Moss Hart charms in this 1959 meeting of the Book and Author Luncheon. Hart is here to plug his new memoir, Act One. With his wife, the actress Kitty Carlisle, as well as the publisher Bennett Cerf and his wife Phyllis on the dais, he describes how a playwright and director came to write prose. His play The Climate of Eden had flopped. Licking his wounds, unable to write, he complained to fellow dramatist S.N. Behrman, who suggested he start keeping a diary. He did, more as an exercise in discipline that with any thoughts toward publication, which he then claimed to burn, because it was “very indiscreet.” (In fact, he kept it, ordering it to be kept sealed until after both his and his wife’s death.) Perhaps in counterpoint to these acid, unpublishable musings, he at the same time began to write the story of his life from his earliest artistic yearnings to his first great show business success. Hart describes the writing as therapy rather than art. He read it every night to his wife, who urged him to continue.

Kitty Carlisle in Die Fledermaus, November 1, 1933
(Carl Van Vechten,/Library of Congress)

When he had reached “the end” of those memoirs, that is to say the beginning of his life as the wildly successful man of the theater known to the public, he stopped, much to the consternation of Cerf, who felt readers would feel cheated if after journeying with him through the poverty and disappointment of his early years they did not get to hear about his subsequent fame and fortune. But Hart stuck to his guns, although he tantalizes the audience with possible material for “Act Two,” telling two theater stories, one about Gertrude Lawrence in his play Lady in the Dark and one about the nineteen-year-old Julie Andrews in My Fair Lady. Both these anecdotes, though mildly amusing, illustrate Hart’s reason for stopping Act One where he did. They are merely vignettes, not part of the achingly moving story of a child’s fairy-tale-like quest to enter the magical world of Broadway.

Moss Hart (1904-1961) grew up poor in the outer boroughs of New York City. His love of theater was early and immediate. He spent years as an entertainer in Catskills resorts, putting on skits and entertaining vacationing guests while also writing plays, none of which were produced. As the website for the American Society of Authors and Writers explains:

He wanted to write big, sprawling plays the way his idol, Eugene O’Neill, did.  But all the major producers kept turning him down, telling him that they wanted comedies.  Eventually, Hart decided to give them what they wanted and wrote the play, Once in a Lifetime.  He enlisted legendary playwright George S. Kaufman to help fine-tune the script, which the two of them worked on for months.  They showed rough versions of the play to audiences and noted what made people laugh and what didn’t.  When it was finally fully released in 1930, it was a huge success, and Moss Hart found himself rich and famous almost overnight.  He was only 25.

Hart went on to write several more hits with Kaufman as well as many successes on his own. He also became a sought-after director, bringing both My Fair Lady and Camelot to Broadway. Act One, however, had an influence far beyond that of your typical theatrical memoir. Its evocation of longing, both for material success and for the magical life of a created world, struck a chord with people all over the country, even those who had never seen a play. It was on the best-seller list for almost a year. Its power is still felt today. Frank Rich, writing in New York Magazine, notes:

…the book’s devoted fan base isn’t limited to theater nerds. Terry Gilliam has told of how Hart inspired him to bolt the Midwest for New York, where he sought out a cartoonist hero, Mad magazine co-founder Harvey Kurtzman, and started on the path to Monty Python. Graydon Carter is an Act One fanatic who discovered the book while in high school in Ottawa… Another, if unexpected, Hart devotee is the novelist Ann Patchett. After she started a second career as an independent bookseller in Nashville two years ago, she said that “Act One is one of the best things about owning a bookstore” because, as she put it, “I can sell Act One to people all day long.”

Paradoxically, Hart the dramatist is now a largely forgotten figure. His theater work seems very much of its time, reflecting popular tastes rather than challenging viewers to think or feel in new ways. Yet as seen from the rapturous reception he is given at this luncheon, he seemed the very epitome of the American Success Story. Brad Leithauser, considering this in the New York Times, asks:

What was Hart hungering for? More than anything else, perhaps, for applause — that miraculous equalizer and simplifier. In this he was united with creators and performers everywhere, great and small. However sublime and rarefied the performance enacted on stage … it ultimately resolves itself into that simple, timeless web of upraised hands, applauding. Moss Hart, who died of a heart attack at the age of 57, chased after that image and that sound his whole life. If he didn’t push his audiences very hard, he stroked them affectionately. And they responded, gratefully.

Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.

WNYC archives id: 150250Municipal archives id: LT8956

WNYC Program Director Nathan M. Rudich in the 1940s courtesy of Glynn Rudich.

Seventy-two years ago today WNYC program director Nathan M. Rudich arrived at the studio at 6:15 a.m. just before the AM station signed on. News and Special Events Director Lily Supove had been at her desk since 4:30 a.m. It would be another in a series of nerve-wracking days anticipating confirmation that the war was really over. We know this because Rudich had typed a  two-page single-spaced letter to station director Morris S. Novik about the events leading up to V-J Day.

Director Novik had gone overseas at the invitation of General Eisenhower, and approval from the White House, as part of a delegation of fifteen American broadcast executives. The trip was aimed at acquainting them with broadcast operations in the European theater as well as military radio in wartime. Before he left, he had told Rudich that peace just might break out on his watch and to “do what we did on V-E Day.”

Rudich’s letter, written on August 21st, confirms that they did. It also provides a rare behind-the-scenes accounting of the charged atmosphere in the city from Saturday, August 11 through Tuesday, August 14, the day World War II ended. A copy of the letter was generously made available to WNYC by Rudich’s daughter Glynn.

Note: The audio above is from Mayor La Guardia’s regular Sunday, Talk to the People on August 12, 1945 courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives. “Mike” in the letter below is WNYC newsman Mike Jablons.

Saturday into Sunday/August 11 and 12

Excerpt of August 21, 1945 letter from Nat Rudich to Morris Novik.
(Courtesy of Glynn Rudich.)

Monday/August 13

WNYC had three public address sound trucks on alert and ready to be dispatched, but nothing was happening. People all over the city were tense. They were beginning to think rumors that the war was over were a hoax. Rudich described the waiting as “most exasperating.”

Tuesday/August 14

Tokyo radio announced at 1:50 a.m. the Japanese had accepted the surrender terms and Rudich got a call from Lily Supove. Still, there was no confirmation from Washington. It was more hurry-up and wait with WNYC’s engineers following Mayor La Guardia from Gracie Mansion to City Hall in the event news broke so he could make a statement.

Excerpt of August 21, 1945 letter from Nat Rudich to Morris Novik.
(Courtesy of Glynn Rudich.)

Mayor La Guardia at 9:45 A.M. August 14, 1945.

Through it all, WNYC kept telling listeners to “go to work” and “stay on the job” and that there still was no confirmation. At 1:00 p.m. there were no doubt groans in the newsroom. Swiss diplomats had still not received any definite word. Everyone remained on standby and at the edge of their seats for another five hours.

Excerpt of August 21, 1945 letter from Nat Rudich to Morris Novik.
(Courtesy of Glynn Rudich)

Mayor La Guardia at 7:35 PM August 14, 1945. You can hear the celebratory horns and whistles in the background.

Excerpt of August 21, 1945 letter from Nat Rudich to Morris Novik.
(Courtesy of Glynn Rudich)

This letter is a sobering reminder of the pre-digital age when history making events were not instantaneously flashed across the screens of billions of smart phones, televisions, tablets and computers. Vacuum tubes, like incandescent light bulbs, were the common carriers while transistors and microchips remained in the domain of science fiction. Still, you could say this coverage was 24/7 news in its infancy; clunky and filled with all the noise and static that came with a mechanical analog world.  

As for the letter writer Nathan M. Rudich, he directed radio and live shows for the Civilian Defense Organization and the United Nations during the war. In fact, some of these radio dramas were broadcast on WNYC and others aired at WOR and WINS. He also taught in the Dramatic Workshop at the New School (later known as the Actors Studio). In 1944 he came to WNYC as the station’s drama director, rising to Program Director by the end of 1945. It was Rudich who would offer a young Canadian-born folksinger named Oscar Brand the chance to do a radio show.

After WNYC, he was a partner with Mike Jablons and Jack Gaines in a public relations firm. During the 1950s he was a program director at WLIB, then owned by the brothers Harry and Morris Novik. Rudich moved on to be a television producer and director at WOR. Subsequently, he worked as publicity manager at United Artists before spending 16 years as executive assistant to Otto Preminger*, the movie director and producer, earning Associate Producer credit on several Preminger films. When Nathan M. Rudich died in 1975 at the age of 56, he was the national director of marketing services for the 20th Century‐Fox Corporation.

Original transcription disc sleeve from the 9:45 a.m. August 14, 1945 broadcast by Mayor La Guardia
(Courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives)

In this photo provided by the U.S. Navy, a sailor and a nurse kiss passionately in Manhattan’s Times Square, as New York City celebrates the end of World War II, on August 14, 1945.
(AP Photo/U.S. Navy/Victor Jorgensen)

Audio courtesy of the New York City Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.

Three apples from “Apples of New York,” by Spencer Ambrose Beach.

The Northeast Organic Farming Association summer conference takes place this weekend at Hampshire College.  One of the first seminars was “The Full Skinny on Healthy Orcharding” with Michael Phillips from Lost Nation Farm in New Hampshire.  Yours truly was there, learning about fungal duff management and other good things .

As it happens, the seminar was held right down the street from the site of Professor Edward Tuckerman’s little home orchard, which he called Applestead.  Tuckerman and his wife, Eliza, built Applestead over the period of a few years in the 1850s, beginning not long after they moved to Amherst from Boston.  The house was of stone – built to last, Eliza said in a letter to her sister Mattie.   Eliza’s letter also suggested that the house was designed by Edward Clarke Cabot, a well-known architect and, again according to Eliza, an old friend of Edward’s.

