Opening up the Archive: 50 years of life on campus

University of Stirling Archives

10am-4pm

Saturday 18 March 2017

As part of a wide range of events being held across campus as part of Stirling Open Doors the University Archives is throwing open its doors to tell the story of the university’s foundation, growth and development. Come and explore the material we hold documenting the history of the university including our extensive photographic collection and view our new Timeline exhibition.

We are also inviting visitors to share their memories of the university. Bring along your old photographs of the campus and we will digitise them and add them to our collection, preserving further images of life on campus. If you’ve got stories to tell, or memories to share, you can contribute to our Stirling Stories project, which is being organised in collaboration with the School of Arts & Humanities. Students from our Heritage and Film & Media courses will be on hand to interview visitors about their memories of the university, creating a lasting record for the University Archive.

Full details of the University’s Stirling Open Doors Day events can be found at:

http://www.stir.ac.uk/anniversary/events/2017/communityopendoorsday/

Students photographed during Charities Week, 1969.

In March 2012 eight wooden crates of WWI posters and ephemera were transferred from the Mead Art Museum to the Archives & Special Collections. These WWI materials all came from John P. Cushing, Amherst Class of 1882, and a complete guide to the collection is now available.

John Pearsons Cushing was born in Lansingburgh, New York on September 5, 1861. He attended high school in Lynn, MA after which he studied for two years at Boston University. He transferred to Amherst College in 1880 and finished his B.A. with the class of 1882. He went on to receive his M.A. from Amherst in 1885. During the time he spent working on his masters degree he also taught at Holyoke High School. He acted as Vice-Principal of Holyoke High from 1889-1892.

From 1892-1894 Cushing attended the University of Leipzig. His dissertation, ‘The Development of the Commercial Policies of the United States’ was published in 1894. Cushing received his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Leipzig that same year. Upon his return to the United States, Cushing became a professor at Knox College in Galesburg, IL from 1894-1900. He returned to New England in 1900 to begin serving as headmaster of Hillhouse High School in New Haven, CT. In 1911 Cushing left Hillhouse in order to begin his own country day school for boys. Hamden Hall opened in Whitneyville (what is now Hamden) CT in 1912 where Cushing acted as headmaster until his retirement in 1927.

While headmaster of Hamden Hall School for Boys, Cushing encouraged his students to collect WWI posters.  The above newspaper clipping reads “Posters of all sizes and descriptions, posters large and small, posters gray and sad, posters artistic and lurid, in fact every kind of poster that has in any way to do with the conflict of nations now raging is what [the students] are interested in.  One of the objects of their collection, of course, is to obtain as great a variety and as many hard-to-get posters as they are able to, and competition is among them, though the spirit of friendly rivalry prevails.”

During the outbreak of the first World War, governments across the globe realized that they needed an effective way of communicating their needs to the general populace. Through the production of propaganda posters, they could reach a wide audience and create a unified cause for citizens to get behind.

Citizens contributed to the war effort by enlisting, constructing military supplies, conserving food, and buying war bonds. Artists contributed by donating their work to various government agencies for the propaganda posters. These colorful works of art appealing to patriotism and nationalism grabbed the attention of the viewer and communicated a message powerfully and succinctly.The visual appeal of the posters was made possible by the printing process known as choromolithography. In this process, a flat piece of limestone is used. The positive part of the image is applied with an oil-based ink. The rest of the stone is washed with a water-based solution. The oil repels water so that when the paper is applied, only the oil sticks and the rest of the sheet is kept clean by the water. This process can be done multiple times with different colors in order to achieve a poster print with as many colors as the artist desires. The most difficult part of this process is keeping the same alignment during multiple prints on the same poster.

This collection contains more than 700 World War I posters, ephemera, and propaganda collected by John P. Cushing (AC 1882). The collection includes work from the United States, France, Germany, Italy, Great Britain, Canada and Spain.  The finding aid for this collection includes item level detail about each poster.  Many of the posters in this collection have been photographed and the images are available on the Archives’ Flickr page.  To view items from this collection in the Archives, please contact the department in advance to request access at archives@amherst.edu.

Amidst sequential snow storms, unseasonably warm weather, and a wild scramble to install the library’s big annual exhibit, we ventured into the wilds of Providence for a studio visit with our 2017 Creative Fellow Keri King.

Here you can see Keri seated at her wooden drafting table (it’s a family heirloom!).

You can read our previous blog post about Keri’s research process here. During this visit, she described her collage process, and the new methods she’s trying during her fellowship:

This Creative Fellowship is driving me to explore color and new collage techniques. I’m experimenting with a combination of analogue and digital processes to create my illustrative collage. I’m adjusting imagery [from high-resolution scans of library materials] in Photoshop so that each collage element prints at the desired size, before I physically cut it out… Typically, I work in black and white; I generate collage materials by photocopying source documents – I can get the size I need through repeated photocopying using semi-rational fraction-based math. Afterwards, I edit with whiteout, sharpie, and black ink … This go round I’m manipulating my color palette in Photoshop and I’m popping details in the hard copy with paint. It’s yielding a lot of juicy surprises!

Once images are cut out, Keri arranges them on a surface using white artist’s tape, which is repositionable, so she can try various layouts. An awesome collage tip from this pro: “I use Sharpie on the cut edge of the paper to avoid flares of white in the finished product. After doing this for a while, I found out that Terry Gilliam used to do this in his cut-out animations for Monty Python!”

Keri’s finished product–an 8 foot x 8 foot, full-color mural, enlarged from the collage she’s working on in these photos–will be on view at the March 1st On the Table launch party. Join us that evening for live music, a food art installation, and the unveiling of our 2017 exhibition!

Coming from a strictly public library background, at first the world of Special Collections felt just as foreign and mysterious to me as I’m sure it does to many people. Luckily, as a graduate assistant in Special Collections & Archives, I’m in exactly the right position to learn more about it every day. While it might seem obvious why some books are special — they’re often very old, or very scarce, or both — archives are a bit more elusive. As the Manuscript Archivist explained to me, archives provide contextual primary source documents to help researchers understand the environment surrounding a person or event.

My first project as a graduate assistant involved the Gloria Jahoda Collection – or rather, collections. An author whose husband taught at Florida State University, Gloria Jahoda initially donated a portion of her personal notes and manuscripts to FSU Libraries forty years ago. Some donors might offer more material to the archives after the first gift; this can happen quickly or many years later. These new items are assessed to see if they fit within the scope of the initial donation and, in many cases, added to the same collection. Sometimes, though, this doesn’t happen. When I started working with her manuscripts, Jahoda’s work was spread across seven collections, all donated at different times. I was first tasked with looking over the materials to find a major theme that might unite them into a single collection. I divided the work into new series – like smaller chapters in a single book, series help organize a collection by grouping items together based on their original purpose. I then rearranged the materials, removed duplicate publications, relabeled folders, and copied unstable materials (like old newspaper articles) onto paper that wouldn’t discolor or deteriorate. As this was happening, I learned a lot about who Gloria Jahoda was.

She was born in Chicago and was very proud of the fact that her first poem was published at the age of four. She liked to write on overlooked areas of Florida, including Tallahassee, which she described as being “200 miles from anywhere else.” She photographed her cats. She enjoyed classical music, especially by the English composer Frederick Delius. Her book The Road to Samarkand chronicled Delius’s life, including his time spent managing an orange plantation in Florida. She was an elected registrar of the Creek Nation. She spoke about ecology and conservation. Gloria Jahoda was bold, witty, and passionate.

What’s left behind after her death in 1980 are her books and, now, the Gloria Jahoda Papers. Visitors to Special Collections can track the development of Jahoda’s works, learn about her personal interests, and laugh at the jokes in her letters. Jahoda’s books document an interesting time in Florida’s development, and I’m proud to say I contributed to preserving her work for future research.

To learn more about the Gloria Jahoda Papers, the finding aid can be found here.

In this 1949 radio broadcast, an uncredited cast (Sydney Poitier? Ruby Dee? Ossie Davis? They were all members) puts on Synge’s early one act play Riders to the Sea. First staged in 1904, Synge’s play portrays a household of Aran Island peasants whose menfolk are being remorselessly taken by the sea. The language, a highly stylized version of Hibernian English, sweeps to its incantatory tragic climax. If there is any implied affinity between the hardscrabble, hand-to-mouth existence of this marginalized segment of Irish society and that of the African-American community it is kept well below the surface. The only hint that this is not typical (ie. white) theater company is in the final moments, when the mother, Maurya, as she mourns the drowning of her last son, does so to the background of her daughters’ keening laments…which sound hauntingly like Negro spirituals.

Largely forgotten today, The American Negro Theater was a revolutionary experiment for its time. The website African American Registry tells how:

…the theater was founded in Harlem in 1940 by the Black writer Abram Hill and the Black actor Frederick O’Neal, who wanted to create a company that would provide opportunity for African-American artists and entertainment for African-American audiences unavailable downtown on Broadway. Over the next nine years, 50,000 people attended ANT productions. Hill and O’Neal felt that the mainstream professional theater provided only limited opportunity for African-Americans, and that it encouraged a “star system,” under which actors constantly competed to be the one, breakthrough hit. Hill and O’Neal were more interested in the potential for local Black community theaters, where directors, writers, and technicians would be as important as actors would, and where Black artists would be able to develop their talents. They sent postcards inviting other local writers and actors to join them, and in June of 1940, 18 artists met to form the American Negro Theater.

