The post was contributed by Michael Rodriguez, Collections Strategist at the UConn Library.
The University of Connecticut has a strong presence on Wikipedia, which goes under the tagline “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.” In a personal summer project, I wrote thirty new encyclopedia articles and expanded seven others about influential figures in UConn’s history. For sources, I drew on texts and images from Archives and Special Collections, as well as other UConn Library resources that brought to life the university’s remarkable history and people.
Background
Wikipedia logo, by Version 1 by Nohat (concept by Paullusmagnus); Wikimedia. – File:Wikipedia-logo.svg as of 14 May 2010T23:16:42, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33285413
Wikipedia is one of the world’s most-viewed websites. Founded in 2001, Wikipedia has over 6 million articles and 3.5 billion words in English alone. Edits happen at a rate of 1.9 per second. Wikipedia is the first stop for millions of people seeking a quick fact, a topic overview, or links to other sources. But because Wikipedia is 100% crowdsourced, articles exist only if someone cares enough to write them and then navigate Wikipedia’s maze of rules to publish them.
When I began editing, eleven of UConn’s twenty-one presidents and principals lacked Wikipedia articles about them. Notable scholars such as Henry P. Armsby and Nathan L. Whetten had zero representation. Wikipedia had little coverage of influential faculty and philanthropists whose names we see on campus buildings. Not a single woman who had a campus building named after her was represented on Wikipedia, reflecting Wikipedia’s longstanding gender gap.
Wikipedia cautions against editing where editors may have a conflict of interest. I wrote my contributions off the clock, but even so, I generally avoided writing about living people. I wrote about no one I knew. I consulted a range of sources, citing not only university publications, for instance, but also the Hartford Courant and other sources unaffiliated with UConn.
Second, I wrote about UConn presidents. Did you know that the college’s first leader, Solomon Mead, patented a special plough? Or that Harry J. Hartley was named Man of the Year by the Daily Campus student newspaper in 1978? Or that Charles L. Beach commissioned Ellen Emmet Rand to paint a posthumous portrait of his beloved wife, Louise? Or that Benjamin F. Koons fought in 17 Civil War battles and ran an Alabama freedman’s school during Reconstruction?
By Topshelver – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=92832868
Third, I wrote about the chroniclers of UConn’s history. Did you know that Jerauld Manter, who served as UConn’s unofficial photographer for half a century, has a gnat named after him? Or that forty-eight erstwhile Daily Campus student editors attended the retirement party of their mentor Walter Stemmons, chronicler of UConn’s first semicentennial? Or that Bruce M. Stave, who literally wrote the book on UConn, was president of the Federation of University Teachers during the campaign that brought collective bargaining to the university in 1976? Stemmons and Stave wrote authoritative histories, including Connecticut Agricultural History: A History (1931) and Red Brick in the Land of Steady Habits(2006). These chroniclers were such key sources for so many articles that I had to celebrate them with articles of their own.
Fourth, I wrote about influential faculty. Sidney Waxman brought along his .22 rifle on car trips, shooting down pinecones to augment his dwarf conifer collection. Henry Ruthven Monteith’s daughter, Marjorie, scored the second goal at UConn’s first women’s basketball game. George Safford Torrey played the organ and carillon at Storrs Congregational Church. Albert E. Waugh, provost for decades, was the only American member of a German group called Friends of Old Clocks. While I necessarily focused on getting facts right, the humanity of these figures, as well as their remarkable contributions to science and to the school, shone through my sources.
Finally, I wrote about figures who, while not faculty members or presidents, nevertheless exerted a powerful influence on the university’s history. Charles and Augustus Storrs donated land and money to start the university in 1881. T. S. Gold was godfather of the school from its inception, shepherding it through its infancy and ensuring it remained viable and appropriately resourced. The Ratcliffe Hicks School of Agriculture was named for an industrialist up the road in Tolland. Ratcliffe’s daughter, Elizabeth Hicks, has a UConn residence hall named in her honor.
Using the archives
UConn Library’s Archives & Special Collections (ASC) were an incredible resource. ASC collects the papers of presidents, prominent faculty, and other figures associated with the University. To inventory materials and guide researchers, archivists write finding aids, which often include biographical information. Finding aids proved a valuable source, as well as helping me assess who was notable enough to merit Wikipedia articles about them. I linked to finding aids in the “External links” section of most of my Wikipedia contributions, ensuring bibliographical depth.
Finally, I drew on the expertise of archivists. I requested high-resolution images from University Archivist Betsy Pittman when scanned online copies proved too pixelated for Wikipedia. Betsy even found me a never-before-digitized photo of UConn coach and acting president Edwin O. Smith. I am grateful for both archives and archivists—the collective memory of the university.
By Topshelver – Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=92092570
In addition to contributing text, I contributed images to Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia. I took photos of various named campus buildings—and a European larch dwarf conifer cultivated by Sidney Waxman—and released the images for unlimited public use on Wikimedia Commons. I downloaded pre-1925 portrait photographs from the CTDA and uploaded them to Wikimedia Commons too, maximizing their discoverability and linking back to the CTDA. Where no portrait existed online, I tracked down group photos in yearbooks or newspapers, took screen captures, and cropped them. When the only extant photos were not clearly uncopyrighted, I used one of the very few fair use exceptions permitted by Wikipedia, in which historic portraits of deceased persons may be uploaded solely to illustrate their Wikipedia biography. I sourced most images from UConn’s archival collections, as well as from UConn Today and various books and serials in HathiTrust Digital Library. Contributing images to Wikipedia is a great way to boost visibility of those images while driving traffic to UConn’s digital archival content in the CTDA.
What’s next?
UConn’s people, places, and unique resources are better represented on Wikipedia than ever. But this work is hardly done. I plan to monitor the in-memoriam section of UConn Today—what better way of acknowledging a prominent professor’s passing than ensuring that they get the most widely read Who’s Who-equivalent entry on the planet? In fact, one of my most recent articles was on Roger Buckley, founding director of the Asian and American Studies Institute, who died in August 2020. I will continue to create articles for UConn people with landmarks named in their honor, such as puppeteer Frank W. Ballard and cellist J. Louis von der Mehden.
On September 21, 1938, just two days before the start of the fall semester, the Great New England Hurricane hit Connecticut State College. The campus had dealt with natural disasters before, such as the ice storm of 1909, but the damage inflicted by the Hurricane of 1938 was unprecedented. The loss of electricity and the impassability of the roads meant that of immediate concern was the water and food supply for the faculty, staff, and students. The College had to resort to using an emergency water pump and chlorinator to provide safe drinking water, and a battery-powered shortwave radio was the only means of receiving outside news. In the days following the storm, workmen and student volunteers scrambled to clear the damage and repair electric lines. The local telephone company hurried to get a pay station working on campus. Fewer than half of the 668 students registered for the fall semester were on campus at the time of the storm, and there were concerns about the rest making it in before classes started.
In the immediate aftermath of the hurricane, news was spread across campus through the College’s publication, the Connecticut Campus. The Campus published special editions on both September 22 and 23 with the use of a hand-cranked mimeograph machine. It supplied updates on the water and food situation, informing students that although the Dining Hall was stocked with enough supplies, “no pie will be served tonight and no ice cream tomorrow.” The newsletter also shared statements made by President Albert Jorgenson and other College staff regarding campus conditions. The superintendent of the grounds speculated that “it would take about one hundred years for the campus to regain its former beauty.” Mixed in with reports on the state of the roads and estimates for the cost of repairs was a concern for returning to the College’s regular activities. The Campus was uncertain if the upcoming football game between CSC and Brown would be cancelled, although it optimistically reported that planning was underway for a barn dance.