It was a beautiful house, and Edward put a lot of effort into designing the grounds, for in addition to his many interests, including botany, religion, history, and genealogy, he was also a zealous gardener.  After he scoured the seed catalogs and planned the garden beds for beans and potatoes and peas, he envisioned many fruit trees.  The modest plan for his orchard — “Preserve carefully” he wrote on the front — is now in the Cushing-Tuckerman-Esty Papers at Amherst College.  There, among the pears and cherries, an observant orchardist will see that he has planned for several fine apple varieties, namely Rhode Island Greening, Baldwin, Northern Spy, Red Astrachan, Sops of Wine, Porter, and Gravenstein, shown in a detail here:

Most of these apples are still available to plant today – I have a few (okay, most) of these myself.  Part of the lure of heirloom apples is the names, and for some budding apple growers it’s hard to resist buying an example of every curiously-named apple.  It’s nice — probably very wise — to have a selection in your orchard of modern, disease-resistant apples such as Liberty, Enterprise, or Freedom (what bloody boring names, though), but it’s far more addictive to track down heirloom varieties such as (to list a very few) Razor Russet, Cornish Gilliflower, Hubbardston Nonesuch, or Westfield-Seek-No-Further.  How can you resist?  The Tuckermans didn’t resist.  They planted their orchard.

Detail from a larger photo, showing the Tuckerman orchard in early spring.

The Tuckerman’s mature orchard in 1921, when Applestead was a fraternity. Note the train running past the house — the track was added only a few decades after the Tuckermans built Applestead.

Detail from map of Amherst, 1873, by F. Beers. “G.F. Tuckerman” should read “E. Tuckerman.”

The property and the orchard only lasted about 70 years.  In the 1920s Amherst College administrators decided that the athletic facilities should be improved, and that the Tuckerman property would be the site of the “Amherst College Base Ball Cage.”  The map at left shows the three properties along “Broadway” (now South Pleasant Street) that would be torn down in order to erect the Cage.  In a few pages devoted to this project in Stanley King’s “Consecrated Eminence,” the destruction of Applestead received only one sentence: “The stone house, known as the Tuckerman house, then standing at the site, was taken down.”  The orchard is long gone, but somewhere — even as pieces or pebbles or dust — that indestructible stone is brooding over the razing of Applestead.

Detail from a photograph in the Buildings and Grounds Collection showing the Cage and its grounds. The Tuckermans’ property would have been to the right of the train tracks.

It has been a long time coming to get to this point but I’m happy to announce that we have finally cataloged and completed the upload of the FSU newspaper, Florida Flambeau from 1915 to 1996. This was a massive undertaking for the Digital Library Center and we didn’t even do the scanning! Digitization of these materials was done from microfilm five years ago. The DLC staff did image clean-up and quality control and then students took over creating metadata for every single issue (easily over 10,000 issues for the 80 year period!). Kudos to all the staff and students who have worked on this project.

The Flambeau provides a fascinating look at not only the college community and its culture over these years but what was happening in and around the great Tallahassee area. Being in the capital city of the state, the Flambeau reports on state and national politics often as well as providing insight into how the college was interacting with the rest of the world. It reports on the funny moments (easily one of our most popular issue reports on streakers in 1974) to how the campus handled tragedies (an article on the Challenger tragedy in 1984 notes how hard hit teachers at FSU felt).

The added bonus of having these online? They are now fully text-searchable. Have a relative who attended, taught or worked at FSU? See if you can find their name! To best way to search all the text is to click on the Advanced Search link at the top right of the page and then make sure Search all (metadata + full text) is selected.

We’ll be looking into adding the issues starting in 1997 soon but how now, happy searching!

It is 1955, and though she is seventy-four years old, Helen Keller, celebrity, author, and activist for the disabled, is about to embark on another journey, this one a staggering 40,000-mile tour of India, Pakistan, Burma, the Philippines and Japan. A banquet is held in her honor at which telegrams from President Eisenhower and other notables are read, speeches by the ambassadors to the countries she intends to visit are heard, and, finally, former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt addresses the world’s most famous advocate for the disabled.  Yet, Mrs. Roosevelt argues, we are the ones not in full possession of our senses. “Most of us go through life just a little blind and a little deaf, not…being fully able to hear and understand those with whom we live.” Helen Keller, however, “…somehow understands the needs of the people.” She speaks about touring a hospital built in Finland during World War II conceived of and largely built by “cripples” (the word not having yet taken on its pejorative connotations) and thinking of Keller’s similar determination to succeed despite all odds. There is perhaps an awkward moment, to contemporary listener, when Mrs. Roosevelt advises Keller, should she tire, to take a day off and go sightseeing. She particularly urges her to visit the Taj Mahal. In her concluding remarks, she assures Keller that on this much-publicized trip to Asia, “You love people and in return, they will love you.”

Keller then responds. Much of the value of this recording lies in hearing how she actually sounded. In crooning, barely decipherable phrases, translated by her aide Polly Thomson, she thanks the previous speakers and shares her dream of “helping to eliminate blindness and deafness from the earth. My heart will sing with joy. That is Heaven itself.” It is inexpressibly moving to hear how difficult it was for this woman, who addressed multitudes and was known by millions, to form even the simplest sentence. One begins to understand on an almost visceral level what obstacles she had to overcome. One is also lost in admiration at what she was able to achieve.

Helen Keller (1880-1968) lost the ability to see and hear at nineteen months. Her initial descent into becoming an isolated, uncontrollable “wild child” and subsequent rescue by her first teacher, Annie Sullivan, is known to many through William Gibson’s “The Miracle Worker.” But the truth, as Keller related it “The Story of My Life” (quoted here in her New York Times obituary) is every bit as thrilling as the dramatized version:

We walked down the path to the well-house, attracted by the fragrance of the honeysuckle with which it was covered. Someone was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten–a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that ‘w-a-t-e-r’ meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free. There were barriers still, it is true, but barriers that in time could be swept away.

Keller proved to be an exceptional student, attending Radcliffe College and becoming the first blind, deaf person to be awarded a BA degree. By then, her accomplishments had turned her into a well-known figure. She lectured and wrote and crusaded on behalf of the disabled, as well as for many other causes. One interesting aspect of her early public life was a strident embrace of socialism. As the International Socialist Review notes:

The roughly twenty-year period spanning the 1910s and 1920s indisputably represents Keller at her most prolific and radical. Taken as a whole, her various writings and speeches during this time also range over a tremendously large area of subject matter: Capitalism and class struggle, exploitation and revolution, war and imperialism, women’s oppression, racism, and of course, disability. Increasingly, these various issues became integrated into a single condemnation of the established social order. As the socialist and labor movements swelled and advanced during the 1910s, and especially as the cataclysmic nature of capitalism was laid bare with the advent of World War I, Keller—like millions of others across the United States and the world—rapidly and successively abandoned one set of seemingly outworn ideas after another.

“What are you committed to,” an interviewer asked her in 1916, “education or revolution?”

“Revolution,” Keller replied.

In later life, Keller became more closely associated with the generalized, muted, Swedenborgian Christianity we hear her espousing at this banquet. The almost saintly status she attained perhaps obscured more fascinating elements of her rise from near total sensory deprivation to the extraordinarily articulate “vision” of her autobiographical writings. Roger Shattuck, writing in the Harvard Magazine, points out that:

…literary critics such as Van Wyck Brooks, Walter Percy, and Cynthia Ozick, and cognitive scientists such as William James, Oliver Sacks, and Gerald Edelman have found in The Story of My Life and The World I Live In two of the most revealing inside narratives of the formation of what we call human consciousness. The books also offer an exciting case history of an unprecedented feat of individual education against crippling odds and make clear why Alexander Graham Bell, Mark Twain, and Andrew Carnegie regarded Keller and Sullivan as two of the most remarkable women of their time.

Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.

WNYC archives id: 150716Municipal archives id: LT6897

Instead of featuring a dashing magician, this week we’re featuring a delightful celebratory page from a catalog of magic supplies.

The 1898 Martinka & Co. catalog from which this page is taken is part of our John H. Percival Magic Collection. (The “German” mentioned in the descriptive text references an 18th or 19th century social dance accompanied by plays and games.)

Also, I’m pretty sure a confetti flute is just any flute stuffed full of confetti. Readers are encouraged to try stuffing fancy-looking flutes with confetti and report back with their results.

It’s that time of year again: PPL is accepting proposals for our 2018 Creative Fellowship.

This year, we’re looking for an artist working in the field of performance (theater, dance, performance art, puppetry, acrobatics, etc) to make new, research-based work related to the theme of our 2018 exhibition: hair!

Details on the Creative Fellowship, requirements, and application guidelines can be found here.

Have you ever wondered what the average salary of an FSU professor was in 1961? ($8,940). Have you ever been curious to know how many full-time students were enrolled in 1995? (23,950).

This information and much more is available in the FSU Fact Books now available on DigiNole. There’s a wealth of data in these documents from budgetary breakdowns and property valuations to organizational charts and enrollment statistics.

There’s something for everyone in these documents. History buffs can track the administration and governance of the university. Data enthusiasts have huge sets of information they can use track educational and budgetary trends. Many issues also demonstrate the important role alumni play in the success of the university.

All fact books from 1960 to the present are available to explore.

A selection of hand-colored children’s books from the nineteenth century are available for viewing on DigiNole as part of the John MacKay Shaw Childhood in Poetry Collection. This project began as a partnership between the Rare Books Librarian and the Digital Archivist as a way to share some of the collection’s unique pieces. Because the illustrations are hand colored using watercolors, no two editions of a book will be exactly alike.

Some of the newly digitized books include:

The Wonderful History of the Busy Bees  (QL565.2.W87 1833)

Describing the life of a beehive, this 1833 chapbook is a mixture of science lesson, allegory, and children’s story. The industrious bees serving their queen must defend the colony against the vicious wasp attacks — but there’s a surprise twist at the end.

A Was an Archer Who Shot at a Frog  (GR486.A24 1860 *)

This primer, like many others in this project, would have been used to introduce children to the alphabet using common words and pictures. Unlike our modern examples — A is for apple, B is for bear, and Z is for zebra — A Was an Archer uses such gems as, “K was a king, and governed a mouse,” and “V was a vintner, a very great sot.” A particularly interesting feature of the book is its interactivity; a moveable piece accompanies each illustration, connected to a paper tab on the back of the page. Readers could manipulate the pictures with these tabs to make a character wave or doff his hat. Sadly, most of the moveable pieces have been glued down by a previous owner.

