss the post please contact Karl Magee, University Archivist, at 01786 466619 / karl.magee@stir.ac.uk

Summer is indeed a quieter time on campus. Today starts the summer term here at FSU and we wish all students the best of luck in their summer classes.

We recently posted in DigiNole: FSU’s Digital Repository more volumes of The Girl’s Own Paper, or The Girl’s Own Annual as it was eventually titled. You can browse issues from this publication geared at young British girls and teenagers from the years 1880-1893 in DigiNole. This is an ongoing digitization project so be sure to look out for “new” issues in the future. This publication is a part of the larger John MacKay Shaw Childhood in Poetry Collection. Titles from that collection which have been digitized may be browsed and searched in DigiNole as well.

Happy Summer!

May 13th marks the 50th anniversary of the election of Charles Evers as mayor of Fayette, Mississippi, a victory which made Mr. Evers the state’s first African-American mayor of a racially diverse municipality.¹ The watershed 1969 campaign in Fayette came less than four years after President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the landmark federal legislation which prohibits states from establishing local laws or practices which may “deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color”.

Soon after the Civil War, the Mississippi State Legislature instituted a set of laws designed to deprive African-American citizens of their right to participate in the electoral system.  This state-sponsored framework of disenfranchisement became known as the “Mississippi Plan.”  Mississippi’s laws, coupled with the free rein the state and local authorities gave to terror groups like the Klu Klux Klan, served as a model for the larger system of American apartheid called Jim Crow.  

Charles Evers, NAACP field secretary with Dr. Martin Luther King in Jackson, Miss., March 20, 1968.
((AP Photo/Jack Thornell))

Charles Evers and his younger brother Medgar grew up in the Jim Crow South and, since the early 1950s, had been activists there, advocating for the civil rights of African-American citizens, including the right to vote. Both men had held leadership roles in the Regional Council of Negro Leadership (RCNL), and in the Mississippi office of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).  

Medgar Evers was assassinated by a Klansman in the driveway of his Mississippi home on June 12, 1963 at the age of thirty-seven.

Prior to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Fayette, Mississippi, a town with a population of 1600 citizens —of which only 400 were white— had no registered black voters.  But Charles Evers’ 1969 campaign and registration drives, backed by the protection of the new federal voting rights laws, increased the number of registered African-American voters in Fayette from 0 to 450.²   Evers told the syndicated newspaper columnist Drew Pearson that this sea-change in the town’s voting rolls would have been impossible to achieve before the passing of the Voting Rights Act.³  He explained:

I know. I’ve tried to register in Philadelphia [Mississippi] before the bill was passed and I personally know the runaround they give you.  First they send you to the chancery clerk, who sends you to the sheriff.  The sheriff tells you that the registration books are out, to come back in thirty days.  So you come back in thirty days and then they make you recite the constitution from memory.  Then, if by extreme persistence you manage to register, and if you do finally get to the polls, deputy sheriffs sit around, armed to the teeth, glowering at you as if daring you to walk past them and vote. 

A local Mississippi newspaper headline in the final days of Evers’ 1969 campaign. 
(The Delta-Democrat-Times; 11 May 1969)

By the second week of May, 1969, it seemed likely that Evers’ mayoral campaign would succeed.  And on May 13th, capturing 60% of the votes, he was declared the winner.  In his inaugural speech, Mayor Charles Evers spoke directly to the white citizens of Fayette, to his detractors, and to those who anticipated retribution from the new African-American mayor:

Have no fear… because we aren’t going to allow, because we are now in charge, our power to abuse you, and to mistreat you like you’ve mistreated us. We’re going to show you what love can do in a community.

Charles Evers was reelected Mayor of Fayette in 1973. 

The audio excerpt from Mayor Evers’ inaugural speech, found in the media player at the top of this page, comes from the Cinema Sound Collection. The Cinema Sound Collection contains hundreds of hours of stock audio footage documenting the politics and culture of the twentieth century. The Cinema Sound Collection is a part of the New York Public Radio Archive’s permanent collection, and is a gift of Joan and Robert Franklin.

Footnotes

¹Mound Bayou, Mississippi is an independent community that was founded in 1887 as an all-black town by formerly enslaved African-Americans.  Its first mayor was Isaiah T. Montgomery, an African-American man born into slavery.

²Editorial, “What Will Happen in Fayette’s Future” McComb Enterprise-Journal, 26 May 1969

³Drew Pearson, “Inauguration At Fayette Monday Direct Result Of Voting Rights Bill” Clarion-Ledger, 07 July 1969

The Archives is very pleased to announce that the Planning Department’s former reference library material is now available to researchers in the Archives’ Reading Room.

An artistic presentation of a proposed redevelopment of the central downtown waterfront: Page 35 of Vancouver central waterfront (National Harbours Board, 1977)

The series consists of almost 1,200 items, including a set of Information Binders created by the department containing clippings, reports, pamphlets, etc. organised by topic or neighbourhood.

All areas related to planning are included in the series. The best documented subjects (as you would expect) relate to City-specific responsibilities: transportation planning, zoning and land use planning, building and urban design guidelines, urban renewal/redevelopment, and housing.

A sketch of Burrard Street view corridors from: A view analysis of downtown Vancouver (1975)

Other related subjects include: economic development, recreational resource planning (in conjunction with the Park Board), unsolicited studies on a number of matters related to planning, proposals for individual buildings and larger developments, and Vancouver’s participation in regional transportation development.

Specifications for use zoning in Hastings Park: page 35 of Hastings Park and New Brighton Park : Functional programming and design objectives study (Vancouver (B.C.). Office of the City Manager, 1991)

While the dates of the material in the series range from the 1920s to the early 2000s, the bulk of the items are from the 1960s to the early 1990s, with items from the 1970s alone making up 49% of the series.

Ocean parkway: Aerial view of proposed Ocean Parkway route, from First Narrows: crossing approaches : Proposed new ocean parkway (Swan Wooster Engineering Co., 1960)

Front cover of Housing conversion : the potential for additional suites in single family houses (Vancouver (B.C.). Planning Department, 1975)

The reports and other documents in the series are rich in historical data on the Vancouver economy, the physical environment of the City and many of its neighbourhoods:

Table depicting building conditions by land use in all industrial districts: page 4 of Vancouver urban renewal study:Technical report no. 4 Industrial districts (Vancouver (B.C.). Planning Department, 1965)

Taking a lateral view, you can see the evolution of concerns from city-wide land use planning in the 1920s through planning as a support function of economic development (transportation planning and urban renewal, especially) in the 1960s…

Infographic of daily motor vehicle flows in & out of downtown: Plate VII from Report on the downtown parking problem (J.F. Muir & A. Peebles, 1948)

…to redevelopment of the city’s former industrial lands and more neighborhood-focused planning in the 1970s…

One of a number of proposed conceptual schematics for the redevelopment of Granville Island: Page 19 of Granville Island: a process for redevelopment (Thompson, Berwick, Pratt & Partners, 1975)

…to planning for Skytrain and Expo in the 1980s, through to managing the explosion of growth that took off in the 1990s.

Front cover of Skytrain extension study : New Westminster to Vancouver via Lougheed Mall (SNC-Lavalin, 1998)

One-third of the material in the series was not created by City departments; much of this material is not readily available elsewhere. These items include external consultant’s reports; academic studies; unsolicited proposals from engineering companies, developers or architects; reports from other governments and public bodies; and studies sponsored by community groups on a wide variety of issues affecting the city and the lives of people living here.

Overall, the impression gained is that many issues currently concerning the city, planners and citizens have been around for a long time: from the mundanities of street design to housing to regional environmental protection, and everything in between.

A proposal to drop Granville Street below its existing grade as part of a redevelopment plan for downtown: Page 11 of Redevelopment in downtown Vancouver (Vancouver (B.C.). Planning Department, 1964)

Cover of Fraser River estuary study : Water quality (Canada. Ministry of Fisheries and Environment, and British Columbia. Ministry of the Environment, 1978)

The series also contains material that is not Vancouver or Greater Vancouver-specific, including studies and regulations published by other jurisdictions. These would have been used as reference material by staff when developing local responses.