Although most buildings on campus suffered some degree of damage, the grounds and barns experienced the worst effects of the storm. In the weeks following the hurricane, various departments across campus reported their losses to President Jorgenson, including those from Forestry, Poultry, Animal Husbandry, Horticulture, Zoology, and Genetics. Some of the campus’ barns, outbuildings, and fences needed to be completely rebuilt, including the horse barn and two sheep barns. One sheep barn was lifted off its foundation in the storm, and the estimated cost to rebuild totaled $16,000. The poultry department also suffered heavy damages, with piles of rubble all that remained of some chicken houses. Not only was the College’s agricultural activities put on hold by the storm, but its scientific research in genetics and animal diseases was also at an impasse until barns could be repaired and rebuilt. While the College’s horses and cattle survived, over 500 birds sadly perished.
There was a great concern with the damage to the trees on campus, and students were involved in assessing and cleaning up some of the destruction. The Campus bemoaned the loss of the Valentine Grove, where some of the trees destroyed had been over 200 years old. Two students counted 1,762 fallen trees on campus, and others were paid 30¢ an hour to salvage apples from the orchard. Workmen used tractors and teams of horses to pull trees back up, however many could not be saved. The College owned over 900 acres of woodlands, and one report advised that the trees lost should be salvaged if possible and cut into lumber. It was estimated that the labor required to clean up the woodlands would cost $10,400.
Fortunately the academic and student housing buildings suffered relatively minor damages. All buildings with slate roofs needed to be repaired, and some of the fraternity houses reported broken windows, leaking roofs, and damaged chimneys. Despite the hurricane, and as a testament to the hard work of both staff and students, the fall semester began on time. However, it would be many months until the campus could return to the extent of its pre-hurricane operations.
Written by Alexandra Borkowski, a UConn PhD student and student assistant in Archives & Special Collections.
Today marks what would have been Maurice Sendak’s 92nd birthday and the 8th anniversary since his death on May 8, 2012. Born in Brooklyn, New York, on June 10, 1928, Maurice Sendak was a largely self-taught artist who went on to illustrate over 100 books during his sixty year career. Books for which Sendak became singularly identifiable include Nutshell Library (1962), Where the Wild Things Are (1963), In the Night Kitchen (1970), Outside Over There (1981), and many others. He was honored with numerous awards, including the international 1970 Hans Christian Anderson Award, the 1983 Laura Ingalls Wilder Award given by the American Library Association, the 1996 National Medal of Arts, and the 2003 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award. Sendak was the 1964 Caldecott Medal Winner forWhere the Wild Things Are.
He later held a second career as a costume and stage designer in the late 1970s, completing work on operas by Wolfgang Mozart, Sergei Prokofiev, and Maurice Ravel. Of music, Sendak said in a 1966 interview produced by Morton Schindel at Weston Woods Studios in Weston, Connecticut:
“I do most of my work to music, and music plays an extremely important part in my work. Depending on what I’m doing at the moment, there is always a specific kind of music I want to listen to. All composers have different colors, as all artists do, and I kind of pick up the right color from either Haydn or Mozart or Wagner while I’m working. And very often I will switch recordings endlessly until I get the right color and the right note and the right sound and then settle down happily to whatever I’m doing.”
Maurice Sendak moved to Ridgefield, Connecticut in 1972 with his partner, psychoanalyst Dr. Eugene Glynn. He supported the University of Connecticut for many years, speaking to the children’s literature classes of Professor Francelia Butler in the 1970s and 1980s and making important contributions over the years to support the legacy of Professor James. On September 5, 1990, Sendak was the recipient of an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts at UConn.
Maurice Sendak addresses the crowd in Jorgensen Auditorium on September 5, 1990. University of Connecticut Collections, Archives & Special Collections, UConn Library
To honor Maurice Sendak’s birthday anniversary, it feels appropriate to celebrate with The Birthday Party (1957), one of eight collaborations between Sendak and children’s book author Ruth Krauss (1901-1993) between 1952 and 1960. The Birthday Party follows a young boy, David, who “had been everywhere” except to a birthday party. He arrives home one day and after searching through the rooms in the house, finally finds everyone in the dining room singing “Happy Birthday dear David” and only then does he realize that not only is he at a birthday party but that the birthday is his own.
Sendak reflects on his relationship with Krauss in the 1994 obituary “Ruth Krauss and Me: A Very Special Partnership”:
“Ruth wasn’t so patient, or quiet, and she could frighten me with her stormy tirades. It was hard for such a fiercely liberated woman to contend with a potentially talented but hopelessly middle-class kid. In the end, she slapped me into shape — almost literally. When Ruth approved of a sketch, I was rewarded with the pleasure of her deep belly laugh, which rose upward and exploded in little-girl giggles. But her disapproval could be devastating…
…My favorite Krauss is A Very Special House, published in 1953. That poem most perfectly simulates Ruth’s voice — her laughing, crooning, chanting, singing voice. Barbara Bader, in her American Picturebooks from Noah’s Ark to the Beast Within (Macmillan), sums up that text: “It runs on, it erupts, it runs together — like a dream, daydream or nightdream or playdream; and the disarray, the flux, the indeterminacy were essential to the personal and private fancies that were to chiefly occupy Ruth Krauss thereafter.” “Thereafter” was the series of books Ruth and I collaborated on, eight in all. They permanently influenced my talent, developed my taste, and made me hungry for the best. But nothing was so satisfying as A Very Special House; those words and images are Ruth and me at our best. If I open that book, her voice will laugh out to me. So I will leave it shut a while.”
The Birthday Party charms. A petite book accordingly sized for children’s hands, the images consist of ink drawings with yellow and grey washes. David wanders alone from a scene of a beach, the woods, and a street corner until he reaches the party and suddenly, turning from one page of David peering into a dark room to another, everyone comes into full view. He is surrounded by smiling adults and a young girl, candles set in cupcakes raised high in the air. Sendak’s imagery captures Ruth Krauss’ playful use of rhythm and David’s surprise, delight and joy.
The Birthday Party is a gentle reminder to celebrate the special days of one’s life and to cherish those fleeting moments. Happy Birthday, dear Mr. Sendak!
The following guest post is by K-Fai Steele, recipient of the 2019 James Marshall Fellowship.K-Fai (www.k-faisteele.com) is an author and illustrator who grew up in a house built in the 1700s with a printing press her father bought from a magician. She wrote and illustratedA Normal Pig. She illustrated Noodlephantby Jacob Kramer (a Kirkus Best of 2019 picture book) and Old MacDonald Had a Baby by Emily Snape. She also illustrated the forthcoming Probably a Unicorn by Jory John and Okapi Tale, the sequel to Noodlephant. She wasa Brown Handler Writer in Residence at the San Francisco Public Library, and the 2018 Ezra Jack Keats/Kerlan Memorial Fellow at the University of Minnesota. K-Fai lives in San Francisco.