Cinderella, of the little glass slipper  (PN3437.C56 1800z)

A classic fairy tale about the benefits of a virtuous life, this book avoids the grisly endings faced by other heroes (like Little Red Riding Hood, Tom Thumb, the Children in the Wood, or — spoiler alert — the bees from the top of this list). Though the coloring is simple, the poetic rhyme and magical elements would have encouraged children to act with kindness, obedience, and modesty. This chapbook is one of eight hand colored Albany edition stories in the Shaw Collection.

The Smiling Book  (PL864.H42S6 1950)

This book was published in 1950 but made its way into this digitization project due to its exquisitely detailed hand coloring. The Smiling Book is printed on crepe paper, giving it a unique texture and flexibility not seen in many other books. While the book does not follow a particular narrative storyline, the illustrations explore nature, weather, and humanity.

A total of 68 books have been added to the digital collection.

Although she has only studied “cultures addicted to betel nut,” America’s most famous anthropologist shows no hesitation in voicing her opinions at this 1970 symposium on the Social Implication of Drug Abuse. She first describes a country in disarray. Crime is on the rise. Taxi drivers are being “slaughtered.” Respectable people go shoplifting for sport. The entire community is becoming corrupt much as it did during Prohibition. The reason? Drugs, which are seen as “wicked,” and drug users, who are regarded as “sinners.” She calls for addicts not to be stigmatized but seen as “casualties of a badly organized society” and for treatment programs run by young ex-addicts as the Generation Gap has yawned so wide that counseling by elders is useless. Interestingly, she also calls for better pay for the police and complains that they are treated with “contempt.” Her speech seems less a political plea than a prophet’s dire warning as she paints a picture of a morally corrupt culture in which “people are being lied to.”

Mead’s talk is followed by a more nuts-and-bolts presentation by Alfred Crisci, from the New York State Attorney General’s office. Crisci takes issue with much of Mead’s position, claiming that the state does, in fact, treat addiction as a disease. He details the legal process for attempting to detoxify and rehabilitate heroin addicts, pointedly adding that “society is not sleeping.” During a contentious question and answer session, the two sides seem to be speaking at cross-purposes, each not hearing the other. Crisci refuses to discuss the criminal aspect of the war on drugs, stating somewhat disingenuously that “it is not a crime in this state to be an addict,” only to be caught possessing drugs. Mead and other audience members attempt to place the problem in a larger context.

These talks provide an excellent snapshot of the cultural divide in the late Sixties and early Seventies. The two sides seem to speak completely different languages. Both are well-intentioned, yet neither can find common ground with the other. The problem they describe is real…and extends even to the dueling approaches used in addressing it. Indeed the ostensible subject of this symposium, “drug abuse” seems only the tip of the iceberg.

Margaret Mead (1901-1978) put cultural anthropology on the map. Her groundbreaking study Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) described young Samoan girls’ passage from adolescence to adulthood as being far less stressful and damaging than in our supposedly more advanced culture. Her implicit endorsement of non-monogamous sexual relations and her focus on women as being the source of true power within the culture resonated with early movements for women’s rights in this country. Mead was not a cloistered academic but a tireless field researcher, popularizer, and (some critics complained) self-promoter. The New York Times in its obituary noted:

The American Museum of Natural History, with which she was associated for most of her professional life, once drew up a list of subjects in which she was “a specialist.” The list read: “Education and culture; relationship between character structure and social forms; personality and culture; cultural aspects of problems of nutrition; mental health; family life; ecology; ekistics; transnational relations; national character; cultural change, and cultural building.” The museum might well have added “et cetera,” for Dr. Mead was not only an anthropologist and ethnologist of the first rank but also something of a national oracle on other subjects ranging from atomic politics to feminism. She took on (and dismissed with disdain) Dr. Edward Teller, the hydrogen bomb advocate, and she was once described as “a general among the foot soldiers of modern feminism.” Insofar as anyone can be a polymath, Dr. Mead was widely regarded as one.

As can be heard in this talk, Mead became as famous a social critic as she was an anthropologist, bringing that discipline’s methods of analysis to bear on contemporary Western problems. This idea, that so-called “primitive cultures” have something to teach us, was controversial. The website of the Institute for Intercultural Studies recalls: 

She affirmed the possibility of learning from other groups, above all by applying the knowledge she brought back from the field to issues of modern life. Thus, she insisted that human diversity is a resource, not a handicap, that all human beings have the capacity to learn from and teach each other.

After her death, much of Mead’s work with the Samoans was challenged. It was claimed her research was faulty and her conclusions invalid. This led to a sharp decline in her posthumous reputation. However, recently this charge has since been refuted. Alice Dreger, writing in The Atlantic, reports:

Paul Shankman, a professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado-Boulder, has for several years been doggedly investigating the smearing of Margaret Mead by the anthropologist Derek Freeman. As Shankman writes in his latest piece, “Freeman’s flawed caricature of Mead and her Samoan fieldwork has become conventional wisdom in many circles and, as a result, her reputation has been deeply if not irreparably damaged.”… But Shankman’s new analysis — following his excellent 2009 book, The Trashing of Margaret Mead: Anatomy of an Anthropological Controversy — shows that Freeman manipulated “data” in ways so egregious that it might be time for Freeman’s publishers to issue formal retractions.

Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.

WNYC archives id: 151029Municipal archives id: T7623 – T7627, T7630

While this blog serves as a running feature of highlights from Special Collections & Archives, our newest exhibit makes the materials we talk about online available for the public to see in person. Illuminations the exhibit features items from our manuscript and rare books collections, Heritage & University Archives, and the Claude Pepper Library. Come and see new acquisitions like the Joseph Tobias Papers, Pride Student Union Records, Marsha Gontarski Children’s Literature Collection, and more.

Illuminations: Highlights from Special Collections & Archives will be on display through the fall semester in Strozier Library’s first floor exhibit space Monday-Friday 10am to 6pm.

This week’s blog post comes from our Bicentennial Metadata Librarian, Amanda Pizzollo:

As avid readers of this blog will know, Amherst College was conceived out of the previously existing Amherst Academy. As Frederick Tuckerman points out in his book on the academy, the founders of Amherst Academy are also the founders of Amherst College. Yet the school’s connection to the foundation of Amherst College is not the only reason that Amherst Academy is worthy of attention. Nor are the school’s connections to Emily Dickinson and Mary Lyon the only highlights of its existence. Though I’m as big a fan as any of Amherst College, Emily Dickinson, and Mary Lyon, I have also thoroughly enjoyed learning more about Amherst Academy for entirely unrelated reasons.

I work at Amherst College as a metadata creator. You know all that information like title, dates, a brief description, and subjects that you see when you look at a digital item in ACDC? That’s supplied by folks like me who get to look at these things and describe them in hopes that it helps you find them. Right now, I’m working on metadata for the Amherst College Early History Collection that we mentioned previously on the blog. It includes items about the history of Amherst Academy as well, and last week I stumbled upon two particular treasures: notebooks of minutes from the Franklin and Platonic Societies of Amherst Academy.

The cover of the Platonic Society administrative notebook looks rather unassuming doesn’t it? Hey, don’t judge a book by its cover.

Both the Franklin Society and the Platonic Society were student literary societies, and they both may have been secret societies (though that’s not entirely clear). In March of 1836 these two societies would merge into one and be renamed as the Washington Society. The notebooks I’m describing include minutes, names of members, and other administrative records from 1833-1835 (in the case of the Franklin Society) and from 1834-1836 (in the case of the Platonic Society). Taking a look at the minutes, I’ve gotten a feel for what their weekly meetings were like. Of course there were variations, but mostly it went like this:

• Review what happened at the last meeting
• Vote on officers (if it was time for that)
• Debate on the question posed at the last meeting
• Decide on the consensus for the question debated (or have the Society President decide)
• Pose a question for the next meeting’s debate and assign members to lead the debate
• Address other society business like proposing new members

There have been lots of interesting things about looking through these notebooks, for instance the first entry in the Platonic Society’s notebook reads:

“And it came to pass in the fourth year of the rain of Alva, A whose sirname is Hurd, the rules of the notoriously courageous family of Plato, that the discrete and scientific disciples of Uncle Plato collected themselves together in the usual place at the sounding of the academical invariable and thunder resounding alarm….”

It goes on to describe the start of the meeting: “soon all arose, and instantly Each by the stealth and fierceness of a Lion, took and guarded the posts of their duty well.”

Later in the same entry, it discusses the meeting’s debate and the leaders of it, society members Stone and Thayer: “..eminently courageous children of the Brother Plato and both remarkably well skilled in fight—These fought well for a season till at length by the stealth and cunningness of a fox, the venerable Sapis which is Stone surrounded Thayer and by the force of Situation and art pulled down by his house and sitt fire to and burned up his riches.”

Alva A. Hurd, mentioned in the first line, was an Amherst Academy student and society member. Sapis, noted later, signs this entry E.J. Sapis as he was acting as secretary and scribe for this meeting.  It seems likely that Sapis and Stone (Elijah J. Stone) are the same person since he states “Sapis which is Stone” and since both are E.J. Why he used Sapis in his signature is unclear. Thayer was likely James S. Thayer based on the Amherst Academy catalogs, and of course he and Stone were the society members debating in this meeting. Now, the handwriting can be a bit tough to decipher at times, so I’m not sure of that last word in the “sitt fire to and burned up his riches” sentence. It could be riches, or it could be ricks perhaps, or something else entirely. Most meeting minutes don’t read like this, and it seems likely that Sapis/Stone was exercising his writing muscles and ability for tongue-in-cheek prose with this first notebook entry. It was certainly an enjoyable read for me.

I also enjoyed looking at the officer positions in these societies. There’s the standard President, Vice President, and Secretary roles, and there were also Critics, a Librarian, Prudential Committee members, and Questioning Committee members at many meetings. My favorite position title, though? Definitely the Bell Ringer.

The officer names and positions chosen at the October 15, 1835 Franklin Society meeting

What I’ve found most interesting with these notebooks, however, are the weekly questions debated. Many are a glimpse at history, and some are still debated today. Below is a sampling of questions debated in one or both of the societies. I’ve kept spelling, capitalization, and most punctuation (or lack thereof) the same, but I have added some question marks since these were often omitted in the notebooks. There’s plenty more questions than these in the notebooks, too.