Cover of Land use planning for noise control in residential communities (Ontario. Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing, 1981)

This valuable resource had formerly been made available to members of the broader planning community while still in the custody of the Planning Department, so there has been considerable community interest in getting the series processed since its transfer to the Archives. Processing the series was expedited by the arrival of a Langara Library Tech program student who had been looking for an internship project with us. Kelsey Reimer listed and rehoused about 80% of the series during her internship; the rest was completed by Archives staff.

We hope this material continues to be of use to the general public and the broader planning community, providing historical context to many of the challenges we still continue to face across the city.

Cover of Metropolitan Airport Plan (Vancouver (B.C.) Town Planning Commission, 1946)

In loading some new titles to the John MacKay Shaw Childhood in Poetry Collection, I noticed an event popping up in several of the texts. The Lord Mayor’s Show, an event still held today, was a popular topic in British children’s books in the 1800s.

Children’s books in this era were often used to educate and explain people, place, nature and events to children. As the first example, Lord Mayor’s show, or, The 9th of November (1810) shows. This hand-colored picture book explains all the pageantry surrounding the event as well as takes the reader through each individual event that makes up the Show.

Another example shows how prominent events in children’s lives could always be used to teach a lesson. In The rose-bud: a flower in the juvenile garland, a poem entitled “Lord Mayor’s Show” shows a young boy exclaiming over all the pomp and circumstance around the traditional parade at the Lord Mayor’s Show. His parents are quick to point out it is the hard work the Lord Mayor puts in that is valued and not the gold of his carriage.

The Lord Mayor’s Show is one of the longest running events of its kind, dating back to the 16th century and still celebrated today on the same date as the young children in the 1800s would have celebrated it. Both of these examples show how children’s literature can give us a glimpse into how events have changed, or remained the same.

You can explore more books and poetry of the John MacKay Shaw Childhood in Poetry Collection through DigiNole: FSU’s Digital Repository. We’re adding new titles to the collection often so be sure to check back!

As SNAC (Social Networks and Archival Context) looks toward the end of its Phase II development, NARA’s External Agency Liaisons to SNAC, Jerry Simmons and Dina Herbert, continue to lead and collaborate in the full spectrum of cooperative activities including outreach and communication, collaborative projects outside NARA, cooperative management with the SNAC Operations Team, technical developments for the ever-evolving SNAC editing interface, and administration of the SNACSchool training program, which is the Team’s predominant task.

SNAC’s landing page mosaic, where users discover archival holdings world-wide via searches for the organizations, persons and families who created them.

One of SNAC’s most popular authority records is that of Julia Child. From Child’s record, researchers have single-click access to archival collections in repositories around the world. Her record also contains links to other persons and organizations related to Child also described in SNAC.

SNAC Outreach and Communication

As we continue outreach in the archives, library and museum community, we are excited by stories from professional researchers who are using SNAC in their day-to-day work. In December 2018, we learned that a team of research specialists working specifically in repatriation at the National Museum of the American Indian were using SNAC as part of their “reference tool kit”, especially exploiting SNAC’s linking features for better overall understanding of artifact provenance. One such search discovered former custodians of the solid gold Echenique Disc. Evidence discovered in SNAC revealed a connection to dealers and collectors of Native American artifacts who were active in Germany during World War II.

One large aspect of our project continues to be external outreach, both near and far. During the past year and a half, the NARA SNAC Liaisons presented information sessions and system demonstrations as close as the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art where the Smithsonian’s Technical Group had a presentation by Liaison Dina Herbert. And another as far away as Oslo, Norway, where Liaison Jerry Simmons gave a presentation to Scandinavian librarians and archivists at the Libraries in the Sky Conference in April 2018. The Oslo presentation focused on tracking the archival record of famed Norwegian aviator and polar explorer Bernt Balchen, who has small collections at the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress and the National Archives, in addition to materials housed in European repositories.

Other conference presentations included SNAC/NARA representation at WikiCon America in October 2018, Bridging the Spectrum Symposium at Catholic University of America in February 2019, and a customized demonstration at the Folger Shakespeare Library as recent at mid-March.

NARA Leadership via SNAC Cooperation and Collaboration

As is the mission of NARA’s SNAC Liaisons, there are a number of special projects, both internal and external, on the Team’s calendar throughout the year.

One very visible aspects of NARA’s leadership in SNAC is our ongoing support of SNAC partner gatherings. The National Archives Office of Innovation has hosted a number of gatherings for SNAC cooperative partners at the Innovation Hub at Archives I, even in the earliest phases of investigation and development, as far back as 2010. The most recent gathering was in August 2018, during the Society of American Archivists conference week in Washington, D.C. Our next all-partners’ gathering is scheduled for September 2019.

Within NARA, SNAC Liaison Dina has collaborated with Innovation staff member Dominic Byrd-McDevitt to integrate SNAC records of women featured in the May 2019 exhibit at the National Archives Rightfully Hers on a new interactive website project. Not only will we feature NARA records for the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, we’ll also feature the connections made possible by SNAC for such women as Susan B. Anthony, Mary Church Terrell, Carrie Chapman Catt, and Sally Ride.

Mary Church Terrell’s SNAC record points to/links to the description of her portrait in the holdings of the National Archives and Records Administration.

Similarly, Dina is supporting the WikiEdu Scholar Program in its efforts to enhance wiki articles about the 19th Amendment. A collaboration between WikiEdu and the National Archives, focused on Rightfully Hers, these online Wiki courses are using SNAC resources to help develop pages in Wikipedia about the unsung women of the fight for equality and the vote. Also under Dina’s watch is our NARA/SNAC Twitter feed @SNACcooperative. Make sure to follow for all the latest information about SNAC and to learn helpful tips on using it.

If you attended the Society of American Archivists’ conference last year in Washington, D.C., you probably saw NARA’s SNAC Team at the SNAC information table and learned about the search engine and other projects. If you attend the SAA meeting in Austin, Texas, this coming August,  make sure to look for the SNAC information station in the SAA registration area. You can talk with SNAC partners about our many projects, and see a quick demonstration of the SNAC search engine.

NARA Leadership in SNACSchool

NARA SNAC Liaisons Team continues its mission to train new SNAC editors via the SNACSchool, a program that’s now in its third year. The team has logged training events as far away as Portland, Oregon, and close to home in Washington, D.C. Each training event hosts a new class of partner/editors from institutions like Yale and Harvard Universities, East Carolina University, and UNC-Chapel Hill. Those editors who cannot attend events held during the annual Society of American Archivists meetings can take advantage of one of the purely remote, web-based training events.

But the NARA Team doesn’t work alone! In a show of strong professional collaborative spirit, SNAC partners from the George Washington University, New York Public Library, University of Miami Libraries, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Wilson Library, and the Getty Research Institute, (a group known as the SNACSchool Team), work side-by-side (virtually) to develop training materials and present SNACSchool events. This group was particularly supportive in the development of SNACSchool’s new “micro modules” curriculum. As the name suggests, micro modules are brief, focused training events intended to deliver quick updates SNAC editors on new interface features, and to inform the cooperative of new editing policies.

Examples of SNACSchool training materials:

As of December 2018, there are 106 graduates of the SNACSchool. We have at least three training events planned before the end of the current grant cycle (October 2019), one of which is slated for the Society of American Archivists week this August in Austin, Texas.

New developments in cooperative membership

As the current phase moves into the final months, SNAC leaders work to expand the membership base. Nearly fifty institutions have expressed interest in being members, among them the National Archives in Luxembourg and the National Archives in Spain. There are also discussions underway with Archives Portal Europe (APE) about SNAC/APE collaboration.

SNAC technical developments and projects

With leadership from SNAC’s Technical Team and Working Group, refinements to the user editing interface are ongoing, with new version releases coming every few months. There is also work on a new SNAC API for use in automated extraction of data by outside parties, and work progresses on a new data ingest tool to facilitate batch uploads of new authority records, in EAC-CPF and other standard authority formats, into the database.

