It’s finally been feeling like spring in Rhode Island this week, which has everyone feverishly thinking about crocuses and tulips, budding trees, mud puddles, and every other seasonal motif one can list.

For instance, we’ve been dreaming about soft, fuzzy chicks…

Novellus Libellus institutionum pro tyronibus. Cologne: Thomas Odendall, 1742.

And loveable, huggable bunnies.

Conference program, New England Convention of Magicians. Boston: NECM, 1947.

Phew! Yikes! Happy spring!

The class of 1877 in Barrett Gymnasium in their class uniforms holding dumbells, February 1875. In physical education classes at this time, students stood in formation and executed synchronized calisthenic routines in time to live piano music.

Archives and Special Collections is pleased to announce the newly available Department of Hygiene and Physical Education Records. This collection documents Amherst’s groundbreaking Physical Education program from its early development in 1861 to the 1930s.

Amherst’s Hygiene and Physical Education department was the first of its kind in the nation. Interest in organized exercise had been growing for decades, along with concern about the perceived ill health of college students, who were presumed to spend all their time hunched over their books. Following the deaths of two Amherst students in 1855, President Stearns began advocating for a formal department of physical education to improve the strength and stamina of the student body. This department was approved by the Trustees in 1860 and, following a brief stint by John Hooker, Edward Hitchcock, Jr. (son of the former president and graduate of the class of 1849) was appointed professor of Hygiene and Physical Education in 1861.

Hitchcock developed a system (later known as the “Amherst Plan”) of mandatory group calisthenics (known as light gymnastics) four days a week for all students, along with voluntary strength training (heavy gymnastics), classes in anatomy and healthy living (“hygiene” courses), and extensive measurements of all students taken throughout their college careers. These measurements were used to demonstrate the progress made by individual students and to prove the efficacy of the program as a whole.

Hitchcock’s passion was for the application of scientific methods to the field of strength training and health building. Anthropometry is the study of the human body using detailed measurements; this field was developing when the Amherst program started and came into its heyday in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Hitchcock was a notable figure on the national stage, writing articles and presenting at conferences about the anthropometry program at Amherst.

In addition to collecting measurements of individual students physical size and capacity, Hitchcock and his successors also recorded extensive health histories, and gathered statistics on a variety of topics like handedness, tobacco use, and eyesight. Most concerning, from a more modern perspective, they also gathered information on students’ national and ethnic backgrounds. The use of anthropometry for measuring and promoting physical health and development was a positive face of what eventually developed into the eugenics movement and this darker aspect can be seen in places throughout the collection.

In the 1890s, additional faculty joined the department, but the format of the courses and philosophy of the department didn’t start changing for a couple more decades. Eventually the mandatory daily classes were dropped along with calisthenics and hygiene courses; the measurement of students ended in the 1940s. By the late 1940s, the Physical Education department more closely resembled its modern counterpart, with courses in team sports and a focus on athletic training and coaching. This collection covers the period to 1933, the year when the department changed its name to drop the “Hygiene”, this symbolic shift was chosen as a cut-off point for the collection. More recent Physical Education records are also available in Archives & Special Collections.

The records of the Hygiene and Physical Education department contain a wide variety of records, from syllabi for hygiene courses and record books showing gymnasium attendance to student measurements and annual reports presented to the Board of Trustees on the department’s activities. Of particular interest are more than a dozen volumes of bound memorabilia created by Professor Hitchcock to document the history of the department, many of the items in these volumes have Hitchcock’s notes on them. Hitchcock was an avid collector (or, less kindly, a real hoarder) and his collections of college history materials formed the foundation of the current College Archives.

These records are a rich resource in many areas: not just the history of physical education, but also student health and understandings of health, the development and promotion of the study of anthropometry, constructions of masculinity, muscular Christianity, and the student experience at Amherst in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The interior of Pratt Gymnasium in 1885. Visible in this picture is gymnastic equipment, the piano for accompanying group classes and bleachers on the balcony for public exhibitions.

Today marks the start of the countdown to Gold Coast 2018, with one year to go to the Games. This morning we visited the Scottish Government building at Victoria Quay, Edinburgh, where our Hosts and Champions exhibition is currently on display to celebrate the occasion. The event provided an opportunity to meet with the Active Scotland Legacy 2014 team who have been great supporters of our Hosts and Champions project, and legacy partners Street Soccer Scotland.

Celebrating #1YTG at Hosts and Champions exhibition, Scottish Government, Victoria Quay, Edinburgh.

With another Commonwealth Games on the horizon we’re delighted with the continued interest in our Hosts & Champions exhibition, which celebrates Scotland’s contribution to the competition, with a number of additional venues across Scotland confirmed for 2017 and 2018.  For further information check our project page and updates on Twitter using #HostsandChampions

Material collected during the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games.

Over the next twelve months we will also be collecting material relating to Team Scotland, preserving a record of Scotland’s participation in the 2017 Commonwealth Youth Games and the 2018 Commonwealth Games. This material will be added to our Commonwealth Games Scotland Archive, which preserves over 80 years of Scottish sporting heritage.

Material from the Edinburgh 1970 Commonwealth Games held in the Commonwealth Games Scotland Archive.

Theater critic, playwright, singer and editor Eric Bentley will turn 101 later this year. Throughout his long and distinguished career, he is perhaps best known as one of the preeminent experts on Bertolt Brecht. Bentley is also known for his works of criticism, as well as his scholarship and opposition to the House Un-American Activities Committee.

We’ve pulled two interviews with him from our collections.  The first (player above) was by Eleanor Fischer, who produced reports and documentaries for the CBC in the 1960s and opened NPR’s New York city bureau in the early 1970s.

 Wolf Biermann auf dem Stadtteilfest in Hamburg-Eimsbüttel 1977
MoSchle/Wikimedia Commons

In this 1967 interview they begin by discussing the banned East German singer and poet Karl Wolf Biermann and how Bentley came to meet him. He likens Biermann to Bob Dylan and Joan Baez and says he is among a new style of poets under 30 who sing their poems and circulate the text on mimeographed sheets.  Bentley suggests he is a rebel who has not broken with communism but seeks a newer and more libertarian type of communism akin to Rosa Luxembourg. Bentley suggests that the economic situation in East Germany has improved for workers but become more repressive for intellectuals, that, in fact, the East German state is far more Stalinist than anywhere else in the east. Still Bentley believes the regime is afraid of Biermann, which is why they want to silence him. He suggests the poet and singer is ‘a sleeping beauty, waiting for his kiss’ and that his silencing is only temporary. 

Fischer and Bentley talk about the need for international publicity that acts to protect artists who are under attack from the state. If the artist or activist is forgotten, then the leadership can do away with them. Bentley argues, however, that Biermann isn’t looking to be a hero of anti-communists. He is and remains a communist who supports anti-colonial wars of national liberation. Bentley describes Biermann’s style of music as reminding him of traditional cabaret and American folk music, and sometimes classical German lieder seeps through.

The discussion turns to how Bentley got involved with Brechtian scholarship and Brecht’s politics. Fischer wants to know how and why Brecht is now popular in the United States. Bentley suggests Brecht’s anti-war themes and the war in Vietnam and ‘drift of world politics’ are factors, as well as the current climate and appearance of political satire attacking President Johnson.  Bentley talks about Brecht’s communist sympathies and criticism from critic Martin Esslin and his disagreement with Esslin. The veteran critic believes Brecht’s irony, spirit, anarchism, cynicism, biting wit, and discontent all feed into Brecht’s current popularity. He ads that the portrayal of homosexuality is also a factor.  Bentley suggests that the more modest efforts at rendering Brecht’s work have been more successful than the more established productions.

The two discuss Brecht’s reconciling his pacifism and sympathies with communism. The discussion wraps up with Bentley’s plans for the future, including a political cabaret on the upper west side of Manhattan.

 ____________________________

In a May 31, 2000 interview with Leonard Lopate, Eric Bentley talks about a recently published compilation of his theater criticism, What is Theatre? incorporating dramatic events and reviews he wrote between 1944 and 1967.

Eric Bentley circa 1960.
(Courtesy of Eric Bentley with thanks to American Theatre.)

As the caretakers of Special Collections, staff work diligently to preserve the integrity of materials for future researchers. This includes reducing materials’ exposure to light and preventing fluctuations in temperature and humidity within carefully controlled environments. Interaction with collections usually occurs in the Reading Room to ensure these conditions can be regulated. Sometimes, though, materials leave the Special Collections vault in order to venture into the wider world. Class instruction sessions are a way to bring collections directly into the hands of students who might otherwise never know of their existence.

Recently I led an instruction session with the Manuscript Archivist for the course Travel in the Ancient World. The class was held in the Special Collections instruction room where students observed several types of ancient texts, including cuneiform tablets, papyrus fragments, and Greek and Latin ostraka. For many students, this was their first experience with Special Collections materials; as some of the oldest items in the library, the ancient texts arguably offered one of the more dramatic introductions to our holdings. The 2,000 year old papyrus fragments, for instance, were previously used as mummy cartonnage – layers of linen or papyrus covered in plaster as part of Ancient Egyptian funerary masks. Seeing these objects up close allowed students the chance to create tangible, meaningful connections to otherwise distant ideas.