“Ought the man who kills another in a duel to be subject to our criminal laws?”

“Is memory more dependent upon nature than upon habit and Education?”

“Ought ladies and gentlemen to obtain their education in separate academies and seminaries?”

“Which is the more powerful, Education or wealth?”

“Ought Emigration to be encouraged?”

“Ought Foreign Emegration to be encouraged prohibited?”

“Which is the greater Evil, Intemperance or Slavery?”

“Is the manufacturing interest of our Country more important than agriculture?”

“Was De Witt Clinton possessed of greater talents than Alexander Hamilton?”

“Was the revolution of 1830 in France a benefit to that nation?”

“Ought any government to interfere in any religion?”

“Which has the greatest influence in this our country, fashion or Education?”

“Which has the most influence on society, wealth or talent?”

“Which has caused the greater loss of lives war or intemperance?”

“Is celibacy a violation of moral duty?”

“Which enjoys most happiness him who is called a poor man or him who is called rich?”

“Had the conduct of General Andrew Jackson during his administration been commendable?”

“Ought the liberty of the press to be restricted?”

“Which has the greatest claim to our benevolence the Indian or the Slave?”

“Ought capital punishment to be inflicted on convicts?”

“Is phrenology on the whole beneficial to science?”

“Ought the Colonization Society to be supported in preference to the Anti Slavery Society?”

“Should appointments be given in Colleges as rewards of Scholarship?”

“Ought Menageries to receive publick patronage?”

“Ought any person after arriving at the age of discretion to be prohibited from attending any religious meeting they choose?”

“Is deception justifiable in any case?”

“Which ought most to be encouraged, Commerce or Manufacture?”

“Have military heroes been beneficial to the world?”

“Were our forefathers justifiable in their treatment to the Indians?”

“Who was worthy of the more Honor, Columbus or Washington?”

“Which is the most beneficial to community Man or Woman?”

“Ought imprisonment for debt to be abolished from the United States?”

“Which is the most unhappy the Slave or the Drunkard?”

“Which has been the cause of the most Good the Magnet Needle or the Printing Press?”

“Is the influence of females in the affairs of the world greater than that of males?”

“From present appearances is it probable the Roman Catholics will gain the ascendency in this country?”

“Is married life more conducive to happiness than single life?”

“Are rail-roads beneficial to the country?”

“Which is more injurious to the public novel reading or gambling?”

“Ought the poor to be supported by tax on the community?”

“Ought Quakers to be compelled to do military duty?”

“Does fashion exert a greater influence in society than education?”

“Which is the most beneficial to the country Academies or common Schools?”

If you want to read more questions, see how members voted on them, delve more deeply into the life of the Amherst Academy student society Bell Ringer, or hear more of the thrilling prose of secretaries like Sapis/Stone, then never-fear, friends. You can see these notebooks now in Archives & Special Collections as part of the Early College History Collection, and not too long from now you’ll also be able to browse these pages on ACDC.

Click to view slideshow.

Listening to WQXR co-founder John V. L. Hogan (1890-1960) in the above radio address, made only a few months after W2XR became WQXR,* one is struck by just how important feedback (pun intended) was to him. Radio was still an evolving media and the listener’s point of view was critical to its forward movement. In the address, Hogan emphasizes that WQXR was different and not content or “self-satisfied” with status-quo –either technically or programmatically. He urges listeners to write in about a variety of issues: the station’s placement of “more restful” classical music over jazz at the bedtime hour; when and how they should announce or not announce the title and author of works; whether their efforts at developing advertising that’s “a service and not a nuisance” are succeeding; and the running of a series of audio level and mixing tests over the air.

Historically, the somewhat understated Hogan tends to be overshadowed by his more outspoken business partner Elliott Sanger. Together in 1936 they created the Interstate Broadcasting Company, the parent of WQXR, radio’s first commercial classical music station. Sanger, a former advertising executive, wrote the well-publicized 1971 history of the station, Rebel in Radio: The Story of WQXR, and was usually the spokesperson for the station. Hogan was the author of a 1923 electronics classic, The Outline of Radio, and the technical genius behind radio’s leading “high-fidelity” broadcaster.  

Nevertheless, even when WQXR was still in its infancy, Hogan had been long recognized in the trades as an innovator and pioneer in broadcasting. Radio Daily published the following profile and tribute to him on June 6, 1937.

Radio Daily, June 6, 1937
(Courtesy of MediaHistoryproject.org)

In 1956, the Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE) awarded its Medal of Honor to John V. L. Hogan. He was cited “for his contributions to the electronics field as a founder and builder of the organization.” The citation also noted his inventions and “continued activity in the development of devices and systems useful in the communications art.” Hogan was the father of single dial radio tuning and made other significant contributions to the field through WQXR. He also pioneered facsimile transmission via radio, and advanced developments in television, radar, and military communication systems. He died in Forest Hills, Queens on December 29, 1960.

________________________________________

*Note: Hogan made the above broadcast over WQXR on March 1, 1937. W2XR became WQXR on December 3, 1936.

In January 1971, radio reporter Eleanor Fischer interviewed Paul Robeson Jr. for a radio documentary she was producing about his father, Paul Robeson. The CBC documentary covered Robeson’s life extensively and included interviews with friends and colleagues that knew Robeson best, along with his only son. The interviews presented here are Fischer’s raw, unedited sessions.

Paul Robeson Jr. and his father in 1963.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)

The first segment above is Paul Robeson Jr. speaking about his father’s statement at the Paris Peace Conference in 1949 which was as follows:

“It is unthinkable that American Negroes could go to war on behalf of those who have oppressed them for generations against the Soviet Union, who in one generation, has raised our people to full human dignity.”

It was this statement that eventually led to Robeson’s complete blacklisting and lockout by the American establishment. Paul Jr. also talks about how the white press handled coverage of the Paris conference compared to the black press.

In the next audio segment, Paul Robeson Jr. comments on the Peekskill Riot that happened in New York during a concert in which Paul Robeson Sr. was scheduled to perform. The concert was an annual event held to raise money for a southern educational group and sponsored by the Civil Rights Congress. Robeson had played the concert the previous four years. His son discusses the riots, and how his father’s life was in danger along with those attending the concert. He says it was a surprise that nothing happened to his father.

Police help a concert goer to his feet at the Peekskill Riot in 1949.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)

Paul Jr. emphasizes it is important to note that the riot was highly political, and, in fact, a police riot. There were 2,000 policemen ordered to attend the concert to keep order. The sheriff’s deputies lined up and beat the concert goers as they were getting off the buses and heading to the concert. Paul Jr. says the police not only did not protect the concert goers, but they explicitly beat the patrons also. He argues current references to the riot do not refer to its nature; as anti-communist, anti-black, anti-Jewish, tied to his father’s statement at the Paris Peace Conference.

In the final audio portion, Paul Jr. discusses his father’s singing and performances. He talks specifically about Robeson’s most famous song, Old Man River, and how Robeson eventually changed the lyrics to the song to make it an anthem of resistance and defiance. Paul Jr. also discusses his father’s controversial use of a microphone in venues like Carnegie Hall, and how this was perceived by critics and fans. He says the reason Robeson Sr. used a microphone was that his voice was not like that of an opera singer’s, but similar to a popular or folk singer.

Special thanks to Elizabeth Starkey.

WNYC Archives id: 61658, 61461

The summer of 1964 marked a critical moment in the American civil rights movement. Eleanor Fischer traveled to the southern state of Mississippi to produce a documentary on the Freedom Summer. She had the opportunity to interview the civil rights workers from Northern cities such as Chicago and New York and the black civil rights and voting activist leaders from Mississippi, while also speaking with white, local political leaders and segregationists. Fischer sets the scene at the beginning of the program:

“I first visited Mississippi in February, 1964. I had come down as a lawyer to give legal advice to and defend a group of white ministers engaged in voter registration work among Negroes in the city of Hattiesburg.  I remember being introduced to the county prosecutor and the cold hard stare with which I was greeted. And I also remember the first words spoken to me by this white citizen of Mississippi. ‘Miss Fischer, this is war.’ War had indeed come to Mississippi but its full impact was not felt until several months later when the Mississippi Summer project got under way. Sponsored by the Conference of Federated Organizations, 600 young people from outside of Mississippi descended upon the magnolia state much to the outrage of an already beleaguered white community. They came as a peaceful army because of the way things are in Mississippi for the Negro, because they wanted to help.”

Throughout the documentary, Fischer challenges the white citizens of rural Mississippi about their views on the segregation of schools and the voter registration roadblocks and obstacles for black Mississippians. Many of the citizens she interviews do not think that blacks want to vote or have the intellectual capacity to make an informed decision. These raw interviews with segregationists, Northern activists, rural black citizens of Mississippi, and black civil rights leaders portray the strain and passive hostility that existed during the Summer of Freedom.  

Students attending an indoctrination course before heading down to Mississippi to help during the Freedom Summer of 1964.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)

In this recording of Fischer’s raw interviews, she speaks with a number of citizens from Mississippi. The audio starts with a recording of a teacher in one of the Freedom Schools set up to help bring a better education to the young black children and black adults in rural areas of Mississippi. Fischer then speaks with Jack Tannehill, editor of the Neshoba Democrat, the weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, MS. Mr. Tannehill talks about the blacks in Mississippi registering to vote. His opinion is that blacks do not want to become involved in politics. An unknown gentleman from Greenwood, MS agrees with Mr. Tannehill. He also speaks about black voters in Mississippi, claiming that they are never turned away. He says that getting to and from the courthouse is not difficult, and it is accessible to everyone who wants to register. He finishes by stating that most of the black citizens in his county are not educated or equipped to be voting at all.

The audio continues on with interviews of black citizens of Mississippi including Hartman Turnbow and Fannie Lou Hamer. Turnbow discusses the process of registering to vote and how difficult it was for blacks in his county. He mentions the activists who helped them study for the examination and led them to the courthouse. Turnbow was one of the first African-Americans to register to vote in the state of Mississippi along with a group known as the “First 14.” Fannie Lou Hamer speaks about getting arrested and the violence that occurred while traveling from a voter registration and citizenship workshop.