A new form technical collaboration comes in the form of monitoring the new SNAC Help Ticket program. Using the osTicket platform, NARA SNAC Liaisons respond to technical help tickets submitted by SNAC’s public users. These help tickets cover a variety of subjects, but mostly involve requests for assistance in locating archival collections described in SNAC records. The NARA Team does this work in close contact with SNAC’s Technical Team headquartered at the University of Virginia’s Alderman Library.

Last but certainly not least, SNAC recently launched a new API which allows for users to programmatically extract data from the database. This makes it useful for researchers who want to look at a large amount of data, and users who want to connect different systems or websites, or make similar edits over and over. You can learn more at SNAC API Documentation.

The NARA SNAC Team stays busy, but always looking for the next big chance to be leaders and collaborators in SNAC’s global mission to connect researchers, scholars and the like to archival holdings wherever they are stored. You can learn more at snaccooperative.org.

The University of Stirling Archives and the Division of History and Politics are pleased to announce details of a one day workshop looking at the struggles for the liberation of Southern and Central Africa and their interconnections, to be held at the University of Stirling on Saturday 15 June 2019.

The event will showcase recent work carried out on the Peter Mackay Archive, a unique and comprehensive collection of the papers of a key figure in the independence, anti-settler and postcolonial democracy movements of several Southern African countries. It will also promote wider academic research into the many interconnections between political activists, such as Mackay, and wider movements in Southern and Central Africa in the latter half of the Twentieth Century.

The workshop will conclude with an evening screening of a documentary produced by the Malawi Lost History Foundation on the 1967 Mwanza War, a forgotten episode in Malawian history. Material from the Peter Mackay Archive features in this new film and we are delighted to provide the documentary with its UK premiere.

Proposals for presentations that explore the interconnections between the various liberation struggles (including both anti-colonial and anti-settler movements, and post-colonial struggles for democracy) in Southern and Central Africa are welcome. The deadline for submissions is 27 May 2019. The full call for papers and further details of the event can be found here.

The event has been made possible through the generous support of the Stirling Fund.

As FSU heads towards the summer class semesters, generally a much quieter time on campus, Special Collections & Archives will be available by appointment only during the intersession week, May 6-10, 2019. Appointments are available between 10am to 12pm and 1pm and 4pm during this week.

The Special Collections Research Center in Strozier Library, the Pepper Library Reading Room, and the Heritage Museum will all be closed during that week. SCA has started to use this time to complete projects and prepare new projects for the summer as well as clean up and re-shelve our stacks after the busy semester.

If you need to make an appointment for any of those spaces during the intersession week, please contact Special Collections at lib-specialcollections@fsu.edu or call us at (850) 644-3271. We will resume our normal operating hours on Monday, May 13, 2019.

Marshall Curry’s recent documentary A Night at the Garden (produced by Field of Vision) about the German-American Bund rally in Madison Square Garden in February 1939 and The Radio Diaries piece When Nazis Took Manhattan remind us that the notion of a fascist America may not just be the stuff of fiction by Sinclair Lewis and Philip Roth, but a real possibility. Given the right social, political and economic conditions, a significant number of the voting public can indeed be persuaded by demagogues. When Radio Diaries asked the WNYC Archives if we could help with their piece, we were able to come up with two hours’ worth of the raw audio from the rally. 

A poster used to promote the German-American Bund Rally at Madison Square Garden on February 20, 1939.
(Poster courtesy of Lorne Bair Books, Inc.)

Why then have we decided to make this hate-filled event available?  Well, it wasn’t because it’s enjoyable listening or that we endorse any of the ideology, perceptions or language used by the speakers. To the contrary, the rally is a raw, unedited 1 hearing of an infamous event that takes place during a critical period in American history; just months away from the outbreak of World War II, when isolationist and ‘America First’ sentiment was gaining traction daily. The public rhetoric used by the German-American Bund played to the underlying assumptions of these movements by raising the fear-mongering specter of an internationalist ‘Jewish cabal’ 2 out to deprive America of its sovereignty and bring Soviet-style communism to our shores. Bund leader Fritz Kuhn put it this way: 

We, the German-American Bund, organized as American citizens with American ideals and determined to protect ourselves, our homes, our wives and children against the slimy conspirators who would change this glorious republic into the inferno of a Bolshevik paradise.

Back then the ‘cabal’ was composed of FDR’s treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr., the financier Bernard Baruch and the Rothschild banking family. Today, for those on the alt-right, the Jewish billionaire bogeyman is the progressive George Soros and his supporters.  

Original program cover for the German-American Bund rally Madison Square Garden on February 20, 1939. Notice, the snake’s head has a hammer and sickle on it. 
(U.S. Holocaust Museum via Wikimedia.)

The speakers relied on a white supremacist tautology with a bizarre American twist that employed George Washington, the nation’s founding father, as the patriotic foundation upon which to build their racist non-interventionist platform. The event, orchestrated to coincide with Washington’s birthday, (February 22nd), featured a thirty-foot image of the first President flanked by red, white and blue bunting and swastikas as the visual backdrop to a succession of uniformed Bund speakers who drew on Washington’s inaugural admonition about avoiding ‘foreign entanglements.’ One speaker even argued that if Washington was alive today, he would be a ‘staunch friend’ of Adolph Hitler. To this they added time-worn tropes, stereotypes and falsehoods about criminal Jewish refugees taking American jobs, Jews creating degenerate art and music, and Jewish teachers corrupting Aryan children. 

America’s home-grown legacy of slavery, the Klan, Jim Crow laws, and, nativism fed into this anti-Semitic Nazi ideology of racial purity, making it easy for speakers to talk about Jewish carpetbaggers during Reconstruction along with miscegenation or ‘race mixing’ and ‘lustful Negroes’ who only wanted to rape white women. After all, one speaker noted, intermarriage is already illegal in more than half the nation, implying that lawmakers should just finish the job.

Father Charles E. Coughlin broadcasts in Royal Oak, Michigan, Oct. 26, 1936.
(AP Photo)

But perhaps no better domestic factor was utilized by the Bund than that of America as a Christian nation with Christian values. Here, the notoriously anti-Semitic Father Charles Coughlin, the outspoken radio evangelist, was held high as a martyr and victim of the ‘Jewish-controlled’ media. No doubt rally goers were disappointed the controversial preacher was a no-show since Kuhn had repeatedly promised a “prominent Catholic” would attend to discuss “the Jewish question” in the days leading up to the event.

This certainly didn’t dampen the address by Bund publicity director Gerhard Wilhelm Kunze, who harped on the Jewish domination of American culture and called for news and culture without “a Jewish accent.” Kunze, who fancied himself an American Joseph Goebbels, complained there is “no free speech for white men” in the United States and condemned ‘parasites’ like Walter Winchell, George Burns, Leonard Bernstein, and Eddie Cantor, for polluting the ether and taking the rightful places of Aryan Americans in the cultural milieu. In brief, he called for an ethnic cleansing of the airwaves. It’s not too much of a stretch to go from the Christian Nationalist rhetoric of 80 years ago to current alt-right allusions to Jewish control of Hollywood studios and other media outlets. 

The Protests

Towards the end of Kuhn’s speech (beginning 1:57:00) you will note there’s a disruption of some kind. While we can’t see it, Kuhn asks people to remain seated and says, “one fanatic doesn’t make any difference, ladies and gentlemen…see, that’s the way we never do it.” This is the moment when protester Isadore Greenbaum mounts the stage and attempts to reach the podium but is grabbed, beaten, and, stripped by uniformed Bund members. It is Greenbaum’s story that is the focus of the Radio Diaries production. The savage assault on him is clearly shown in Marshall Curry’s documentary film produced by the short documentary unit Field of Vision.

Isadore Greenbaum being beaten and subdued by Nazi storm troopers at Madison Square Garden, February 20, 1939.
(Photo courtesy of The New York Times)

The number of protesters on the streets of New York that cold evening depended in large part on your source, with police estimates ranging anywhere from 10,000 to 100,000.3 Nevertheless, the anti-fascists were hemmed in by at least 1,700 policemen, many mounted on horses, outside of the Garden and at various points on 8th Avenue. (In 1939 the Garden was located at 8th Avenue between 49th and 50th Streets in Manhattan). The New York Times described the police cordon the following day as “a fortress almost impregnable to anti-Nazis.”