When collaborating with professors about class visits, it’s often helpful to communicate in advance so Special Collections can provide the best supporting materials for the course. In this case, a course on travel meant we wanted to highlight letters and other mobile documents. Preparing for the session involved studying translations of the materials to cultivate a selection that would match this need while also representing the collection as a whole. Class sessions offer the Special Collections instructors just as much opportunity to learn about the collection as the students – and perhaps even more so. In an effort to prepare for any questions that arise, we study the stories and context of our materials as diligently as possible. That way, if a student wants to know how our cuneiform tablets compare to the Flood Tablet, or why some ostraka were written in Latin instead of Greek, we can provide the answer.

So while teaching assistants teach and research assistants research, graduate assistants get the best of both worlds. We not only learn more about our collections every day, but we then get to teach others about the incredible histories behind our objects, hopefully inspiring students to visit us again after class lets out.

“Peace with Russia depends on us,” the former ambassador and governor declares in this talk on American-Soviet relations. Speaking at a 1959 Books and Authors Luncheon to promote his book Peace with Russia, Averell Harriman reflects on his recent visit to Russia and his meetings with Khrushchev.He attempts to explain the difference between the “new” Russia of Khrushchev and that of Stalin. While both leaders were committed to world revolution, Stalin relied on the failures of capitalism to stoke the flames of revolt, whereas Khrushchev now feels the visible successes of the Soviet economy will attract like-minded leaders to emulate the communist system. Stalin felt he was the equal of Lenin, a “creator of the religion.” Khrushchev, by contrast, is “a disciple,” well-versed in Marxist-Leninist ideology but not possessed by the same messianic fervor. Instead of the Terror, there is party discipline.

Harriman disagrees with the then-fashionable Powder Keg Myth, that the Soviet Union is so rotten and volatile that a single spark will lead to its collapse. On the contrary, this patrician millionaire, businessman, veteran diplomat, and politician, seems to have a very clear-eyed grudging respect for our adversary. He admits there are lots of “gripes,” particularly about housing, but admits that people are generally accepting of the regime. Because such a tight grip is maintained on education there is no radical student class. Though the people are “brainwashed” by incessant propaganda, it is up to the United States to deal with the USSR as an equal, not feed the frenzy of anti-communism by name-calling and needlessly aggressive acts. Throughout this speech, delivered in Harriman’s much mocked hesitating monotone, one feels he is not talking down to the audience but genuinely attempting to make his points. It’s an interesting counterpoint to the Red Scare hysteria which dominated so many headlines of the day. 

Averell Harriman (1891-1986) had a career in public service that appears almost unimaginable today. Heir to enormous wealth (his father was a railroad baron), Harriman was an indifferent student noted mostly for his polo prowess when he was swept up in the idealism of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. He worked his way through a series of increasingly high-level appointments in the Roosevelt administration, eventually becoming this country’s wartime ambassador to the Soviet Union. An important figure in the Truman administration as well, he is credited (or charged) with encouraging the Truman Doctrine of containment which contributed to the Cold War. When Eisenhower came into office, Harriman surprised many by showing political ambitions. In 1954, running as “Honest Ave,”  he was elected Governor of New York. His presidential ambitions were thwarted in both 1952 and 1956 when he lost the Democratic party nomination to Adlai Stevenson. He then returned to positions of diplomatic power under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, focusing on peace missions to Southeast Asia.

The New York Times, in its obituary, notes that:

Patience, persistence, resourcefulness, a grasp of detail and a shrewd sense of how to get things done were among the qualities that helped Mr. Harriman win his high government appointments in the administrations of four Democratic Presidents – Roosevelt, Truman, Johnson and Kennedy – and to get his work done, decade after decade, with a striking degree of success. He also benefited from much hard work and, notably as Ambassador in Moscow, from an independent-mindedness that was nourished by the awareness that he did not need his salary. As he put it: ”Fortunately, I’m not dependent on my job to eat and, therefore, have a certain independence. That is a great advantage.” And there was his sheer gusto: Neither age nor shifting political winds could wither the enthusiasm of William Averell Harriman for affairs of state. His lanky, somewhat stooped figure was present in the highest councils of the nation and the world for four decades, so long that to many Americans he was the country’s superdiplomat.

As noted above, Harriman does not sound like a politician, neither hectoring nor pleading with his listeners. He does not weasel or waffle like a career State Department employee, either. There is something endearingly uncharismatic about his public persona. Despite his fantastic wealth and fascination with power, which enabled him to “bond” with such disparate types as Churchill and Stalin, he seems to have inspired an almost universal loyalty in those who served under him. Thomas W. Wilson, the Information Officer during Harriman’s stint implementing the Marshall Plan, recalls:

I did know Harriman very well and worked with him several times. I don’t know anybody who worked with him, if they could work with him, who didn’t love him. He was a man who was absolutely totally committed to what he was doing. He worked like a dog. He expected you to also, but he didn’t expect you to do anything he didn’t do himself. He was really a wonderfully effective person. Everybody felt they had to respect him.

Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.

WNYC archives id: 150521Municipal archives id: LT8896

In 1966, a group of women, frustrated at the failure of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to recognize sex discrimination in the workplace and the failure of the conference they were attending to demand the EEOC do so, started what became the National Organization for Women (NOW). In 1971, Tallahassee gained its own NOW chapter, chartered through the national organization. Two years later in 1973, the Florida NOW state chapter was chartered to help coordinate the local chapters’ activities as well as to organize new chapters into formation. The state chapter’s records reside at the University of Florida.

As March is Women’s History Month, this week the Pepper Library is highlighting the National Organization for Women, Tallahassee Chapter records. The Tallahassee NOW papers contain official NOW correspondence, meeting minutes and agendas, reports, budgets, newsletters, and other records which chronicle the development and activities of Tallahassee NOW from its founding in 1971 until 1997. An excellent resource for studying the history of the Equal Rights Amendment in the state of Florida, the NOW material offers a firsthand glimpse into the organization’s efforts to empower and inform. This is particularly on point right now as last Wednesday, the Nevada State Legislature ratified the Equal Rights Amendment, which guarantees that “equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.” NPR stated in an article on the ratification that the ERA “was first passed by Congress in 1972 and last approved by a state (Indiana) in 1977.” Florida has yet to ratify the ERA. The NOW records provide a look at the fight to do so in the 1970s.

Last fall,the staff of the FSU Digital Library digitized and made available online for researchers the Florida NOW Times (1974-1997). Within this statewide NOW publication, the history of the ERA and the activities of NOW chapters throughout the state can be followed over a twenty year period. Providing digital access to the newsletters was a challenge. Each newsletter needed to be reviewed to provide useful description for users to be able to browse and search these objects successfully. The DLC enlisted help from our Cataloging & Description colleagues to catalog the 211 newsletters that range from 1974 to 1997. These items cover the state chapter’s ERA fight, its yearly conferences, legislative and lobbying actions, and the many events sponsored to fight for the rights of women in Florida. You can see all the newsletters in the FSU Digital Library.

We have recently made descriptions and high-resolution scans available for the photographs in the Art Grice fonds. We have also made a selection of the images available on flickr. These are high-quality images created by a professional photographer and they document views and details of some buildings in Vancouver. All of the images in the fonds are signed prints and we have included the signatures.

Houses row near Hawks Avenue East Pender Street, looking south, 1972. Reference code AM1536-: CVA 70-77.

Arthur (Art) Grice was based in North Vancouver at the time he took these photographs. These images were created in 1972 and 1973, so some of the buildings no longer exist. The row of houses shown above is one example.

Below, you can see the Birks Building on the left and the Vancouver Block on the right. The Vancouver Block has a Birks sign on top.

Birks Building and Vancouver Block, 1973. Reference code AM1536-: CVA 70-11.

The Birks Building was demolished in 1974. The Vancouver Block still stands.

The Georgia Medical-Dental building was well known for its terra cotta nurses. Below is a view of the building showing one of them.

Georgia Medical-Dental Building, Nursing Sisters statue, 1973. Reference code AM1536-: CVA 70-28.

This building was demolished in 1989.

The fonds also contains photographs of details and interiors. Here are a couple of interior views of Century House from different years.

Century House, 432 Richards Street, interior staircase, 1973. Reference code AM1536-: CVA 70-34.

Century House, 432 Richards Street, interior entranceway, 1972. Reference code AM1536-: CVA 70-35.

Some of the images in the fonds are of ordinary neighbourhood buildings, such as this corner grocery.

Kong’s Corner Store and Handy Meats, Campbell Avenue and East Georgia Street, 1972. Reference code AM1536-: CVA 70-67.

We are grateful to Art Grice for donating the copyright for these images to the City of Vancouver. Art is still an active photographer and has a personal website.

The History of Sixteen Wonderful Old Women, Illustrated by As Many Engravings; Exhibiting Their Principal Eccentricities and Amusements (1820) was recently added to the John MacKay Shaw Collection of Childhood in Poetry. It was published in London by prominent children’s publisher John Harris as part of “Harris’s Cabinet of Amusement and Instruction.” These little books, “printed in a superior manner upon good paper,” sold for 1 shilling and 6 pence, which made them significantly pricier than other chapbooks on the market. There are three other titles from Harris’s Cabinet of Amusement and Instruction available in the Shaw Collection:

• The Peacock “At Home” : A Sequel to the Butterfly’s Ball
• Cock Robin : A Pretty Painted Toy for Either Girl or Boy : Suited to Children of All Ages
• The Monthly Monitor : Consisting of Easy Lessons, or, Short Stories, Adapted to Every Season of the Year

“Is Gibbon necessarily less of an artist in words than Dickens?” historian Barbara Tuchman asks in this 1966 talk at a Book and Author Luncheon. Proposing that the creative process is the same for historians as for poets and novelists, Tuchman objects to her work being lumped with other “non-fiction.” “I don’t feel like a non-something.” The writing of history requires imagination and sympathy. Imagination “stretches the facts” to get the deeper truth out of them, while sympathy “is essential to the understanding of motive.” Conscious that she is regarded as a “popular historian,” she defends herself against the academic charge of being an amateur, quoting the famous British author G. M. Trevelyan who advised historians to “write for the wider public.” She then turns to the book she has just published, The Proud Tower, which traces the roots of World War I, attempting to show how its gestation and eventual transformation represent a series of artistic rather than purely technical considerations.