Fannie Lou Hamer speaks at a Freedom Democratic Party rally in 1965.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)

The last few interviews feature young civil rights activists that traveled to Mississippi to help the black communities and register people to vote. The activists talk about the measures taken to get people to register including bringing groups of blacks to register with the only security precautions being a fast car. Fischer travels with a young activist who goes door to door to speak with black citizens about voting for the Freedom Democratic Party. The audio ends with Fannie Lou Hamer speaking candidly and emotionally about the state of racial tensions and violence in America.

Special thanks to Elizabeth Starkey. 

WNYC archives id: 61631, 61491, 61490

The former vice president under Truman, now recently elected “junior” senator from Kentucky (he was seventy-seven), Barkley is ostensibly here to plug his memoir, That Reminds Me. However, his speech is mostly a mixture of (even then, one senses) antiquated campaign jokes and a paean to public service. Barkley was a professional politician and proud of it. Having served in various legislative bodies almost all his adult life, he professes contempt for “those citizens who wrap their spotless garment around them and withdraw from any public activity.” He makes a plea for Senate and House members to receive a greater salary, so they can maintain two establishments (one in Washington DC and one at home.) Illustrating his points with anecdotes about Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, John Calhoun, and John Randolph (Barkley speaks so familiarly of these historical figures one almost believes he knew them personally), he makes a timely case for mutual respect and the spirit of compromise in governance. Legislators, he urges, should “reflect not the whimsical will of the people but their profound judgment and profound convictions.”

This endorsement of collegiality and bipartisanship can be seen two ways: as a glimpse of a bygone era of more gentlemanly deal-making or as a hint that today’s problems of ideological gridlock were just as pressing then as now. Perhaps of more interest, though, is Barkley’s delivery. He indulges in a leisurely, orotund style and often rises to a kind of mellifluous bellow taking one back to the fairgrounds and outdoor meetings of the early 20’th century, when a “stump speech” was indeed delivered on a stump. 

Alben Barkley was born in 1877. He represented his native Kentucky in the House of Representatives in 1912 and in the Senate from 1926. Barkley became majority leader in 1937, succeeding “Scrappy Joe” Robinson, a combative and dictatorial ruler.  As the Dictionary of American Biography recounts, Barkley’s style was different.

Alben Barkley extends his hands
(Harris and Ewing/Wikimedia Commons)

 Barkley’s performance as majority leader drew mixed evaluations. Robinson had been one of the strongest leaders in the history of the Senate, and Barkley succeeded him just as the conservative coalition was beginning its twenty-five year dominance of the Congress. He not only faced difficulty with the Republicans but also suffered frequent obstruction from powerful members of his own party. He appears to have seen his job as one of conciliation between the conservatives on Capitol Hill and the militant New Dealers who formulated the White House legislative program. Barkley’s own policy positions were predominantly liberal, even to the extent of supporting civil rights legislation, but he usually counseled acceptance of whatever compromises could be put through the legislative process. Frequently criticized as weak and ineffective, he was nonetheless capable of ordering the Senate sergeant at arms to “arrest” absent members in November 1942, in an effort to compel their attendance to break a filibuster.

Although backing most of FDR’s New Deal legislation, Barkley’s relations with the White House could be tense, most notably during Roosevelt’s veto of the 1944 Revenue Bill. Later that year, he vied unsuccessfully for the vice-presidential nomination. His relationship with the eventual nominee, Truman, was civil but cool. He is perhaps best-remembered as having inadvertently coined the campaign slogan, “Give ’em hell, Harry!” Despite being elected vice president in Truman’s upset victory of 1948, his heart remained in Senate. As the website senate.gov relates: 

Barkley was the last of the old-time vice presidents, the last to preside regularly over the Senate, the last not to have an office in or near the White House, the last to identify more with the legislative than the executive branch. He was an old warhorse, the veteran of many political battles, the perpetual keynote speaker of his party who could rouse delegates from their lethargy to shout and cheer for the party’s leaders and platform. … He was partisan to the marrow, but with a sense of humor and a gift of storytelling that defused partisan and personal animosities. 

Barkley’s death seems entirely in keeping with the devotion to public service he speaks of here. In 1956, after regaining his place in the Senate, he declined an offer to switch seats with a more senior senator so as to be able to sit in the front row of the chamber. Giving a speech at Washington and Lee University, he alludes to Psalms 84:10, proclaiming:

 “I am glad to sit on the back row, for I would rather be a servant in the House of the Lord than to sit in the seats of the mighty.”

Then, as can be heard on youtube.com, there is a crash. The announcer explains that the senator has collapsed. A call is made for a doctor. Barkley had died, on the podium, addressing the crowd. 

Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.

WNYC archives id: 150152Municipal archives id: LT2987

We found some naughty imps of yore in an unlikely place: an 1892 book on the industrial arts.

This folio contains a true bonanza of illustrations, covering all manner of modern inventions. Each page is arranged to show developments in the design of the invention, beginning with the primitive, and ending with the cutting-edge.

(Have you been wondering about the vanguard of egg carriers? This book can satisfy your curiosity!)

The entry on school furniture shows some truly marvelous folding desk contraptions, as well as simpler wooden desks populated by….

…misbehaving schoolchildren! We have a scowling miss undergoing some unfortunate piliferous bullying, the infamous Sleeping Guy with his head on his slate, and a lively scene of bench-style seating gone awry. Here’s a close-up of the latter situation:

“Hey, Johnny? Hey Johnny!”

“Not now, Caleb, I’m doing my sums.”

“Johnny! Hey. Yer forehead is weird. Can I look at your sums?”

“No, Caleb. Stop being a hornswoggler. Just because this primitive wooden school furniture lacks a flat surface for you to work on doesn’t mean you can pester me.”

“Hey, Johnny. Why don’t you have ears. Did ya see the dunce kid? Did ya see his walkie talkie?”

“SHHH. Caleb. Geez.”

Today at 8 a.m., the National Archives released a group of documents (the first of several expected releases), along with 17 audio files, previously withheld in accordance with the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992. The materials released today are available online only.  Access to the original paper records will occur at a future date.

Download the files online: https://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/2017-release

Highlights of this release include 17 audio files of interviews of Yuri Nosenko, a KGB officer who defected to the United States in January 1964. Nosenko claimed to have been the officer in charge of the KGB file on Lee Harvey Oswald during Oswald’s time in the Soviet Union. The interviews were conducted in January, February, and July of 1964.

Inauguration of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, January 20, 1961
Record Group 111, Records of the Office of the Chief Signal Officer (111-SC-578830)

This set of 3,810 documents is the first to be processed for release, and includes FBI and CIA records—441 documents previously withheld in full and 3,369 documents previously released with portions redacted. In some cases, only the previously redacted pages of documents will be released. The previously released portions of the file can be requested and viewed in person at the National Archives at College Park (these records are not online).

The re-review of these documents was undertaken in accordance with the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, which states: “Each assassination record shall be publicly disclosed in full, and available in the Collection no later than the date that is 25 years after the date of enactment of this Act, unless the President certifies, as required by this Act, that continued postponement is made necessary” by specific identifiable harm.

The act mandated that all assassination-related material be housed in a single collection in the National Archives and defined five categories of information that could be withheld from release. The act also established the Assassination Records Review Board to weigh agency decisions to postpone the release of records.

The National Archives established the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection in November 1992, and it consists of approximately five million pages of records. The vast majority of the collection (88 percent) has been open in full and released to the public since the late 1990s. The records at issue are documents previously identified as assassination records but withheld in part or in full. Federal agencies have been re-reviewing their previously withheld records for release, and will appeal to the President if they determine that records require further postponement.

For more information, please see the following online resources:

• JFK Assassination Records Processing Project—background and FAQs
• Final Report of the Assassination Records Review Board
• JFK Assassination Records FAQs
• Warren Commission Report

Over the River

We have written about Amherst’s missionaries who traveled the world, but some missionary work was done much closer to home. For just over forty years, Amherst students worked with Holyoke’s Rev. Dr. Edwin B. Robinson (class of 1896) at Grace Church. Holyoke was a busy manufacturing city; Grace Church was a working-class congregation located in the Flats, where tens of thousands of immigrant families worked in the paper and textile factories and lived in crowded tenements (often company-owned).

Parsons Paper Mill, in Holyoke (1909), with coal smoke billowing from its chimneys.
Image from the Library of Congress [1]

Starting in 1910, when Arthur Boynton (class of 1910) asked Rev. Robinson about running a summer program at the church, a partnership developed. A handful of students would spend six weeks each summer running a ‘Vacation School’ for local children, teaching classes, doing recreational activities, and holding services. A number of well-connected Amherst students took part early on, including Professor Olds’ (later, president of the College, 1924-1927) two sons, Leland and George D. (Jr.), for the summers of 1911 and 1912. About sixty students would take part over the 42 years the program ran; it ended in 1952, the year after Rev. Dr. Robinson’s death.

Several years ago, my granddad volunteered to sort through the archives at his church (United Congregational Church) in Holyoke. While doing the work, he found mentions of an Amherst College summer program in the city with Grace United Church (in 1995, it merged with the Second Congregational Church to form the present United Congregational Church). At the time, it was just an interesting tidbit of local history.

Unexpected Connections

Now that I’m part of the team here in the Archives, I’ve had the chance to do a bit of digging as I’ve learned my way around. While researching the program, I found this gem in George D. Olds, Jr.’s biographical file. The writing on the back of the picture only notes that Olds is in the shot, with no details about the origin of the image.

However, I immediately recognized that it was from the summer program, and that Olds (on the far right) is posing with the children from the Vacation School in front of the church, as a nearly identical photograph is in a 1933 article in the Amherst Graduates’ Quarterly. [2] One of the best things about working in libraries is the way little fragments connect unexpectedly.

George D. Olds Jr., and the Amherst College Vacation School in Holyoke, MA. Summer 1912. [3]

What did the students think about their work?

Some students, like George’s older brother, Leland Olds, were deeply affected by their work in Holyoke. Thirty-seven years later, Olds referred to his time in Holyoke during a difficult confirmation hearing. Up for his third term as chair of the Federal Power Commission, Olds stated, “During two summers while I was at college I helped to run the vacation school of Grace Church in the neighboring industrial city of Holyoke, Mass… There I learned at first hand the impact of the industrialism of that period on the lives of the children of wage earners.”
[4]
Olds continued on to describe how his time in Holyoke (and later in Boston and New York) informed his early work for labor unions and workers’ organizations.