New York City’s mounted police forming a line outside Madison Square Garden to hold in check a crowd that packed the streets where the German American Bund was holding a rally.
(AP Photo/Murray Becker)

A mounted police officer attempts to take flag away from anti-Nazi demonstrator outside of Madison Square Garden, February 20, 1939.
(AP Photo courtesy of The New York Times)

The event received broad national coverage that reflected these divergent takes on what happened. The Brooklyn Eagle reported thirteen people were arrested and eight received medical attention, including four police officers in street skirmishes between Nazis, anti-Nazis and police. Yet overall, “Despite the scattered fighting in the streets, no serious trouble resulted, and the rally failed to produce the bombing and rioting predicted.”4    

Socialist Workers Party protest poster against German-American Bund Rally
(Poster courtesy of Field of Vision/Marshall Curry Productions.)

People from a wide range of political and Jewish organizations protested, although only the Socialist Workers Party (whose poster is pictured here) was actually noted by the city’s paper of record.5 The communist Daily Worker, of course, avoided mentioning the Trotskyist SWP, and pulled no punches in its lead: 

“The fetid stench of Hitler Fascism billowed and eddied through Madison Square’s vastness last night. Nazidom’s outpost in America, the German-American Bund, carried its war on democracy into the Garden with shouts, heils, a band of uniformed storm troopers — all the made-in-Berlin trappings, including a thin ‘Americanism’ veneer craftily plotted by German propaganda headquarters.”6

My guess is the paper would not have been as damning six months later (August 23, 1939) in the wake of the signing of the Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact. Still, the Daily Worker that February remained the only newspaper to mention a simultaneous counter-rally “for true Americanism through brotherhood, through democracy,” that was held at Julia Richmond High School in Queens. Speakers there included, Acting Mayor Newbold Morris (La Guardia was out of town), Judge Anna M. Kross, Professor David Efron of Sarah Lawrence College, and WHN News Commentator George Hamilton Combs. 7 

With a pair of Bund “storm troopers” beside her, columnist Dorothy Thompson is pictured still seated, just before being escorted out after laughing and heckling a Nazi speaker. Police later allowed her to return. 
(AP Photo.)

It Can Happen Here 8

Columnist Dorothy Thompson of The New York Herald Tribune (and wife of novelist Sinclair Lewis, the author of It Can’t Happen Here), was escorted out of the rally by two New York City police officers and a Bund storm trooper after she laughed mockingly when Kunze said the Aryan race follows the Golden Rule while Jews only follow the ‘rule of gold’ (approx 1:16:50). Thompson was allowed to return after it became clear she was there as a member of the press. Nevertheless, Thompson called Americans ‘saps’ for allowing such rallies and wrote:

I saw an exact duplicate of it in the Berlin Sports Palast in 1931. That meeting was also ‘protected’ by the police of the German Republic. Three years later the people who had been in charge of that meeting were in charge of the Government of Germany, and the German citizens against whom, in 1931, exactly the same statements had been made as were made by Mr. Kunze, were being beaten, expropriated and murdered… Whenever he made one of his blanket indictments against all Americans not purely Aryan, the audience applauded and howled with joy. Between Mr. Kunze’s speech and a wholesale pogrom is a very short step…I laughed because I wanted to demonstrate how perfectly absurd all this defense of ‘free speech’ is, in connection with movements and organizations like this one.9

Religious and other groups had, in fact, petitioned New York Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia, an outspoken anti-fascist, to ban the rally. A few days before the scheduled event the Mayor suggested featuring Hitler in a chamber of horrors at the World’s Fair but said that he wouldn’t stop the gathering. He told reporters, “I would then be doing exactly what Hitler is doing in carrying on his abhorrent form of government.”10

German-American Bund leader Fritz Kuhn at the Madison Square Garden rally in 1939.
(National Archives/Wikimedia Commons)

The Banality of Evil 11

With the U.S. entry into World War II the German-American Bund was disbanded and the leaders who spoke at the rally did not fare well. The German-born Fritz Kuhn (the last speaker) was found guilty of tax evasion and embezzling more than $14,000 from the Bund. He was sent to Sing Sing prison for two-and-a-half years. While there his citizenship was revoked on the grounds it had been obtained falsely. He was then rearrested for being an enemy agent and interned at a camp in Texas until the end of World War II when he was deported to Germany. He died in obscurity in 1951. 

Gerhard Wilhelm Kunze at the Madison Square Garden Rally in 1939.
(National Archives/Wikimedia Commons)

Bund publicity director Gerhard Wilhelm Kunze succeeded Fritz Kuhn as head of the organization. He reportedly provided the New York District Attorney with the financial documents needed to prosecute Kuhn.  After the U.S. entry into World War II, Kunze fled to Mexico with the intention of making his way to Germany but was arrested and extradited to the United States, where he was prosecuted and sent to prison for espionage and violating the Selective Service Act.

James Wheeler-Hill, National Secretary for the Bund.
(Daily News clipping)

Bund national secretary James Wheeler-Hill was described by the Daily News as “the boy orator of the Bund.” He opened the rally and acted as emcee. Wheeler-Hill resigned his post in January 1940 following his arrest for falsely claiming he was an American citizen. A  Russian-born (Latvian) national, Wheeler-Hill was convicted and went to prison for a year on Welfare Island. In March 1942 he was interned as an enemy alien by the FBI and may have been deported after the war. This is unconfirmed. His brother Axel was sentenced to 16 years in prison for being a Nazi spy.

Isolationist Pastor Sigmund G. Von Bosse was the rally’s second speaker. Described by the Daily Worker as “a frequent headliner at Philadelphia Nazi rallies,” Von Bosse was, in fact, a clergyman, heading up the Bethanien Lutheran Church of Roxborough, Pennsylvania from 1934-1941. According to an obituary in The Morning News of Wilmington, Delaware, Von Bosse then went into seclusion. It reported his death in Miami Beach, Florida on November 29, 1958. 

Russell J. Dunn was the third speaker. Dunn was a founder of the Catholic Common Cause League and was involved with the founding of the Flatbush Anti-Communist League. He spoke often for the Bund and the Christian Front and had ties to the American Nationalist Party. No other information is available at this time. 

The German-born Rudolph Markmann was the fourth speaker. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1933. He led the Atlantic Coast District of the Bund. He was one of eight Bund leaders whose citizenship was revoked in June 1944 on the grounds he violated his citizenship oath by joining the Bund. The Brooklyn Eagle reported (March 21, 1944) that Markmann testified in Brooklyn Federal Court that he eventually quit the Bund’s many activities because it interfered with his family life and made him “tired and sleepy.” It’s not clear if Markmann was ever deported.  

A Bund color guard as it marched in Madison Square Garden are saluted by followers on February 20, 1939.
(AP Photo courtesy of The New York Times)

Closing Thoughts

After listening to two hours of raw audio and then watching Marshall Curry’s six minutes of archive footage, it’s almost as if there were two different rallies. Missing from the audio is all of the pageantry and choreography that went into making it a spectacle. Add to that, the earnest looks, the storm trooper uniforms, and the Nazi salutes. Sure, we hear the crowd roar its approval at what is said, but seeing it, even for a moment, is so much more powerful. Perhaps, this is because it now seems so bizarre, I can’t begin to imagine it in my mind’s eye.

From a strictly audio perspective, as rallies go, this one had some pretty boring stretches. Kunze was the most dynamic if not rabid of the speakers while Kuhn’s revisionist history, though ponderous and tedious, made him, perhaps, the most dangerous. Still, what is remarkable is that their organization was able to muster 20,000 like-minded true believers to fill Madison Square Garden in the name of George Washington and white Christian nationalism. Add to that those around the country who agreed with them but couldn’t make the trip and we’re talking about a significant number. As filmmaker Curry says:

It’s scary and embarrassing. It tells a story about our country that we’d prefer to forget. We’d like to think that when Nazism rose up, all Americans were instantly appalled. But while the vast majority of Americans were appalled by the Nazis, there was also a significant group of Americans who were sympathetic to their white supremacist, anti-Semitic message.