One could argue that Tuchman protests too much over what is finally a semantic distinction: “creative writing” versus “history.” But in 1966 these barriers seem to be more firmly in place than they are now. She ends her discussion with a reference to Truman Capote’s just published In Cold Blood, a book which decisively erased the line between non-fiction and fiction. Capote’s method, she claims, “is not so new as he thinks.” She compares it to that of Herodotus and Francis Parkman.

Barbara Tuchman (1912-1989) was, in the best sense of the phrase, a popular historian. She won the Pulitzer Prize twice. Her books were often featured on the Bestseller List. This achievement is all the more extraordinary when one considers the obstacles she had to overcome. As the New York Times noted in its obituary:

She had neither an academic title nor even a graduate degree. ”It’s what saved me,” she later said. ”If I had taken a doctoral degree, it would have stifled any writing capacity.” But to be a writer was difficult, she found, simply because she was a woman. ”If a man is a writer,” she once said, ”everybody tiptoes around past the locked door of the breadwinner. But if you’re an ordinary female housewife, people say, ‘This is just something Barbara wanted to do; it’s not professional.’ ”

Tuchman’s success can be attributed in part to her strong emphasis on narrative, which she defends in this talk, and to a lively, readable style that neither talks down to the reader nor patronizes by over-simplification. Naturally, these qualities got her into trouble with professional historians, who routinely pointed out shortcomings in her research and doubted her conclusions. But her aim was not academic approval. As the Jewish Women’s Archive pointed out:

…she preferred the literary approach. She was regarded by some as more of a summarist than an explorer of fresh sources, ideas, and methods. She was not a historian’s historian; she was a layperson’s historian who made the past interesting to millions of readers. Her prescription for writing was “the writer’s object is—or should be—to hold the reader’s attention.” She visited the battle sites involved in her histories to increase realistic detail. But she chided, “historians who stuff in every item of research they have found, every shoelace and telephone call of a biographical subject, are not doing the hard work of selecting and shaping a readable story.”

Perhaps a more valid objection to this kind of work is that by keeping its eye on the “wider public” it can lose its chronological objectivity and use history more as a lens through which to see our current time. This is a weakness Washington Post critic Jonathan Yardley noticed when he reread The Proud Tower in 2009.

Living in a state of considerable wealth and privilege, she was given to rather conventional limousine-liberal political and ideological convictions and occasionally to oracular pronouncements thereof. Though clear-eyed about the Anarchists in these pages, she waxes more than a trifle misty about the socialists. Though the full import of the U.S. presence in Vietnam was far from clear as this book was written, the chapter about American imperialism unquestionably was colored by present events. When she quotes Charles Eliot Norton of Harvard — “I have been too much of an idealist about America, had set my hopes too high, had formed too fair an image of what she might become. Never had a nation such an opportunity; she was the hope of the world. Never again will any nation have her chance to raise the standard of civilization” — his thoughts clearly are her own.

Of course all history is as much about when it was written as about the time it ostensibly portrays. But the popular historian, even one as conscientious as Tuchman, will inevitably be more buffeted by the storms of the present than the cloistered, tenured professor. Tuchman’s work has become contextualized within the literature of late 20’th century, becoming “history” itself.

Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.

WNYC archives id: 71336Municipal archives id: T1741-T1742

Gerard Foley
Thursday, March 23, 2017 – 18:09

Are these prison photographs the final images of Australia’s last convicts?

Western Australia was the last of the Australian colonies to receive transported convicts, the final cohort arriving in Fremantle on the Hougoumont on 9 January 1868. In recent times there has been considerable research about the lives and fate of many of the Convicts transported to WA.

Photographs of the Convicts are rare, but recently long time genealogical researchers Lorraine Clarke and Cherie Strickland explored the State Archives Collection, WA’s largest archival collection which is preserved and made accessible by the State Records Office of Western Australia. There are thousands of prisoner photographs in the collection, but what was not known was how many of these photographs depicted those Convicts who were transported to WA between 1850 and 1868. In particular they examined a 19^th century Convict Register (Cons1156/R23), Fremantle Prison Registers (Cons4173), and surviving Fremantle Prisoner photographs (Cons4286) for relevant photographs of the Convicts who came to WA. Their research has been very fruitful and 74 heretofore unidentified photographs of WA Convicts have been located. Lorraine and Cherie have produced a book called Australia’s Last Convicts which contains these photographs along with short biographies of each of the Convicts depicted.

Portraying inmates in Fremantle Prison, these photographs are essentially late 19^th and early 20^th century equivalents of ‘mugshots’. They depict those men – only men were transported to WA – who returned to the penal system after they had served their original sentences. Age has faded some of the photographs and other original images are quite small. A few are blurry revealing that the standard of photography was not always high. Some photographs are of men standing next to a mirror, so that one image provides both a ‘front on’ and ‘side on’ mugshot. The men are quite elderly and some photographs reveal difficult, hard lives.

Dating from the late 1880s until around 1910 the images are brought together and presented in this book revealing the final collection of images of the last transported Convicts in Australia. Citing where the original photographs can be located in the State Archives Collection, there is a page entry for each man photographed, the entries also summarises the information in the registers about the crimes committed, using original terminology. Quite a few of the men are recidivists who spent much of their lives in the prison system for mainly petty crimes. Others were gaoled for more serious offences. Several of the photographed men spent a considerable amount of time in the community as reformed individuals, but returned to prison for a criminal act that occurred many years later, a crime that was very different in nature to that which originally saw them transported to Australia.

Australia’s Last Convicts is available for purchase through the Friends of Battye Library  (Inc.). To purchase download and complete an order form. The cost is $20 and there is an extra charge of $15 postage and handling. All profits go to the Friends of Battye Library (Inc.), which supports the J.S Battye Library of West Australian History and the State Archives (now known as the State Records Office of Western Australia) through its aims and activities in assisting with the acquisition, preservation and use of archival and documentary materials.

PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS BOOK IS CURRENTLY OUT-OF-PRINT.
 

Remember this box discovered during recent building works?

Today’s posting comes from undergraduate Dalva Gerberon, who has been investigating. Over to you, Dalva…

I undertook the study of the Jacquetta Hawkes collection for the Archives of the Oxford Institute of Archaeology in December 2016 as a part of my fieldwork as a second year undergraduate in Archaeology and Anthropology. It was particularly exciting to be given the responsibility of these items – the arrowheads are particularly impressive, both in their aspect and in their quality. Studying the collection required spending a lot of time observing the items one by one and analysing them, which forced me to see more about them that what I could them from just one glance; eventually it led me to note important and interesting details, such as fractures, retouches, or decorations. I definitely enjoyed getting to know these objets and working out their functions and roles in the life of the inhabitants of the site.

This collection of objects was given to Jacquetta Hawkes, during a visit to Portugal in 1949. It was presented to us in three different boxes, which we ordered from 1 to 3, starting counter-clockwise from the top. Box number 1 was a long box that contained 66 flints – flakes, blades, and arrowheads – ranging from medium-sized to very small. Box number 2 was a smaller, closed card box – item n°87 of this list. It contained 20 items, 15 of them arrowheads, while the other 5 were bone tools involved in the processing of fabric. Box number 3 was a long box that contained 4 cylindrical stone items and 9 roughly rectangular fired clay items, all of unknown purpose. In addition, in also contained a plastic bag and its 10 ceramic fragments of varying size and shape. In total, the collection has 110 items, plus one extra fragment that probably comes from another item of the collection.

The collection when I started studying it

Some of the objects of the first box, especially the few arrowheads, were roughly, if not poorly, executed, and display marks of imprecise knapping. More importantly, they appear to have been made from poor-quality stone; some items were made from the outer stone (cortex), and not from the core, which would be more solid, and better to work or knap. This leads to the possibility that these were practice pieces, given to children or learners as an exercise, not to produce items for use. On the other hand, the second box contained very fine arrowheads, most of them quite small and fine, which indicates that the site was also occupied by individuals who mastered stone toolmaking techniques and could produce high-quality tools and weapons, and retouch them to enhance them. The broader range of stones used indicates that they also knew which raw material to select to optimise the quality of their tool.

Box n°2 contained an exquisite set of arrowheads

The last box posed more of a problem in terms of interpreting and analysing its objects. The nature of the cylindrical objects was uncertain as we did not know what material they were made of. We concluded that they are fossilised plant stems, broken in several pieces. Their purpose is still unsure, but the traces of use-wear that can be seen on some of them would suggest that they could have been used for grinding. The fired clay items clearly appear to be loom-weights. They were held in place by strings that went through the holes that we can see at each of their corners – some of them were elongated by the pulling action. Most interestingly, the weights are decorated with engraved lines in varying patterns.

