This post was written by Professor Aaron Coy Moulton of Stephen F. Austin University, who has been researching our collections for information to support his work of The ‘Communist Hand’ in Cuba and Birmingham: Cuban Exiles and the U.S. Right.
Supported by the Kellems Family Fellowship, I had the opportunity to spend a week in Archives & Special Collections as part of my project on the activities of Cuban exiles across the United States. This was a truly productive experience thanks to the help of a generous and patient faculty who accommodated my eclectic requests. After all, tracking transnational subjects whose histories defy simplistic categories often requires a wide-ranging research methodology across diverse collections. Together, the Kellems Family Fellowship and the great staff gave me ample time to locate fascinating items regarding Cuban exiles who rallied US support against the 1959 Cuban Revolution and regime of Fidel Castro.
News release from Thomas J. Dodd, September 2, 1965, regarding incitement of American Negroes to violence.
Much of this can be found in the Thomas J. Dodd Papers. Dodd was an influential Connecticut Senator who supported myriad anticommunist causes during the Cold War, so I was curious about his relationships with anti-Castro organizations and Cuban exiles. Right away, I came upon Dodd’s many speeches and writings denouncing Castro as a Soviet puppet, and some directly cheered Cuban exiles seeking to remove the island’s regime. One that stood out was a September 2, 1965, press release where Dodd blamed the Los Angeles Watts Riots on Robert F. Williams, a North Carolina civil rights activist who fled to Havana where his writings and “Radio Dixie” radiobroadcasts encouraged self-defense rather than nonviolent protest.
Memo to Senator Dodd from Milt regarding comments made on Radio Dixie interview, August 31, 1965
Conspiratorial right-wingers frequently summoned Williams as proof that Cuban communism influenced US civil rights activism, yet Dodd held a moderate anticommunist reputation that diverged strongly from those who put forward such claims; it was strange to find that the Congressperson agreed and insisted that Williams’s work in Cuba influenced African Americans to commit violent riots. Dodd’s public stance grabbed attention, and CBS requested an interview on this very subject. This forced his staff to intervene because they argued over whether Dodd should go onto a national forum and publicize a supposed link between “Radio Dixie” and US riots without evidence.
Correspondence to David from Paul on Citizens Committee for a Free Cuba, Inc. letterhead, September 16
Dodd’s Papers reveal that anti-Castro organizations including the Citizens Committee for a Free Cuba (CCFC) responded positively to Dodd’s unfounded allegation. The CCFC brought together leading anticommunist activists ranging from Clare Boothe Luce and Edward Teller to Victor Riesel and Edgar Ansel Mowrer and blamed US social and cultural issues on Cuban communism. Hoping to know more about Williams and Cuba, one of Dodd’s assistants called CCFC executive secretary Paul Bethel about “Radio Dixie,” and Bethel gladly provided Dodd’s office with their materials on Williams. This demonstrates that Dodd’s office had a cordial relationship with the CCFC, illustrating how anti-Castro organizations assisted anticommunist Congresspersons.
Letter to Senator Dodd from Ernesto Freyer thanking him for speaking to the American Legion National Convention in August 1965, September 2, 1965.
Cuban exiles also cultivated these relationships. Dodd’s Papers hold a handful of letters from Cuban exiles who cheered Dodd for his vocal opposition to Castro. José Bosch of the Bacardi liquor company was just one exile who thanked the Connecticut Senator for denouncing Cuban communism. Cuban exile organization Representación Cubana del Exilio [Cuban Exile Representation, RECE] both encouraged Dodd and gave the Congressperson’s staff various materials that could help Dodd make additional anti-Castro speeches. One reason I have found an ample number of Cuban exiles’ writings throughout the United States is that RECE, CCFC, and others disseminated those materials with the help of likeminded Congresspersons.
Letter to Senator Dodd from General Generoso of the Cuban Army on Alianza Para la Libertad de Cuba letterhead referencing an invitation from Pepin Bosch and Ernesto Freyer of the Cuban political party Representacion Cubano Exilio, September 24, 1965.
Dodd’s Papers also shed light into another aspect of my research: divisions among Cuban exiles. Even before the disastrous Bay of Pigs fiasco of 1961, exiles competed to secure the US government and US public’s support for their competing anti-Castro activities, severely undercutting the possibility of a unified movement. As a result, exiles regularly wrote Congresspersons and published articles denouncing their rivals as inauthentic, incapable, or even communist. At the same time that the CCFC and RECE were helping Dodd’s staff, Generoso Campos Marquetti with the Alianza Para la Libertad de Cuba [Alliance for Cuba’s Liberty, APLC] wrote the Congressperson. Marquetti warned Dodd against helping RECE and Bosch based upon how they had opposed the previous dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista whom Castro succeeded. APLC was another exile organization who kept alive longstanding grievances about fall of Batista and the rise of Castro, thereby hindering a universal movement to retake the island.