Eighty years have passed. For some, however, the language and attitudes of that time and place have not faded. Indeed, the ideas and beliefs never really left.  It’s as if they were a person that went into hiding, kept below the radar and out of sight, waiting patiently for an opportunity to come out into the open. It seems that opportunity has arrived. Some of the persons and groups attacked have changed along with the circumstances, but contemporary discourse and events, sadly, have some eerie echoes from that night at the Garden.   

____________________________________

[1] There are a few gaps in the original recording, not necessarily due to an effort to censor or omit material, but simply because that material was missing from the original recordings done on a series of instantaneous lacquer coated aluminum discs. Based on the original event program, what appears to be missing here is the music and singing.

[2] The notion of a global conspiracy by rich and powerful Jews is hardly new. Members of the German-American Bund were no doubt inspired, at least in part, by The Elders of the Protocols of Zion a late 19th century anti-Semitic tract published in Russia that purports to be the minutes of meetings held by Jews plotting to take control the world. Although a proven forgery, it was published and widely distributed in the United States in the 1920s by auto magnate Henry Ford through his weekly newspaper, The Dearborn Independent. 

[3] 22,000 Nazis Hold Rally in Garden; Police Check Foes, The New York Times, February, 21, 1939, pg.1. This contrasts with The Albany Times Union front page headline the next day proclaiming: “RIOTS AT N.Y. BUND MEETING 100,000 Jam Area as Army of Police Quells Outbreaks.” 

[4] “Army of Police Cuts Bund Rally Casulties to Only a Few Injured,” The Brooklyn Eagle, February 21, 1939, pg.3. But did any of the injured include the 13 Nazis who attacked Joseph L. Greenstein, a.k.a. The Mighty Atom, who ripped down a Nazi banner outside the Garden? It may never be known, but you can listen to Greenstein’s story by Nate DiMeo following the Radio Diaries piece at: When Nazis Took Manhattan or go directly to: The Year Hank Greenberg Hit 58 Home Runs. 

[5] Ibid., The New York Times.

[6] “Nazi Rally Hails Hoover’s Foreign Policy,” Daily Worker, February 21, 1939, pg. 1

[7] Ibid, pg. 4.

[8] This refers to the Sinclair Lewis’ novel It Can’t Happen Here, a political satire describing the election of ‘patriotic’ demagogue to presidency and his Nazi-like take over of the country. This is also the same pitch line filmmaker Marshall Curry used to advertise his documentary on Fox News. The network, however, refused to air the ad as written, calling it “inappropriate.” See: Hollywood Reporter.

[9] Thompson, Dorothy, “Miss Thompson Issues Statement on Bund Rally,” The New York Herald Tribune, February 21, 1939, pg. 3.

[10] “La Guardia Lets Bund Hold Rally,” The Daily News, February 18, 1939, pg. 3.

[11] This phrase refers to Hannah Arendt’s description of Adolph Eichmann at his 1962 trial in Israel. Eichmann was the Nazis’ chief architect of the genocidal ‘final solution’ for the Jews of Europe. In Arendt’s 1963 book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, she writes about the ‘normalization of wickedness’. In this regard, I highly recommend reading a piece by writer Maria Popova.

Special thanks to Andrew Golis, Jim Schachter, Joe Richman, Sarah Kramer, Marshall Curry, Ben Goldberg and Lorne Bair.   

Wearing the shirt which storm troopers ripped when he interrupted a speech given by Bund leader Fritz Kuhn, anti-Nazi protester Isadore Greenbaum is reunited with his wife and son after his ordeal, February 20, 1939.
(AP Photo courtesy of The New York Times)

Herbaria are collections of different plant specimens which have been dried and preserved. They can be used for many different reasons including personal collecting and as data necessary for scientific studies. FSU even has a museum-quality collection of plants and micro-algae specimens held at the Robert K. Godfrey Herbarium.

Special Collections also has a good sized collections of herbals, including a 1791 portable herbarium of plants in the vicinity of Liege. This item is without a cover and has varying degrees of water and age damage throughout the pages. The specimens which were originally in the item were removed in order to better preserve the book, however the impressions and stains they left on the pages are still easily visible. The original specimens from this item can be viewed from a CD which is included with the book within Special Collection.

I particularly like how indents and water marks from leaves can be seen within the gutter of some of the pages. It gives the item character, and speaks of an unnamed person who sometimes may have slipped leaves in the pages of the book for safe keeping or as bookmarks. This book is designed to have been bought with the text only, and each page which would hold a plant would be inserted as that herb was found. It’s a design not often seen in books but nifty for the use of this particular book.

In comparison, Ruby Diamond’s collection of pressed flowers from her trip to Jerusalem is in phenomenal condition. This particular item should sit on the table as seen in the image (left) with the spine facing to the right as is customary when reading Hebrew text. This particular herbaria has a cover made of wood from Jerusalem and is something Diamond probably bought while in Israel to fill with the plants. This method of collection, buying a pre-made book and filling it with one’s own items, is a common theme when it comes to herbaria. When opened, the beautifully arranged herbs show the care that was put into this travel sized item.

Each page of herbs is covered with a thin absorbent paper that will keep the pages, for the most part, from suffering water and mold damage. It shows to be very effective when compared to the 1791 portable herbaria. The spine of this item is very stiff and it should not be opened all the way as one would assume. Instead, it is best to open an item like this only slightly to avoid any long term damage. Likewise, the specimens on the pages of this herbaria should only be exposed for a short amount of time to protect them from chemicals or pollutants that may damage them if exposed for too long.

The 1791 portable herbarium of plants in the vicinity of Liege and Ruby Diamond’s own collection of pressed flowers from the Holy Land can can be viewed in Special Collections at Strozier Library.

All photo credits go toward the author.

Today’s New York Times has a lovely article about the rare children’s books housed at the Library of Congress, 100 of which are now digitized and available online. (Intriguingly, the children’s book called The Cats’ Party that the article features is entirely different from the identically-titled book that we hold at PPL. We’re pleased to know that two different 19th century authors decided to pen books about feline festivities.)

Check out the Library of Congress’s digitized children’s books here.

The Gertrude Margaritte Ivory Bertram Collection covers the service of one African American nurse in the U.S. Army during World War II.

Bertram was born in Clarksville, Georgia on February 17, 1916. She attended nursing school at the Brewster Hospital and School of Nurse Training in Jacksonville, Florida, which was the first African American hospital in the United States. She then enlisted in the U.S. Army on May 1, 1941 at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. While in the Army, Bertram served as a ward nurse in Fort Bragg and later in the West African theater.

Her collection includes numerous photographs depicting herself and her fellow nurses in uniform, as well as African American G.I.s, and a few photographs from her time in West Africa. Her collection also includes an oral history transcript, personal items, newspaper clippings, and manuscripts. This collection is important, as it covers the unique experiences of women and African Americans during World War II, and offers insight that differs from the majority white male G.I. perspective. It depicts African American nurses in both a professional setting, and a casual setting as Bertram enjoyed downtime with her friends.

This collection is one of many at the Institute on World War II and the Human Experience that offers perspective on Army nurses and African Americans during the war. Portions of the Bertram Collection are now available online through DigiNole: FSU’s Digital Repository and you can see more information about the collection in its finding aid.

Post was written by two guest authors:

Lee Morrison has been involved with the Institute on World War II and the Human Experience since Summer 2018. After graduation, he will pursue a Master’s Degree in Medieval History at Florida State University.

Gillian Morton has been involved with the Institute on World War II and the Human Experience since Spring 2016. After graduation, she will pursue a Master’s Degree in Information Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

Nothing beats a good set of diaries for getting a flavour of how people lived in the past. In 2017 the Archives received the diaries of Henry Mole, a Vancouver settler in what is now Kerrisdale, who regularly chronicled his days from 1872 to 1914. There are 35 volumes, each averaging about 50 pages.