This combination of artistic and social goals was typical of the period. One can see in the organization’s development a microcosm of how the personal and political climate changed in the subsequent decade. Commercial success accentuated the natural rift that developed as a politically charged attitude towards theater changed to regarding plays, radio and, eventually, movies as more of a pure entertainment experience. Blackpast.org reports that:

…ANT’s program was divided into three categories: stage production and a training and radio program. …The play that brought ANT the most recognition, however, was Anna Lucasta. It opened at The Harlem Library Theatre, but Broadway producers were anxious to move it downtown because of its commercial appeal. The show ran on Broadway for 957 performances before it toured throughout the country and later abroad in London, England. The success of Anna on Broadway had a two-fold effect on the company. It caused the demise of ANT because it departed from the company’s community roots and resulted in the loss of its founder Hill, who resigned due to the shift in goals and ideology.

The American Negro Theater’s legacy can be seen most obviously in its famous alumni. However, its influence ran deeper than that. In a time when it was almost impossible for an aspiring black actor to find even apprentice work, much less be considered for “serious” roles, the ANT provided a crucial training ground for a generation of performers who would have otherwise had no alternative. As theclio.com notes:

Many company members left the ensemble and had immediate success. Ruby Dee after leaving was in the hit Broadway production of A Raisin in The Sun by Lorraine Hansberry. Sidney Poitier, also had a turbulent stint with the company, being rejected by ANT twice he finally managed to prove himself and gain roles with company after fellow member, Belafonte, left a show for another job. Sidney was seen in a touring production and began his film career shortly after. Harry Belafonte [was] in his time was one of the most revered members of the acting ensemble. He also left for stardom shortly after his arrival. The educational portion of the company was very extensive and rigid. It allowed many young talented African-American stage actors to be trained in all elements of theater, film, and radio. In 1945, the theater was the first to have its own radio show featuring performances of it operas and a variety show.

No better example of the ANT’s bringing the very possibility of a theatrical career to people who lived worlds away from Broadway is how the future star Harry Belafonte discovered the organization. While working as a “janitor’s assistant” he was given two tickets to a performance…as a tip.

Harlem Cultural Archives, with the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, produced this video for the 75th Anniversary of the American Negro Theatre exhibition.

Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.

WNYC archives id: 8350Municipal archives id: LT70

Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune (1875-1955) was a prominent, influential African American woman of her time who became an American educator, philanthropist, and civil rights activist. In 1904, Dr. Bethune created a school for African American girls in Daytona Beach, Florida known as The Daytona Beach Educational and Industrial School for girls. In 1923, the school combined  with the all male Cookman Institute of Jacksonville which later became Bethune Cookman University. In 1935, Dr. Bethune cultivated and became President of multiple organizations to fight against school segregation and inadequate healthcare for black children. Her organizations consisted of the State Federation of Colored Women’s Club,  the prestigious National Association of Colored Women’s Club, and the National Council of Negro Women. Dr. Bethune also served as the President of Bethune Cookman University until 1942, and later served again from 1946-1947. On April 25, 1944, she fostered the development of the United Negro College Fund which has provided scholarships for thousands of African American students, including 39 black colleges and universities.

Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune profound work as an humanitarian in such a tumultuous time period in history allowed her to become one of the most eminent leaders in history. She was appointed to numerous national commissions including the Coolidge Administration’s Child Welfare Conference, the Hoover Administration’s National Commission on Child Welfare and Commission on Home Building and Home Ownership. She eventually became an advisor on minority affairs in the Roosevelt Administration, organizing two national conferences on the problematic issues that black Americans faced on a daily basis. While providing counsel to presidents and networking with America’s elite, Mary McLeod Bethune remained accessible to mentor young men and women to be great in their chosen paths academically and professionally.

Dr. Bethune, amazing strength and commitment to service pave the way for African Americans to be victorious. Her, impeccable journey truly exemplifies a line from Maya Angelou’s poem,  called “Our Grandmothers” which states, “I come as one but I stand as 10,000.” She truly envisioned more for her people and stood at the forefront to use her voice as a weapon to promote change.

-Tammy Joyner,

Claude Pepper Library Associate

Mary McLeod Bethune Part 1

Video Creator: Brian Stewart (YouTube.com),Date created: January 24, 2009, Category-Education

Mary McLeod Bethune Part 2

Video Creator: Brian Stewart (Youtube.com),Date created: January 24, 2009, Category-Education

Mary McLeod Bethune Part 3

Video Creator: Brian Stewart (YouTube.com), Date Created, January 24, 2009, Category-Education

FSU Special Collections & Archives is pleased to add a new chapbook to the John MacKay Shaw Collection of Childhood in Poetry. The History of the House That Jack Built is a popular nursery rhyme told as a cumulative narrative. Starting with “This is the House that Jack built,” each verse adds on to the previous one, creating a delightfully nonsensical, rhyming story. This edition was printed in 1841 by Gustav S. Peters, a notable printer of broadsides who often catered to the German-speaking population of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and its environs. While many cheaply printed books of the time were colored by hand, if at all, Peters was one of the first printers in America to make color printing commercially viable (even if, as seen above, his colored printing blocks didn’t always register perfectly). This edition printed by Peters is one of several versions of The House That Jack Built that can be found in the Shaw Collection.

“The view is tremendous!” John Glenn exclaims, as the booster rocket falls away and his spacecraft, the Friendship 7, is launched into orbit. This file is a compilation of news coverage from the 1962 Mercury 6 mission, which successfully put the first American in orbit around Earth and made a national hero of the 41-year-old astronaut. After a brief introduction by a reporter, we listen in on “raw” sound from NASA’s communication with the craft as well as chatter from Mission Control and various tracking stations around the world.

Glenn seems completely comfortable as he narrates his adventure, describing the view, identifying constellations, punctuating the completion of his first orbit by joking, “That was about the shortest day I’ve ever run into.” But the former test- and bomber pilot is hardly a passive spectator. A problem with the craft’s guidance system forces him to “fly by wire,” taking manual control of the firings to stay on course. The flight is, by today’s expectations, startlingly brief. From launch to impact the mission took a little less than five hours. There is a moment of tension during re-entry when a faulty micro-switch indicates the heat shield has detached. But the technicians on the ground are fairly sure this is an inaccurate reading. More drama occurs during the radio silence after re-entry when the craft has not yet been spotted by the Destroyer Noa, which is waiting for it near Grand Turk Island. But all is well, with Glenn being plucked out of the sea and pronounced “a hale and hearty astronaut.” There follows President Kennedy’s congratulatory call to Glenn and then a series of post-flight press conferences with various scientists assessing the mission.

John Glenn Jr., Mercury 6
(NASA Glenn Research Center (NASA-GRC) [Public domain]/Wikimedia Commons)

John Glenn (1921-2016) already had a spectacular career in aviation before being selected as one of the seven original Mercury astronauts. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross six times, flying missions in both World War II and Korea. In 1957, he set a transcontinental speed record from Los Angeles to New York, spanning the country in 3 hours and 23 minutes, the first transcontinental flight to average supersonic speed. But none of this, of course, compared to the excitement generated by his orbiting Earth, as the United States attempted to catch up in the “space race” with the USSR. The New York Times reported:

The whole continent watched on television as Colonel Glenn’s capsule was launched. The world listened by radio. And almost 100,000 persons had a direct view from here and the beaches around as the Atlas rocket booster bore the Project Mercury capsule upward with a thrust of 360,000 pounds…. There were the usual cries of “Go! Go!” at take-off. Tears came to the eyes of some viewers, in the blockhouse, at the observer’s stand two miles from the launching pad, and on the beaches.

Glenn went on to be elected a US Senator, representing Ohio for twenty-five years. One of his major accomplishments was being the chief author of  the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Act of 1978. This did not, however, mark the end of his career as an astronaut. As the website space.com notes:

Despite his advancing age, Glenn was not yet finished with the space program. On Oct. 29, 1998, while still a senator, Glenn made history again when he rode the space shuttle Discovery to become the oldest space traveler. Over the course of nine days, the shuttle orbited Earth 134 times.

Unlike many astronauts who were not comfortable with the attention becoming a national icon brought, Glenn seemed to thrived as a public figure. After serving in the Senate he founded what eventually became the John Glenn College of Public Affairs, which is dedicated to encouraging careers in public service. And he still commented on current political questions, exhibiting the same commonsense approach he did under far more pressure-packed circumstances. As Fox News noted:

The astronaut, now 93 with fading eyesight and hearing, told The Associated Press in a recent interview that he sees no contradiction between believing in God and believing in evolution. “I don’t see that I’m any less religious by the fact that I can appreciate the fact that science just records that we change with evolution and time, and that’s a fact,” said Glenn, a Presbyterian. “It doesn’t mean it’s less wondrous and it doesn’t mean that there can’t be some power greater than any of us that has been behind and is behind whatever is going on.”

Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.

WNYC archives id: 150264Municipal archives id: LT9329

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has long had a special relationship with the incoming Presidential Administration, including providing archival and records management guidance and support to the White House upon request. This relationship continues throughout the Administration, until the Presidential records are transferred into the National Archives for permanent preservation in our President Library system.

The 2016 Guidance on Presidential Records is available on archives.gov. This document, which NARA has prepared for every incoming administration since 2000, provides basic background information on the Presidential Records Act (PRA) of 1978, as amended, 44 U.S.C. §§ 2201-2209; how the National Archives implements the PRA; and how we assist the White House in managing its records under the PRA.