Some of the loom-weights were decorated

The last part of the collection was the 10 pottery fragments contained in the plastic bag found in box n°3. 5 of them were glazed ceramics that we identified as the typically Roman Samian ware. Four of them were shards of fired clay pottery, and the remaining one was a bit of plaster. All of these can be identified as belonging to the Roman period, while the rest of the collection belongs to the Chalcolithic period.

This information could be particularly helpful in identifying the site of origin of these items, as both the site and precise age of these items are still unknown to us. The presence of both Samian ware and Chalcolithic tools on the site strongly suggest that it was occupied from the Copper Age until the Roman occupation, at least. In that case, it means that we are probably looking for a relatively important site. We are still working on identifying the site and time periods, as well as confirming the function of some objects of box n°3, and should soon reach satisfying conclusions.

Many thanks for all your hard work recording, photographing, and researching this material, Dalva!

The Charles Drew House in a previous form

It is always thrilling when a single location on campus can pull together from the archival record multiple threads of Amherst’s history. In preparing for Professor Mary Hicks’s Black Studies class in research methods, we discovered the history of the Charles Drew House, a history which incorporated material from five different collections: the Fraternities Collection, the Biographical Files, The Alfred S. Romer Papers, the Building and Grounds Collection, and the Charles Drew House Photo Albums.

A 1922 article from the Springfield Union on the completion of the Phi Kappa Psi renovations

The history of the Charles Drew House begins with the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity chapter at Amherst College. Founded in 1895, the fraternity first occupied a home on Amity Street in Amherst. It purchased and remodeled in the late 1910s the mansion owned by Julius Seelye, a former president of the College. The Springfield Union touted the home’s “choicest location” in town and the justification of “as pretentious a motive as the circular porch.”

In the midst of World War II, the fraternity came close to losing its home. Amherst College administration considered prohibiting fraternities on campus. Advocates, including many alumni, convinced the trustees to preserve fraternity life with the condition that certain reforms would be made. In 1946, the trustees of Amherst College announced that fraternities would be required to remove any clause in their constitutions that discriminated against pledges based on race, ethnicity, or religion.

This momentous change challenged the national attitudes toward inclusion in fraternities. This became evident when the Amherst chapter of Phi Kappa Psi pledged Thomas Gibbs, an African American freshman, in the spring of 1948. Gibbs was a member of the track team and a class officer. A fellow Phi Kappa Psi brother described him as “quiet but not shy, and all in all, an extra special sort of fellow.” Students and alumni alike were largely in support of Gibbs joining. The Fraternities Collection in the Amherst College archives provides evidence of community opinion. However, the national organization pressured the Amherst chapter into depledging Gibbs until the fraternity had had ample time to consider the affair. In the fall of 1948, the Amherst chapter polled Amherst alumni and the Phi Kappa Psi national community and moved forward with their plan to pledge Gibbs. The story garnered news interest and the national organization – bristling at Amherst’s perceived public defiance – pulled the Amherst chapter’s charter. The chapter pledged Thomas Gibbs and became a local fraternity: Phi Alpha Psi.

A letter sent by the Amherst chapter asking for the advice and support of its alumni.

The Phi Alpha Psi entry in the Olio of 1951, the year Thomas Gibbs graduated. In his time with the fraternity he was elected president.

This March 1948 letter written by a member of the pledging committee seeks Romer’s advice on Thomas Gibbs.

The chair of the Phi Alpha Psi corporation at the time was Alfred Sherwood Romer (AC 1917), the director of Harvard University’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. His papers in the Amherst College archives contain correspondence between Romer, the Phi Kappa Psi brothers, and alumni. The correspondence demonstrates a variety of opinion on the matter. Romer wrote an article, “The Color Line in Fraternities,” which was published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1949. It garnered attention. A student in Illinois read the article in her “Social Problems class” and wrote to Romer in the early 1950s, curious as to the outcome. This prompted Romer to write a postscript to the article.

This exchange between Romer and Miss D. Frederick in 1951 shed further light on the Gibbs/Phi Alpha Psi story. Click on the images to view them in closer detail, and note the secretary’s shorthand on D. Frederick’s letter to Romer.

Drew’s (r) entry in the Amherst Olio from his fourth year, 1926

Charles Drew was born in Washington, D.C., in 1904. He attended Amherst College and graduated in 1926 – afterwards he received an M.D. and a C.M. from McGill University. Charles Drew was known for his pioneering research into blood banks and the use of blood plasma. During the early years of World War II he spearheaded the collection of blood plasma as part of the “Blood for Britain” program. He also was appointed director of the first American Red Cross Blood Bank. He served for many years on the faculty of the Howard University Medical School. Tragically, Drew’s life was cut short in an automobile accident while driving with colleagues to a conference at the Tuskegee Institute. Many organizations honored Charles Drew by putting his name on elementary schools, a medical university, and residence halls at both Howard University and Amherst College.

By the mid-1960s, Phi Alpha Psi (also known as Phi Psi) had withdrawn from the fraternity system and were known for their reputation as a counter-cultural institution on campus. In the 1970s Phi Psi pushed for the house to be named after Charles Drew but the organization was denied. For more information on Phi Psi visit Amherst Reacts, a digital humanities project put together by Amherst students in 2016.

In 1984 Amherst College banned fraternities, following the resolutions laid out in the  Final Report of the Ad Hoc Committee on Campus Life. The houses were transformed into dormitories and were renamed after significant members of the college community. The unofficial Charles Drew House once again pushed for an official dedication and was granted such in 1987.

Today, the Charles Drew House sponsors “events that will celebrate the achievements of black people such as Charles Drew and explore the cultures of Africa and the Diaspora at large. This house was founded as a space where members of the Amherst community can engage in intellectual debate, social activities, artistic expression, and all other endeavors, which highlight Africa and the Diaspora and the accomplishments of its diverse peoples.” (see the full constitution here)

The Charles Drew House also lives in the Amherst College Archives and Special Collections, where scrapbooks and photograph albums kept by the residents of the Charles Drew House from 1986 to 2010 are held.

Eleanor Fischer produced the above report on September 8, 1968 in the wake of a tumultuous Democratic National Convention in Chicago and the coincident police riot against demonstrators. Fischer references the DNC protest several times, covering all the bases: the protestors, the onlookers, the new Miss America, the new Black Miss America and the pageant’s chief representative. It was a time of ongoing cultural conflict, when both white and African-American women were struggling against the establishment as well as the male-dominated anti-war protest movement.

A member of the Women’s Liberation Party drops a bra in a trash barrel to protest the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City, N.J.
(AP Photo)

The pageant protest was organized by New York Radical Women, a group active in the civil rights, anti-war, and New Left movements. Garnering most of the attention at the event was the “Freedom Trash Can,” a bin in which protestors deposited false eyelashes, dish washing detergent, copies of women’s homemaker magazines and Playboy, high heels, curlers, wigs and girdles. They also threw bras into the bin. Although nothing was burned, a rumor spread that the underwear had gone up in flames and reporters promulgated the phrase “bra burners” to describe the protesters. It was no doubt seen by the meme makers as women adopting the, now iconic, image of male draft card and flag-burning anti-war demonstrators. They drew an audience of some six hundred largely unsympathetic men, a few of whom can be heard in Fischer’s report.

At her press conference, the new Miss America, Judith Anne Ford, a gymnast and trampoline champion, is noted for being “the first blonde to win the title in eleven years.” She indicated that if 18-year-old men are expected to fight and die for their country then they should have the vote. Ford also said it was okay for a “Negro” to be Miss America “as long as she’s the prettiest,” but not “just because she’s a Negro.”[1]

In contrast we hear from Saundra Williams, the first Miss Black America. She was described at the time as a 19-year-old from Philadelphia who wears her hair natural, “does African dances and helped lead a student strike at her college last spring.” Williams won over seven other competitors in a contest held four blocks from the long-running pageant as a protest to the all-white contest. She told reporters, “Miss America does not represent us because there has never been a black girl in the pageant. With my title, I can show black women that they too are beautiful.” [2]

Saundra Williams, 19, center, of Philadelphia, Pa., was crowned Miss Black America 1969 at ceremonies in Atlantic City, Sept. 8, 1968
(AP Photo)

The war in Vietnam along with the assassinations of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Senator Robert F. Kennedy combined with the evolving civil rights, student, black power and women’s movements set the context to 1968 event. With this in mind, Fischer’s closing is a bit disappointing. But to be fair, there’s nothing quite like hindsight for a clearer perspective on events which can sometimes be hard to fully fathom in the midst of historical moments. 

______________________________________

[1] Curtis, Charlotte, “Along With Miss America,” The New York Times, September 9, 1968, pg. 54.

[2] Klemesrud, Judy, “There’s Now Miss Black America,” The New York Times, September 9, 1968, pg. 54.

Special thanks to Elizabeth Starkey.

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When The Pitt Rivers Museum acquired “Our Ancient Monuments” written by the man (Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers) himself, the School of Archaeology’s Ian Cartwright photographed the book for them to add to their ‘Documenting Pitt-Rivers‘ project.

Want to see how it was done?

Many thanks to Ian for sharing this photograph with us!

How can men live together on this earth? noted educator and social activist Algernon Black asks in this 1951 talk given at Cooper Union. Black, leader of The Society for Ethical Culture, starts by contrasting the ways in which we are alike and the ways in which we differ. His aim is to strike a balance between the two, based on mutual respect and understanding. Our bedrock similarities–our chromosomes, our bodies, our capacity for thought–are rooted in science, not spirituality. Yet we all possess different “rhythms,” both cultural and personal. He identifies seven levels of human relationship on an ascending scale starting at murderous intolerance, culminating in altruistic love, concluding with a plea that may sound clichéd today but perhaps did not over a half-century ago, “the need for unity with diversity.”