Grace Church proved a real trial heat. We taught and preached, led square dances and sang songs; we shared the gloom of unopened mills and the joy of an extra day’s work; we visited, listened and learned.

–J. Herbert Brautigam (class of 1939) [5]

Fun in the sun…

Amherst students handled the lighter side of things: they were in charge of entertainments (one student would write a play, often about Amherst-related topics, like Doshisha University, or the College in Wartime, while another was responsible for a circus fair), and daily services.

Before the summer was over passers-by on Race or Cabot Streets became accustomed to hearing any one of a number of songs rendered with great enthusiasm, the most popular of all being “Lord Jeffrey Amherst”. Once a week the whole school went on an outing to Hampden Pond, where there was a ball game and swimming, to say nothing of a trolley ride both ways and a lunch in the picnic grounds.

–Amherst College Christian Association annual report (1916) [6]

What don’t we know?

What’s missing from the story in our collections are the voices and experiences of the children and families participating in the vacation school. The published work (short pieces in the Holyoke Transcript and the Amherst Graduates’ Quarterly) on the program is silent about the children attending, except in general statements about keeping the children occupied and out of trouble; children under seven attended kindergarten, girls older than seven learned sewing, and boys learned chair caning and carpentry. Some boys were also trained in printing.

Holyoke Vacation School Printing Room. This was started in 1915, when Julius Seelye Bixler (class of 1915) obtained the second-hand press. [6]

We do have a typed manuscript written by Charles G. McCormick (class of 1937), describing his summer at Grace Church. McCormick’s piece is more open about the daily struggles of life he witnesses among the families he visits with; there may be further recollections in other participants’ files here in the Archives.

Diving Deeper

Anyone interested in digging further into Holyoke workers’ lives will also find interesting material over at Holyoke’s history collections at Wistariahurst Museum and Holyoke Public Library.

Sources

[1] Haines Photo Co., Parsons Paper Co., Holyoke, Mass, 1 photographic print : gelatin silver (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, 1909), https://www.loc.gov/item/2007661042/

[2] Clark, William W., “Amherst in Holyoke,” Amherst Graduates’ Quarterly 23 (1933): 104–10.

[3] George D. Olds Jr., 1913,” George D. Olds Jr. Alumni Biographical File, Class of 1913, Amherst College Archives and Special Collections, Amherst, MA.

[4] U.S. Congress. Senate. Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce. Subcommittee on Nomination of Leland Olds., “Reappointment of Leland Olds to Federal Power Commission” (81st Cong., 1st sess., Sep 27-29, Oct 3, 1949), https://hdl.handle.net/2027umn.31951d03588500w

[5] Brautigam Jr., J. Herbert, “Church and College Work Together,” Pilgrim Highroad, 1939, General Files: Religion: Amherst-in-Holyoke, Amherst College Archives & Special Collections, Amherst, MA.

[6] Amherst College Alumni Council, Annual Report of the Committee on Religious Work, 1916 (Amherst, MA: Amherst College, 1916).

October 31, 2017 will mark the end of the Social Networks and Archival Context (SNAC) pilot phase; an endeavor funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Since receiving the grant in August 2015, SNAC has moved forward in its goal of establishing a sustainable, community-driven and -supported cooperative for sharing descriptive archival data; archival data housed in search system which forefront the identities and stories of millions of creators of archives, special libraries and museum holdings.

As the pilot end date approached, there was still work to be done, so the cooperative leadership officially requested an extension, and Mellon granted an additional three months. It’s also important to know that SNAC was invited to apply for a second pilot phase with funding from November 2017 through October 2019. The grant proposal for the next pilot phase is pending the award grant from the Mellon Foundation at this time. The cooperative leadership and membership are excited about the prospect of SNAC’s future development.

SNAC’s user interface mosaic tumbler

NARA’s official involvement in SNAC started in 2012 when Archives staff accepted an advisory role in SNAC as the project morphed from a research and development venture into an effort to launch a new cooperative of archives data sharing. Presently, two staff from NARA’s Office of Innovation, Jerry Simmons and Dina Herbert, represent the agency as External Agency Liaisons to the SNAC cooperative. They coordinate all of NARA’s efforts for SNAC work, including active participation in the planning and development of SNAC’s governance and administration along with the seventeen partner institutions. NARA, as the Federal lead institution, forms one third of the SNAC operations effort, working closely with representatives from the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities and the California Digital Library.

From the beginning of the pilot phase in August 2015, NARA’s representatives were actively involved in SNAC’s user interface system development through consultation and software testing. Currently, NARA’s SNAC Liaison team responds to requests to test newly developed system functions, ensuring all necessary user requirements are met. Additionally, we work closely with the leadership of the SNAC Communications and SNAC Editorial and Standards Policy working groups in order to coordinate efforts and share responsibility for communicating all aspects of SNAC activity to the cooperative partnership, and to be a responsive voice to policy issues surrounding descriptive standards and use policies implemented in SNAC.

Sample SNAC record with links to archival collection descriptions

In keeping with NARA’s dedication to social media, NARA’s SNAC Liaisons are engaged in a robust Twitter project to bring exposure to SNAC’s rich content of descriptive data. Regular tweets with anniversary-focused themes have been well received in the early months of the effort. And, in keeping with the cooperative spirit, NARA SNAC Liaisons are actively teaming with social media experts from partner institutions to promote SNAC and to demonstrate its power to connect records creators with shared relationships and common life stories. Among these efforts is a special project to demonstrate the relationships between polar explorers, their personal and professional connections, their affiliations with polar expeditions, and the locations of their personal papers and artifacts.

Admiral Robert E. Peary’s SNAC record demonstrating his relationship (with a link) with ship captain and polar navigator Bob Bartlett.

In its primary role, NARA has taken the lead in development and execution of SNAC’s formal training program called the SNACSchool. Both of NARA’s SNAC Liaisons are active members of the SNACSchool Working Group along with SNAC partners from other SNAC partner institutions including Barbara Aikens, Smithsonian’s Archive of American Art; Alan Mark, George Washington University Library; Melanie Yolles, New York Public Library; and Glen Wiley, University of Miami Library. The working group formed in late 2016 with the primary mission of developing a formal training program for SNAC. The current curriculum includes modules covering basic archival authority control, searching the SNAC database, and creating and editing data in SNAC.

Training module for creating and editing SNAC records

Next week, SNACSchool will make its debut at the Millar Library on the campus of Portland State University during the Society of American Archivists (SAA) annual meeting. SNACSchool instructors will host a group of new SNAC users for a live classroom event, and another group participating remotely from several locations across the country. SNACSchool’s future will involve in-person events at large conferences such as SAA, however, a great deal of energy is now dedicated to developing a training schedule via remote events, while developing a highly flexible, self-paced learning platform for the cooperative’s future.

On July 11, 2017, the House of Representatives Minority Leader, Nancy Pelosi announced the appointment of John F. Tierney to serve a three-year term as a member of the Public Interest Declassification Board.   The members of the PIDB look forward to working with Mr. Tierney as they continue their efforts to improve declassification and modernize the classification system. You may access a biography of Mr. Tierney here.

The Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO), established in 1978, is responsible to the President for overseeing the Government-wide security classification program, and receives policy and program guidance from the National Security Council. ISOO has been part of the National Archives since 1995.

Today, ISOO released online its Report to the President for Fiscal Year (FY) 2016. This annual report includes information on government agencies’ security classification activities and costs, and provides an update on the implementation of the Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) program. This annual report was mandated by Executive Order 13526, Classified National Security Information.

FY 2016 report highlights include:

Classification Activity:

• A 27 percent decrease in original classification activity, for a 2016 total of 39,240 decisions.
• A 5 percent increase in derivative classification action, up to 55,206,368 decisions.

Declassification Activity:

• Under automatic, systematic, and discretionary declassification review, agencies reviewed 102,172,703 pages and declassified 43,943,600 pages of historically valuable records. This was a 17 percent increase in the number of pages reviewed and 19 percent increase in the number of pages declassified.
• Agencies reviewed 248,413 pages under mandatory declassification review and declassified 117,453 pages in their entirety, declassified 92,678 pages in part, and retained classification of 38,282 pages in full.

Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) background and implementation:

ISOO published the CUI Federal regulation (32 CFR part 2002) in the Federal Register on September 14, 2016. This regulation promotes the protection of CUI, appropriate information sharing, and consistent safeguarding and dissemination practices.

ISOO helps agencies implement the CUI program by conducting formal appraisals of existing agency practices, consulting with executive branch agencies and supporting elements (i.e., component agencies and non-Federal entities) on strategies and practices related to implementation, and raising awareness of key CUI program elements, timelines, and requirements through briefings, training sessions, and panel discussions.

Industrial Security:

The National Industrial Security Program Policy Advisory Committee (NISPPAC) established an Insider Threat working group to facilitate information sharing within security agencies on insider threat programs. ISOO Director Mark Bradley chairs this Committee and appoints its members.

ISOO is updating the Directive on Safeguarding Classified National Security Information (32 CFR part 2004).

As ISOO begins their next reporting cycle, Director Mark Bradley states that, “ISOO will focus on improving our methodology in data collection and will begin planning and developing new measures for future reporting that more accurately reflect the activities of agencies managing classified and sensitive information.”

Read the full Annual report, including an archive of previous annual reports, on the ISOO website: https://www.archives.gov/isoo/reports

Only two parchment manuscripts of the Declaration of Independence dating back to the 18th century are known in the world. One is held by the National Archives and displayed to the public in the National Archives Rotunda in Washington, DC. The other was recently discovered in Chichester, England, by two Harvard University historians, who recently spoke about their discovery at the National Archives in the public program, “Discovering the Sussex Declaration”:

Danielle Allen, Director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University and colleague Emily Sneff, Research Manager for the Declaration Resources Project identified a second parchment manuscript of the Declaration of Independence in Chichester, England. Allen and Sneff came across the “Sussex Declaration,” as it has come to be known, in August 2015, while conducting online research of the digitized records collection of the United Kingdom National Archives for Harvard’s Declaration Resource Project. This previously unknown manuscript, dating from the 1780s, is written in the hand of a single clerk.

