Category Archives: From the Researcher’s Perspective…

“Tití Doris taught me dance…”

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Collections in archives and special collections come to life when researchers visit us and use our archival holdings. They turn what seem like a cluster of old, unrelated books and papers into meaningful stories and histories. Case in point is the recent visit to the archives by Margarita Barresi, a novelist doing research for her first book. The setting of the book is in Puerto Rico and she wanted to learn more about the social and cultural life of Puerto Rico during the first half of the 20th century.

“I’ve always wanted to write a novel based on the story of my grandparents,” says Barresi. “They lived during a time of great change in Puerto Rico, when a group of young idealists headed by Luis Muñoz Marín led the island from widespread poverty to great prosperity during the 1940s. I remember Luis Muñoz Marín having dinner at our house, and attending Christmas Eve parties at the house of Don Jaime Benítez, chancellor of the University of Puerto Rico, and a great educator and statesman. Knowing these people did not seem remarkable to an eight-year old child. They were just family friends. I am so grateful for the archives like the Dodd Research Center where I can go to hear their voices once again.”

Barresi wanted access to several rare books and pamphlets from the Puerto Rican Collection, a rich collection of 19th and early 20th century books, pamphlets and government documents assembled by three generations from the Géigel Family from Puerto Rico. “It was particularly helpful to me that the Géigel Family was from Ponce. Part of my grandmother’s story is set in the Ponce of the 1920s, and having access to books that recounted the time, such as Ponce y su Historial Geopolítico-Económico y Cultural by Manuel Mayoral Barnes, was invaluable,” says Barresi.

In addition to gathering information about Puerto Rico in the first half of the 20th century, Barresi found an actual family connection while delving in these books and newspapers. She tells me, “Your archive resources were very useful and fascinating, as were the back issues of ‘El Imparcial’ and ‘El Mundo’ in the library.  I will probably come back to review more of the newspapers once I am further along in my research. On a fun note, I was surprised to see my grandfather’s cousin, Doris Ortiz, listed in the first PR Ballet program. I knew she was a dancer of some renown, who was even in a Hollywood movie dancing Flamenco, but I didn’t know she was also in the first Puerto Rican ballet company. Tití Doris taught me dance in her Hato Rey studio when I was a young girl.”

We look forward to reading Ms. Barresi’s novel in the future and see Puerto Rico’s social and cultural life comes to life  in her work.

Note: Images from:  Les Presages : anunciación de un arte nuevo en Puerto Rico : [programa de ballet]

Marisol Ramos, Curator for Latin American & Caribbean Collections

Malka Penn Children’s Book Collection on Human Rights

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In 2005, Michele Palmer of Storrs, Connecticut, established the Malka Penn Children’s Book Collection on Human Rights as part of the Northeast Children’s Literature Collection at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center.  The picture books, young adult novels and non-fiction works address issues such as the Holocaust, racism, prejudice, war and conflict.  The works below were  published in 2010 or were made available in the U.S. for the first time in 2010.  Ms. Palmer, who has written several children’s books under the pseudonym Malka Penn, is also a volunteer for the Windham Textile and History Museum.

Chapman, Fern, Is It Night or Day? (New York : Farrar Straus Giroux, 2010).

Ellis, Deborah, No Safe Place. (Toronto : Groundwood Books/House of Anansi Press, 2010).

Engle, Margarita, The Firefly Letters: A Suffragette’s Journey to Cuba.  (New York : Henry Holt and Co., 2010).

Jablonski, Carla, Resistance: Book 1 (New York : First Second, 2010).

Kittinger, Jo, Rosa’s Bus.  (Honesdale, Pa. : Calkins Creek, ©2010).

Lottridge, Celia, Home is Beyond the Mountains. (Toronto : Groundwood Books/House of Anansi Press, 2010).

Molnar, Haya, Under A Red Sky: Memoir of a Childhood in Communist Romania. (New York : Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2010).

Nelson, S.D., Black Elk’s Vision. (New York : Abrams Books for Young Readers, ©2010).

Pinkney, Andrea, Sit-In: How Four Friends Stood Up by Sitting Down.  (New York : Little, Brown, ©2010).

Ramsey, Calvin, Ruth and the Green Book. (Minneapolis, MN : Carolrhoda Books, ©2010).

Reynolds, Aaron, Back of the Bus. (New York : Philomel Books, ©2010).