Turning to specifics, Black calls for desegregated schools which must, in turn, result from desegregated neighborhoods. He urges changes in curriculum, questioning why slavery is barely discussed in today’s History classes, which could in turn lead to a discussion of the day’s current race problems. Puerto Rican children should not be taught by teachers who do not speak Spanish. Teachers who teach in Harlem should know something about the community. Black is convinced that education can solve most of society’s ills. His own experiences have taught him that “man is infinitely more plastic than I ever thought.” He speaks at length about the Encampment for Citizenship program and its use of dramatic skits and role-playing as a way to confront the question of how one should respond to public displays of bigotry. He addresses anti-Semitism as well, noting that airlines and banks still do not hire Jews. While he applauds legislation to address these problems he still insists it is the responsibility of the individual who, if properly informed, will do the right thing. This belief that wisdom can be attained through the eradication of ignorance reaches its height during a question-and-answer period when he contends the A-bomb is only a threat because we have “bad human relations” with the Soviet Union.

Algernon Black (1900–1993) was a product of the belief system he came to represent. A child of immigrants, he was knocked unconscious by a public school assistant principal for a committing a minor infraction. His mother then applied for him to be granted a scholarship to the Ethical Culture School, which advocated a faith based on reason rather than God. Black, after attending Harvard, returned to the Ethical Culture and eventually took over the leadership of the society from its founder. As the New York Times notes in its obituary:

Upon the death of Dr. Adler in 1933, Mr. Black was among those most responsible for translating the movement’s message into programs to meet the crises of the Depression. And after World War II, he came to be viewed by many as emblematic of that spirit as he spoke out on social issues like equal housing opportunities or health conditions in Harlem… He headed or sat on numerous committees, panels and boards concerned with juvenile delinquency, racial discrimination and human rights.

As can he heard here, Black was a tireless speaker, hosting many talks on various radio stations. The range of his interests seems, in retrospect, remarkably prescient, addressing many problems that would only gain wider attention in the decades to come. The Ethical Culture website lists how:

…Black worked actively against discrimination in housing, chaired the Civilian Police Review Board, and participated in the Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy. In 1944, he founded the Encampment for Citizenship, a summer program for young adults with the purpose of encouraging political activism and volunteerism that sought to educate its participants about civic responsibility, participation in government, and tolerance of diversity. 

Indeed this last program, which he describes in detail during the talk, sounds like a model for many similar camps and organizations that sprang up in the 1960’s and continue to this day. The Encampment for Citizenship website speaks of how:

…Al Black was inspired by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), but thought those programs lacked diversity and didn’t explore the meaning of democracy enough for a lasting impact. The Encampment was founded on the core idea that young people can be a positive force in their communities if they develop critical thinking skills, youth activism, leadership qualities and the courage to break free from stereotypes. … The young men and women who took part in the first Encampment for Citizenship were from every part of the United States and from several other countries. White, Black, American Indian, Japanese-American and Mexican-American, North and South, Protestant, Catholic, Jew, farmer, office worker, factory worker, miner, veteran, student—all were represented. 

Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.

WNYC archives id: 150857Municipal archives id: LT1379

This piece was originally published in Wavelength, WNYC’s program guide in November, 1989 and followed a profile of NPR’s Bob Edwards.

To New York listeners, Morning Edition has always been synonymous with another name: Eric Zoro, who as news anchor has been putting together the local and state news in the predawn hours for more than a decade. This fall marks Eric’s 20th anniversary as “morning man” at WNYC.

Eric says his involvement with the news “just evolved. I’ve done everything here –traffic, weather reports, classical music.” Before he began doing the news on Morning Edition and working with WNYC’s news team, Eric was a one-man band. “I would do the morning news at 6am and then go over to City Hall, where I would tape interviews with city councilmen,” he says, adding that the current set-up suits him just fine: “Now that I’m in the studio all the time, I have more control over what I’m doing; I spend more time editing and rewriting. The news is better now because we’re able to devote more time to analysis.”

A “radio nut” since childhood, Eric got into the business shortly after he got out of the navy, when he happened to spot an advertisment for television workshops in the Yellow Pages. With the help of the GI bill, he got his first class radio license and spent several years down South working as a transmitter engineer. In Norfolk, Virginia, Eric started his own radio station literally “in a friend’s backyard.” Although the station “was an impressive hit with the listeners,” Eric had to sell out after a few years. In 1967, he came to New York, where he worked at several station “disc jockeying and doing the news” before coming to WNYC.

Eric says that his career in radio has not been without its risks. Among the mishaps that have occurred while he was on the air are an exploding microphone wire (“Thankfully someone on the other side of the studio window realized what was happening and took the helm”), a radiator that burst, and a nosebleed that obliterated his copy (“I talk my way through it: after a while you can almost repeat some stories verbatim off the top of your head”). Eric has literally put his life on the line: Once, while he was working on some wires at the Virginia station he owned, 3,000 volts passed through his body, throwing him to the floor. “Smoke was coming out of fingertips and I couldn’t talk…but I went back on the air that night.”

As news anchor, Eric says that toughest part of the job is the hours. Five days a week. Eric clocks into the WNYC newsroom at 4:30 after commuting in the dark from his home in Astoria, Queens.

Why does he do it? Partly it’s the love of radio: “The intimacy of radio is beautiful. To me, radio will always rank higher than television because no matter how powerful TV is, radio brings the message home. When you want to know what’s going on in the world or what the weather’s like, turn the radio on and in a few minutes, you’ll know. It’s a business everyone’s got their ear on.” Partly it’s the ambience of public radio: “It feels good to be giving information in a responsible way. We’re not gearing ourselves to 12- or 13-year-olds.” Most of all, says Eric, its the WNYC audience that makes his job truly rewarding. “Sometimes you think no one is listening when you’re on the air. But then, whenever I meet our listeners at fund-raisers, I’m amazed at their warmth and sincerity. They do listen. At WNYC, you connect with a real listener, not a statistic. That’s one of the tangible benefits I get from an intangible job.”

_________________________________________

Eric Zoro left WNYC in 1991 and retired to Virginia Beach, Virginia. He passed away in 2004.

Listen here to Eric’s coverage of the Mets reception at City Hall in 1969 after they won the World Series.

Le Moniteur Universel was a French newspaper founded in Paris under the title Gazette Nationale ou Le Moniteur Universel by Charles-Joseph Panckoucke. It was the main French newspaper during the French Revolution and was for a long time the official journal of the French government and at times a propaganda publication, especially under the Napoleonic regime. Le Moniteur had a large circulation in France and Europe, and also in America during the French Revolution.

We’ve been steadily working on digitizing the run of Le Moniteur that we hold here in Special Collections and Archives for about a year now (how time flies!). We’ve provided access to the publication through the end of 1808 in the FSU Digital Library. Our run of these papers starts with the founding of the newspaper in May of 1789. So, we’ve loaded 20 years worth of the publication or over 7300 issues! We still have quite a long way to go but we’re happy to be providing online access to a publication that supports scholarship here at FSU through the Institute on Napoleon and the French Revolution as well as beyond our campus.

We’re delighted that our edited volume Ark of Civilization: Refugee Scholars and Oxford University 1930-1945 which took up much of our time and energy last year is now OUT.

When we started researching the Jacobsthal archive at the Institute of Archaeology, we had the great pleasure of meeting a number of researchers who were also working on the histories and archives of other refugee scholars at Oxford. Coinciding with an exhibition on Jacobsthal at the Town Hall in Oxford in 2012, we held a workshop, hosted by Jas Elsner at Corpus Christi College in the (highly appropriate) Fraenkel room, named after refugee scholar Prof. Eduard Fraenkel (we later discovered Jacobsthal had been instrumental in arranging his move from Germany to Oxford).

As it turned out, the workshop was just the tip of the iceberg of uncovering history of the myriad of refugee scholars in the arts and humanities who passed through, engaged with, or eventually found refuge in Oxford.

The resulting volume is a step towards acknowledging the importance of Oxford’s role in rescuing, helping along, and sheltering refugees in the art and humanities, and the immense value they brought to Oxford in return. We were not aiming for an encyclopaedic tome on every scholar who passed through the city, though there is no doubt such a book needs to be written. Equally, there is a lack of knowledge on the history of women scholars, which will need addressing in future research. What we wanted to do through Ark of Civilization was to explore Oxford as an ‘ark of knowledge’ – a refuge, a meeting point, and a centre of thought in the arts and humanities. The contributors to the volume take up this theme, sometimes through individual refugee stories and sometimes looking at the University’s institutions, drawing on archives, oral histories and private collections.

There are important lessons to be learned by looking at the way in which a university and city – which had been, pre-war, essentially provincial, insular and self-contained (even by 1937 83% of Oxford Fellows had been undergraduates at the University) – adapted and transformed in the process of welcoming hundreds of refugee scholars and their families.

One strand that emerges is the importance of individuals on the British side, who worked incredibly hard to do the right thing against often overwhelming odds. These same individuals appear time and time again in the refugee stories, arranging money, papers, and even welcoming refugees to live with them. Their story is only alluded to, and will need looking at in much more detail.