NARA has also continued to engage with Federal agencies to inform them of their records management responsibilities under the Federal Records Act (FRA).  The Office of the Chief Records Officer at the National Archives has updated its Documenting Your Public Service publication and developed other resources for agencies to ensure that records management is an integral part of agency transition plans. See the Records Express blog for more information about records management guidance for the Presidential transition.

It is important to understand the distinction between Presidential records and Federal records, which are governed by the two different laws described above:

Presidential records only apply to the President, the Vice President, their immediate staff, or a unit or individual of the Executive Office of the President whose function is to advise or assist the President, in the course of conducting activities which relate to or have an effect upon the carrying out of the constitutional, statutory, or other official or ceremonial duties of the President. (For further details, please see the Presidential Records Act.)

Federal records apply to all “federal agencies” in the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches, but do not include the Supreme Court, the Senate, the House of Representatives, and the Architect of the Capitol. 

The rules governing Federal and Presidential records and their preservation have not changed since the FRA and PRA were amended in 2014, but updating and sharing our guidance is one component of the support that NARA offers to both Federal agencies and the White House, especially when a new administration begins.

 Celebrating the Life and Legacy of Thurgood Marshall

Thurgood Marshall became the 1st African American man to serve as Justice of the Supreme Court. Throughout his career he possessed tenacity and resilience in ending legal segregation by becoming a legal counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In that work, he broke barriers in American history by guiding the litigation to eradicate the legal underpinnings of Jim Crow segregation laws. Moreover, he became victorious in his position as Justice of the Supreme Court by crafting a distinctive jurisprudence marked by uncompromising liberalism, unusual attentiveness to practical considerations beyond the formalities of law, and an indefatigable willingness to dissent.

Marshall was born in Baltimore, Maryland on July 2, 1908 and was the grandson of a slave. Marshall’s father religiously instilled morals and values in his son’s upbringing as well as an appreciation for the United States Constitution, including the rule of law. As a result, his father’s words served as a strong foundation which later became evident in his profound role in law. Marshall completed high school in 1925 and later followed his brother, William Aubrey Marshall, to the historically black Lincoln University in Chester County, Pennsylvania. Surprisingly, his classmates at Lincoln included a distinguished group of  future Black leaders who would later make their mark on the world. For example, poet and author Langston Hughes, the future President of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, and musician Cab Calloway. Before Marshall graduated from Lincoln University, he married his first wife, Vivian “Buster” Burey. Sadly, their 25 year marriage ended with her untimely death from cancer in 1955.

Later in 1930, Marshall applied to the University of Maryland Law School, but was denied admission because he was black. He did not know that this event he perceived as a failure would later turn into one of the most ground breaking cases that would leverage his professional career and negate superficial college admittance procedures based on race. Thurgood sought admission at Howard University Law School and was accepted that same year. During that year, Marshall became deeply influenced by the new dean, Charles Hamilton Houston. Houston instilled in all of his students the desire to apply the tenets of the Constitution to all Americans. In 1933, Marshall took on his first case involving the University of Maryland Law School which was the same Law school that denied his admission years before due to his skin color. He successfully sued the University of Maryland for the refusal of admitting a young African American Amherst University graduate by the name of Donald Gaines Murray due to race. Author H.L. Mencken celebrated Marshall’s victory by writing that the decision of denial by the University of Maryland Law School was “brutal and absurd,” and they should not object to the “presence among them of a self-respecting and ambitious young Afro-American well prepared for his studies by four years of hard work in a class A college.”

After accomplishing this huge milestone in his career, Thurgood Marshall  followed his Howard University mentor, Charles Hamilton Houston to New York and later became Chief Counsel for the NAACP. During this period, Mr. Marshall was asked by the United Nations and the United Kingdom to help draft the constitutions of the emerging African nations of Ghana and what is now Tanzania. It was felt that the person who so successfully fought for the rights of America’s oppressed minority would be the perfect person to ensure the rights of the white citizens in these two former European colonies. After amassing an impressive record of Supreme Court challenges to state-sponsored discrimination, including the landmark Brown v. Board decision in 1954, President John F. Kennedy appointed Thurgood Marshall to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. In this capacity, he wrote over 150 decisions including support for the rights of immigrants, limiting government intrusion in cases involving illegal search and seizure, double jeopardy, and right to privacy issues. Biographers Michael Davis and Hunter Clark note that, “none of his (Marshall’s) 98 majority decisions was ever reversed by the Supreme Court.” In 1965 President Lyndon Johnson appointed Judge Marshall to the office of U.S. Solicitor General. Before his subsequent nomination to the United States Supreme Court in 1967, Thurgood Marshall won 14 of the 19 cases he argued before the Supreme Court on behalf of the government. Thurgood Marshall lead an impeccable career in law by winning more cases before the United States Supreme Court than any other American.

Until his retirement from the highest court in the land, Justice Marshall established a rapport by using his voice to enforce change to improve the lives of minority groups and improve laws to promote equality. Having honed his skills since the case against the University of Maryland, he developed a profound sensitivity to injustice by way of the crucible of racial discrimination in this country. As an Associate Supreme Court Justice, Thurgood Marshall left a legacy that expands that early sensitivity to include all of America’s voiceless. Justice Marshall died on January 24, 1993.

-Tammy Joyner, Claude Pepper Library Associate

February is Black History Month. This month and every day, the National Archives celebrates the extraordinary contributions of African Americans to our history and culture.

The National Archives holds a wealth of material documenting the African American experience, including millions of records related to the interactions between African Americans and the Federal government. These materials are highlighted in online resources, in public programs, and throughout traditional and social media.

You don’t have to live in Washington, DC or visit one of our research rooms to be inspired by the wealth of information available at the National Archives. Visit our African American History webpage to learn more about events and activities celebrating African American History. This webpage contains photographs, historical videos, articles, links to online resources for research, public programs and events, Presidential Library resources, exhibits, and much more.

You can also browse our Catalog for more information about records and holdings documenting the African American experience. Are you interested in transcribing documents to help make these records more accessible? We’ve created an African American History transcription mission in celebration of Black History Month. Learn more and get started on our Citizen Archivist Dashboard.

Questions about conducting research at the National Archives? Visit our African American History research group on History Hub. And see our Pieces of History blog for more information and resources about the National Archives holdings related to African American History.

Dorie Miller (1919-1943), was the 1st African American man awarded the U.S. Navy Cross to acknowledge his heroic efforts when the battleship of West Virginia was attacked at Pearl Harbor.

Doris Miller, known as “Dorie,”was born in Waco, Texas, in 1919. He was one of four sons. After high school, he worked on his father’s farm until 1938 when he enlisted in the Navy as a mess attendant (kitchen worker) to earn money for his family. Unfortunately, at the time the Navy was segregated so combat positions were not open to African Americans. Yet, Dorie went against all odds by proving that African American men had the ability to serve in combat equal in skill to any man regardless of race. On December 7, 1941, Dorie arose at 6 a.m. to serve breakfast aboard USS West Virginia when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Dorie, immediately reported to his assigned battle station and began moving the ship’s Captain to safety who was brutally wounded. Miller then returned to deck and noticed that the Japanese planes were still dive-bombing the U.S. Navy Fleet. As a result, he picked up a 50 caliber Browning anti-aircraft machine gun without any professional training and managed to shoot down three to four enemy aircraft. With great bravery he fired until he ran out of ammunition, by then the men were being ordered to abandon ship as the West Virginia slowly began to sink.

Shortly after, the Pittsburgh Courier , one of the country’s most widely circulated black newspapers sent a reporter out to recognize and honor Miller’s bravery. On April 1, 1942 Miller was commended by the Secretary of the Navy, Frank Knox, and on May 27, 1942 he received the Navy Cross for his extraordinary courage in battle. In fact, Miller’s rank was raised to Mess Attendant First Class on June 1, 1942. Dorie Miller was later sent on tour in the States to raise money for war bonds, but he was called back in the Spring of 1943 to serve on the new escort carrier known as the USS Liscome Bay. The ship was operating in the Pacific near the Gilbert Islands. at 5:10 a.m. on November 24, the ship was brutally hit by a single torpedo fired from a Japanese submarine. The torpedo lead to a massive bomb explosion in minutes. Miller was initially listed as missing; by November 1944, his status was changed to “resumed dead.” Only 272 men survived the attack.

Because of Dorie Miller commendable sacrifices for his country there is a Dorie Miller park in Hawaii and several schools and buildings that are named throughout the U.S. to exemplify his valiant temperament during such a monumental event in history.

The Claude Pepper Library Celebrates the Legacy and Life of Dorie Miller and Salutes him for his bravery.

-Tammy Joyner

Claude Pepper Library Associate

Special Collections & Archives maintains an Omeka instance mostly to be used with the Museum Objects classes that use our physical exhibit space periodically and also need to include a digital exhibit with their work. Our hope is that someday the FSU Digital Library will be able to handle the digital exhibit needs for these classes. However, for the moment, Omeka is our tool for this need.

We were approached a few months ago by a professor looking for a new home for his Omeka site that classes had used to collect information and share his student’s work from Religion classes at FSU. As these collections fit in well with the collecting areas of Special Collections & Archives, particularly as we expand our collections of local religion institutional records, this Omeka site was a good candidate for migration to the Special Collections Omeka instance.