Robinson, Anthony, Hamzat’s Journey: A Refugee Diary. (London, England : Frances Lincoln Children’s Books, 2010, ©2009).

Shimko, Bonnie, The Private Thoughts of Amelia E. Rye. (New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010).

Slade, Suzanne, Climbing Lincoln’s Steps. (Chicago, Ill. : Albert Whitman, ©2010).

Stanley, Diane, Saving Sky. (New York : Harper, ©2010).

Warner, Jody, Viola Desmond Won’t Be Budged. (Toronto : Groundwood Books/House of Anansi Press, 2010).

Terri J. Goldich, Curator, Northeast Children’s Literature Collection

Nellie and Pinocchio go a-roaming

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The Wenham Museum in Wenham, Massachusetts is borrowing artifacts, sketches, and illustrations from the Northeast Children’s Literature Collection for their upcoming exhibit Picture This: 90 Years of Storybook Art (February 3- May 6, 2012).  Classic toy stories will come to life through more than 50 original illustrations, vintage toys, and antique books in a colorful display that is engaging for all ages. In the gallery visitors will be able to make their own picture book to take away after their visit, dress in costume to become part of the story, and use story cubes to create their own picture stories all while enjoying the illustrations and reading classics of children’s literature.

The NCLC is lending two artifacts from Nellie, a cat on her own, written and illustrated by Natalie Babbitt and published in 1989 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.   Ms. Babbitt was born in 1932 in Dayton, OH, the daughter of Ralph Zane and Genevieve (Converse) Moore. She received her B.A. from Smith College in 1954. That same year she married Samuel Fisher Babbitt, who also collaborated with her on her first book, The 49th Magician.

The Babbitt Papers hold the manuscripts, preliminary sketches, finished artwork and models for this and many other Babbitt titles, including her most famous work, the multiple award-winning Tuck Everlasting.   Seven paintings and two sketches by Ms. Babbitt will accompany Nellie and her hat to Wenham. Nellie a cat on her own written and illustrated by Natalie BabbittTo keep Nellie company, eight collages by Ed Young will be featured in the Wenham show as well.  These collages are the finished works of art for his Pinocchio, published in 1996 by Philomel.  Mr. Young, a children’s book author/illustrator and winner of many awards was born in Tientsin, China and raised in Shanghai and Hong Kong, where he was interested in drawing and storytelling from an early age.  He moved to the U.S. in 1951 to study architecture but quickly changed his focus to art.  Mr. Young has illustrated over eighty books, many of which he also wrote.

Pinocchio by Ed Young

The mission of the Wenham Museum is to protect, preserve, and interpret the history and culture of  Boston’s North Shore, domestic life, and the artifacts of childhood.  The Museum was established in 1922, making 2012 its 90th anniversary. It began as an historic house museum, but the first donor, Elizabeth Richards Horton – who also happened to be the last child to grow up in the house – donated nearly 1000 dolls to the museum that had been her childhood home, thus establishing the Wenham Museum as one of the premier museums of dolls, toys, and the artifacts of childhood from the 17th century to the present. Since then the museum has maintained a tradition of celebrating childhood and domestic life through its exhibitions of artifacts that have been a part of childhood for the past 400 years, including children’s books, toys and dolls of all kinds, electric trains, and textiles and objects of domestic life.

From the Researcher’s Perspective…

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La Anarquia: Gran Galop

Music composed exclusively for the women magazine, El Correo de la Moda by D. Pascual Galeana (1852)

 Click here to listen to the music (Thanks to Prof. Vargas Liñán for providing this music)

Since embarking in the project of digitizing a selection of Spanish Women’s Magazines from our Spanish Periodical and Newspapers Collection we have learned that making the collection accessible online has had the positive effect of attracting new users and visitors to the collection in-situ in addition to the many new users online. One of these visitors last spring was Prof. Belén Vargas Liñán, a Strochlitz’s awardee, from the University of Almería, Spain, who came to research the relationship between music and women’s images found in our print collection of Spanish women’s magazines.