Pamphlet, “Cuba – The Truth. We Shout “Victory” But Khrushchev Still Has Cuba”, undated.
One of the most surprising finds, though, did not come from the Thomas J. Dodd Papers but the Alternative Press Collection. Elsewhere, I have often found Cuban exiles who reached out to right-wing organizations in order to raise financial and material support. For this reason, the staff allowed me to peruse the Alternative Press Collection’s various folders, specifically those for the Citizens Anti-Communist Committees of Connecticut. Like their compatriots across the United States, Connecticut citizens launched anticommunist organizations that reproduced the writings and allegations of regional and national outlets. For this reason, the Citizens Anti-Communist Committees of Connecticut folder happened to have a pamphlet published by the Committee on Pan American Policy (CPAP), a right-wing organization that in the late 1970s merged with the conspiratorial John Birch Society. CPAP spent two decades focused on alleged communist plots in Latin America, and here I found one of their popular pamphlets, “CUBA – THE TRUTH: We Shout ‘Victory’ But Khrushchev Still Has Cuba.” The pamphlet encouraged US citizens to oppose Castro’s regime, and this is certainly why it was distributed by Connecticut’s anticommunist organizations.
Pamphlet, “Castro Admits Cuba is Communist. The Truth About Cuba.” Citizens Anti-Communist Committee of Connecticut, undated.
However, what I did not expect to find was a second pamphlet, this one titled, “Castro Admits Cuba Is Communist.” This pamphlet was produced by a well-known Cuban exile organization called The Truth About Cuba Committee (TACC). Led by Luis V. Manrara, TACC distributed anti-Castro materials, deployed speakers, and lobbied multiple US Congresspersons in opposition to Cuban communism. At first, this pamphlet does little more than reinforce what we already know about various exile groups. What makes this pamphlet stand out, though, is that it was stamped with the address of the Citizens Anti-Communist Committee of Connecticut based in Bridgeport. Not only did TACC mail its pamphlets from its Miami headquarters to Connecticut but the state’s anticommunists distributed TACC’s publications. This pamphlet in the Alternative Press Collection thus illustrates how local anticommunists amplified the work of Cuban exiles.
Further research might uncover even more materials about how the Cuban Revolution reverberated in Connecticut. Though my project focuses on those opposed to Castro, an investigation into those who supported the Revolution might show the other side of this history.
The following post is by Brandon Hurst, PhD student in UConn’s Department of English. His research interests include Nineteenth Century British and American Literature, Book History, and Digital Humanities and Media Studies.
The Wayne S. Franklin Collection of early American works and reference materials consists largely of books published and printed during the nineteenth century—including novels, histories, and autobiographical/biographical accounts—assembled by the American Studies and literary scholar and faculty at the University of Connecticut, Wayne S. Franklin.
Wayne Franklin was a University of Connecticut Professor of English and Professor of SCI/American Studies from 2005 to 2026; he was regarded by his colleagues, students, and all who know him as a generous, kind, and encyclopedic scholar and teacher. Franklin arrived at the University of Connecticut to serve as director of the American Studies program and was chosen head of the English department in 2009. He authored the two-volume, definitive biography of James Fenimore Cooper: James Fenimore Cooper: The Early Years (2007) and James Fenimore Cooper:The Later Years (2017). Both volumes were Choice Outstanding Academic Titles. During his illustrious career, he authored or edited another 12 books (with an additional 2 authored books in progress upon the donation of the collection), including a study of early American travel writing, Discoverers, Explorers, Settlers (1979), and a study of Cooper’s frontier fiction, The New World of James Fenimore Cooper (1982). He founded the University of Iowa Press’s “American Land and Life” series in 1990, for which he edited 30 books. Franklin also served for 20 years as an editor of the Norton Anthology of American Literature and served as a reader for several university presses. During his career he was a Mellon Foundation fellow (1981), Guggenheim fellow (2004), and awarded an American Antiquarian Society-National Endowment for the Humanities grant (1994).