The Declaration Resource Project set out to build a database of all known editions of the Declaration of Independence as an informative and educational resource about the Declaration. The original Declaration of Independence, also known as “The Matlack Declaration” scribed by Timothy Matlack, is preserved and displayed at the National Archives Rotunda.

Mary Lynn Ritzenthaler and Catherine Nicholson, former conservators at the National Archives, were consulted by Allen and Sneff and provided advice for the authentication of the Sussex Declaration. When the National Archives Rotunda in Washington, DC was renovated in 2001, Ritzenthaler and Nicholson had the opportunity to remove the Charters of Freedom (the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights) from their earlier encasements to perform examinations and conservation treatments. Their hands are the last to have touched the Declaration of Independence.

The Sussex Declaration is currently housed where it was discovered at the West Sussex Record Office in Chichester, England. Officials there are working to ensure its proper preservation and care now that they know the valuable item within their possession.

Read more about Sneff and Allen’s discovery and the Declaration Resource Project: https://www.archives.gov/news/topics/sussex-declaration

In this 1943 edition of Great Americans, a program claiming to provide “authentic biographical sketches of outstanding Negroes in the American scene,” Captain Hugh Mulzac is profiled…although elevated to sainthood might be more the more appropriate phrase. Mulzac’s story is a fascinating one and definitely worth telling, but this ham-handed bit of propaganda sounds more like the output of Radio Moscow than any homegrown product. There are hokey dramatic scenes throughout, charting young Hugh’s progress from a cabin boy on British ships to his eventual attaining of American citizenship and qualifying for his Captain’s license. Many of these gloss over or flatly contradict the actual incidents of Mulzac’s (much more colorful) past. The tone is condescending. Actors often stumble or forget their lines. Yet the facts, even when shoehorned into what increasingly becomes clear is an overt political agenda, are compelling. Mulzac, an African-American, could not get a ship to command, the fear that a white crew would not obey a black man outweighing his obvious qualifications. This came to a head in World War II, when the need for commanding officers became acute. In the radio drama, Mulzac goes to the Maritime Union, where an organizer tells him, “This war’s against discrimination. White or black, we’re in it together!” The archive’s recording of this program then ends abruptly. In fact, the real story of Captain Hugh Mulzac is much more instructive…and not nearly so uplifting.

Mulzac was born in 1886 in the West Indies. He ran away from home at an early age and led an adventurous youth. Eventually, he became an accomplished seaman. As the Maritime Administration website explains:

By 1920, Mulzac passed the examination as a U.S. shipmaster, but there were no shipboard berths available to a black captain. Although he held a master’s license, which qualified him to be a ship’s captain, he worked for the next 20 years mostly in the steward’s department of various shipping lines. This was the only shipboard work he could find, and he became an expert in food service management. With the outbreak of World War II, Mulzac recognized an opportunity to use his license and command a vessel. At age 56, he was named master of the new Liberty ship Booker T. Washington , christened by legendary opera singer Marian Anderson. Mulzac insisted on having an integrated crew, not the all black crew that had been planned. The U.S. Maritime Commission relented, and the Booker T. Washington made 22 round-trip voyages with Mulzac at the helm.

This would seem to be the happy ending the program is heading towards when it breaks off. Alas, it was not to be. Hugh Mulzac was indeed America’s first African-American ship master. But the war effort’s yoking of patriotic fervor with civil rights proved short-lived. As blackpast.org reports:

When his last assignment on a Liberty ship ended in 1947, now 61-year-old Mulzac was still denied the opportunity to command privately owned commercial vessels. He retired from seafaring and turned to radical politics. In 1950, Mulzac ran on the American Labor Party (ALP) ticket for Queens Borough President.  He received only 15,000 votes in his losing bid.  With the U.S. in the midst of the Cold War, Mulzac in 1951 was blacklisted by shipping companies because of his affiliation with the controversial ALP which many considered a Communist organization.  The U.S. Government also revoked his seaman’s papers and license.  In 1960, a federal judge reinstated Mulzac’s seaman’s documents and license and soon afterward at the age of 75 Mulzac found work again as a seaman. 

Mulzac’s moment in history was brief but intense. His successful command of a mixed crew was a rare attempt to overcome differences of both race and rank in the highly stratified setting of life at sea. The Village Voice quotes one of the sailors who served under Mulzac:

“The Booker T. was the only ship I’ve ever been on which had a sense of purpose from the top down,” Rosenhouse told The Voice. He recalled the classes in seamanship, in art, and in international affairs, as well as the tongue-lashing he’d received when he chose to stand watch on a stormy night inside. “On the bridge we called Mulzac ‘captain,’ but when he came to union meetings we called him ‘brother.’ Beefs between the officers and the men could be settled on that ship,” Rosenhouse said.

Hugh Mulzac died in 1971.

Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.

WNYC archives id: 5971Municipal archives id: LT5750

In early June, I attended the annual Association of Canadian Archivists conference in Ottawa. The theme was Archives, disrupted – an exploration of “how archivists and archival institutions progress, respond, change and persevere in response to disruptive forces, which may arise from outside or can be self-imposed” (from the conference program, which can be found here). Here are some of the highlights.

Rideau Canal, Ottawa. Photo by Michel Rathwell (CC BY 2.0) via Flickr

LINKED DATA AND THE SEMANTIC WEB

In keeping with the conference theme, sessions addressed a variety of emerging and potentially disruptive issues in the archival field, and explored the challenges and opportunities that might arise.

In a session titled O Triple Store, What Art Thou?, Evelyn McLellan of Artefactual Systems, Kate Guay of the Northwest Territories Archives, Tim Hutchinson of the University of Saskatchewan Archives and Special Collections, and consultant Anne Ward presented on the potential impacts of linked open data on archival practice. Wikipedia defines linked data as a “method of publishing structured data so that it can be interlinked and become more useful through semantic queries” – that is, using existing Web technologies to publish data in a way that enables computers to read, query, and connect data from different sources. Publishing archival descriptions as linked data has the potential to facilitate discovery of related resources across institutions and provide richer contextual information about records’ creators, creation and use.

Data modeled as a graph. Slide courtesy of Artefactual Systems

The application of semantic technologies to archival work was discussed in more depth in a session titled Disrupted description? New directions in archival theory and practice. Kat Timms of Library and Archives Canada presented on the ongoing work of the International Council on Archives (ICA) Experts Group on Archival Description (EGAD, which has to be one of the best acronyms in the field), who have drafted the Records in Contexts conceptual model (RiC-CM) and are working on RiC-O, to be expressed as a W3C OWL (Ontology Web Language). RiC is intended to supplant the existing four ICA standards for describing archival records (ISAD-G), records creators (ISAAR (CPF)), functions (ISDF), and archival institutions (ISDIAH), providing a semantic web-ready way to capture and describe archival contexts in all their glorious complexity. Giovanni Michetti of Sapienza University of Rome addressed this complexity as it applies to the concept of provenance, while Chris Prom of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign discussed the challenges to traditional archival description posed by Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). Disruption is certainly in the air, and I look forward to seeing how the ideas and efforts described may translate into everyday archival practice in the near-ish future.

An archival description conforming to RiC-CM presented as a diagram. From Records in Contexts: A Conceptual Model for Archival Description, Consultation Draft v0.1, September 2016

TAATU

The day before the conference officially began, I took part in The Archives and Technology Unconference, or TAATU. TAATU is an annual opportunity for folks working at the intersection of archives and technology to get together and share knowledge and ideas in a fun, relaxed atmosphere, and 2017 marked the tenth anniversary of the event. This year’s TAATU was generously hosted by the City of Ottawa Archives at their (relatively) new purpose-built facility. Participants swapped stories of digital forensics efforts, migration of multiple databases to a single system, and development of generic-yet-sufficiently-granular digital preservation workflows, as well as enjoying a few rounds of IT Balderdash, proposing fake definitions of terms including grey goo (real definition here) and frobnicate (real definition here).

City Archivist Heather Gordon also attended the ACA conference this year, allowing us to take advantage of the many concurrent sessions on offer. Of particular interest was a session on monetary appraisal which provided an update on the work of the National Archival Appraisal Board and a lively discussion of fair market valuations in the age of digital recordkeeping. Also of interest was a debate-style session involving Michael Moss and David Thomas from Northumbria University and Daniel German and Leah Sander from Library and Archives Canada. The resolution posed was “To serve the common good, archivists must reject ‘Archives as cultural heritage assets’ and embrace their role as strongholds as evidence.” Moderated by Geoffrey Yeo of University College London, each debater had seven minutes to present and then rebut, followed by audience participation on the question. The room was surprisingly evenly split between those professionals focussed on digital preservation and data management (in favour of evidence), and those who focus more on analogue recordkeeping and preservation (in favour of cultural heritage asset). Our City Archivist suggests that the answer depends on the audience we serve at any given time, and that we shouldn’t reject one role at the expense of the other; there is room, and a need, for us to be both.

The ACA conference is an opportunity to exchange knowledge with the Canadian archival community and keep current with the latest developments in archival theory and practice. Kudos to the conference committee for organizing such a lively, engaging event!

In this 1959 edition of Public Press Conference, New York City Mayor Robert Wagner is joined by Youth Board President Ralph Whalen and Police Commissioner Stephen P. Kennedy in answering questions sent in from listeners. The moderator is Gabe Pressman. A proposed curfew and the police use of nightsticks are hot issues of the day. Mayor Wagner reports most city officials are opposed to a curfew for young people, pointing out that the small percentage of troublemakers such a restriction would affect are the very types who have bad home lives and would instead congregate in “cellars and backyards,” still causing trouble. Kennedy, the police commissioner, is in favor of retaining nightsticks. He warns that the police department “is not a punitive agency, not a social service agency, but a law enforcement agency.” A listener accuses the Youth Board of “giving gang lords a special glory.” Whalen defends the organization, insisting that if it sees any evidence of illegal activity, it contacts the police immediately. But “gangs exist,” he points out. His job is to “bring them around.” Another listener blames “coddlers, lenient justices, professional do-gooders, and sob sisters” for the recent upswing in gang violence. Whalen argues for more parental authority to be exercised.