K-Fai Steele, 2019 James Marshall Fellow
The job of a professional children’s book author and illustrator is challenging. There’s no one formula for, or definition of success. The job walks the line between commercial and creative disciplines and requires a bizarre combination of skills: not only writing and illustrating books but being able to perform in front of large varied audiences (toddlers one day, fifth graders the next), deftness at publicity and social media, teaching, and generally being able to project an aura of success and expertise. It can often feel competitive and lonely. And one is paid as a freelancer, so (at least in the United States) there is no economic safety net and it’s hard to plan for a long term career. Another aspect of the job requires constant learning, growth, and improvisation which can either be stressful or exciting and luxurious (if you have the time and space to fully devote to it). Whenever I feel stuck I end up in a library and I’ve learned that some of the best libraries and collections contain public collections of children’s literature preliminary materials. The University of Connecticut is one of these places, and through the James Marshall Fellowship I was given the time, space, and funding to spend time learning and luxuriating in their collection.
If you spend enough time with someone’s work you get a sense of their process; in a way it’s the closest thing you can get to a mentorship. In his essays Caldecott & Co.: Notes on Books and Pictures, Maurice Sendak quotes Alphonse Mucha (a mentor to one of Sendak’s heroes Winsor McKay, the creator of the Little Nemo comic): “I think it would be wise for every art student to set up a certain popular artist whom he likes best and adapt his ‘handling’ or style… when you are puzzled with any part of your work, see how it has been handled by your favorite and fix it up in a similar manner.” It’s a very clever way to get a very good (and free) education.
Audio recordings of lectures by James Marshall presented to students of Francelia Butler
When you read a picture book you only see the finished product. When you visit archives, you see evidence of an often messy process, from sketches and sketchbooks to drafts, manuscripts, and original art. Occasionally you find very special pieces of media, like collections of audio cassette lectures. Francelia Butler was a professor of Children’s Literature at UCONN from the 1960s to 1990s and she invited dozens of authors, performers, and otherwise impressive thinkers to speak in her Children’s Literature 200 class, or as students referred to it, “kiddie lit 101.” She had the foresight to record most of these lectures which are now housed in the Northeast Children’s Literature Collection. James Marshall lived a couple of miles from the UCONN Storrs campus and would give a yearly lecture to her class of primarily undergraduates from 1976-1990 when he was 34 to 48 years old (he died when he was 50). These lectures are mostly off the cuff; he reads a book aloud (often George and Martha or The Stupids), discusses how he came up with ideas for books like Miss Nelson, then takes questions from the audience.
Marshall is the perfect guest lecturer. He is funny, insightful, knows how to work a crowd, and best of all he’s a generous lecturer. He knows how to communicate ideas and make them accessible. At his core he was an educator; he worked professionally as one for a while, having taken over Maurice Sendak’s picture book making class at Parsons. Much of the insights he shares in these recorded lectures are still deeply relevant today, particularly in terms of the creative process and the job of a children’s book creator. Marshall agonized about writer’s block and felt the pressure to make money. He also spoke from the perspective of an outsider who worked extremely hard and never took the joy of making books for granted.
When I arrived at UCONN to start my fellowship I didn’t anticipate that most of my time would be spent using my ears rather than my eyes. I had spent three weeks in 2018 at the Kerlan Collection looking through dozens of his sketchbooks in their collection and since then have tried to read all of his books. I realized I was engaging in a bit of detective work, trying to put the pieces together of a fascinating, talented, funny creator through the crumbs he left behind. Hearing him talk about his work (getting a firsthand narrative) made me feel incandescent. I popped in one cassette after another and was grateful for my fast typing (as of the time of this blog post’s publishing only two of the cassettes have been digitized; according to the archivist it’s an expensive and laborious process). In this post I’m going to share some quotations from these audiocassettes, what surfaced for me as a picture book creator, and what I think other people in the field might find interesting, from his process to how he thought about creative work.
Character development from the sketchbooks of James Marshall
“I start off drawing. I develop a character, make it as crazy as I can, and put that character in a situation. I start with a visual. I couldn’t sit at a typewriter and start a story with words… Drawings first, and then I type it up” (1977, cassette 504). Marshall was known for his strong characters; consider George and Martha, Fox, or The Stupids; the story revolves around them and how they interact with other characters. It’s not so much about plot; Marshall at one point describes George and Martha as a comedy of manners. “I teach my kids at Parsons that to start out you must have a very solid rounded character that lives. I have lots of sketchbooks and I just develop characters as they go along” (1982, cassette 515). Marshall trusted that a good story would organically come out of a good character, particularly if put in an interesting situation where they have to react. There’s a sort of faith required in starting with a character; you don’t know who’s going to show up on the page. You get to know a character by the way they look, their gesture, and how they react to other characters.
Marshall didn’t discuss a specific method that he used to generate stories because he didn’t seem to have one. He described working intuitively, relying on his brain and hand to put together funny ideas. “People ask me often where the ideas come from. If I knew that I could probably spell it out to you… I don’t know where the good stuff happens. It happens when I work a lot, and late at night. Usually If I’ve been working 8-10 hours doing just mechanical stuff I’m so tired all my defenses are down. I’m not worried whether it’s going to be a success or not, and some nutty idea comes in, it’s like someone else told me that… You know it came from inside your head but you don’t know why or how” (1979, cassette 506). “What I do is try to sit down, and if I fall down and start laughing that’s a good sign” (1980, cassette 508). It seemed that he didn’t examine his story-making because he was worried that if he figured it out he would lose the muse. “What I do is intuitive and I don’t know why I’m sitting here talking to you because I don’t really know why I do what I do, and to talk about it is a little scary to analyze it. I’m afraid if I look at it too much and try to figure out what I do it’ll go away” (1985, cassette 525). Since he relied so heavily on intuition his fear of losing the muse makes sense. He mentioned this fear in several lectures, and it seems to really be the thing he feared the most: the bucket going down the well and coming up dry.
Perhaps this fear came from a sense of what we would now describe as imposter syndrome. “Often I have so much trouble coming up with endings. It’s just like hell. Because you think here I am, this is what I do for a living, but maybe I’m not so good anymore, maybe I never had any talent in the first place” (1987, cassette 527). Marshall continues in a 1990 lecture, “I’ve thrown up in my studio from the fear of thinking I’m all finished, I’m washed up, I have no talent, I can’t even write one of these dumb books, I can’t think of another joke” (cassette 531).
Perhaps it came because making good books for children is deceptively challenging. There isn’t a roadmap, particularly when you’re making something that pushes boundaries of humor, style, etc. “When I’m drawing it’s like heaven, even when it’s not going so well I’m really, really happy. I feel connected, I feel like I belong. Why it’s such hell to get started, I don’t know. I guess it’s because I’m scared. Chekhov had the same feeling, he thought he was no good, couldn’t cut it. If a guy that great can have those feelings maybe it’s not so abnormal, maybe you should have those feelings of insecurity. Because if you’re absolutely sure that what you’re doing is brilliant what you’re doing is copying yourself or copying someone else” (1988, cassette 529).