Many of the items were collected for Franklin’s research and writing on James Fenimore Cooper, especially his two-volume biography of the novelist. Materials include early editions of works written by J.F. Cooper, his family, and his literary contemporaries; those providing context on Cooper’s historical sources, the contemporary socio-cultural landscape and literary milieu, or used for historical reference by Franklin; those owned by members of the Cooper family; and miscellaneous items. The collection has been arranged into three series, following Franklin’s own groupings and the installments in which they were received.
Presently, finding aid descriptions are only available for items in the first series, which I spent this summer assembling. This first series contains two subseries: early and first editions of Cooper’s works published in the U.S., England, and Continental Europe, and works owned and/or authored by the Cooper family. The first subseries, which Franklin assembled for research on Cooper’s publishing and printing history and Cooper’s navigation of the still emerging and tenuously enforced transatlantic copyright laws, makes up the bulk of the series.
The second series, received in 2022, includes works related to J.F. Cooper and early American literature more broadly, with the bulk of items related to maritime or naval literature and history. The third series, donated in 2023, contains largely reference materials acquired during Franklin’s research for the Cooper biographies and early American literature.
While the first series may, on initial glance, seem of interest mainly to scholars of J.F. Cooper, what I found most intriguing during my time working with the collection is that these earlier editions, initially collected for a biography and historical background on their author, held an abundance of insight into so many more individuals—the owners, the printers, the publishers, the users, (and, in the future, researchers), illustrating the importance of texts and literature in our lives and relationships. The material evidence of both the texts creation and these artifacts afterlives reveals much about the way literature mediates between the individual and sociocultural dynamics.
Perhaps the best, or at least one of the more interesting (to me), examples of this dynamic comes not in the form of any officially published edition of Cooper’s works. Rather, it was the paper-bound, cheap reprinting of Cooper’s The Red Rover by the London-based “Novel Newspaper” publication. The series republished novels cheaply, but did so by violating copyright. This inverted the more conventional practice, gestured to in the preface to the very first volume of the series (which contained “five of Fenimore Cooper’s novels: The Pilot, The Spy, The Pioneers, The Last of the Mohicans and Lionel Lincoln”), in which American penny newspapers and other publishers of inexpensive literature exploited the differences in English and U.S. copyright laws to reprint British novels in the U.S. without paying for the copyright, meaning their author’s received no compensation (Webby).
The Red Rover. A Tale. London: J. Cunningham, 1842. “Novel Newspaper”, 1842, /repositories/2/archival_objects/316176. Wayne S. Franklin Collection of early American works and reference materials, 2021-0097. Archives and Special Collections, University of Connecticut Library.
While the publishers behind this scheme justified their practice on moral and ethical grounds (and carried out their publishing quite ostentatiously, advertising in well-circulated journals their cheap reprintings of many American—and some British—works), what is particularly illuminating is that they also claimed that their work carried out a social good because it made Cooper’s novels more widely accessible and that the works would subsequently have an ameliorative influence on this newly reached class of readers. They wrote in the preface:
“Nor will Mr Cooper regret the wide circulation throughout England of the five novels contained in the present volume; since, being mainly on subjects of American history, they will tend to diffuse a better knowledge of his country amongst a class of persons whose national prejudices are even yet stronger than their reason.
Such practices and rhetoric point towards the shifting economics and politics of literary and cultural access in the nineteenth century. Book ownership, or lending, and printing was undergoing a large transformation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with new technologies, changing legal practices, and increasing literacy rates all impacting who read, what they were reading, and in turn, what was being written and why—and artifacts like the “Novel Newspaper” reprinting of Cooper’s Red Rover provide us with examples that can teach us more about these dynamics.
Further revealing evidence about reading practices in the period, and the afterlives of these physical copies, can be found in the presence of bookplates in some of the volumes. (Notable bookplates in the collection include that of Henry A. Muhlenberg, son of U.S. Congressman Henry A. P. Muhlenberg; the American Antiquarian Society also holds bookplates from Muhlenberg. Another belongs to Dr. Noël J. Cortés, an early-20th-century collector of French manuscripts whose own collection is held at Yale. A third set belongs to Sir Frederick Milner (1849-1931), a former member of British parliament and a baronet).
These material markers of ownership personalize the text to the person, marking the book as one’s own while also identifying the individual as a “book owner” and “reader”. At the same time, by physically impressing or pasting a stylized signature and design, the physical book and content of the “text” become bound up with the owner’s identity. Together, owning the book and the intimate, process of materially making the book one’s own are acts of self-expression and identity-making.