Happily, Omeka provides a plug-in that allows for the migration of materials between Omeka instances to be a fairly painless process. The site has been migrated (mostly) successfully. A few lingering problems with video files is being working on by the professor and some Library IT staff. In the meantime, enjoy this new addition to the FSU Special Collections & Archives Omeka lineup, Religion @ Florida State University.

This past November I attended the 2016 conference of the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA). It took place in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania – the City of Bridges. Here are a few of the highlights.

The Roberto Clemente Bridge – one of 446 in Pittsburgh! Photograph by Jana Grazley

HACK DAY

A pre-conference tradition since 2013 is the AMIA/DLF (Digital Library Federation) Hack Day, wherein participants collaborate on short projects to develop solutions to various problems associated with moving image preservation and access. Hack Day is a free event focused on practical outcomes and skill-sharing amongst developers and non-developers. This year’s projects included:

• Checksumthing, a Python script to transform the data inside checksum sidecar files to the archivist’s desired format. The project won two awards – Best Solution to the Stated Problem and the audience favourite award.
• Loggr, a schema and template for logging audiovisual artifacts (errors, usually visual, introduced during the digitization process) using consistent terminology. Loggr can help archivists create reports on the frequency and severity of artifacts in order to prioritize quality control work.
• Linked Film Description Framework, a linked open data driven web resource that retrieves descriptive information about film titles from resources listed in Wikidata;
• Wikidata for Digital Preservation, a contribution to an ongoing project to describe file formats, software, and other elements of digital preservation as structured data on Wikidata. This team created a crosswalk that compared existing audiovisual file format properties in Wikidata with properties from other sources of format description, and made recommendations for new properties to be added to Wikidata. I participated in this team, and we won an award for best embodiment of the Hack Day Manifesto!

AFTER DIGITIZATION

A common misconception among non-archivists is that for fragile or obsolescent media, digitization is “the end” – that once media are digitized, the preservation and access problems are solved. In reality, the new digital file requires just as much (if not more!) management and care as the physical item for which it is a surrogate. Many of this year’s sessions focused on the work that needs to be done after digitization. Brendan Coates of the University of California Santa Barbara and Morgan Morel of George Blood Audio Video presented QCT-Parse, a series of scripts for automating actions in QCTools. QCTools is open-source software for performing quality control on digitized video files, and QCT-Parse includes scripts for generating, then parsing a QCTools report in order to speed up quality control work. QCT-Parse is a wonderful example of the way open source allows members of the preservation community to build upon one another’s tools, and I look forward to exploring its application to our quality control workflows here at CVA.

Output of the QCTools Report Parser available as part of QCT-Parse

Chris Lacinak of AVPreserve and Jon Dunn of Indiana University presented on Indiana University’s Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative, which is now addressing the challenge of mass description following mass digitization. In order for researchers to be able to discover digitized audiovisual content, description needs to be sufficiently granular, and IU is exploring how best to harness multiple existing sources of metadata and emergent technologies like facial recognition and content matching to generate meaningful descriptions on a large scale. I look forward to seeing how outcomes from this project might apply to the rest of the field.

Metadata generation mechanisms (MGMs) in IU’s three project phases

DIGITAL PRESERVATION STREAM

There was also a curated stream dedicated to the digital preservation of audiovisual content – a very timely topic as more and more organizations amass digital AV through digitization projects and acquisition of born-digital records. The stream was spearheaded and curated by Kathryn Gronsbell of the Carnegie Hall Archives, Shira Peltzman of UCLA, Ashley Blewer of the New York Public Library, and Rebecca Fraimow of WGBH and the American Archive of Public Broadcasting. This stream was particularly relevant for me as I’m currently tackling over twelve terabytes of born-digital video created in the making of GVTV in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Anne Gant of Amsterdam’s EYE Filmmuseum spoke about the challenges of acquiring and accessioning born-digital moving image donations, including the need to allocate more staff time to up-front activities like checking hard drives upon receipt. Tim Babcock of Penn State talked about establishing a digital preservation program from scratch, and addressed the intimidation beginners can feel in the face of daunting best-practice documents and the courage we all need to be open about our digital preservation practices so we can learn together. This sentiment was echoed across the Digital Preservation stream and the Do-It-Yourself Community Archiving Symposium which ran concurrently (and which was kindly recorded and posted for those who couldn’t attend the conference or, like me, were busy in the Digital Preservation stream).

Tim Babcock confronts a perennial digital preservation challenge

Together with Tom De Smet of the Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision, Dinah Handel of the New York Public Library, and Travis Wagner of the University of South Carolina, I participated in a theory-versus-practice panel that addressed the distance between expectations and realities of digital preservation work, and the sometimes limited applicability of standards and codified best practices to practitioners’ real-life situations. I spoke about the early stages of my work on GVTV, including creation and analysis of disk images containing thousands of video files, and, in the spirit of openness, took audience members on a play-by-play of everything that didn’t work the way I thought it would. It was great to exchange stories and ideas with my fellow panelists and other conference attendees, and I returned to Vancouver ready to dig in to GVTV with renewed vigour.

AMIA conferences draw attendees from all over the world, and the annual conference is a great opportunity to compare notes with others in the field and keep current with the latest developments in moving image archives professional practice.

Although Paul Laurence Dunbar was only 33 years old when he died of tuberculosis on February 9, 1906, he left behind a lasting legacy of poems, short stories, and novels. The eldest son of former Kentucky slaves, Dunbar published his first poems in his hometown newspaper at the age of sixteen. His first collection of poetry, Oak and Ivy, was published in 1893. While much of his poetry was written in traditional English verse, Dunbar achieved widespread popularity for writing in African American vernacular dialect. Several volumes of Dunbar’s poetry like Poems of Cabin and Field (1899), Candle-Lightin’ Time (1901), When Malindy Sings (1903), and Li’l’ Gal (1904), shown here, featured full-page, black-and-white photographs taken by the Hampton Institute Camera Club, with whom Dunbar frequently collaborated to illustrate his verse. The hundreds of photographs in these books have significant cultural value as representations of rural African American life at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Several volumes of Dunbar’s poetry are included in the John MacKay Shaw Collection of Childhood in Poetry. In his short life, Dunbar spoke with passion, humor, and elegance of the human experience, inspiring later writers such as Maya Angelou, who titled her autobiography after lines from Dunbar’s poem Sympathy: 

W.H. Auden and John O’Hara prove true to form in this recording of the 1956 National Book Awards. Auden, receiving the award for his collection The Shield of Achilles, is modest and professorial. He confronts the received opinion that today poetry is “a somewhat old-fashioned craft” thought of primarily as “a pastime for women and children.” He contrasts this with a perhaps imaginary past when a poet’s role was to record “encounters with the sacred.” That concern is still the same, he insists, to memorialize the “terror, despair, awe, wonder, or gratitude” of modern life. But since these events are no longer public but, more often, intensely personal, the task is more difficult. He then touches on a fascinating argument concerning the sacred, language, and repetition, but breaks off, announcing, “I’m boring myself,” and sits down.

Herbert Kubly is awarded the prize for non-fiction for his memoir American in Italy. In his acceptance speech he pleads for more US aid, and deeper understanding, as America battles the Soviet Union for the hearts and minds of the Italian peasant.

John O’Hara’s speech, upon receiving the fiction award for his novel Ten North Frederick, showcases the author’s well-known mix of arrogance and vulnerability. He has been “waiting almost twenty-two years” for this recognition and chooses to make it a kind of lifetime achievement award, surveying his entire body of work. “I am immodest enough to believe that the opinion of posterity is the least of my worries. … I have written so accurately and so honestly that my overall contribution will have to be consulted by future students of my time.” But then, just when he seems on the verge of making even more grandiose claims for his work, he chokes up, trying to express how much the award means to him, giving a glimpse of an insatiable need for approval by pleading, almost pathetically, for yet more kudos. “At this time, I want to make one request, which I will put in the form of an expressed hope: I hope you will ask me again.”

W. H. Auden 1939
(Carl Van Vechten (1880–1964)/Library of Congress)

W.H. Auden (1907-1973) had been an American citizen for ten years when he won the National Book Award for The Shield of Achilles. Yet in this speech he is still a distinctively English presence, not just because of his accent but by his insistence on seeing poetry as a formal discipline rather than the then prevalent New World view of it as a pathway towards personal and cultural liberation. Auden’s presence and practice of his art in this country had an enormous influence on the course of poetry in the second half of the twentieth century. In addition to the high seriousness he brought to his calling, his technical skills were unmatched. As the Poetry Foundation’s website points out:

Auden possessed a formidable technique and an acute ear. In her book, Auden, Barbara Everett commented on the poet’s facility: “In his verse, Auden can argue, reflect, joke, gossip, sing, analyze, lecture, hector, and simply talk; he can sound, at will, like a psychologist on a political platform, like a theologian at a party, or like a geologist in love; he can give dignity and authority to nonsensical theories, and make newspaper headlines sound both true and melodious.”

The title poem of The Shield of Achilles, with its message of shared responsibility for the horrors political institutions force upon their subjects, still resonates today. While reporting on the suicides of three prisoners being held in the Guantánamo detention facility in 2006, Journalist Scott Horton wrote in the Harpers blog of the poem’s continuing relevance.