Similarly, it was only by beginning to tell the refugee academic’s stories that we became aware of how much the university and city collectively owed and still owes them. This extraordinary group of Continental classicists, historians, artists, archaeologists, lawyers, philosophers, musicians, and philologists changed the university as transformative new ideas, courses, and institutions flooded in. This legacy still continues today.

A huge ‘thank you’ to all our contributors: Anthony Grenville, Laurence Brockliss, Philip Davies, Harold Mytum, Katharina Lorenz, David Gill, Christopher Stray, Oswyn Murray, Charmian Brinson, Marian Malet, Kate Lowe, Conrad Leyser, Fran Lloyd, Ann Rau Dawes, Rachel Dickson, Alexander Cullen, Bojan Bujic, Anna Teicher, Graham Whitaker, Anna Nyburg, and Rahel Feilchenfeldt.

Today’s blog post comes from Jill Dye, a second-year PhD student at Stirling on a SGSAH-funded Applied Research Collaboration with the University Dundee and the Library of Innerpeffray. Whilst her PhD research focuses on borrowers from the Library of Innerpeffray 1747-1854, Jill has been using the archives at Stirling to research the borrowers from the Leighton Library, Dunblane, as part of the Scottish Universities Research Collections Associate Scheme (SURCAS) Pilot.

How much can we know about ordinary individuals long since deceased? Any search usually starts with parish and census records via one of the many platforms of the thriving genealogy business. Before the first census in 1841, however, the only information you’re likely to find is birth, baptism, marriage and death. While the early censuses record addresses and occupations, such information does not give a particularly good insight into what they were like as an individual, only key places and dates. Any archive that allows us to see more than these simple facts and build a better picture of a person is therefore invaluable.

My research focuses on 18^th and 19^th century library borrower records, which are particularly rich in historic Perthshire. Whilst my PhD is centred on the borrower records from Innerpeffray, as part of a public outreach project I have recently been focusing on the region’s other incredible borrowing record, that of the Leighton Library at Dunblane, which is housed at the University of Stirling. Borrowing records usually give address and occupation information (far earlier than the census), but more importantly, they show how an individual interacts with the library and the types of books which they were interested in reading. These archives are invaluable not just to academics but to the family or local historian, and yet few know of their existence.

This project aims to highlight the usefulness of this resource to the wider public. The website created from the project explores the borrowings of selected Leighton Library users, using, where possible, local and family history sources to place the records of their borrowing into the wider context of their lives. These individuals range from well-known figures such as the writer John Ramsay of Ochtertyre, to a Minister from St Ninians, a local Surgeon, and even a female visitor to the Dunblane Mineral Springs. In a forthcoming guest post on the website, fellow PhD Student Maxine Branagh-Miscampbell will be commenting on the borrowings of a local student. The site will also eventually include an index of names recorded in the register so that anyone researching local individuals can easily identify whether they appear in the record. The project will culminate in a display of material from the Leighton Archives followed by a short talk, free and open to the public, which will take place at the University Library on Tuesday 28 March. More details on the event are available here.

Click here for more information on accessing the Leighton Library collections at the University. For further details on the borrowers project visit leightonborrowers.com.

Jill Dye

This week is Sunshine Week, an annual initiative that seeks to educate the public about the importance of openness in government.  Each year during mid-March, organizations dedicated to advocating for a more open government hold events around the nation to
discuss the various ways we can hold our government accountable to the people by limiting secrecy and advancing the free exchange of information.

The PIDB supports these Sunshine Week events, including one being held today at the National Archives and Records Administration.  The event features a variety of panelists, including the Archivist of the United States and the Librarian of Congress, as well professionals from the Office of Government Information Services and civil society groups, who will discuss the importance of increasing the public’s ability to access government information.

On the eve of the American Civil War, 1.6 million Irish-born people were living in the United States, most in the major industrialized cities of the North. The stories of 35 Irish families whose lives portray the nature of the Irish emigrant experience are captured in Damian Shiels’ new book, The Forgotten Irish: Irish Emigrant Experiences in America.

Damian Shiels, a celebrated conflict archaeologist, historian, and author, has focused his research in the widows and dependents pension application files of the American Civil War found at the National Archives. These records often include not only letters and private correspondence between family members, but unparalleled accounts of their lives in both Ireland and America.

The National Archives’ project to digitize these valuable files has opened up an invaluable online resource for Irish social historians. The author systematically examined each of the digitized files associated with Irishmen (using surnames as a primary indicator) in order to retrieve social information. Each of the 35 stories in the book uses at least one digitized file from the National Archives as its base and builds on the family story both through other online resources and historical documentation.

The book’s existence underscores the importance of digitization and our goal to expand public access to historical holdings, and it illustrates the importance of NARA’s holdings to social historians worldwide. In the acknowledgements section of his book, the author states:

“The majority of the research undertaken for this book was conducted from Ireland. This is something that would not have been possible prior to the increased accessibility of online records that has been a hallmark of recent years. Though nothing can truly replace direct archival research, the accessibility of millions of scanned primary documents online has provided a unique opportunity for scholars, particularly those located outside the country in which they have an interest, to engage with (and hopefully contribute towards) their chosen subject.
I had the great privilege of meeting some of the NARA team whose hard work in digitizing the pension files allowed me to explore these Irish stories. They include Archives Specialist Jackie Budell, who coordinates the project. Over the years, Jackie has been a constant source of encouragement, advice, support and friendship, for which I am extremely grateful. More than any other she deserves a special note of thanks for helping this book come to fruition.”

Join us on the eve of St. Patrick’s Day, Thursday, March 16, 2017 from 7:00pm to 8:30pm EST in the William G. McGowan Theater at the National Archives in Washington, DC for a discussion program with Damian Shiels based on his book, The Forgotten Irish. This will be the book’s launch in the United States, and the first time Damian will speak on this book in the U.S. The National Archives will be the exclusive point of sale in the U.S. for this book through May 1 when it becomes available nationwide.

Michael Hussey, a National Archives archivist and historian, and David T. Gleeson, Professor of American History at Northumbria University and author of The Green and the Gray: The Irish in the Confederate States of America, will co-moderate the discussion and audience Q&A. A book signing will follow the program.

Register to attend the event in person, or watch the livestream of the event on our YouTube channel.

Learn more about this program on our events page, and read more about Damian’s research on his blog, Irish in the American Civil War.

A nation that neglects or scorns ideas “is playing a losing game,” Clifton Fadiman warns as he hosts the 1958 National Book Awards. He hastens to add that the country he refers to is “ancient Egypt.” But the ever-widening gap between mass culture and that of the intelligentsia is clearly on the minds of many speakers. Robert Penn Warren, receiving the poetry award for his volume Promises, speaks of a Hollywood executive wondering why Warren would bother to write poetry, except “for kicks.” He then launches into an erudite discussion of the “poem as structure,” wondering how structure and meaning are related and what is the meaning of structure itself. He concludes by defining the poem as “a little myth of man’s capacity for making life meaningful”

Catherine Drinker Bowen, the non-fiction winner for her biography of Sir Edward Coke, The Lion and the Throne, points out how daunting it was to write about a man no one had ever heard of. She attributes her urge to write to being the youngest of six children. “Nobody would listen to anything I said.” She then gives advice to biographers, chiefly on what to avoid: moralizing, antiquarianism, and pedantry.

A very young and nervous-sounding John Cheever (he was forty-five), winning the fiction prize for The Wapshot Chronicle, speaks of the “amiable coolness” that has grown between himself and the book, now that it is finished. With his trademark optimism he lauds how the novel “depends on the good opinion of strangers,” calling it “a glorious form…a marketplace where we investigate man’s complexity.”

The final forty minutes of the ceremony is devoted to Randall Jarrell’s lecture on the future of culture in America. Jarrell leans heavily on the work of sociologist Ernest van den Haag, arguing that modern technology has created a monstrously homogenizing mass or pop culture in no way comparable to the folk art of previous societies. This dumbed-down “product” is essentially crowding out the formerly respected fields of creative endeavor. Television is held up as the prime culprit, but movies, magazines, and Elvis Presley come in for their share of abuse. Artists are now becoming more “market-oriented.” Jarrell makes a passionate plea for high art, disinterested and uncompromising. He calls out those who wish to straddle the divide, lumping together Peyton Place, South Pacific, Liberace, and What’s My Line, insisting, “It’s better to read Proust. Better in every way.” As a reminder of just how prescient Jarrell was as a critic, he singles out Philip Larkin (this being very early in Larkin’s career) and quotes from his poem Church Going. The talk has a rather desolating effect, as much today as it no doubt did then. One can almost hear the psychic sigh of relief when Fadiman announces that the bar is now open.

Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989) was that rare writer successful in both poetry and prose, writing a series of highly praised novels, most notably All the King’s Men. He explained, as quoted in the Poetry Foundation website:

…a poem for me and a novel are not so different. They start much the same way, on the same emotional journey, and can go either way…. At a certain level an idea takes hold. Now it doesn’t necessarily come with a form; it comes as an idea or an impulse…. I’ve started many things in one form and shifted to another…. The interesting topics, the basic ideas in the poems and the basic ideas in the novels are the same.

Catherine Drinker Bowen (1897-1973) wrote a series of highly successful biographies. The biographical dictionary Notable American Women reports how:

…a strong supporter of the rights of women to exercise their talents independent of home and family, in a speech near the end of her life Bowen observed that, “No woman of spirit can focus her entire life on the raising of two children,” she must also use her vital energies “in national causes, world causes.”