There is a surprising question for Wagner submitted by none other than former President Herbert Hoover! He advocates increased funding for Boys Clubs (with which he had a long affiliation) and other organizations. The problem, Wagner points out, is that the hardcore delinquents can’t be tempted to join such groups. A more eerily topical note is sounded when a listener asks “Why are people allowed to buy guns so freely?” Wagner’s and the Police Commissioner’s answers could be ripped from today’s headlines. Tighter legislation needs to be enacted, on the federal level. Otherwise, guns simply come in from states with loose or nonexistent regulation.

While the problem, even the term itself, “juvenile delinquency” (and its proposed solutions) may seem quaint, one can discern from this uneasy discussion the seeds of New York City’s eventual descent into the maelstrom of crime, “white flight,” and fiscal insolvency that characterized the next decade. The municipal government, however well-intentioned, seems ill-equipped to respond to changes brought on demographic and cultural shifts in the population. 

Robert Wagner (1910-1991) was a popular, three-term mayor. His father had been a powerful New York senator. Wagner himself, though a product of the Tammany Hall, turned on the machine in his final campaign. In its obituary, the New York Times summarized Wagner’s tenure, noting:

By the time that young Robert became Mayor, at the age of 43, the city was undergoing profound change as post-World-War-II prosperity enabled middle-class whites to start moving to the suburbs in waves. They were replaced largely by blacks from the South and Puerto Ricans lured here by the hope of better jobs and less racial discrimination than they had found in other parts of the country, as well as relatively generous welfare benefits. Mr. Wagner, even his critics acknowledged, grasped the enormity of the social problems that were accelerating and sought in a deliberate, methodical way to solve them…Flexing his political muscle, Mr. Wagner won infusions of state and Federal funds to clear slums in urban-renewal areas, build public housing and to help maintain the 15-cent subway fare. He granted collective-bargaining rights to municipal labor unions. He integrated government with more black and Hispanic appointees who began to reflect the city’s rapidly changing population. And his third-term campaign against his estranged political mentors dealt the Democratic machine a defeat from which it has never recovered.

Gabe Pressman (1924-2017) was one of the first television reporters to cover City Hall and started his electronic media career as the host of WNYC’s Campus Press Conference. The Wall Street Journal noted, when

…he arose to address his fellow New York Press Club members at their annual awards ceremony in June, his admonition to jealously guard the freedom of the press was as full-throated as ever. “I think I’m sort of a nut job on the First Amendment,” he admitted. …Mr. Pressman’s message to his colleagues was never to fear speaking truth to power. “If the press doesn’t stand up for that, no one else will,” he said. “It’s unusual for anyone in authority to stick up for the press. We have to do it for ourselves….Part of my effort is to brainwash my fellow journalists into doing more human-interest stories about the people we serve.”

Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.

WNYC archives id: 5713Municipal archives id: LT8817

This week I’ve had the pleasure of adding a number of scrapbooks to our Amherst College Scrapbooks Collection. As I assessed the scrapbooks I was adding, I noticed that a number of them had been created by pasting material into existing books. This was a common practice for centuries and I always enjoy running across new examples.

My interest is two-fold: the underlying books are, by their nature, something that the owner no longer wanted and would otherwise have discarded. We don’t tend to have many examples of some these more ephemeral volumes, for instance: sales catalogs, subscription books, and penmanship notebooks. Also interesting is what types of materials the creator of the scrapbook chose  to put in a volume with a visually cluttered background. In the 19th century, when the bulk of our scrapbook collection was created, blank books would have been relatively accessible to college students. Indeed the majority of our scrapbooks were created in volumes sold for that explicit purpose. Often the scrapbooks created in books were more informal, a way for the maker to keep track of interesting news clippings or humorous anecdotes rather than a showpiece of memorabilia from their college years.

This scrapbook (pictured here and at the top of this post) was created by Charles Lord, Amherst class of 1838, in an old penmanship notebook.

Edward Lacey, class of 1890, created this scrapbook in the “Value of Railroad Securities, Earnings and Charges, Prices of Stocks and Bonds”. Under memorabilia from Mount Holyoke and clipping on college sports, the tables of values are still visible.

This scrapbooks was created in a volume containing the first nineteen annual reports of the New England Mutual Life Insurance Company. The compiler of this book tried hard to completely obscure the original text by pasting newspaper clippings tightly spaced over the whole page. He didn’t finish the job however; the later pages of the book reveal the underlying text where articles are tucked between the pages but not yet pasted in. This compiler is unknown, although assumed to be a member of the class of 1876 based on the content of the book.

When George Waite White, class of 1861, was looking for a book to use for his college memorabilia, a copy of a bound subscription book for Lossing’s Pictorial Field-Book of the Revolution, first published in 1850, came to hand. Purchasing books by subscription wasn’t unusual at this time (somewhat like a kickstarter or Amazon pre-order) and this subscription book allowed potential subscribers to see what the cloth binding would look like and read a summary of the work and many, many testimonials. Other subscription books might have had selections from the text and sample illustrations. George only filled a few pages, so we can see the subscription list, with only two names on it, unobscured.

Henry Holmes, class of 1860, created this scrapbook of humorous newspaper clippings in an 1847 edition of Emerson’s North American Arithmetic. He made no attempt at obscuring the original text, which makes for a visually confusing reading experience.

I saved my favorite scrapbook for last. James Plimpton, class of 1878, created this one in a 220 page, illustrated brass goods catalog from 1871. Except for the illustrations of brass products in the background, this is a classic undergraduate scrapbook full of programs, tickets, dance cards and other memorabilia. I love nineteenth century catalogs and this is an excellent one – I particularly enjoy the odd conjunction of materials: baseball programs with faucets, concert tickets with steam whistles.

I’ll close with gratitude for James Plimpton and every one of the nearly 200 alums whose scrapbooks have made their way to Archives & Special Collections over the years for the fascinating glimpses they give us into their lives and interests!

On July 2, 1937, famed aviatrix Amelia Earhart went missing during an attempt at a round-the-world flight along with her navigator, Fred Noonan. Following the report of her disappearance, U.S. Navy and Coast Guard vessels, including the aircraft carrier USS Lexington, assisted in search operations. These efforts are detailed in the “U.S. Navy Report of the Search for Amelia Earhart, July 2-18, 1937″.

While the details around Amelia Earhart’s disappearance remain a mystery, researchers recently found this photograph within the holdings of the National Archives which they believe shows Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan alive on a dock in the Marshall Islands after their disappearance over the Pacific Ocean.

PL-Marshall Islands, Jaluit Atoll, Jaluit Island. ONI #14381. Jaluit Harbor. National Archives Identifier 68141661

There is much to learn about Amelia Earhart in the resources and records held at the National Archives. For example, a search in our Catalog reveals photographs of Earhart, documents related to the search of her missing aircraft, as well as a letter she wrote to President Franklin D. Roosevelt before her flight, asking for help coordinating with the Navy to refuel her plane in air over Midway Island. You can also learn more about the radio log of the last communications with Earhart on our Text Message blog.

View more National Archives resources related to Amelia Earhart on archives.gov.

While we may never know the complete story of what happened to Amelia Earhart during her fateful flight 80 years ago, this photograph is just one example of the many fascinating finds uncovered by researchers at the National Archives on a regular basis. Among the billions of records held at the National Archives, there is always something new to discover. What will you uncover in your research?

As a follow-up to our recent post about our ALA statement broadside, we’re sharing a few photos taken at DWRI while they were working on the project. And if you like those, you’ll really like following them on Instagram.

We still have some posters available, so contact us if you’re interested in getting one.

The following is the second of two posts from Dr. Kathy Clark, a professor here at FSU in the College of Education. You may see the first post here. For the past several years, she’s been involved in the digitization and description of a set of papers in the Dirac Collection that are known collectively as the “shoebox” papers. These materials are available online and will shortly benefit from enhanced description from Dr. Clark.

I should say that the “we” in this case are an incredibly bright and talented young man, Emmet Harrington, and myself. Emmet was an undergraduate honors student, who selected my project as part of the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP) at FSU. Although his UROP commitment was only one year, Emmet continued on the project for a second year, and his work was funded by the HOMSIGMAA grant. Emmet graduated from FSU in May 2016, with a bachelor’s degree in Mathematics. He began the Ph.D. in mathematics program at Michigan State University in Fall 2016. Emmet’s work on the “shoebox papers” project was invaluable, and he was responsible for three key aspects of the project work.

In particular, Emmet first reviewed the scans of the original items that I identified in 2012 for their mathematical content, and this was necessary work for metadata entry. Emmet also selected interesting problems, which we would ultimately highlight and discuss during a workshop as part of the Seventh European Summer University in Copenhagen in 2014. Finally, Emmet spent a great deal of time cropping images from the original images (of the “shoebox papers” that I selected in 2012), for the purpose of focusing on particular aspects of Dirac’s mathematical doodlings found in the “shoebox papers.” We felt this was an intriguing first project for the purpose of highlighting one aspect of the Dirac Papers at FSU. For example, because of Dirac’s reputation as a Nobel prize-winning physicist, we purposefully investigated the collection for examples of pure mathematics, since Dirac first began his academic life in the field of mathematics.

Finally, Emmet and I submitted a short paper to the BSHM Bulletin: Journal of the British Society of the History of Mathematics, in which we tell the story of our work together, and in which we highlight examples from our investigation into the “shoebox papers” (Clark & Harrington, 2016).

In closing, I want to publicly express my appreciation to HOMSIGMAA’s interest in the Dirac Papers at FSU. I greatly appreciate Dr. Amy Shell-Gellasch’s encouragement to me to seek funding for this project, and for assisting me over the years as we’ve tried to accomplish what we set out to do. I am also supremely appreciative of the assistance and encouragement of Dean Julia Zimmerman, Associate Dean Katie McCormick, Digital Archivist Krystal Thomas, and Studio Manager Stuart Rochford, all of the FSU Libraries. Without them, this work would not have been possible. I am especially grateful for their patience with me, as they have waited a very long time for me to finish my part of this work so that it can be shared with the world.

References

Clark, K. M., & Harrington, E. P. (2016). The Paul A M Dirac papers at Florida State University: A search for informal mathematical investigations. British Society for the History of Mathematics Bulletin, 31(3), 205-214.