Auden’s poem is a work of beauty and power. It has prophetic vision, but that vision is a nightmare. It is born from the horrors of World War II. The barbed wire of concentration camps and death camps brings the Homeric epoch up to date. Auden is not portraying the tragedies of the last war as such. He is warning of a world to come in which totalitarian societies dominate and the worth and dignity of the individual human being are lost. He warns those who stand by, decent though they may seemingly be, and say nothing–perhaps because political calculus or the chimera of national glory have blinded them to the greater moral imperatives against homicide, torture and the dissemination of lies in the cause of war. 

John O’Hara (1905-1970) was an enormously successful popular novelist and short story writer. His well-documented longing to be more than that, to be taken as seriously as his contemporaries Hemingway and Fitzgerald, is much in evidence here. Lately there has been a resurgence of interest in O’Hara’s unblinking, dogged take on the mores of his class and time. Lorin Stein, writing in The New Yorker, points out:

No one could call O’Hara unobserving. On the topics of class, sex, and alcohol—that is, the topics that mattered to him—his novels amount to a secret history of American life. So do his stories. O’Hara may not have been the best story writer of the twentieth century, but he is the most addictive. You can binge on his collections the way some people binge on Mad Men, and for some of the same reasons. O’Hara is always recording surface stuff: the make of the car, the shirt label, the record on the phonograph, all the little signifiers that grown-ups are not supposed to care about, and do. Paradoxically, this gives the effect of depth. 

O’Hara did not win another National Book Award, as he pleads for here, but was given the 1964 Award of Merit by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He cried during that acceptance speech too. 

Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.

WNYC archives id: 150222Municipal archives id: LT7121

Please join PIDB member Sanford Ungar at the “Free Speech Legacies: The Pentagon Papers Revisited” symposium on February 16-17, 2017 at Georgetown University.   The event is free and you can register at tinyurl.com/freespeechlegacies.

Mr. Ungar orchestrated the symposium, which will feature a variety of distinguished panelists, including Floyd Abrams, Martin Baron, David Cole, David Sanger, Bob Woodward, and others.

The symposium will commence Thursday evening at 7:30 p.m. with a public dialogue between Mr. Ungar and Daniel Ellsberg on the importance of the Pentagon Papers when originally published in 1971 and today.  We hope to see you at the symposium.  You can view more information about the legacy of the Pentagon Papers here.

There were several reasons why trash was giving New Yorkers anxiety in 1969. The city was still reeling from a historic sanitation strike that at one point had left over 100,000 tons of trash on the street. That crisis, coupled with a boom in disposable consumer products and a sudden lack of nearby landfill space, had many wondering how New York would deal with its exponentially growing garbage problem. In this broadcast from 1969, writer Paul Wilkes discusses his New York Magazine article titled “The Trash Explosion“, which outlines some of the more ominous predictions and specious solutions of the time.

Unlike today, Wilkes doesn’t talk much about massive recycling efforts, city-wide composting programs, or plastic grocery bag levees. Rather, the proposed solutions veer more toward the creative, like filling in the Sahara Desert with municipal waste or equipping homeowners with personal laser beams that could ‘poof away’ kitchen trash. Unless something is done soon, Wilkes argues, the city will run out of room for garbage by 1973.

Even though Wilkes’ most dire prediction may not have come true, this audio reminds us that many disposable products we use today were still something of a novelty in 1969: disposable bed sheets, diapers, and plastics packaging was all relatively new. But that novelty soon became the norm as consumers began demanding greater convenience over cost or environmental considerations. Wilkes estimates that within 10 years, this new kind of consumerism will double the amount of garbage New Yorkers produce from 6 to 12 pounds a day.

So where exactly does all of New York City’s garbage go today? Well, according to the New York Times, the city has the most complex waste management system in North America. And although there is a fascinating history of garbage removal in New York, the short story is that today the city spends $300 million dollars a year to truck 85% of its waste to landfills in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Upstate New York, and even China and India.

Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.

WNYC archives id: 151640Municipal archives id: T4784

From now until the end of May, visitors to the Morgan Library & Musuem in New York City will be able to stand in one room and see Emily Dickinson manuscripts and other pieces drawn from seven different collections. The exhibition is the culmination of a two-year collaboration between the Amherst College Archives & Special Collections and the curators of the Morgan Library.

Take a look at the information on the Morgan’s web site: http://www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/emily-dickinson 

I want to use this blog post to thank several of the people who made this happen, starting with my collaborator on the Morgan side, Carolyn Vega, Assistant Curator of Literary and Historical Manuscripts. I often say that I got to do the fun parts of the exhibition while Carolyn took charge of less-fun things, like arranging loans from several different repositories.

That very work is what makes this exhibition so special — many of the items brought together have never been exhibited together before, and will likely not come together again for quite a while. Chief among these items is the famous portrait of the Dickinson children, which has not left the Houghton Library at Harvard University since they acquired it in the 1940s.

Here is the portrait as it is now displayed in the gallery at the Morgan, against a backdrop of the reconstruction of the wallpaper from Dickinson’s bedroom. That wallpaper was only discovered as part of the reconstruction of Dickinson’s bedroom undertaken by the Emily Dickinson Museum in 2013. We are all very grateful to Houghton Library for lending this work, and to Jane Wald and the crew of the Emily Dickinson Museum for their support of this exhibition.

Other recently discovered Dickinson items include the portrait of two women, one of whom MAY be Emily Dickinson:

While this daguerreotype remains the private property of an anonymous collector, “Sam Carlo” was kind enough to place it on deposit at Amherst College and to allow us to include it in this exhibition. For the first time ever, visitors can see the portrait of Dickinson as a child (Houghton Library), the silhouette cut when she was 14, the lock of her hair, the authentic 1846 daguerreotype, and compare all of those likenesses to this recently discovered image.

Other lenders to the show are: the Emily Dickinson Museum, Mount Holyoke College, New York Public Library, and Boston Public Library. The Morgan’s own holdings of Dickinson manuscripts round out the total of seven institutions who contributed to making this show a success. Many thanks to all of them.

Another massive thank you goes out to Mark Edington, Director of the Amherst College Press, who valiantly managed the production of the exhibition catalogue: The Networked Recluse: The Connected World of Emily Dickinson. As with all of the products of the Amherst College Press, anyone with an internet connection can download the complete work as a PDF file. Copies of the printed book are currently available through the Morgan Library gift shop. Many thanks to Mark and to our contributors: Marta Werner, Susan Howe, and Richard Wilbur.

Last, and definitely not least, I must thank the staff of the Amherst College Archives & Special Collections for their knowledge and support and patience. We have a lot to be proud of, and none of it could have happened without them.

I will end with a link to the first review of the exhibition which appeared in the New York Times on Friday, January 20 — the date the exhibition opened to the public. Pulitzer Prize winning critic Holland Cotter said many nice things about our work, for which we are all extremely grateful:

“I’m Nobody”? Not a chance, Emily Dickinson

“How odd is it that communism doesn’t frighten me,” African-American journalist Louis Lomax muses in this 1964 Book and Author Luncheon. Instead, he tells the audience, “You do!” Ostensibly here to publicize his new book on Black Muslims, When the Word is Given, Lomax seizes the opportunity to address a white, middle class, largely female audience and give a concise picture of what is going through the mind of a contemporary black man. Rather than communist infiltration of the American way of life, as was warned of by the previous speaker, spy novelist Helen MacInnes, Lomax’s fear is “that your husband will call my son a nigger and not give him a job.” He fears he will finally be able to buy a house in a good neighborhood only to see “you,” his white neighbors, panic and flee, sending the surrounding community into decline. He recalls his childhood in Georgia, where segregation was “a fact of life,” and then an amusing boyhood encounter playing marbles with a younger “stupid child” who turned out to be Martin Luther King! But the point of his reminiscences is to emphasize that “the world that was once is no more” and that ladies of privilege such as those seated before him now are faced with a choice, “to wish it were not so…or to take a personal Freedom Ride.” After he sits, there is unusually sustained applause and what sounds like a standing ovation. Lomax’s challenge, particularly his pointed inclusion of women as a group suffering from discrimination, sounds remarkably prescient for 1964….or today.  

Louis Lomax (1922-1970) was a journalist and author best remembered today for an early interview with Malcolm X and for first coming to his colleague Mike Wallace with the idea of filming a TV special about the Nation of Islam which became The Hate That Hate Produced. Lomax occupied a middle ground in the Civil Rights landscape of the time, both explaining and provoking. The website Black Past notes how: 

By 1964, Lomax became one of the first black television journalists to host a 90-minute twice-a-week interview format television show. The Louis E. Lomax Show ran on KTTV in Los Angeles from 1964 to 1968. He interviewed guests on his television program about controversial topics like the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam, the women’s movement, and the war in Vietnam. He analyzed the black power movement from a vantage point rarely shared by commentators at the time. He also questioned the moderate approach taken by the leadership of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and he defended the rebellious young African Americans who had embraced black power. Despite that stance, he also encouraged whites and blacks to come together, maintaining that race problems were aggravated because people know little about each other. Given his unusual positions, Lomax encountered criticism from all sides.  