A selection of the Henry Mole diaries. Photo by Chak Yung

Mole, who lived from 1839 to 1923, was a successful farmer as well as, from 1894 to 1903, a councillor for the Municipality of South Vancouver. South Vancouver was established in 1892 and comprised all of current-day Vancouver south of 16^th Avenue (up until 1908 when the Corporation of Point Grey was created south of 16^th and west of Cambie). It amalgamated with the City of Vancouver in 1929.

Portrait of Henry Mole, ca. 1910. Reference code: AM980-S3—: CVA 804-910

In 1855, the then-16-year-old Mole left his home county of Huntingdonshire, England and settled on Ontario’s Niagara peninsula. After a few years, he decided to head for the gold fields out west. Arriving in Victoria in 1882 and then, shortly after, in New Westminster, he found the gold was almost gone. Instead of returning home, he decided to settle in Vancouver. He and a partner, E.J. Betts, pre-empted a piece of land and established a farm in North Arm, now the Kerrisdale area, and in doing so became one of the area’s first settlers.

Detail from Henderson’s BC Directory, 1889.

Mole’s farmland and house were located between Blenheim Street and SW Marine Drive:

Detail from Goad’s Fire Insurance Atlas, 1912. Reference code: AM1594-MAP 342a-: MAP 342a.38

According to a later description by Mole’s grandson, Henry F. Mole, the area in the 1860s was:

. . . nothing but sloughs and ridges . . . .There were no roads – only trails. The only way to travel was to walk – or go by boat up the Fraser River to New Westminster or around Point Grey to the False Creek area and Burrard Inlet. Buildings, fences, implements, bridges and flood gates were all made from lumber cut on farm.[1]

This difficult life was reflected in Mole’s dairies. Each entry started with the weather (he was a farmer, after all), and then proceeded to the day’s business. Entries for each day are quite brief, but nevertheless informative, and the diaries are easy to read thanks to Mole’s quite beautiful and legible hand writing. Here is his first entry from his first diary, from 1872:

Caption: First page of 1872 diary showing Mole’s excellent hand writing. Reference code: AM1676-F01

The entries clearly document how busy the life of a pioneer farmer was. Mole worked seven days a week and his daily routine included farm work, building and repairing dykes, rearing cattle and transporting beef, hay, butter and milk to different places in Vancouver and New Westminster by canoe. He began his work as early as 5 o’clock in the morning and was back home as late as 9 o’clock in the evening or, in some cases, 1 o’clock in the morning.

Excerpt from 1872 diary. Reference code: AM1676-F01

After years of hard work, Mole’s farm began to flourish. Sales increased and farm products were sold further afield to the Vancouver Island area. In 1878, for example, a large order of 14,218 lbs. of hay and 3,985 lbs. of oats was sent to a client named Taylor in Nanaimo. Six cattle were also sold in 1878.

Excerpt from 1878 diary. Reference code: AM1676-F05

Excerpt from 1878 diary. Reference code: AM1676-F05

Although Mole wrote mainly about farm business in his diaries, he did mention some important personal events. On November 7, 1881 he noted his marriage to Elizabeth Ann Cornish:

Excerpt from 1881 diary. Reference code: AM1676-F08

The family grew in 1882 with the birth of twins:

Excerpt from 1882 diary. Reference code: AM1676-F09

Mole was also involved in municipal affairs, and noted his election as a “Councilman” by acclamation in 1894:

Excerpt from 1894 diary. Reference code: AM1676-F21

Mole keeps writing right up to 1914, ever focused on the weather:

February entries from 1914 diary. Reference code: AM1676-F35. Photo by Chak Yung.

A frosty, dull day on February 16th. Close up from 1914 diary above. Reference code: AM1676-F35. Photo by Chak Yung.

Henry Mole’s diaries are an important addition to the Archives’ holdings. Not many daily records of life in Vancouver from the perspective of an early settler exist, and Mole is remarkable in his dedication to the daily task of writing for over more than four decades.

Mole family, ca.1889. From left to right: Polly Paull (Mole’s stepdaughter), Henry Mole, Jane Paull (Mole’s stepdaughter), Elizabeth Ann (Mole’s wife), John Mole (Mole’s son) and Annie Mole (Mole’s daughter) in front. Reference code: AM980-S3—: CVA 804-912

We invite you to come to the Archives and have a look through these diaries and re-live life in late 19^th century south Vancouver.

[1] Peter S.N. Claydon and Valerie A. Melanson, ed., Vancouver Voters, 1886, (Richmond, BC: British Columbia Genealogical Society, 1994), 462.

The Stirling Fund exists to support Stirling’s student community by awarding small grants for activities that contribute to University life. The University Archives recent received two grants from the fund to open up access to our unique collections.

The Brig Digital Archive project will digitise the full set of the first twenty-five years of Brig, the university’s student newspaper, creating a digital archive which will be made freely available on the University Archives website. The paper has been a constant presence in student’s lives, providing an alternative student-centred view of life on campus, since its first issue in October 1969 and we are delighted to be embarking on this exciting project in the papers 50^th anniversary year.

The Freedom Road project will support an African history conference which will feature the UK premiere of a new documentary on Malawian history produced by the Lost History Foundation. The documentary focuses on the Mwanza War of 1967 and draws heavily on our Peter Mackay Archive, which provides a rich resource for students of modern African history. The support of the Stirling Fund will allow us to bring members of the Lost History Foundation team to the university to speak about their work challenging and reassessing the modern history of Malawi.

We’re looking forward to working on these projects over the summer months and will provide regular updates on our progress via our blog and social media using #StirlingFund.

While combing through the vast amount of science related items we hold in Special Collections & Archives, I came across quite the peculiar book. I decided to scour the stacks for it as astronomy has always interested me and I was hoping for some interesting images. I knew from my initial search in the catalog that this item held images; a total of 25 plates, in fact, however what exactly those were was a mystery.

James Ferguson’s
Atlas of plates illustrative of Ferguson’s principles of astronomy is a book that holds multiple illustrations of astronomy related technology from the 1800’s. Ferguson was a Scottish astronomer best
known as the individual who improved and invented many astronomical and other scientific instruments, many of which can be found imaged in this atlas. Surprisingly, the totality of Ferguson’s formal education was met at a single grammar school at Keith in his younger years. His works within the field of astronomy and other sciences can thus only be attributed to his own self discipline, and an ambition to study the sciences.

The cover of the atlas was made of a cloth fabric that was designed to look like leather, a cheaper alternative for the time, and only has a few pieces left attached to the bare surface show in the image to the left. It is a delicate artifact that needs support when opened however the pages themselves are mostly intact.

I couldn’t help think the images I found in this atlas were the epitome of aesthetic pleasantries. The amount of suns with faces was something I enjoyed most along with the inclusion of zodiac related constellations. Although this is a nice book to look at, there aren’t very many descriptions to go along with them, save for those found on the Orrery illustration on the first page and that found on the map of the world found in the very back of the atlas (see slideshow below for map). As someone who isn’t versed in this subject, I found it difficult to understand not only what these devices were but what they were used for. Despite this, the appreciation for the work itself is still present as it is clearly a magnificent collection of one man’s journey of discovery and invention.

Although his inventions are used for scientific inquiry, they were an item that caught the eye of a totally different set of individuals. I find it funny when researching Ferguson that many of his creations lean more toward the genre of clock-making than scientific discovery, despite the fact that they go hand-in-hand in this particular case. Many of his books detail designs for astronomical clocks that give time of day as well as day of the month, phases of the moon, and the position of the stars. Sometimes, his clocks would even include the state of the tide. If I had a clock like that, I’d want to show it to everyone and, clearly, this sentiment was not lost on clock-makers as they used his designs to build some of the greatest functioning timepieces of the time.

Fascinatingly enough, I’d never heard of James Ferguson until now. When most people think of the sciences, astronomy in particular, names like Nicolaus Copernicus, Isaac Newton, or Johannes Kepler come to mind and rightly so. These scientists created many works and made many discoveries that have led up to where we are today. Ferguson is not lacking in these works either. He produced a number of books during his life, including The use of a new orrery… (1746), Astronomy explained upon Sir Isaac Newton’s principles… (1756), The young gentleman and lady’s astronomy (1768), and The art of drawing in perspective… (1775). 