The practice of adding a bookplate to a book is a curiously private and public act. The need to mark a text as one’s own implies that other readers may come across the text, and we need to identify our copy as ours—an inherently social practice. At the same time, the bookplate is pasted inside the book, and often kept in a private library, perhaps never to be seen by anyone. So not only does the bookplate signify an external act of identity/self-crafting, but it also reflects the very dynamics of identity itself: something deeply internal but defined by its capacity to be perceived and recognized by others.
Such practices can, we may intuit, create or become part of deeply affective relationships. Not only do we form intimate relationships with literature and the physical copy, but the act of ownership can become part of the rituals and interactions that help establish and/or cement interpersonal relationships. For instance, in the collection is a copy of The Bravo that bears two bookplates in each volume. One, a bookplate signed “Gertrude D Maling”, which reminds borrowers to return the book to its owner (again, the dually social and personal dynamics of book ownership and reading), and the other, a bookplate indicating the shared ownership of the book by her and her husband: Ex Libris Gertrude D. and Ernest H. Maling. The couple’s bookplate marks the book as belonging to a shared library—a manifestation of their shared lives together in the form of shared property—giving form, expression, and reaffirmation to a shared identity as married couple. At the same time, the presence of Gertrude’s own bookplate and her signature reminds us that her individuality is not erased in their marital union. She owns her own books, shares them with people she cares about, and is her own person; her reading/book owning practices give a material form to and outwardly express her multidimensional identity.
The Bravo: A Tale. Philadelphia: Carey & Lea, 1831. 2 vols. (Copy 2), 1831, /repositories/2/archival_objects/316187. Wayne S. Franklin Collection of early American works and reference materials, 2021-0097. Archives and Special Collections, University of Connecticut Library.
Gertrude’s bookplate reminds us that sharing books is another form in which books establish and reaffirm our affective, interpersonal relationships, a cultural practice we see further evidenced by the inscriptions many of the books bear, especially those in subseries two: the books owned and authored by the Cooper family. For instance, William Wake, D. D.’s The Principles of the Christian Religion Explainedcontains a signature marking the shared ownership of the book by the two Cooper sisters (inscribed “Susan & Caroline Fenimore Cooper | Paris May 15th 1831”), functionally reifying the sibling relationship in much the same way the Malings’ bookplate does for the marital connection. While this signature is partially overwritten, the evidence of their shared ownership of the book and the relationship it symbolized remains legible. Indeed, the palimpsest-like aspect highlights the accumulation of personal histories that the material book accumulates and records.
William Wake, D. D. The Principles of the Christian Religion Explained: in a Brief Commentary upon the Church Catechism. 16th edition “corrected.” London: C. & J. Rivington, 1826. Inscribed “Susan & Caroline Fenimore Cooper | Paris May 15th 1831”, 1826, /repositories/2/archival_objects/316140. Wayne S. Franklin Collection of early American works and reference materials, 2021-0097. Archives and Special Collections, University of Connecticut Library.
Many others in the series are gift copies (like this copy of Rural Hours, gifted on the winter solstice of 1993 “To Chris Schulty | Woodswoman | and | WYLDE writer”), with several being gifts between family Cooper family members, . The inscriptions mark the intimate, affective act of gifting, and the relationships these moments symbolize, reifying the familial bonds connecting one another, as demonstrated by Susan Fenimore Cooper’s gifting of her Rural Hoursto her sister Caroline, the copy of Pages and Pictures from the Writings of James Fenimore Coopershe gave to her brother-in-law H.F. Phinney, and the copy of Howitt’s Home and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets she received from Phinney. The fact that these books are owned and authored by family members accentuates these implications. As seen in Susan Manning Sage’s gift to J.F. Cooper Jr (great-grandson of J.F. Cooper), not only do inscriptions mark the personal moments and tie identity to book ownership, gifting, and receiving, but these books authored by self or a family member act as extensions of our self or physically instantiate a reminder of a shared lineage, link, and identity.
William Linn, D. D. (1752-1808). Discourses on Signs of the Times. New-York: Thomas Greenleaf, 1794. Bookplate of JFC Jr. [1892-1918], JFC’s great-grandson. Front flyleaf bears inscription to JFC Jr. signed by “S. M. Sage”, Sarah Manning Sage [Fenimore Cooper] (1841-1915), 1794, /repositories/2/archival_objects/316141. Wayne S. Franklin Collection of early American works and reference materials, 2021-0097. Archives and Special Collections, University of Connecticut Library.