Lomax’s The Negro Revolt (1962) performed a similar service. Kirkus Reviews makes it sound like a primer for white Americans interested in the race problem: 

Beginning with the seamstress who refused to move back to make room for white people in a bus in Montgomery, in 1955, he traces the growth of Negro protest. He also gives us a succinct picture of the history of slavery in this country, and how the freedoms gained by the Negro after the Civil War were quickly, often brutally curtailed. There are things in this book—things like stories of police brutality, liberal hypocrisy, and the chronic failure of Americans to face the cruelty of Negro discrimination—which can only make the reader angry and, if he is white, ashamed. But there are close-ups too of men like Martin Luther King, of organizations like the NAACP or CORE, of activities like sit-ins and freedom rides, which also give one some idea of what people are trying to do to fight segregation. A chilling alternative too is seen in the Black Muslim movement, in Malcolm X and other extremists, who would deny the white man and withdraw to a world of their own. Lomax’ interview with X is, in fact, one of the best things in a sane and useful book. An appendix gives interesting statistics on the Negro’s economic and social position in the United States today—statistics which give the lie to what many false optimists tell us is the Negro’s “better” lot in life.  

Lomax was working on a three volume History of Black Americans when he died in an automobile crash at the age of forty-seven. Rumors persist that because of his investigation into the death of Malcolm X he was a target of assassination. There is indeed an extensive file on Lomax kept by the FBI but no evidence has been uncovered to bolster these claims. Lomax did write, in the book he was promoting at this appearance (as quoted by the website Questia.com): 

I know white people are frightened by Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad; maybe now they will understand how I have felt all my life, for there has never been a day when I was unafraid; we Negroes live our lives on the edge of fear, not knowing when or how the serpent of discrimination will strike and deprive us of something dear–a job here, a house there, an evening out over there, or a life itself.

Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.

WNYC archives id: 150523Municipal archives id: RT159

The Fevered Land is an unusually frank series of sketches about racism and discrimination circa 1946 produced by WHA in Madison, Wisconsin.  The vignettes highlight common stereotypes about and attitudes toward African-Americans, Jews and immigrants, to illustrate the “contagious disease of discrimination.”

WHA Players 

The WHA Players was the name of the troupe at WHA (primarily University of Wisconsin students) who presented plays over the air and worked as actors in any WHA program needing them, like the Wisconsin School of the Air or Wisconsin College of the Air series. They had a regular timeslot in 1941-42 for a series called “The Playbill of the American Theatre,” which was broadcast live from the theatre at Wisconsin Memorial Union. They were also used as the talent for a 1955 series called “Mind of the Writer,” presenting plays like ‘Nicholas Nickleby’ and ‘Ah, Wilderness.’ Bill Siemering was a member of the WHA players during his student years in the 1950s. After a stint at manager of WBFO-Buffalo in the 1960s, he went on to become the first program director for National Public Radio, wrote its mission statement, and developed “All Things Considered.”

Karl Schmidt/Producer

The Fevered Land was produced by Karl Schmidt, a longtime employee of WHA Radio, the flagship of the network now known as Wisconsin Public Radio.

Karl Schmidt reading over WHA in the 1940s
(Courtesy of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Archives ID # S11084).)

Schmidt came to the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1941 as a freshman. He soon discovered WHA and what would come to be his life’s work. After his military service in World War II with the Armed Forces Radio Network, he returned to Madison and to WHA where he became the primary reader for “Chapter a Day,” a program that serialized literature for radio. It had debuted as a summer program in 1932 and had become a year-round offering in 1939. It remains on the air today; it’s one of the longest-running broadcast programs in the world. 

Schmidt was also heard on a variety of other programs. He was color commentator for University of Wisconsin football broadcasts and he also lent his talents to the Wisconsin School of the Air, a series of programs broadcast for use in school classrooms around the state. 

Schmidt eventually became the state network’s Director of Radio, then stepped down from that role in 1971 to found Earplay, a national program that had a mission to produce radio dramas for public stations in the United States and Europe. For the next decade, Earplay distributed audio works by playwrights like Edward Albee, David Mamet and Archibald MacLeish, and included the work of actors like Meryl Streep, Tony Roberts, Bruno Kirby, Jean Marsh, Howard da Silva and others. 

Schmidt played a key role in the development of National Public Radio as a member of its founding board. He won two Peabody awards and two Major Armstrong Awards as well as the Prix Italia. Many consider his masterwork to be his radio adaptation of the classic post-apocalyptic novel “A Canticle for Leibowitz.” The fifteen-part series aired over Wisconsin Public Radio several times, and won both a 1983 Gabriel Award and a 1984 Ohio State Award. 

After his official retirement, Schmidt continued to read books on the air for “Chapter a Day,” up to shortly before his death in April of 2016 at age 93. 

Don Voegeli/Organist

The organist heard on this segment is most likely Don Voegeli, WHA’s longtime music director.

Don Voegeli WHA Organist & Pianist
(Courtesy of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Archives ID #S13356)

He was heard on a variety of programs and was the accompanist for the Wisconsin School of the Air’s regular music program. He teamed up with Schmidt to found the National Center for Audio Experimentation. The outgrowth of the Center’s experiments with electronic music was a series of albums distributed to non-commercial radio and TV stations. They contained musical themes for use in local broadcasts. Many stations still have these LP records in their libraries and used their themes at some point. Most public radio listeners have heard Voegeli’s work: he wrote the theme for NPR’s “All Things Considered,” a variation of which remains in use today. He died in November 2009 at age 89. 

WHA-AM 

WHA is that flagship of the Wisconsin Public Radio network. It debuted as University of Wisconsin experimental station 9XM. It began a regular “broadcast” on December 4, 1916 (the state weather forecast by Morse code) and began a regular schedule of voice broadcasts in January 1921. It’s the oldest non-commercial radio station in the U.S. It teamed up with Wisconsin-owned WLBL in central Wisconsin in 1932 to share programs and built a network of FM repeaters around the state during the years 1947-1952. Counting translators and affiliates, WPR now is heard on 34 stations with three simultaneous programs streams.

WHA’s Radio Hall Mural
(Courtesy of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Archives  ID#S06926)

WHA has a long history of taking on serious topics in its programs. Here’s a sampling:

“Exploring Americana:” a Wisconsin College of the Air program from 1941-42. Host James Flint took a portable recorder to industrial Ohio to talk to immigrants, their children and grandchildren and how they made the adjustment to American society. Flint, the Congregational Student Pastor at the University of Wisconsin had used his recorder in earlier years to interview young adults on issues of the day in series like “American Youth Speaks” and “World Youth Speaks.” 
“The Strong Black Hand:” an episode of the 1942 Sunday series Civilians in Service which called for equality for African Americans in the war effort. (Ohio State Award winner) 
“Adventures in Our Town:” a series presented as part of the Wisconsin School of the Air offerings in 1946-47. It explored problems in human relationships with regard to differences in appearance, ability, race, religion or culture.
 “How to Live A Hundred Years…Happily:” a 1949 special on psychosomatic illness presented by Dr. John Schindler, from nearby Monroe, Wisconsin. The program generated so much response it was offered to others stations nationwide and a print version was excerpted in various magazines including Reader’s Digest. Schindler later wrote a book on the topic, which was printed in numerous languages. 
“The Inner Core:” a week of programs done in conjunction with WHA-TV in 1968 focusing on the issues facing inner city Milwaukee (the TV offering garnered WHA-TV the first Emmy ever awarded to an educational station).
 “Youth on a 4-Day Trip:” a 1968 series of five programs on drug and alcohol abuse among teens and other issues affecting young people (WHA-TV also did eight similar programs). 
“The Darker Brother:” a Wisconsin School of the Air series from 1969-70 for fifth and sixth graders that focused on race relations in the U.S.
“We Are The Other People:” another Wisconsin School of the Air presentation from 1970-71: this one on prejudice as experienced by various ethnic groups in the U.S.

And, check out WHA’s 100th anniversary site!

_____________________________

Randall Davidson is the Director of Radio Services at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh as well as Wisconsin Public Radio historian and author of 9XM Talking: WHA Radio and the Wisconsin Idea.

Special thanks to Mike Crane, the Director of Wisconsin Public Radio for permission to stream, The Fevered Land and to Digital and Media Archivist Catherine H. Phan at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Archives.

Groundbreaking Ceremony

Cornerstone Ceremony

Opening Ceremonies

Proposed Sale of the Coliseum in 1987

None

We are delighted to present the full programme for Pass it on! Celebrating Scotland’s sporting heritage. The event will bring together experts in the curation, care, use and promotion of sporting heritage to discuss their work and provide details of current projects. The event if free and open to anyone with an interest in sporting heritage. If you would like to attend please contact Ian Mackintosh, Exhibitions Assistant, Hosts & Champions, at ian.mackintosh@stir.ac.uk / tel. 01786 467240

Pass it on! Celebrating Scotland’s sporting heritage

University of Stirling Library

Friday 24 February 2017

10.30: Tea & coffee

10.45: Sporting Heritage Networks

• Justine Reilly, Sports in Museums Network
• Hugh Dan MacLennan, Sports Heritage Scotland

12.00: Unlocking Scotland’s Sporting Heritage #1

• Hosts & Champions project
• Karl Magee, University of Stirling
• Ian Mackintosh, University of Stirling
• Richard Haynes, University of Stirling

13.00: Lunch

13.45: Unlocking Scotland’s Sporting Heritage #2

• Richard McBrearty, Scottish Football Museum
• Rebecca Prentice, British Golf Museum, St Andrews
• Neil Johnson-Symington, Cycling collection, Glasgow Museums
• Paul Brough, Bill McLaren Archive, Hawick Heritage Hub

15.00: Tea & coffee

15.15: Using Scotland’s Sporting Heritage

• Andy Mitchell & John Hutchinson, Independent researchers
• Matthew McDowell, University of Edinburgh
• Chris Wilkins, Sporting Memories Network

16.30: The Future of Scotland’s Sporting Heritage

• Discussion chaired by Richard Haynes, University of Stirling

Throughout the day a small exhibition of material from the Commonwealth Games Scotland Archive will be on display in the Archives & Special Collections area.