Regardless of how well-known Ferguson is today, he was widely influential in his own time and has been mentioned by personalities such as Founding Father Thomas Paine and German experimental physicist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, who is most known for his discovery and study of the Lichtenberg figure which is named after him. Ferguson died in London on November 17, 1776, leaving works like this extraordinarily illustrated atlas as a legacy.

You can explore this item further at the Special Collections Research Center at Strozier Library.

Sources:

https://blogs.adelaide.edu.au/special-collections/2016/11/28/astronomy-explained-upon-sir-isaac-newtons-principles-james-ferguson-1757/

All image are taken by and credited to the author of the blog.

In celebration of the College’s bicentennial in 1821, we’re reprocessing several large collections in the archives. One of these is the Dramatic Activities Collection – material assembled by Tuffy McGoun, a professor of dramatics at the College. The collection documents the history of dramatic productions and activities on campus. It’s a long history – our first production ephemera dates from 1826!

In addition to giving a great overview of the dramatic life of the college, the collection is an excellent resource for showing trends in design over the decades. Nowhere is this more evident than in comparing several different productions of the same play. I’ve chosen two popular plays to show examples of how different productions handled costumes, set design, and publicity in different decades.

Our first play – The Rivals, a comedy of manners by Richard Brinsley Sheridan, was first performed in 1775. The plot follows the romantic intrigue between several visitors of the town of Bath, England, a popular holiday spot at the time. The play is somewhat forgotten today – though it did give us the term malaprop, derived from the character of Mrs. Malaprop (who unintentionally substitutes the wrong term for similar-sounding words throughout).

The first Amherst College production took place June of 1843. It was performed three other times: March 1896, February 1906, and May 1963.

Program from the June 1843 production of scenes from The Rivals. Part of the Amherst College Summer Exhibition

Program from the March 1896 production of The Rivals.

Playbill for the 1896 production, performed at the Academy of Music at Northampton. Touts “college men. Costly scenery. Elaborate costumes.”

Cast photograph of the 1896 “Rivals.” Annotations on the back state that this was the first College production to go on tour.

The 1906 “Rivals” program, by the Amherst College Dramatics Association.

Program from a Ware, Massachusetts performance. The penciled annotation says: “The night the curtain came down on Deroin’s head.” Frank Deroin (AC 1908) played the character of Bob Acres.

The 1963 production program. Kirby Memorial Theater was built in 1938.

A production photograph from 1963 depicting the characters Julia and Faulkland.

The second play I chose comes from Shakespeare – the Scottish play! Macbeth was performed at Amherst College in January 1910, November 1941, November 1965, and November 1995. The documentation for the 1941 production is particularly rich, showing the effort that went into the set design and costumes.

A program for the 1910 performance. Note: this wasn’t quite a dramatic production, rather a “reading by members of the Junior Class in public speaking.”

Costumes and set in 1941.

Behind the scenes in 1941.

A set design sketch for the 1941 production.

Program for the 1965 production. This aesthetic look persisted into the 1970s.

Program for the 1995 production.

These images represent only a small slice of the collection which stands at about 72 linear feet of material. As part of the Bicentennial project in the library, we’ll be digitizing a lot of this material in the coming years.

All of us in Special Collections have been deeply charmed by the chatty whales and blackfish in this surprisingly entertaining whaling logbook from our Nicholson Whaling Collection.

The logbook is the Journal of the Smyrna (Bark) out of New Bedford, MA, mastered by George Bliss and kept by George Bliss, on a whaling voyage between 1853 and 1857. 

You can view the full logbook online. “What’s that about a digitized logbook,” you ask? 751 of our logbooks were recently digitized and are available now on the Internet Archive; soon they’ll be added to PPL’s digital collections, along with even more digitized logbooks!

As always, contact us if you’d like to set up an appointment to see any logbooks in person.

Special Collections here at FSU holds a large collection of books on botany and herbal medicine that go as far back as the 16th century. As much as I would love to scour through the many many herbal encyclopedia we hold, I found myself more interested in the different types of flowers and plants collected and depicted through either art or scientific study that can be found in the archives.

Here is Special Collections, we have the five volumes of a collection that holds some of the most beautiful prints of flowers created in the early 1900s. This collection, titled North American Wild Flowers, includes some 400 plates illustrated by American artist and naturalist Mary Vaux Walcott and was first published in 1925 by the Smithsonian Institute.

What’s most interesting about this collection is not the images themselves, but the sweet story of how they came to be. Walcott first took interest in watercolor painting after graduating from Friends Select School, a Quaker college preparatory school. She painted wildflowers she came upon during family trips with her brother who would study and record glacier flow in drawings and photographs as part of his mineralogical studies.

This was only the start for Mary Walcott. She would go on to marry Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution Charles Doolittle Walcott at the age of 54. As she traveled with her husband for his paleontology research in the Rockies and throughout Canada, Mary made watercolor illustrations of wildflowers which can now be seen in the five-volume collection held in Special Collections & Archives.

During a 10 year period, Mary would spend somewhere between three and four months in the Canadian Rockies, finding and studying the finest specimens. More often then not, these illustrations were created under “trying conditions” such as on a mountain side of high pass, and at times when a fire was necessary to warm her numb fingers and body. Despite these conditions and others, such as diffused lighting and subjects which had a lifespan seemingly too short for creating art from them, the fruits of Walcott’s labor can be seen in these immortalized specimens.

Each box volume in this collection consists of a slipcase which holds a book listing each flower, describing them in detail, and a plate of each flower beautifully detailed by Walcott’s hand.

The North American Wild Flowers Collection, can be referenced here in the library catalog. For more information please call or visit Special Collections & Archives.

All photo credits go to the author.

This morning I presented the final tranche of newly-declassified U.S. Government records to Argentine Minister of Justice and Human Rights, the Honorable Germán Carlos Garavano. The ceremony marks the successful completion of the U.S. Declassification Project for Argentina, the largest government-to-government declassification release in United States history.

David S. Ferriero (left), delivers the final installment of records to Argentina’s Minister of Justice and Human Rights, the Honorable Germán Carlos Garavano (right). Photo courtesy of Intelligence.gov.

This represents the final stage of an historic effort by the U.S. Government to search, identify, review for public access, and provide records that shed light on human rights abuses in Argentina between 1975 and 1984. More than 43,000 pages of U.S. documents from 16 Executive Branch agencies were provided to the Government of Argentina.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has posted the collection as a whole, which can be found here: intel.gov/argentina

Records released by the National Archives’ National Declassification Center are available to the public here:  https://www.archives.gov/argentina/humanrights

My remarks from the ceremony:

Good morning Attorney General Garavano, Ambassador de Roa, and Director Quinteros.

I am honored to host you today.  I’d also like to thank John Dinkelman, John Demurs,  Corin Stone, Karen Meyers, and Carlos Osorio for attending today’s ceremony.

My first duty is to welcome you to the National Archives – “my house” – as I like to say.  The National Archives serves a crucial role as our Nation’s record-keeper. Our mission is to collect, protect, and preserve the permanently valuable records of all three branches of the United States Government.  We take this responsibility seriously. Public access to government records strengthens democracy by allowing citizens to hold their government accountable, understand their history, and participate more effectively in their government.

When President Franklin Roosevelt, who signed the legislation creating the National Archives, articulated his vision and our mission during the dedication of his Presidential Library in Hyde Park, New York, he said:

“It seems to me that the dedication of a library is in itself an act of faith.  To bring together the records of the past and house them in buildings where they will be preserved for the use of men and women in the future, a Nation must believe in three things.  It must believe in the past. It must believe in the future. And it must, above all, believe in the capacity of its own people so to learn from the past that they can gain in judgment in creating their own future.”  Creating their own future—our mission.

Today, the collection has over 15 billion sheets of paper, 44 million photographs, miles and miles of video and film, and more than 5 billion electronic records—the fastest growing record form. These records start with the Oaths of Allegiance signed by George Washington and his troops at Valley Forge and go all the way up to the Tweets that are being created in the White House as I speak.