Or perhaps the pressure was more external; he needed to make more books in order to keep his career (and income stream) flowing. This is when his practice of writing intuitively probably chafed against a demanding publishing schedule. “I have an artistic problem: when a book is successful, editors like to see success perpetuated, so they hire you to do a sequel. I’ve done so many sequels but I haven’t gotten any quite right. It’s the hardest thing in the world to capture the spirit of another book when you don’t have an idea. I’m doing three picture books, all three are sequels, and I’m stalled on all three. It’s a sickening feeling to think that you’re going to have to turn that money back and that you’ve run out of ideas” (1985, cassette 525). Marshall’s output was prodigious; he made around eighty picture books during his 50-year life. What is the result of working faster than your machine wants to run? The quality may suffer, at least in the creator’s eyes. In one lecture Marshall says, “I’ve made 60 books and only about 20 am I really proud of” (1983, cassette 517).
Marshall’s writing and drawings have a sense of lightness and ease to them, particularly in the way he draws characters and communicates their emotions through their eyes (often simple dots). In 1997 several years after Marshall’s death, Sendak wrote in the New York Times, “Much has been written concerning the sheer deliciousness of Marshall’s simple, elegant style. The simplicity is deceiving; there is richness of design and mastery of composition on every page. Not surprising, since James was a notorious perfectionist and endlessly redrew those ”simple” pictures.”
Marshall drew with joy, and this is most evident in UCONN’s collection of his sketchbooks. In his lectures he talks about the phenomenon I hear a lot of other author-illustrators experiencing when they move from sketches to final art; some freshness is lost. “It’s when you have to prepare something that’s going to get published, at least not only me but everyone I know in the business, you get tense and frightened because this is going to be out there, there are going to be 20,000 copies of this, and it gets tighter and tighter. The best stuff I’ve done of any quality is in my sketchbooks and I pick that stuff out and I’m like why can’t I do that here?” (1984, cassette 520). Perhaps it’s different when you’re making final art because you know that you have an audience, that you’re relying on the art to make money.It’s less about amusing yourself; it goes from a private activity to a very public one. “The sketches are so much more interesting, that’s the fun part. It’s when you do a line that you know is going to be published you start to clutch and tighten up. I’m just now learning to do books and get a line that’s going to be published that’s as good as the one in the sketches. I’d love to take my old sketches out and publish them. I feel so much more comfortable with them. I don’t know if it’s a fear of success or fear of failure, it’s a really terrifying process to go through” (1981, cassette 511).
Preliminary sketches by James Marshall
Marshall also shared insights into how he thought he was perceived by gatekeepers of the industry, specifically librarians who had a more traditional sense of illustration and who also reviewed books and selected for awards (in particular the Caldecott Award). “I work in basically creative periods of about 3 weeks that’s all I can stand… This is dangerous because when I tell librarians (“conventional people”) if I tell them how short it takes me to do a book I can see in their eyes my stock going down. You have to tell them you worked 5 years on this book and you’ve drawn with the blood of your slaughtered children and then it’s a masterpiece” (1985, cassette 519) Marshall drew somewhat injured and bitter conclusions about why he had been overlooked, “People who are in children’s books are ashamed of being in children’s books. People on committees want to pick a book that shows they’re an important, art-minded profession” (1985, cassette 519).
Sendak wrote that Marshall “paid the price of being maddeningly underestimated — of being dubbed ”zany” (an adjective that drove him to murderous rage)… he was dismissed as the artist who could — or should or might — do worthier work if he would only dig deeper and harder. The comic note, the delicate riff were deemed, finally, insufficient. James knew better, of course, and he was right, of course, but he suffered nevertheless. There was nothing he could do to impress the establishment; that was his triumph and his curse. Marshall did fulfill his genius, and its rarity and subtlety confounded the so-called critical world. The award-givers were foolish enough to consider him a charming lightweight, and when Caldecott Medal time came around, they ignored him again and again.” Marshall also spoke about competition in the children’s literature world, which undoubtedly was connected to him not feeling appreciated, validated, or celebrated by the people who held power. “The world of children’s books I used to say is a nice world. It is not, it’s a nest of vipers, we all hate each other… we’re very competitive” (1982, cassette 513).
It was interesting to hear Marshall talk about the other authors and illustrators he was in community with. In nearly every lecture he named some of the people who he thought were doing the best work in children’s literature: Arnold Lobel, Edward Gorey, Maurice Sendak, Tomi Ungerer, Rosemary Wells, William Steig, Edward Ardizzone, and Quentin Blake were all mentioned. “If you want to see some magnificent small jewels, look at the Frog and Toad books. I thought, oh I can do that. First I saw Sendak: oh, I can do that. Lobel: oh I can write stories about two friends too. They sort of gave me confidence. I didn’t know how hard it is. Sometimes it’s fun, sometimes it’s impossible to try and write two-page stories with a beginning, middle, and end” (1990, cassette 532). He clearly adored Maurice Sendak, who he referred to as “the granddaddy of us all” (1980, cassette 508) in terms of contemporary illustration. The Maurice Sendak Collection of James Marshall at UCONN contains several of Marshall’s books that he inscribed for Sendak, including a rare copy of his first illustrated book, Plink, Plink, Plink (1971) by Byrd Baylor which Marshall said “sunk, sunk, sunk” due to the “awful poems and awful pictures” (1977, cassette 504).
Copy of Plink, Plink, Plink inscribed to Maurice Sendak
This collection of recordings is a very rare and special item; you just don’t find a lot of authors speaking in their own words, at length, about their work. I think that this speaks to Marshall’s experience as an educator; someone who has good communication skills, a sense for what might be interesting content, respect for their audience, a willingness to be generous with the knowledge they possess, and their love for the work.
One of my favorite things that Marshall said had to do with the joy of getting to do the thing you love most in the world as a job. “To be able to support myself by doing what I really like to do best and by being creative, I never dreamed that that could be. I was raised with protestant puritant [sic] ethics. In Texas you had to bring home the bacon by doing stuff that you hated; my daddy hated his job, my mama hated being a housewife, everyone in my family hated everything. I thought when I became an adult I had to just swallow it. It’s not true. It’s a wonderful, wonderful feeling” (1983, cassette 517). This is something that you can easily lose sight of a children’s book maker as you get involved in the day-to-day of trying to meet deadlines, negotiate with art directors, redo cover art, schedule school visits, make money and budget wisely, etc. I’m writing this blog post in late spring 2020 in the midst of a global pandemic which has made clear that nothing is guaranteed, in particular human life, especially those most vulnerable in our society. For a while I wasn’t sure if books or art even mattered. But of course they do, and the act of engaging in joyful creative work is a much-needed lifeline, as Marshall attested to during his short life, ended by the HIV/AIDS pandemic in 1992. “One of the most wonderful things in the world is to do creative work, it is the greatest high, it makes your life come together” (1987, cassette 527).
Audio recording of James Marshall lecture from the Francelia Butler Papers
An exterior view of the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center on June 21, 2013. (Peter Morenus/UConn Photo)
To our community of scholars, donors, and supporters,
I’m reaching out to provide an update on the status of Archives & Special Collections. In accordance with the University of Connecticut’s response to the COVID-19 situation, Archives & Special Collections remains closed to the public. Although our facilities are currently closed, we remain committed to providing the highest level of care and support for our collections.
In preparing for the shutdown, our staff made all necessary provisions to secure the collections and ensure their safety. We have onsite security staff monitoring our collections, research, and exhibition spaces, and receive daily briefings on the status of our facilities. We also maintain an up-to-the-minute environmental monitoring system, which includes the ability to check on the temperature and humidity of our spaces remotely.