17.00: Evening social event, Macrobert arts centre

• 17.00 – Drinks reception
• 17.30 – Film screening
• 19.00 – Conference dinner

Today marks 20 years since the official celebration of WNYC’s independence from the City of New York. The first payment of $3.3 million was made against an agreed upon $20 million for the WNYC Foundation’s acquisition of the AM and FM broadcast licenses held by the city since 1924 and 1943, respectively. 

I’ve yet to tally the number of times WNYC’s very existence was threatened in those 73 years, but it was a lot, and frankly, it’s a miracle the station survived. Not long after it first went on air on July 8, 1924, its signal was challenged because Mayor Hylan had used the airwaves to attack owners of private subway lines. In 1930, there was a serious question about the separation of church and state because of the station’s broadcast of Holy Name Society breakfasts by the police and fire departments. Fiorello H. La Guardia, that great champion of WNYC, ran for Mayor in 1933 on a platform calling for the elimination of the station to save taxpayer dollars. It took some time and effort, but he was eventually convinced of its value and then made great use of it himself. In 1938 members of the City Council accused WNYC of airing Soviet propaganda that suggested life under Joe Stalin was hunky-dory. There was an investigation and vehement calls for WNYC to be silenced.

WNYC’s Laura Walker makes the first payment to the City of New York for WNYC’s licenses, January 27, 1997.
(NYC Municipal Archives)

In the years that followed, regular demands for the demise of WNYC in the name of relieving the taxpayer’s burden continued to be heard. By the early 1970s the station’s outlook became truly bleak. The Lindsay administration made such dramatic cutbacks that long-time Director Seymour N. Siegel felt he could no longer remain at his post. From Lindsay to Mayor Beame was like going from the frying pan to the fire as far as the station’s financial situation was concerned. The city fiscal crisis meant Greek-style austerity, and Mayor Beame named a task force to make recommendations on the future of WNYC. The situation improved under Ed Koch, but he then later provoked questions about city ownership and the station’s editorial independence by pressing for the broadcast of the so-called John Hour.

Fortunately, the creation of the WNYC Foundation in August 1979 was the seed for independence, as supporters of the station now had a vehicle for channeling non-city funds to the stations. In the years that followed, more and more of the financial burden was shifted to the foundation, so that by 1995, when the Giuliani Administration called for the city “to get out of the broadcasting business,” the foundation was ready to assume control and responsibility for the valuable broadcast licenses. Negotiations between the city and the foundation were intense. But 20 years of independence, awards, growth, and great programming have made it all worthwhile.

For the definitive story of WNYC’s shift from the city to non-profit ownership, see Peter H. Darrow’s Going Public: The Story of WNYC’s Journey to Independence.

May 31: 1995, Violinist Itzhak Perlman adds his signature to WNYC’s ‘Declaration of Independence.’ Other signers included Bill Moyers, Betty Comden, Robert Krulwich, Bob Edwards and Spaulding Grey.
(WNYC Archives)

 
One of many such postings over WNYC’s 73 years with the City of New York.

Radio World, April 10, 1926, pg. 26
(Radio World courtesy of American Radio History.com)

On January 1st, the copyright expired for some of our holdings: they are now in the public domain in Canada. These digital materials may now be legally re-used for any purpose. Here’s a quick look at some of the images, maps, moving images and audio that have become easier to re-use.

Black Sunday in Gastown is a recording of a June 13, 1966 CBC radio program which describes the events of the Great Vancouver Fire of 1886. It features interviews with five Vancouver seniors who remember the fire. Major J.S. Matthews, first City Archivist of Vancouver, is heard paying tribute to all the survivors of the fire. Note the audio starts about 18 seconds in to the recording. Here’s our full description.

This is a map of British Columbia that was specially created for Canada’s Centennial and also commemorated British Columbia’s 1966 centennial. It would be interesting to compare this to commemorative materials produced for Canada’s sesquicentennial this year. Here’s the hi-res version with the full description.

British Columbia : an historical illustrated map commemorating two centenaries, 1867-1967, 1866-1966. Reference code AM1594-: MAP 539

Here’s a detail from an image of the 1966 UBC Graduation Dance, held at the Pacific Showmart Building at the PNE. The hi-res version is here.

U.B.C. graduation dance, June 3, 1966. Reference code AM281-S8-: CVA 180-6633

This 1966 interview from CHAN-CHEK TV came to us when we acquired the Playhouse Theatre records. It was thought to be related to the Playhouse Theatre, but when the old 2” videotape was digitized, it was found to be a local television interview by Bob Dawson, director of the Mount Seymour Ski School. It may have been used as a prop. The video cuts out in a few places, but that’s the best transfer that could be made from the old tape. Here’s the full description in our database.

This is just a small selection of the items which have recently come into the public domain.

Have you ever wondered what the computer dating scene was like in the 1960’s? I know I have! Listen to host E.S. Savas of WNYC’s “Computers in Modern City Government” talk with Assistant Attorney General Sandy Mindel about the pros and cons of mainframe-powered matchmaking.

How exactly did computer dating work in 1969? Well, typically, dating agencies would deploy “attractive young girls” to roam city streets and hand out paper questionnaires. Those questionnaires would require information like your name and address but also your sexual attitude (are you conservative? very liberal?) and drug use (do you prefer grass? goof balls? STP?). Your responses, along with other eligible singles’ answers, were fed into a computer punch card system, which in turn analyzed and delivered a list of potentially perfect mates.

Being a new technology, computer dating systems had little oversight and Mindel discusses some of the most common complaints coming into the Attorney General’s office. Some are fairly mundane (bad matches through computer glitches), but others seem more egregious, like fraud and the sale of personal information to the highest bidder.  

By 1969, the skepticism and curiosity about computer dating had reached its peak in popular culture. On an episode of Gomer Pyle: USMC, the title character is tricked into a computer date, and on Bewitched, Samantha uses a computer service to find an earthly match.  Of course, television sitcom matchmaking always ends in comic disaster, and the whole idea was ripe for satire. In this fairly offensive clip from 1969, Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra find out they are made for each other with the help of “Liberace’s computer.”

So,  if you think your crippling dating-app-induced social anxiety is your generation’s burden alone, take some comfort in the fact that your forbearers had it just as bad. 

Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.

WNYC archives id: 151647Municipal archives id: T4817

This blog post sources a timeline researched and compiled by Mary Kate Downing.

Happy birthday, Florida State! Can you believe that it’s only been 166 years since the Florida Legislature (then the General Assembly of the State of Florida) passed an act that led to our inception as an institution? We can’t either! …especially since only until fairly recently, it was widely accepted that FSU’s founding day was in 1857, and not 1851 as we now know. Why all the confusion? This isn’t a situation of FSU lying to get senior discount on movie tickets. Yes, FSU’s predecessor institution, the State Seminary West of the Suwannee River, didn’t open its doors until 1857, but there was a lot more going on for 6 years before its grand opening.

On January 24, 1851, the General Assembly of the State of Florida passed an act establishing two seminaries of learning, one to the east and one to the west of the Suwannee River. It wasn’t until 1854 when the Tallahassee City Council offered to pay $10,000 to finance a new school building on land owned by the city in an attempt to “bid on” being the location of the seminary west of the Suwannee, which the legislature had yet to decide. The $10,000 consisted of the value of the property, the yet-to-be-constructed building, and the remaining balance in cash. Approximately $6,000 was originally committed, with the Council promising to give the city the remaining balance if Tallahassee was determined as the location of the seminary west of the Suwannee. Later in 1854, construction on a school building began and Tallahassee’s city superintendent approached the state legislature to present the case for the seminary to be in Tallahassee. However, state officials failed to make a decision regarding the location of the seminary before the end of the legislative session.

By 1855, the newly constructed College Hall (in the area that is now Westcott Building) opens. Because of the state legislature’s lack of a decision on whether it would be one of the legislature-designated seminaries, it was not given an official name. Instead, it was alternately called “The City Seminary” and “Tallahassee Male Seminary.”

In 1856, the ball got rolling as the City Council of Tallahassee (hereafter referred to as the Board of Trustees of the Florida Institute) met and designated “The City Seminary” as the “Florida Institute.” It also indicated that “government of the institution or seminary shall be under the direction of a president” and decided that “a preparatory school will be established in connection with the academic or collegiate department of the institute.” It is established that one of the president’s duties will be to publish a “Catalogue Course of Studies” for the institution. Later in 1856, William (W.Y.) Peyton, previously principal of The City Seminary, is unanimously elected by the Board of Trustees of the Florida Institute as first president of the Institute.

By late 1856, the General Assembly passed legislation declaring that “the Seminary to be located West of the Suwannee River be, and the same is hereby located at the City of Tallahassee in the County of Leon.” There were several conditions that must be granted for this to occur – “the proper and authorized conveyance of said Lot and College edifice thereon be made to the City of Tallahassee to the Board of Education,” that Tallahassee “guarantee to said Board of Education the payment of the sum of two thousand dollars per annum forever, to be expended in the education of the youth of said City, in such manner and on such terms as shall be agreed between the corporate authorities of said City and the Board of Education,” and that Tallahassee “shall pay to the Board of Education as much money in cash as shall be found necessary after a valuation of the Lot and College edifice aforesaid, to complete the sum of ten thousand dollars.”