John Cheever (1912-1982) was one the preeminent writers of the mid-twentieth century. He is most remembered for his evocation of the American suburb. Martin Chilton, writing in The Telegraph, reports how Cheever: 

…understood the ambition and inferiority complexes of post-war American life. He could be funny about the “crushing boredom” of life in the suburbs with the “stupid, depressed and uncreative” people who populated their tidy houses but he was more than just an angry critic of torpid rural life. As his contemporary John Updike put it: “John Cheever was often labeled as a writer about suburbia; but many people have written about suburbia. Only Cheever was able to make an archetypal place out of it.”

Randall Jarrell (1914-1965) was a poet but also a brilliant literary critic and author of one of the great novels about academia, Pictures from an Institution. His early death was mourned by his friend, Robert Lowell, who, quoted on the website poets.org, wrote:

What Jarrell’s inner life was in all its wonder, variety, and subtlety is best told in his poetry…His gifts, both by nature and by a lifetime of hard dedication and growth, were wit, pathos, and brilliance of intelligence. These qualities, dazzling in themselves, were often so well employed that he became, I think, the most heartbreaking English poet of his generation…Always behind the sharpened edge of his lines, there is the merciful vision, his vision, partial like all others, but an illumination of life, too sad and radiant for us to stay with long—or forget.

Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.

WNYC archives id: 150532Municipal archives id: LT7951

In honor of the 152nd anniversary of the Battle of Natural Bridge, we are re-posting an entry that was originally published on March 6th, 2013 by Eddie Woodward.

Almost from its inception, there had been a military and cadet component at West Florida Seminary (1851-1901), predecessor to Florida State University. With the commencement of the Civil War in 1861, this aspect of the school’s curriculum increased in importance, so much so that the State Legislature proposed changing the name of the institution to the Florida Collegiate and Military Institute. Throughout the War, the students served as something of a home guard, occasionally guarding Union prisoners of war and always on call in the event of a Federal threat to the capitol. In early March 1865, that threat was realized when word came that a Union fleet had landed troops on the Gulf coast at the St. Marks lighthouse with the probable intention of capturing the capitol in Tallahassee.

The invading forces, commanded by Brigadier General John Newton, moved northward from the coast, hoping to cross the St. Marks River at Newport and attack St. Marks from the rear. Local militia was called out to delay the Union advance, and among those were cadets from West Florida Seminary. At noon on March 5, the cadet corps assembled at the school and marched to the state capitol where they were enlisted and sworn into Confederate service. The cadet’s principal, Captain Valentine M. Johnson then led them to the Tallahassee train station for their journey southward to meet the invaders. Johnson was a veteran and had served honorably in the Confederate Army until 1863 when he was forced to resign for health reasons. It is nearly impossible to accurately determine the number of cadets that participated in the campaign. However, reasonable estimates put the number at around twenty-five, with their known ages ranging from eleven to eighteen. At the train station, Johnson filtered out those cadets, mostly the youngest of the corps, that would not participate. Others were left behind to continue their home guard duties and to man fortifications as a last line of the capitol’s defense.

The cadets and other Confederate troops boarded a train in Tallahassee which carried them south to Wakulla Station on the St. Marks Railroad. From there, they marched six miles to the small village of Newport. There, in the late afternoon on March 5, they joined forces with a portion of Lieutenant Colonel George Washington Scott’s 5th Florida Cavalry Battalion and a small contingent of Confederate marines and militia. Scott’s men had skirmished with the Federal troops the previous day, gradually falling back from the East River Bridge toward Newport. It was at that bridge that the Union forces hoped to cross the St. Marks River, enabling them to move against St. Marks and perhaps Tallahassee. At Newport, the cadets occupied a line of breastworks running parallel to the river along its west bank. From there, they commanded the approaches to the East River Bridge, which Scott’s men had partially burned. Federal troops on the opposite side of the river still hoped to force their way across and a skirmish soon developed. By nightfall, the firing diminished, and everyone waited in their positions to see if the Federals would resume the conflict the next morning. It was in those trenches on the banks of the St. Marks River that the young cadets from the West Florida Seminary received their baptism of fire.

Newton, frustrated in his efforts to cross the St. Marks River at Newport, learned of another crossing upriver at Natural Bridge. At that location, the St. Marks River ran underground for a short distance, creating a natural crossing point. In anticipation of such a move, the Confederate General William Miller positioned Scott’s cavalry at Natural Bridge with orders to delay a crossing until reinforcements could arrive. At dawn on March 6, a battle erupted with the Federal forces unable to force their way across the span. The cadets were soon ordered out of their entrenchments at the East River Bridge and marched along the Old Plank Road to reinforce Scott’s men at Natural Bridge. One mile from the battlefield, two cadets peeled off to aid the wounded at a field hospital. The rest continued on, all the while the sounds of cannon and musket fire growing louder.

When they reached the battlefield, the cadets were positioned near the center of the Confederate line, a giant crescent enveloping the Natural Bridge. There they immediately dug trenches to protect them from enemy fire and were instructed not to fire unless a charge was made on an adjoining Confederate battery. In these early stages, the battle was primarily an artillery engagement and the cadets could do little more than wait it out with the rest of the defenders. All attempts by the Federal troops to cross at Natural Bridge were stymied with heavy losses. The worst fighting occurred in front of the Confederate line in a dense hammock that covered the crossing. The cadets were not heavily involved in this action but remained under constant artillery and musket fire. Cadet Lieutenant Byrd Coles credits the Seminary’s teachers on the battlefield with the safety of the cadets: “no doubt many of the cadets would have been struck if our teachers had not watched us constantly and made us keep behind cover.”

With the arrival of reinforcements, the Confederate troops counterattacked, charging across the bridge and driving the Federal troops a short distance. At this instance, the Union General Newton, realizing that Natural Bridge, like the East River Bridge at Newport, was too heavily defended to cross, ordered a retreat back to the St. Marks lighthouse and the protection of the Federal fleet. The cadets were then ordered to return to Newport to guard against another attempted crossing there. However, the Federal forces had had enough, and the cadets’ active duty had come to an end.

The Confederate victory against the Federal invasion was complete. Confederate casualties numbered three killed and twenty-three wounded (three mortally), with Federal losses totaling 148. The cadets from West Florida Seminary suffered no casualties. With the battle won, some of the cadets returned to Tallahassee, while others remained at Newport where they guarded two Confederate deserters that had crossed over to the Federal army and had been captured during the campaign. After the cadets witnessed their trial and execution, they escorted a group of around twenty-five Federal prisoners of war back to Tallahassee. On their return to Tallahassee, the cadets were welcomed as conquering heroes. A ceremony was held in the State House of Representatives chamber of the state capitol, where the cadets were presented with a company flag. Cadet Hunter Pope accepted the flag in the name of his comrades. It is uncertain what became of the flag, and it is thought that it returned with the cadets to the Seminary and was probably taken by Federal troops when they occupied Tallahassee after the War.

The Confederate victory at the Battle of Natural Bridge had no effect on the outcome of the War, and in less than a month, Robert E. Lee would surrender the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox Court House in Virginia. The terms of Joseph E. Johnston’s surrender of the Army of Tennessee seventeen days later, included the surrender of Confederate troops in Florida as well. On May 10, Federal troops under the command of Brigadier General Edward McCook took possession of Tallahassee. The Federal army captured and paroled approximately 8,000 Confederate soldiers, including twenty-four cadets. It is thought that some of the cadets simply returned home after the surrender and before being formally paroled.

Tallahasseeans fondly remembered the service provided by the West Florida Seminary cadets. Beginning in 1885, the state of Florida granted pensions to Confederate veterans, and two years later, they were also extended to home guard units, which included the cadets. Sixteen former cadets applied for pensions, while several others endorsed the applications of their comrades. The Tallahassee chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy issued Southern Crosses of Honor to the former cadets who applied for the award, and they received tributes as “The Youngest of the Young Who Wore the Gray.” That phrase, forever associated with their participation in the battle, is inscribed on a monument at Natural Bridge Battlefield, which is today a state park.

As a result of the cadet/students participation in the engagement, on February 28, 1957, the FSU Army and Air Force ROTC units were officially presented with battle streamers by Governor LeRoy Collins in a ceremony at Doak Campbell stadium. Today the Florida State University Reserve Officers’ Training Corps detachment is permitted to fly a battle streamer as a result of the School’s participation in the action at Natural Bridge. It is one of only three colleges and universities in the United States which is permitted to do so. In the 1990s, the campus ROTC Building was renamed the Harper-Johnson Building in honor of Captain Valentine M. Johnson and a twentieth century Air Force ROTC graduate who rose to the rank of general.

For a full account of the battle, see David J. Coles,  “Florida’s Seed Corn: The History of the West Florida Seminary During the Civil War,” Florida Historical Quarterly 77, no. 3 (Winter 1999): 283-319.

Even though WNYC had been broadcasting on FM for some seven years, the FM radio band in 1950 was still a fairly new medium. AM broadcasting was dominant and a few new FM stations actually promoted themselves by offering FM receivers to listeners in an effort to build an audience.

At the time, WNYC’s schedule had a lot of classical music programming, as the above letter suggests. This also included The Masterwork Hour, radio’s first regular broadcast of recorded classical music, as well as David Randolph’s Music for the Connoisseur, and Edward Tatnall Canby’s Recordings E.T.C. All were largely classical music oriented programs.