Although some of our services are limited at this time, we are working hard to ensure that you can continue to engage with our collections throughout this closure, from providing virtual instruction sessions to developing online exhibitions from our rich digital collections.
We recently launched a new online search portal, where you can access guides to our collections remotely, and have made more than 750,000 digital objects from our collections available for research and use through the Connecticut Digital Archive. We are active on social media – I encourage you to check out our Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram regularly for new content, programming, and collection highlights.
Our staff are teleworking and remain accessible by email and phone – please feel free to contact us at any time with questions or concerns: archives@uconn.edu or 860-486-2524. We will keep you informed about service and facility updates via the UConn Library’s COVID-19 response webpage and our social media outlets.
We appreciate your continued support as we work together to ensure the safety and well-being of our communities, and look forward to seeing you again in the near future.
~ Rebecca Parmer, Head of Archives & Special Collections
The UConn Archives is interested in documenting the wide range of recent reactions, experiences, and activities undertaken by members of the UConn Nation as we all adjust, struggle and move forward through the challenges of a world-wide pandemic.
Archived news and internet sites will be excellent primary sources for future historians studying the pandemic. It is well documented, however, that the day-to-day activities and social and emotional experiences of people can get lost if not collected and preserved while memories, experiences, and reactions are fresh.
We are reaching out to the UConn community–students, faculty, staff, administrators, alumni, and other affiliated community members–to share your stories, in whatever form you wish, to be collected, preserved for posterity, and made accessible for research and study in Archives & Special Collections’ UConn COVID-19 Collection. More information and instructions on how you can participate can be found on our website at https://lib.uconn.edu/location/asc/about/documenting-covid/
Thank you for contributing to this important new collection!
On April 26, 1962, Edwin Way Teale, at Trail Wood, his home in Hampton, Connecticut, wrote this passage:
A little after 5 am, just as the sun was rising above the trees along the brook, this morning, I walk down Veery Lane, up over the tundra and to Juniper Hill the long way. The air – down to 35 [degrees] — has an autumn sparkle. I see the earliest tent caterpillar nests shining silver in the crotch of a wild cherry sapling. All the ravines are filled with the yellow-green stippling of the spicebush blooms. Where a maple has fallen across the path near the crossing before Juniper Hill, I see where some animal has gnawed the bark from several branches near the ground. What was it – a rabbit? Because only the lower and smaller branches were attacked a rabbit seems to be the most likely possibility rather than a deer or porcupine…
Edwin Way Teale (1899-1980) was a naturalist, photographer and writer, born in the Midwest but who lived in New York after earning his masters degree at Columbia University. In the 1930s he worked as a writer and photographer for the magazine Popular Science and began his career as the author over 30 books on natural history topics. His books include Dune Boy: The Early Years of a Naturalist (1943), The Lost Woods (1945), North With the Spring (1951), Journey into Summer (1960), and Wandering Through Winter (1965), for which he won the 1966 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction.
In 1959 Teale and his wife Nellie left suburban Long Island for 130 acres of farmland in Hampton. They named the property Trail Wood and developed a series of looping trails, which the Teales walked almost daily. He describes the property in such books as A Naturalist Buys an Old Farm (1974) and A Walk Through the Year (1978).
A constant writer, for much of his life Teale kept a daily journal with the details of his habits and musings. He also kept a special journal – The Trail Wood Journal – about his observations of the change of seasons of the landscape of his beloved patch of land.
Fifty-eight years after Teale wrote the journal entry noted above, the author of this blog post visited Trail Wood, which is now managed as a nature preserve by the Connecticut Audubon Society and open to the public. It is my impression that the landscape I walked on my visit on April 25, 2020, was fairly close to that of which Teale wrote about on April 26, 1962, excepting the existence of trail signs installed along the way for visitors. The streams of this mid-Spring were running freely, the day was warm and the bugs abuzz. While I cannot claim to be as observant a nature lover or as skilled a writer as Edwin Way Teale, I can claim the same joy he must have felt whenever he strode the trails, discovering whatever revealed itself to him.
Archives & Special Collections holds Edwin Way Teale’s extensive papers and photographs, truly one of our premier collections. Some of the photographs, as well as Trail Wood Journal, can be found online in our digital repository.
In late 2016 and the first half of 2017 author Richard Telford spent many months intensively researching the Teale collection in preparation for a book he was writing on Teale’s life. Mr. Telford contributed many posts to our blog, which are drafts from the book. In them the details of Teale’s life, as revealed in the diaries, correspondence and publications, are beautifully placed into context. You can find Telford’s writings, which he titled Reexamining the Life and Writing of Edwin Way Teale in our blog:
The Connecticut Audubon Society, which maintains Trail Wood, has information about Edwin Way and Nellie Teale online and on the signs throughout the trails. Happily most of the boards are reproduced on their website. You can find this information at these links:
For more than a century, the E. Ingraham Company was a prominent family-operated manufacturer of clocks and watches, with headquarters and plants located in Bristol, Connecticut. Most of its employees were natives of the Bristol region, and members of the Ingraham family of Bristol controlled its management.
The company was founded in 1831 by Elias Ingraham (1805-1885), who opened his own shop in Bristol as a cabinetmaker and designer of clock cases. After several mergers with other companies and name changes the company was known as E. Ingraham and Company by 1884. From 1884 to 1958, the period during which most of the surviving company records were created, the firm was known as E. Ingraham Company. In 1958, the name was changed to Ingraham Company, and in November 1967, when the company was sold to McGraw Edison Company, it became Ingraham Industries.Through much of the company’s history, members of the Ingraham family served as its presidents and in other official capacities. The last to hold the office of president was Dudley Ingraham, until 1954.
E. Ingraham Company’s products throughout its history reflected technological advances and changing consumer demands for timepieces. Until about 1890, the company manufactured only pendulum clocks. During the 1890s, they began making lever escapement time clocks and alarm clocks. Radical changes in manufacturing methods during the following decade enabled E. Ingraham Company to produce 30-hour alarm clocks, pocket watches (1914), and 8-day alarm lever and timepieces (1915). In 1913 the company began to manufacture the popular “dollar watch.” In 1930, Ingraham added non-jeweled wrist watches and in 1931 began marketing electric clocks.
The depression of the 1930s did not affect E. Ingraham Company as severely as it did many other businesses. Employment never dropped more than 15% and wage and salaries were not cut. By the beginning of the Second World War, the company was producing clocks and watches at maximum capacity in order to meet the great export need after many European supplies were cut off. However, in 1942 the War Production Board ordered E. Ingraham Company to cease manufacture of all clocks and watches. By August 1942 the company had entirely re-tooled for production of items of critical war use, such as mechanical time-fuse parts for Army and Navy anti-aircraft and artillery. Full production of clocks and watches was not resumed until 1946, but the years 1946 to 1948 were boom years for company sales.
The company was sold to McGraw Edison Company in November 1967 and its name changed to Ingraham Industries.
In 1980 the company donated its records to the University of Connecticut Library. They consist of account books, general business records, correspondence, printed materials, photographs, maps and drawings which document the company’s history from 1840-1967. Also included are general accounting and administrative records; records relating to sales, purchasing, production, and labor; subsidiary company records. The general correspondence, which comprises more than half of the records, is particularly voluminous for the years 1916-1947.