In her own words she shared with us:

My research at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center is part of my doctoral thesis, currently ongoing, on the music in Spanish magazines between 1833 and 1874. Five years ago I became aware of the Dodd Center periodical collection (through the online catalog), but my interest for this collection increased last year when I visited the digital portal of women’s magazines prepared by Marisol Ramos. The collection of Spanish magazines and newspapers in the Dodd Center is very valuable to researchers as a complement of Spain’s archival collections, because it contains newspapers that do not exist in the public archives of our country and it completes partial collections preserved in them, especially emerging musical and cultural magazines from Madrid and Andalusia. Moreover, we note that many specimens preserved in Storrs are not as damaged as their peers at the National Library in Madrid, and many titles still contain many supplements fashion plates and scores that existing copies found in the Iberian Peninsula did not preserved.

Newspapers are primary sources that are extremely helpful to approach the study of musical life, anytime, anywhere. It does not only provides information on works, composers and performers, but it also allows the study of sociological aspects of music such as musical taste of the public, the business of music publishers, the main musical spaces of a city, type of music education offered by institutions and professionals, or the controversy surrounding the opera and zarzuela in the Spanish society of the time. In this line, an extremely interesting facet that we can discover in the pages of nineteenth-century press is the image of women and their relationship with music.

Prof. Vargas Liñán came to the Dodd Center to study different types of magazines and newspapers which contain music and how it was presented to a female audience and how that reflected a vision of feminism in Spanish society during the 19th century. While at Storrs, Prof. Vargas Liñán shared her findings with us in the traditional Strochlitz Lecture which we taped. Click here to listen to her video presentation (in English–you should download the viewer Silverlight). Also, click here for the presentation’s text (both in English).

It was a pleasure to support Prof. Vargas Liñán’s research and we look forward to providing more ways to give access to all our collections at the Dodd Center.

Marisol Ramos, Curator for Latin American and Caribbean Collections

From the researcher’s perspective

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We have posted frequently about the collections, events and activities surrounding Archives & Special Collections in this blog.  Today I’d like to do something a little different and share an example of  the research being conducted in the reading room this spring.  Olivier Burtin, a graduate student from France and Strochlitz Travel Grant awardee, made a second trip to Storrs in March to continue his research in the Vivien Kellems papers.

Olivier Burtin, a Strochlitz Travel grant awardee, conducting research in the reading room.

A comment about his research from Olivier:

The research I am conducting on Vivien Kellems is the product of my broader interest in U.S modern history, and more specifically in the history of U.S conservatism. I started to delve into the subject early in 2010 for my Master’s Degree thesis at Sciences Po in Paris.    Since then, I have made two trips to the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, where Kellems’ personal papers are located. There are a number of reasons why I decided to study this topic.

A successful Connecticut businesswoman, Kellems (1896-1975) founded and operated her own cable grips company for more than thirty years, at a time when managerial positions were overwhelmingly male-dominated. She was also a highly controversial public figure known primarily for her unorthodox opposition to income taxation, beginning in World War II. Her political involvement combined staunch anti-tax resistance (leading to several suits against the federal state), fierce conservative criticism of government and unwavering advocacy of women’s rights, all put forward by unique oratorical and public relations skills that made her famous nationwide. She acted as a prominent maverick in Connecticut politics, running several times for Congress from 1942 to 1962. Although she remains a lingering presence today in the memory of many conservatives and residents of this state, her personal papers – donated to the University by her nephew in 1992 – have yet to be thoroughly investigated by historians.

Kellems’ life is not only fascinating in itself, it is also a valuable addition to the growing literature on U.S conservatism and it helps us understand its historical development. Her career spanned a critical time in America when liberalism was flourishing; hence it offers an insight into the relatively under-documented origins of the conservative renewal in the 1940s and 1950s. Although she ultimately failed to create a perennial political movement around her, she gathered more than 10,000 sympathizers in the early 1950s with her national women’s organization, the Liberty Belles. Years later, she played a central role as a standard bearer of tax resistance in the late 1960s and early 1970s, with her struggle against unfair income taxation for singles. Her papers contain a wide variety of sources – political fan letters, membership lists, newspapers clippings, etc. – that allow me to document not only her career but also the growth of a political movement.

She passed away in 1975 as active as ever: she had just resumed her PhD a few years earlier at the University of Edinburgh and was about to submit her doctoral dissertation…on taxation, of course!

Mr. Burtin is one of several travel grant awardees who have come to Storrs this year to conduct research in the collections.  Over time, I hope to share more of their interests and stories with you.

Betsy Pittman, University Archivist