You’ll note too in the postscript that Director Siegel reminded listeners that they could subscribe to the station program guide, The Masterwork Bulletin, by sending in some uncancelled postage stamps. Not mentioned, however, was the philatelic nightmare all those stamps had become. Siegel was desperate to unload them. The entertainment trade publication Billboard asked readers if anyone was interested in buying $15,000 worth of unused postage stamps from WNYC and explained:

“Thruout the years WNYC has been accumulating the stamps–roomsfull of ’em. Once a year key execs in the comptroller’s office come over and count them out in an annual audit of the station’s books. Used to be they counted the stamps, one by one, by hand, but they finally gave in and put hundreds of them in sealed envelopes to simplify matters. Not too long ago, Siegel, tired of tiptoeing his way into his office between stacks of stamps and envelopes, tried to get the U.S. Post Office to take them back. U.S. policy calls for payment of around 65 cents on the dollar. Siegel got the ante up to 90 cents, but the corporation counsel said this sort of stuff couldn’t go on with city property. Meanwhile, more subscribers subscribed, and more stamps came in…”[*]

$15,000 in one, two and three cent stamps is indeed a lot of stamps. How did Siegel get rid of them? Did he get face value? When did they stop asking for program guide subscriptions paid for in stamps? These are just some the questions we still seek answers to. Please let us know, if you find out. 

U.S postage stamp from 1950.
(U.S. Government)

 ___________________________________________[*] “WNYC is Awash in Postage Stamps,” The Billboard, August 12, 1950, p. 3.

Special thanks to listener Cathy Marczyk.

Every March, the National Archives proudly observes Women’s History Month. We recognize the vast contributions women have made to our nation’s history as we explore their stories through letters, photographs, films, and other primary sources. Because the National Archives holds the records of the federal government, each day we find stories documenting the countless ways women interacted with the government and engaged with national issues of the time.

Liberty motors manufactured for government use. Electric welding on the steel jacket on a Liberty Motor cylinder. Lincoln Motor Co. plant. Detroit, Michigan. National Archives Identifier 45567610

There are also stories of women’s history from within the National Archives building itself. In October 1975, a new exhibit opened at the National Archives to coincide with International Women’s Year and the Bicentennial of the Declaration of Independence. The exhibit, “Her Infinite Variety: A 200-Year Record of American Women,” ran from July 1975 to February 1976.  The exhibit examined women’s roles at home, work, in wartime, as reformers, and in public life.

Then in 1976, the National Archives hosted a ground-breaking conference devoted to women’s history, examining records pertaining to women’s history and papers that used these rich resources to demonstrate women’s contributions throughout American history. Read the full story from the National Archives History office on our Pieces of History blog.

I am proud that women currently represent 51 percent of the National Archives’ workforce and commend their tireless efforts and recognize the significant role that they play in accomplishing our mission. Additionally, I support NARA’s Employee Affinity Group (EAG) Women’s Affinity Group (WAG), whose mission is to provide information, resources, networking opportunities, promote career growth, and facilitate mentorships for women at NARA. You can follow WAG on Twitter @RecordsofWomen and on Tumblr.

NARA’s holdings regarding women are extensive and include documents on a wide range of subjects. You can browse our Catalog for more information about records and information documenting women’s history. Are you interested in transcribing documents to help make these records more discoverable? Celebrate the contributions of American women by transcribing records from our Women’s History Month mission. Learn more and get started on our Citizen Archivist Dashboard.

View more Women’s History resources on archives.gov.

Agnes de Mille lauds the Council of the Arts, forerunner to today’s NEA. In this 1966 interview, De Mille, America’s leading exponent of modern dance, describes her role in the founding of the American government’s funding of the arts. The need grew, she explains, from the State Department’s cultural exchange programs. While other countries lavishly subsidize their institutions (West Germany, for instance, spends over fifty million dollars on music alone), American dance companies, symphonies, painters, sculptors, and writers were in such dire need of support that there was a diminishing pool of “export” culture from which to choose. De Mille was at the Rose Garden ceremony during which President Johnson signed the bill. Afterwards, he told her, “Don’t just sit around talking. Do something!” She goes on to enthusiastically describe the program, marveling that there is no cronyism or politicking, how members of the council are leading experts in their respective fields working very hard to be unbiased and equitable in their decisions. The total amount the council is authorized to disperse seems paltry by today’s standards, all of two million dollars, but already one sees the infamous “culture wars” that lay ahead, as when De Mille complains that Republicans, suspicious of any state-sponsored art, have managed to lop off a fifth of the requested allotment for the following year.

Since dance in particular is her area of expertise, she details grants to the American Ballet Theater, Martha Graham, and Jose Limon. Some of these came under the heading of emergency grants because “every dancer in America is in a state of emergency. That’s chronic. If they don’t dance, they don’t exist…whereas a painter can stack paintings in the hall and die famous.” In the future she hopes to channel money towards regional dance companies. Ideally, looking far down the road, she would like America to have four or five major, financially secure companies, one concentrating on folk dance, as well as Martha Graham endowed for life and her work preserved. One gets the sense of a competent, focused, enormously driven advocate. When the host tries summarizing her many accomplishments and positions she points out one more: having organized the stage directors and choreographers, she is the country’s only female head of labor union.

Agnes de Mille was born in 1905. She came from a family with deep theatrical connections. (Her uncle was the famous Hollywood director C. B. de Mille.) Having determined at an early age that she wanted to dance, she performed and choreographed for several companies, notably the American Ballet Theater. Her ballet Rodeo (1943) with music by Aaron Copeland, was a seminal event in American dance history. The dance critic Jack Anderson, writing in The New York Times, describes her style:

Viewing dance as a theatrical and expressive art, Miss de Mille stressed motivated gestures rather than niceties of classical style in her choreography and in her coaching of dancers. For her, bodily movement was a form of communication akin to speech. An eclectic, she drew from ordinary gesture and everyday movement as well as from the technical vocabularies of classical ballet, modern dance and folk and social dance. The dramatic situation always determined the type of movement she employed.

De Mille’s breakthrough, however, came not in the world of ballet proper but on Broadway. Her dances for the hit musical Oklahoma! gave dance a new stature within the form, integrating it with the other elements rather than having exist as a stand-alone hiatus from the dramatic action. Martin Bernheimer, on the Los Angeles Times, describes how:

…she made Broadway history in 1943 with the dream ballet, a creation that integrated dance with the basic narrative. For once, the plot didn’t stop cold for a hippity-hop diversion that would bring on the showgirls. With a little help from Rodgers & Hammerstein, De Mille introduced choreography that propelled the drama forward and, at the same time, added telling psychological comment.

After the success of Oklahoma!, De Mille became a choreographing force both on Broadway and in the ballet world. During what is considered the Golden Age of the American musical she choreographed the dances for Brigadoon, Paint Your Wagon and many other legendary shows. Her notable ballets include Black Ritual, Fall River Legend, Three Virgins and a Devil, and many others.

As this interview shows, De Mille was also a tireless promoter of dance, as well as author (she wrote a controversial biography of Martha Graham), public speaker, and memoirist. After a near fatal stroke in 1975 she wrote about her grueling struggle to regain control of her body in Reprieve (1981.)  Imperious, a strong and publically visible woman in a time when there were few, she was frank about what her achievement had cost. In a 1981 profile in People Magazine, she expressed no regrets:

“I came to be known on Broadway as a terror,” she notes with satisfaction, “a really tough, intransigent woman.” She has never been one to remember the names of the kids in the chorus or to sweeten her tart evaluations of other people’s work. “I’ve never been a very kind person,” she admits. “I’m me. And I had to do what I had to do.”

Agnes de Mille died in 1993. 

Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.

WNYC archives id: 150008Municipal archives id: T2215

The 2015-2017 NEH-Funded Preservation Project has been made possible in part by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the Human Endeavor. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this web resource do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

NOTE: The clipboard feature described below is currently unavailable. We are working on the problem.

Our online search has been upgraded to version 2.4 of AtoM and with that has come many changes in its look and behaviour. We’d like to guide you through the major differences.

COPYRIGHTED DIGITAL OBJECTS

One of the more exciting new features is the change in your access to copyrighted digital objects. Previously, if you were searching the database from home you could only access the thumbnail of a digital object under copyright to a third party (that is, not the City of Vancouver) or of unknown copyright. If you tried to look at a larger image, you would see a warning that said “This digital object can only be accessed in person at the Archives because of the associated rights”. You would have had to come to the Archives to see the full image online.

With our upgraded system, you will now see the larger image in the full record page.

Larger image of photograph with unknown copyright. Reference code AM281-S8-: CVA 180-5649.

If you click on that image to save the larger image or access the high-resolution version, an agreement appears asking you to use the image for Fair Dealing purposes unless you have permission from the copyright holder. Continue reading →

The C.B.I. Pointie Talkie Number 4 is a fascinating phrase book issued by the US Army Air Force for airmen in the China Burma India Theater in World War II. Containing sections in Chinese, Burmese, French, Annamese, Thai (Siamese), Shan, Lolo, and Lao, the book offers phrases for airmen to point at when trying to communicate with locals. The phrases range from basics like “Where is the latrine?” to pointed questions that reveal the fears and suspicions American soldiers were likely to have in a war zone, such as “Are there any spies around here?” The Pointie Talkie has recently been added to our rare book collections alongside a 1944 Japanese Phrase Book issued by the War Department.