Millions of visitors and researchers visit us each year to learn about our Nation’s history.  The National Archives operates 44 facilities in 17 states, including 14 Presidential Libraries and Museums, two research facilities here in the Washington DC area, and 14 Regional Archives across the country.

I am honored to host this important event on behalf of the President, the United States Government, the 16 agencies that participated in this project, and the American people.  To set the stage and emphasize its importance, I used my prerogative as Archivist to showcase two treasures from our vault.

Outside of this room, there are two treaties on display. In 1822, the United States was the third nation to recognize Argentina’s Declaration of Independence from Spain.  While our two nations enjoyed good relations and started trading, it was not until July 10, 1853, that our two nations first formalized bilateral relations with a treaty to allow free navigation on the Parana and Uruguay Rivers. This treaty––focused solely on navigation rights––quickly led to agreement of a broader treaty.

This second treaty, the Treaty of Friendship, Navigation, and Commerce, was signed shortly thereafter on July 27, 1853, and expanded our relationship to include agreements to facilitate increased trade.

Please have a look at them after the ceremony.

I also invite all of you to visit “The Public Vaults” in our museum. The Treaty of Friendship, Navigation, and Commerce that the Argentine Confederation gave to the United States is now on display. This ornate version includes a skippet with the seal of the Argentine Confederation.

The U.S. Declassification Project for Argentina is both historic and significant. There have been other declassification projects in the past. But this one stands out for several reasons. First, the project spanned two Presidential administrations. President Barack Obama directed agencies to conduct this project after receiving a request from Argentine President Mauricio Macri. And after President Macri renewed his request early in this Administration, President Donald Trump directed that it continue.

The project is unparalleled for its scope and breadth. Sixteen Executive branch agencies participated, including Intelligence, Defense, and law enforcement agencies. Over 380 employees from these agencies spent almost 32,000 hours searching for and reviewing records on a word-for-word basis.  The results of those reviews are impressive and reflect the President’s interest. Over 43,000 pages were––or are about to be publicly released. The declassification rate on these pages is 97% and aligns with the President’s instruction to release as much information as possible.

Finally, the process for organizing and completing this project is unique. I attribute its success to the inclusion of all stakeholders. They include the Executive branch agencies working with officials from the Argentine Embassy in Washington DC, the United States Embassy in Buenos Aires, and the Argentine Government. There was also dialogue and communication with Argentine civil society organizations, including two videoconferences; historians working closely from within and outside Government; and cooperation with Carlos Osorio from the National Security Archive.

I thank the National Archives staff who participated in this project: staff from the National Declassification Center, the Center for Legislative Archives, the Presidential Materials Division, the Office of Innovation, the Information Security Oversight Office and archivists from the Ford, Carter, Reagan, and George H.W. Bush Presidential Libraries.

Our staff played a key role throughout this project. In August 2016, just two months after receiving the Presidential directive, the archivists in the Presidential Libraries quickly compiled and reviewed over 1,000 pages of Presidential documents. Secretary of State John Kerry delivered these documents to President Macri later that month on an official trip to Buenos Aires. In December 2016, as the Government of Argentina honored the life of former Assistant Secretary of Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs Patt Derian, U.S. Ambassador to Argentina Noah Mamet delivered an additional 550 pages.

These pages remain significant as they include information from 25 President’s Daily Briefs from the Carter administration. “PDBs” as they are called, are among our nation’s most sensitive intelligence documents and are compiled expressly for the President.

Few others in Government get to read them.

The Carter Administration PDBs were not scheduled for review until the next decade.  These declassified PDBs allow for important context and aid historians in understanding President Carter’s actions and policies regarding human rights violations in Argentina.

In April 2017, President Trump provided over 3,000 pages of newly declassified documents to President Macri.  They included documents from the Carter Library identified by Department of State historians for inclusion in the South America volume of the Foreign Relations of the United States series, the official documentary and historical record of major United States foreign policy decisions and activities.

For this last tranche of records, the staff at National Declassification Center searched over 740 cubic feet of records and identified over 4,600 pages for inclusion. They included records created by the Air Force, Army, the Departments of Justice, Labor, and State, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Joint Staff, the US Information Agency, and US Agency for International Development.

The National Declassification Center staff was supported by declassification professionals from several agencies. I’d like to thank the staff from the Air Force, the Army, the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the FBI, the Joint Staff, the Washington Headquarters Services at the Department of Defense, the Navy, the U.S. Southern Command, and the Departments of Justice and State for their work.  This collaboration illustrates how the National Declassification Center brings together people and processes within the Executive branch declassification community to advance declassification and public access to historical records.

There are distinguished retired Diplomats here today – like Tex Harris and Fred Rondon  who helped save lives while working at the Department of State.

Mario del Carril is here representing his wife, Isabel Mignone.  Her sister was arrested and disappeared in 1976. Her mother Angelica was one of the founders of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and her father, Emilio, championed human rights and accountability, including testifying in trials.  Azul Hidalgo Sola is also here. Her grandfather, Ambassador Hector Hildalgo Sola was kidnapped and disappeared in July 1977.

The records of Tex Harris and Fred Rondon are here at the National Archives.  The records about Monica Mignone and the work of her parents for justice are here just as records relating to the disappearance of Azul’s grandfather are here. They help tell the story of this period in Argentine history – and in our history.

On your way into this building this morning you passed by two statues. One statue included the words, “Study the Past.”  Using archival records, this project was designed to:

• •         Help families and victims find closure, peace and justice
  •         Ensure accountability and aid judicial processes
  •         Aid Argentine citizens understand its history

The other statue included the words “The Past is Prologue.”  The declassification of these records greatly aids the national history so we can learn from it.

The lessons from these records––and from survivors and those who seek truth and justice for the people of Argentina – are meaningful and offer hope for the future.

Thank you.

The National Archives marks the 156th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation with a special 3-day display of the original document.

The National Archives will display the Emancipation Proclamation in the museum’s East Rotunda Gallery from April 14 through 16, coinciding with the anniversary of Lincoln’s death on April 15. Concurrently, the District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act of 1862 will be featured in the West Rotunda Gallery from April 12 through 16 in celebration of DC Emancipation Day on April 16.

On January 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared “that all persons held as slaves” within the rebellious states “are, and henceforward shall be free.”

Emancipation Proclamation, 1/1/1863. View the full document in the National Archives Catalog

As a milestone in the long journey toward abolishing slavery, the Emancipation Proclamation has assumed a place among the great documents of human freedom. The story of the Emancipation Proclamation is one that would help to redefine freedom and eventually change the course of history. Both the Proclamation and the DC legislation represent a promise of hope, freedom, and justice that continues to inspire and resonate with the American people more than 150 years after its creation.

Both documents allowed for the freedom of slaves. President Abraham Lincoln signed the District of Columbia legislation on April 16, 1862, almost nine months before signing the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863.

For conservation reasons, the original Emancipation Proclamation document of January 1, 1863, is displayed only a few days at a time under extremely low light to protect it from damage. This year, visitors can view the documents between 10 a.m. and 5:30 p.m. in the National Archives East and West Rotunda Galleries in Washington, DC. Admission is free and open to the public.

Additionally, the Emancipation Proclamation and the DC Compensated Emancipation Act will be on special display together between 6 p.m. and 6:45 p.m. on Tuesday, April 16, 2019, in conjunction with a related public program that evening.  

The National Archives will host the program, “DC Emancipation Day and the Emancipation Proclamation,” on Tuesday, April 16, 2019, at 7 p.m. in the William G. McGowan Theater at the Washington, DC, museum. A panel will discuss the history and political implications of both documents. Reservations are recommended but not required. Special performances by the Artists Group Chorale of Washington will take place during the display and at the start of the program.

This document display is made possible in part by the National Archives Foundation, through the generous support of The Boeing Company.

You can learn more about the significance of the Emancipation Proclamation, its history, and the measures the National Archives has taken to preserve it in our video .

For a more detailed history, including transcripts, of the document, see the Emancipation Proclamation page on Archives.gov. Visit our Catalog to view and download high-resolution images of the Emancipation Proclamation and the District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act of 1862.