With all of the requirements fulfilled, the State Seminary West of the Suwannee River was allowed to open its doors and so began FSU’s long history.

To see more photographs, ephemera, and artifacts related to the history of Florida State, check out the FSU Heritage Protocol Digital Collections or like the Heritage Protocol Facebook page.

From a photocopy of the original broadcast transcript of WNYC’s Art in New York airing on October 13, 1943.  The program aired from 5:45 to 6:00 PM ‘Eastern War Time.’

WNYC – New York’s Own Station, Art in New York Program. H. Stix, Dir.

THE PORTRAIT AND THE MODERN ARTIST

Adolph Gottlieb:

We would like to begin by reading part of a letter that has just come to us:

“The portrait has always been linked in my mind with a picture of a person. I was therefore surprised to see your paintings of mythological characters, with their abstract rendition, in a portrait show, and would therefore be very much interested in your answers to the following—”

Now, the questions that this correspondent asks are so typical and at the same time so crucial that we feel that in answering them we shall not only help a good many people who may be puzzled by our specific work but we shall best make clear our attitude as modern artists concerning the problem of the portrait, which happens to be the subject of today’s talk. We shall therefore, read the four questions and attempt to answer them as adequately as we can in the short time we have. Here they are:

1 Why do you consider these pictures to be portraits? 2 Why do you as modern artists use mythological characters? 3 Are not these pictures really abstract paintings with literary titles? 4 Are you not denying modern art when you put so much emphasis on subject matter?

Now, Mr. Rothko, would you like to tackle the first question? Why do you consider these pictures to be portraits?

Mark Rothko:

The word portrait cannot possibly have the same meaning for us that it had for past generations. The modern artist has, in varying degrees, detached himself from appearance in nature, and therefore, a great many of the old words, which have been retained as nomenclature in art have lost their old meaning. The still life of Braque and the landscapes of Lurcat have no more relationship to the conventional still life and landscape than the double images of Picasso have to the traditional portrait. New Times! New Ideas! New Methods!

Even before the days of the camera there was a definite distinction between portraits which served as historical or family memorials and portraits that were works of art. Rembrandt knew the difference; for, once he insisted upon painting works of art, he lost all his patrons. Sargent, on the other hand, never succeeded in creating either a work of art or in losing a patron—for obvious reasons.

There is, however, a profound reason for the persistence of the word ‘portrait’ because the real essence of the great portraiture of all time is the artist’s eternal interest in the human figure, character and emotions—in short in the human drama. That Rembrandt expressed it by posing a sitter is irrelevant. We do not know the sitter but we are intensely aware of the drama. The Archaic Greeks, on the other hand used as their models the inner visions which they had of their gods. And in our day, our visions are the fulfillment of our own needs.

It must be noted that the great painters of the figure had this in common. Their portraits resemble each other far more than they recall the peculiarities of a particular model. In a sense they have painted one character in all their work. This is equally true of rembrandt, the Greeks or Modigliani, to pick someone closer to our own time. The Romans, on the other hand, whose portraits are facsimiles of appearance never approached art at all. What is indicated here is that the artist’s real model is an ideal which embraces all of human drama rather than the appearance of a particular individual.

Today the artist is no longer constrained by the limitation that all of man’s experience is expressed by his outward appearance. Freed from the need of describing a particular person, the possibilities are endless. The whole of man’s experience becomes his model, and in that sense it can be said that all of art is a portrait of an idea.

Adolph Gottlieb:

That last point cannot be overemphasized. Now, I’ll take the second question and relieve you for a moment. The question reads “Why do you as modern artists use mythological characters?”

I think that anyone who looked carefully at my portrait of Oedipus, or at Mr. Rothko’s Leda will see that this is not mythology out of Bulfinch. The implications here have direct application to life, and if the presentation seems strange, one could without exaggeration make a similar comment on the life of our time.

What seems odd to me, is that our subject matter should be questioned, since there is so much precedent for it. Everyone knows that Grecian myths were frequently used by such diverse painters as Rubens, Titian, Veronese and Velasquez, as well as by Renoir and Picasso more recently.

It may be said that these fabulous tales and fantastic legends are unintelligible and meaningless today, except to an anthropologist or student of myths. By the same token the use of any subject matter which is not perfectly explicit either in past or contemporary art might be considered obscure. Obviously this is not the case since the artistically literate person has no difficulty in grasping the meaning of Chinese, Egyptian, African, Eskimo, Early Christian, Archaic Greek or even pre-historic art, even though he has but a slight acquaintance with the religious or superstitious beliefs of any of these peoples.

The reason for this is simply, that all genuine art forms utilize images that can be readily apprehended by anyone acquainted with the global language of art. That is why we use images that are directly communicable to all who accept art as the language of the spirit, but which appear as private symbols to those who wish to be provided with information or commentary.

And now Mr. Rothko you may take the next question. Are not these pictures really abstract paintings with literary titles?

Mark Rothko:

Neither Mr. Gottlieb’s painting nor mine should be considered abstract paintings. It is not their intention either to create or to emphasize a formal color—space arrangement. They depart from natural representation only to intensify the expression of the subject implied in the title—not to dilute or efface it.

If our titles recall the known myths of antiquity, we have used them again because they are the eternal symbols upon which we must fall back to express basic psychological ideas. They are the symbols of man’s primitive fears and motivations, no matter in which land or what time, changing only in detail but never in substance, be they Greek, Aztec, Icelandic, or Egyptian. And modern psychology finds them persisting still in our dreams, our vernacular, and our art, for all the changes in the outward conditions of life.

Our presentation of these myths, however, must be in our own terms, which are at once more primitive and more modern than the myths themselves—more primitive because we seek the primeval and atavistic roots of the idea rather than their graceful classical version; more modern than the myths themselves because we must redescribe their implications through our own experience. Those who think that the world of today is more gentle and graceful than the primeval and predatory passions from which these myths spring, are either not aware of reality or do not wish to see it in art. The myth holds us, therefore, not through its romantic flavor, not through the remembrance of the beauty of some bygone age, not through the possibilities of fantasy, but because it expresses to us something real and existing in ourselves, as it was to those who first stumbled upon the symbols to give them life.

And now Mr. Gottlieb, will you take the final question? Are you not denying modern art when you put so much emphasis on subject matter?

Adolph Gottlieb:

It is true that modern art has severely limited subject matter in order to exploit the technical aspects of painting. This has been done with great brilliance by a number of painters, but it is generally felt today that this emphasis on the mechanics of picture making has been carried far enough. The Surrealists have asserted their belief in subject matter but to us it is not enough to illustrate dreams.

While modern art got its first impetus thru discovering the forms of primitive art, we feel that its true significance lies not merely in formal arrangements, but in the spiritual meaning underlying all archaic works.

That these demonic and brutal images fascinate us today, is not because they are exotic, nor do they make us nostalgic for a past which seems enchanting because of its remoteness. On the contrary, it is the immediacy of their images that draws us irresistibly to the fancies, the superstitions, the fables of savages and the strange beliefs that were so vividly articulated by primitive man,

If we profess a kinship to the art of primitive men, it is because the feelings they expressed have a particular pertinence today. In times of violence, personal predilections for niceties of color and form seem irrelevant. All primitive expression reveals the constant awareness of powerful forces, the immediate presence of terror and fear, a recognition and acceptance of the brutality of the natural world as well as the eternal insecurity of life.

That these feelings are being experienced by many people throughout the world today is an unfortunate fact, and to us an art that glosses over or evades these feelings, is superficial or meaningless. That is why we insist on subject matter, a subject matter that embraces these feelings and permits them to be expressed.

_________________________________________________________

This edition of Art in New York was hosted by Hugh Stix.  Hugh Sylvan Stix owned and managed the non-profit Artists’ Gallery on East 57th Street in Manhattan. After its opening in 1936 the gallery became showcase for emerging artists. Among those were Willem de Kooning, Louis Eilshemus and Louise Nevelson.

Stix’s gallery moved to 113 West 13th Street in 1940. He saw it as a stepping stone for struggling artists to help them to become accepted by more established galleries. The progressive tabloid PM described Stix as having studied art at Harvard but making his living “in the sales department of a grocery concern.” [*] He and his wife Marguerite later became absorbed with sea shells and wrote, The Shell: Five Hundred Million Years of Inspired Design. Stix died in 1992 at the age of 85.  In a 1976 interview Stix said that Gottlieb and Rothko had originally proposed the WNYC show episode to him. 

The New York Public Radio Archives gets several requests each year for this broadcast. Sadly, to-date no audio copy of this program has been found anywhere. We suspect, however, that lacquer transcription discs of the broadcast were cut allowing for someone to produce the above transcript. Since this broadcast was made at the height of World War II, these discs were most likely to have been glass-based rather than the conventional aluminum-based lacquers, as vital metals like aluminum were being reserved for the war effort. Subsequently, many World War II era transcription discs have not survived the ravages of time. On the other hand, if you do happen to find this broadcast recording, please let us know!

[*] “PM’s Weekly News of Art,” July 28, 1940. pg. 45.