Now available online in the UConn Archives digital repository is a set of sales catalogs of the E. Ingraham Company’s clocks and watches, beginning at http://hdl.handle.net/11134/20002:19800034Catalogs. These catalogs are a terrific resource for clock collectors and historians.
Maurice Sendak signs books at the UConn Coop bookstore on April 28, 1981. Photo: Jo Lincoln, Archives & Special Collections, UConn Library.
“All of my pictures are created against a background of music. More often than not, my instinctive choice of composer or musical form for the day has the galvanizing effect of making me conscious of my direction. I find something uncanny in the way a musical phrase, a sensuous vocal line, or a patch of Wagnerian color will clarify an entire approach or style for a new work.”
-The Shape of Music, Maurice Sendak, 1964
…
Maurice Sendak, celebrated and renowned author and illustrator of children’s books such as the revolutionary 1963 Where the Wild Things Are and 1970 In the Night Kitchen, held a life-long and deeply intimate and interwoven relationship with music. Holding in high esteem composers such as Wolfgang Amadeus Wolfgang and Franz Schubert, he was in the habit of listening to music while working on his creations, and often, references to music crept into his preliminary and final drawings. A significant example occurs in the artwork for the 1981 Outside Over There.
Musically inspired and layered with resounding personal overtures, Sendak was already working on Outside Over There when stage director Frank Corsaro asked him in 1978 to design the costumes and sets on a production of “The Magic Flute” for the Houston Grand Opera. A catalyst for the creation of Outside Over There, Sendak explained: “In some way, Outside Over There is my attempt to make concrete my love of Mozart, and to do it as authentically and honestly in regard to his time as I could conceive it, so that every color, every shape is like part of his portrait. The book is a portrait of Mozart, only it has this form-commonly called a picture book. This was the closest I could get to what he looked like to me. It is my imagining of Mozart’s life.”[i]
In the 1964 essay, The Shape of Music, Sendak describes in beautiful terms the definition of “quicken” as it relates to illustration and animation and that to him to quicken “suggests a beat-a heartbeat, a musical beat, the beginning of a dance.” In other words, to “quicken” is to bring life into the inanimate – a source of rhythm so that a picture grows alive in the flow of imagery, color, and shape, or more succinctly, music in physical form. Outside Over There follows Ida, a young girl bearing the brunt of responsibility for caring for her baby sister while her father is away at sea and her mother immobile from melancholy. While music, or rather the act of Ida playing on her wonder horn and neglecting to attend to her sister, helps to cause the kidnapping of the baby by the goblins, music is the tool or action which redeems Ida. For by playing on her wonder horn, Ida drives and melts the goblins away and results in the siblings’ reunion and reconciliation.
Sendak acknowledged that “right in the middle of Outside Over There, everything turned Mozart. Mozart became the godhead.”[ii] Dully, Mozart is seen in profile during the children’s return journey from “outside over there,” omnipresent to the scene and story but in shadow across the river in his Waldhütte, the creative cabin in the woods that becomes a recurrent Romantic theme for Sendak.[iii] In the final artwork for Outside Over There, for some drawings Sendak included not only notations for the creation dates, but also, the exact music which helped to inspire his illustrations. For example, for the artwork for page 13, a scene where Ida is playing the wonder horn and an ice baby is substituted by the goblins for the real child, the notation reads “Dec. 28, 77-Dec 30, 77 (tracing & inking)-Jan. 2, 78-Jan. 18, 78.” Above these dates, “string quartet in C- Mozart” is written in pencil. Mozart, by way of this inscription, receives his due acknowledgement as muse.
Outside Over There, after Where the Wild Things Are and In the Night Kitchen, is heralded as the final book in a trilogy of “variations of a theme” in which children cope with the day-to-day pressures of life by way of fantasy.[iv] Maurice Sendak, in speaking of Ida, says, “What she did is what I did and what I know for the first time in my life I have done. The book is a release of something that has long pressured my internal self. It sounds hyperbolic but it’s true; it’s like profound salvation. If for only once in my life, I have touched the place where I wanted to go, and when Ida goes home, I go home too.”[v] If Sendak’s love of Mozart helped to guide the textual and visual feel of Outside Over There and Ida’s journey, it is the underlying touch of the intangible which roams within the other world only to finally return home and perhaps, it is this element which ultimately touches the images and “quickens” them within their physical boundaries.
As we now experience the shutdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many of us in self-quarantine, our thoughts turn to those who are essential to caring for those afflicted by the deadly virus. Doctors, nurses, EMTs, hospital workers and others in the medical fields are providing services for the sick and selflessly keeping us all safe. People across the country are rightly acknowledging and thanking them for their devotion to their work and to our well-being.
In the scheme of things at this moment in time the work of archivists seems pretty inconsequential, although my colleagues and I will contend that any event that we are dealing with in the present can, and should, be looked at through the lens of history. So that’s where we come in. That’s what we do.
The UConn Archives has an ample number of resources about the tireless work of those who care for others.
We hold an extensive number of collections on the history of nursing, many of which provide context and support to the materials found in the University of Connecticut School of Nursing Archives. This area is particularly strong in its documentation of the professional development, status, and legal activities associated with nursing by the organizations in Connecticut on behalf of their members as well as 20th century nurse training. There is limited, but significant, documentation of information on 19th century nursing activities during the American Civil War in the Josephine Dolan Collection. Formats accepted include manuscripts, diaries, correspondence, photographs, ephemera, sound recordings, and moving images. More information about these collections can be found in our collection management system at https://archivessearch.lib.uconn.edu/repositories/2/classifications/9 but a few of the more significant collections are highlighted here:
UConn School of Nursing Records. As early as 1937, public health personnel in the state explored the possibility of organizing courses for public health nurses at Connecticut State College but, lacking funds, the project was shelved. In 1940, a committee of 18 members was formed and in 1941 presented a report entitled “A School of Nursing for Connecticut.” The proposal envisaged a program for registered nurses leading to the Bachelor of Science degree and a curriculum which would include 33 to 36 credits in required general courses plus a major in Nursing Education, School Nursing/Health Teaching or Public Health Nursing. The newly created University of Connecticut (named changed in 1939) Administration decided that a School of Nursing that would provide basic preparation in nursing as well as curricula for registered nurses would meet the need expressed in the report. The new School of Nursing was established in Fall 1942; the first Dean, Carolyn Ladd Widmer, was appointed in July, 1942, and arrived on campus in August. The finding aid to the collection can be found at https://archivessearch.lib.uconn.edu/repositories/2/resources/668
Josephine A. Dolan Collection of Nursing History consists of materials gathered by Dolan, the first nursing professor at the University of Connecticut School of Nursing, consisting primarily of correspondence of the Wolcott family, articles and proceedings of various nursing organizations.https://archivessearch.lib.uconn.edu/repositories/2/resources/346. Items related to wartime nursing and the Wolcott family can be found in the digital repository at http://hdl.handle.net/11134/20002:199500288
Eleanor Herrmann Nursing History Collection; professor of nursing at UConn from 1987 to 1997 and a member of the American Association for the History of Nursing, was one of its past presidents, and served on editorial boards and review panels for several professional journals. She also was a member of Sigma Theta Tau Nursing Honor Society; a fellow of the American Academy of Nursing — https://archivessearch.lib.uconn.edu/repositories/2/resources/43
Records of the UConn Health Center. Founded in 1961 the University of Connecticut Health Center is composed of the School of Medicine and School of Dental Medicine, John Dempsey Hospital, the UConn Medical Group and University Dentists pursues a mission of providing outstanding health care education in an environment of exemplary patient care, research and public service. The Health Center’s main campus is situated in Farmington, Connecticut. The finding aid to the Heath Center records can be found at https://archivessearch.lib.uconn.edu/repositories/2/resources/713
Records of the UConn School of Pharmacy. The Connecticut College of Pharmacy was established in 1925 and located in New Haven, Connecticut. the course in pharmacy was extended from two to three years (1927) and to four years in 1932 (B.S. degree). In 1941, the Connecticut General Assembly incorporated the College as a School of the University of Connecticut. Beginning in 1942 diplomas were awarded in Storrs rather than in independent ceremonies at Yale University as had been the practice to date. In 1951, the School moved to the Storrs Campus of the University of Connecticut. The collection contains an extensive collection of clippings (scrapbooks) concerning the program and its faculty, students and graduates in addition to historical papers, documents and reports about pharmacy and the program at the University. The finding aid to the collection can be found at https://archivessearch.lib.uconn.edu/repositories/2/resources/592 and a small number of items associated with the School of Pharmacy are in the digital repository at http://hdl.handle.net/11134/20004:19930077
Other collections touching on medical issues:
George W. Hanford correspondence from World War I. Hanford worked in the medical corps in the war and wrote to his parents in Kensington, Connecticut. The letters, from 1917 to 1918, can be found at http://hdl.handle.net/11134/20002:20050140
“An idea for me must be ‘heartfelt’–something that rings
true for me–something worthy to share with children.” – from an interview with
Tomie dePaola by Phyllis Boyson, Tomie dePaola: Storyteller of a New Era, New Era, Vol. 62, Issue 3, 1981
We are saddened to hear of the passing of beloved
illustrator and author Tomie dePaola, donor, supporter and friend to the
Northeast Children’s Literature Collection, held in the Archives & Special
Collections at the University of Connecticut Library.
Tomie dePaola was born September 15, 1934 in Meriden,
Connecticut. He received a Bachelor’s degree from Pratt Institute in 1956 and
later a Master’s degree from the California College of Arts and Crafts in
Oakland. dePaola shared his ideas with children in over 250 books over his
55-year career, and for that effort has won many accolades. In 1976, he was
awarded a Caldecott Honor for Strega Nona
and in 2000 a Newbery Medal Honor for the autobiographical work, 26 Fairmount Avenue. The Association for
Library Service to Children, a division of the American Library Association,
awarded dePaola the biennial Children’s Literature Legacy Award in 2011. A year
later, the Society of Illustrators honored him with a Lifetime Achievement
Award.
In the interest of assuring that children and others would
have an opportunity to explore the process of turning worthy ideas into award
winning children’s books, dePaola assembled and donated 70 linear feet of
archival material to the Northeast Children’s Literature Collection in 1999.
dePaola was urged to preserve his papers by his former professor at Pratt
Institute, Roger L. Crossgrove, who had also been Department Head at the School
of Fine Arts at UConn and was co-founder of the Northeast Children’s Literature
Collection. The mission of the Northeast Children’s Literature Collection to
preserve the history of the creation of our best literature written for
children with an emphasis on illustration as an art form appealed to dePaola’s
concern for showing the entire creative process, including the errors,
revisions, and failures that occur prior to an idea becoming a successful
publication. dePaola continued to donate material through 2015, lending
additional depth to the collection through illustrations, book manuscripts, new
publications, and original artwork.
The Tomie
dePaola Papers contain artwork and sketchbooks, manuscripts, research files
and reference works, printed material, marketing products, and video recordings
from 1949-2015. The strength of the collection is in the number of paintings
and sketches produced by dePaola from 1953-1978, during his early artistic
career. The collection also includes dePaola’s reference library, mainly
graphic design, illustration, and art and craft magazines and encyclopedic book
collections on the ages of man and historically important painters. Actively
used by students and researchers, works from the collection are often shown and
loaned for exhibition. All of Our Angels,
a picture book dePaola created for a Pratt class project was recently exhibited
in The Picture Book Re-Imagined: the
Children’s Book Legacy of Pratt Institute and the Bank Street College of
Education (Pratt Manhattan Gallery, 2016).
dePaola was a fervent supporter of UConn not only with the
generous donation of his collection but also through his participation in the Connecticut
Children’s Book Fair. In the 23-year history of the Fair, he joined us 9 times,
most recently in 2018. A popular guest, he seemed to relish in the idea of
bringing together children from all over the state to tell his stories, and to
hear theirs. In fact, the committee learned early on that they would need to rearrange
both the presentation room and signing spaces to accommodate the large crowds
he drew.
In 1999 the University honored dePaola with an Honorary
Doctorate of Fine Arts, which was celebrated in true Tomie dePaola fashion with
a lighthearted roast and plenty of singing. In 2007 the Library honored him
with the inaugural Northeast Children’s Literature Collection Distinguished Service
Award for his long-standing contribution to the field of children’s literature
and support of the Northeast Children’s Literature Collection.
While dePaola’s legacy will live on in the archives, we will
miss his personality and passion for children’s literature. We send our
condolences to his friends and family.
For many,
the gay liberation movement began on June 28, 1969. At the Stonewall Inn, a bar
located in New York City’s Greenwich Village, patrons and neighborhood
residents fought back against a violent police raid in the early morning hours.
The crowd’s fierce resistance against law enforcement quickly grew into an
uprising that lasted six days and signaled the arrival of a militant and confrontational
movement for the liberation of LGBTQ+ people.
For students attending the University of Connecticut, something like their own Stonewall moment came a few years later, in the 1971-1972 academic year. By then, the UConn Gay Alliance, founded in 1967 by Peter Aubichon and Paul Harrison, had grown from a small private group to an officially recognized student organization. As part of its activities, the organization began to hold dances at the Inner College trailer on campus.
Around
2:00 am on the night of the first dance, some fraternity members “started
screaming obscenities, yelling, and throwing bottles and rocks” at the trailer
and those gathered outside. But similar to Stonewall, those attending the dance
fought back. “Of course we started yelling back like maybe we could start
something, like crack their heads,” one of dance attendees later recounted, “It
was amazing!”
The
meetings, dances, and other activities organized by the UConn Gay Alliance proved
that by the early 1970s, the gay liberation movement had arrived on campus. Yet
the State of Connecticut and its flagship university had long been home to
various forms of LGBTQ+ activism and organizing.
In the
1950s, the homophile movement took shape as LGBTQ+ people began to organize and
agitate for their rights. Groups like the Mattachine Society, ONE, Inc., and
the Daughters of Bilitis sought to raise awareness, unify LGBTQ+ people, and
challenge widespread social stigmas. Yet unlike later struggles for gay
liberation, the homophile movement adopted a more cautious and gradual
approach.
In the
early 1960s, Foster Gunnison, Jr., who had arrived in Hartford, Connecticut, to
pursue a master’s degree at Trinity College, began to immerse himself in the
homophile movement. He offered his services as a secretary to the Eastern
Conference of Homophile Organizations (ECHO), an early coalition of
organizations working to create a national homophile organization. Then, in
1966, he was appointed Chair of the Credentials Committee for the North
American Conference of Homophile Organizations (NACHO).
From 1965
to 1969, Gunnison collected the office and conference records of ECHO and
NACHO, along with the records and periodicals of several LGBTQ+ organizations
throughout the United States. During this period, Gunnison even founded his own
organization, the Institute for Social Ethics (ISE) and in 1967 wrote the
pamphlet, An Introduction to the
Homophile Movement.
While
Gunnison busied himself with preserving and documenting the homophile movement,
students such as Daniel Campbell explored the spaces opened up by a burgeoning
counterculture back on the University of Connecticut campus. Campbell attended
UConn as a graduate student in 1967-68. In a poignant memoir, Campbell
describes his pre-Stonewall experience on campus. “We may have been closeted to
one degree or another,” he writes, “but we did not live in isolation.”
The rise
of the counterculture and the hippie movement supplied a shared context. As
young men faced the prospect of the military draft, and young women, the loss
of their brothers and boyfriends, “they escaped into a separate reality and
took liberties no generation had dared take before.” Campbell notes that LGBTQ+
people “shared in those liberties” in different ways. For Campbell and others,
the popular slogan, “the personal is political,” became an everyday reality.
In the
1980s, The HIV/AIDS crisis that racked the LGBTQ+ community also generated
notable forms of organizing and activism in Connecticut. The Connecticut
Women’s Educational and Legal Fund (CWEALF), a non-profit public interest law
firm founded in 1973, originally sought to help women gain equality under the
law. But along with this mission, CWEALF began to hold conferences and other
events in Hartford and around Connecticut to share information about HIV/AIDS
and provide the LGBTQ+ community with resources to secure their legal rights.
Much of
the LGBTQ+ activism, organizing, and educational work that continued in the
1990s and the first decades of the twenty-first century also made their mark on
the University of Connecticut and around the state. After several years of
organizing, planning, and lobbying by students and staff, UConn opened the
Rainbow Center on campus in 1999. Still operating today, the center is
dedicated to serving the needs of the LGBTQ+ community on campus. Throughout
this period, LGBTQ+ activists and organizations across Connecticut also helped
lead the movement for marriage equality, both in the state and the nation.
If you’d
like to learn more about the history of LGBTQ+ activism and organizing at the
University of Connecticut and across the state, Archives & Special
Collections holds a wealth of material that may interest you. Among some of our
relevant collections are:
University of Connecticut,
President’s Office Records The
collection comprises extensive material, especially administrative files and correspondence,
from the offices of UConn’s various presidents. The records of presidents Homer
D. Babbidge (1962–1972) and John A. DiBiaggio (1979-1985) are particularly
useful. Both contain correspondence and other material relating to LGBTQ+
issues on campus, such as the emergence and activities of the gay liberation
movement in the early 1970s. The finding aid for Homer Babbidge’s office
records can be accessed here: https://archivessearch.lib.uconn.edu/repositories/2/resources/789 and the
finding aid for John A. DiBiaggio’s office records can be accessed here: https://archivessearch.lib.uconn.edu/repositories/2/resources/603
Alternative Press Collection The Alternative Press Collection (APC) includes thousands of
national and international newspapers, serials, books, pamphlets, ephemera and
artifacts documenting activists and organizations from the 1800s to the
present. Alongside the President’s Office Records, the APC files provide a
bottom up look at LGBTQ+ organizing at UConn. Especially notable are materials
from the Storrs Gay Coalition and the UConn Gay Alliance. The APC also contains
voluminous materials from other LGBTQ+ organizations in Connecticut and
throughout the United States. The APC can best be consulted using the card
catalog available at Archives & Special Collections, though some digitized
materials can be accessed here: https://archives.lib.uconn.edu/islandora/object/20002%3A19920001APCFiles
Daniel R. Campbell Papers The papers comprise a manuscript, a
published article, and copies of photographs from Daniel R. Campbell, who
attended UConn in 1967-1968 and was one of the first openly gay students on
campus. The manuscript describes Campbell’s experiences at UConn and elsewhere,
and offers insight and perspective on pre-Stonewall LGBTQ+ culture on campus.
Campbell describes his life during this period, some discrimination he faced on
campus, his interactions with students and professors, and comments on the
wider culture of the late-1960s. In particular, Campbell highlights the hippie
movement and the counterculture as helping to open space for living as an
openly gay person during this period. The finding aid can be accessed here: https://archivessearch.lib.uconn.edu/repositories/2/resources/284
University of Connecticut, Rainbow
Center Records The
collection comprises administrative records, financial records, correspondence,
publications, and other materials such as newspapers,
brochures, pamphlets, and posters associated with the UConn Rainbow
Center. The center was founded in 1999 after several years of organizing, planning,
and lobbying by students and staff. The center is dedicated to supporting the
needs of the LGBTQIA+ members of the campus community, and the collection
documents the center’s history and activities up to the present day. The
finding aid can be accessed here: https://archivessearch.lib.uconn.edu/repositories/2/resources/962
Foster Gunnison, Jr. Papers The collection comprises personal correspondence, organizational records, conference proceedings, serial publications and periodicals, posters and fliers, buttons, newspaper clippings, and photographs relating to LGBTQ+ activism in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as other issues such as smoker’s rights and barbershop quartets. Foster Gunnison, Jr. collected a range of materials from the homophile movement in Connecticut and across the United States, and later founded his own organization, the Institute for Social Ethics (ISE). The collection provides materials on a wide range of LGTBQ+ organizations in Connecticut, many of which have been digitized. The finding aid can be accessed here: https://archivessearch.lib.uconn.edu/repositories/2/resources/413 and digitized materials can be accessed here: http://hdl.handle.net/11134/20002:19960009SIIISE
Connecticut Women’s Education and
Legal Fund Records The
collection comprises administrative files, committee reports, legal testimony,
workshop materials, lists of contacts and referrals, records on outreach and
education, as well as related materials such as flyers, handouts, surveys, etc.
The Connecticut Women’s
Educational and Legal Fund (CWEALF), a non-profit public
interest law firm, was founded in 1973. CWEALF helps women gain equality under
the law and focuses on discrimination in such areas as education, employment,
insurance, and health care. CWEALF is also concerned with reproductive rights
and LGBTQ+ issues. In particular, relevant materials concern education and
outreach on legal rights for gays and lesbians, as well as medical and legal
information surrounding the HIV/AIDS crisis. The finding aid can be accessed
here: https://archivessearch.lib.uconn.edu/repositories/2/resources/334
Marriage Equality and LGBT Activism in Connecticut Oral History Collection The collection comprises eleven oral histories with leading activists in Connecticut who have been a part of the marriage equality movement and engaged in other forms of LGBTQ+ activism in the state and beyond. The interviews were conducted by Valerie Love, Curator for Human Rights and Alternative Press Collections, between July 2010 and April 2011. Six of the eleven interviews have been transcribed and are available. The finding aid can be accessed here: https://archivessearch.lib.uconn.edu/repositories/2/resources/925 and digitized transcripts from the collection can be accessed here: http://hdl.handle.net/11134/20002:201100766
We invite you to view these collections in the reading room at Archives & Special Collections. Our staff is happy to assist you in accessing these and other collections in the archives.
This post was written by Shaine Scarminach, a UConn History Ph.D candidate who is a student assistant in Archives & Special Collections.