To gift books in such a way can be “read” as gifting a part of the self, and a part of the self that is forever linked to the recipient. In some ways, it is to materialize and then gift the relationship itself in a material form.
This deeply personal relationship with books and reading practices can take on a poignantly political valence as well. For instance, two copies bear the signature of Mark J. Scearce (the inventor of the Mint Julep cup): The Headsmanand Sketches of Switzerland; By an American. Alongside Scearce’s signature is his inscription of his locale, Shelbyville, Kentucky, where he lived in the early to mid-twentieth century. Considering this context, Scearce’s owning and ostentatiously autographing the pastedowns of at least two first-edition novels by Cooper—a New York Yankee—can be read as a politically charged act of inscription. This is especially the case for a book like The Headsman, which Franklin describes as “intent on critiquing hereditary rank in all its forms. Every instance of it entailed a curse, if not on the heir then on humanity at large” (“Republican Principles” 141). Like with the bookplate, the signatures in the books tie the identity and self-expression of the Southerner with the texts of a Yankee (and, notably, two texts inspired by that Yankee’s experience in Switzerland—the second being Sketches of Switzerland, which itself was critiqued “by the European press for overzealously defending American republican principles” (AAS)). Scearce’s signatures and ownership become implicit expressions of political identity—intimately private yet externally material acts—articulating republican and egalitarian ideals in a region and time period in which race and class politics were especially fraught and tense. Yet Scearce explicitly identifies himself as a Kentuckian, inscribing his hometown alongside his signature. But doing so in these specific books reveals how politically and personally complicated that regional identity could be. In the evidence of these two signatures, we can see the role that literature and the material book play not only in an individual’s navigation of the complex dynamics of identity-crafting and self-expression, but also in the additional meaning this takes on amid the sociocultural and political climate of a given period and region.
The Headsman; or, The Abbaye des Vignerons. A Tale. 2 vols., 1833, /repositories/2/archival_objects/316197. Wayne S. Franklin Collection of early American works and reference materials, 2021-0097. Archives and Special Collections, University of Connecticut Library.
I’d like to end this blog with a brief aside about the variety of uses and reading habits on display in just this series of the collection. One copy of Susan Fenimore Cooper’s Rural Hours bears markings and annotations from Franklin himself, offering a fascinating glimpse into a research- and scholarship-oriented reading and marking practice. Franklin’s annotations, cross-references, and systematic markings contrast with the marginalia by other readers, which range from unrelated poetry and drawings (like those shown below), to sporadic markings or annotating of passages which appear to have been marked for their personal or seemingly universal relevance, important plot moments, and corrective emendations. So, while the series may seem, on its surface, to be primarily about J.F. Cooper, it puts on display so much more about our relationships to books—material and conceptual—and the ways books mediate our relationships with each other and to larger sociocultural dynamics.
[Susan Fenimore Cooper], Rural Hours by a Lady. New York: George P. Putnam, 1850., 1850, /repositories/2/archival_objects/316130. Wayne S. Franklin Collection of early American works and reference materials, 2021-0097. Archives and Special Collections, University of Connecticut Library.
The Spy. NY: Wiley and Halsted. 1822. “Third Edition.” 2 vols., 1822, /repositories/2/archival_objects/316143. Wayne S. Franklin Collection of early American works and reference materials, 2021-0097. Archives and Special Collections, University of Connecticut Library.
I hope my discussion (and digressions; my many thanks to the readers who’ve indulged me to this point) has piqued some of your interests. And should you wish to explore the collection, following up on idea or item that sparked your curiosity, don’t hesitate to schedule an appointment in the reading room!
Webby, Elizabeth. “The Novel Newspaper and Its Role in the Transmission of American Fiction to Australia.” Reading Across the Pacific: Australia-United States Intellectual Histories, edited by Robert Dixon and Nicholas Birns, Sydney University Press, 2010, pp. 167–76.
The UConn Library’s Archives & Special Collections holds over 1000 archival collections. Some of these collections are well known and are used all the time for research, while others may not have been accessed since they arrived at the archives. Because of this, I thought it would be fun to spotlight some collections that I have come across that seem interesting that researchers have not used much or simply do not know exist.
Here are some of the collections I found while perusing our online finding aids and physical collections:
Based on the collection’s title I did not expect it to be as interesting as it turned out to be. I assumed that this collection would only be administrative records and economic data, but I was completely wrong.
This collection contains over 80 linear feet worth of newspaper clippings, correspondence, pamphlets, brochures, photographs, and other print materials that document the evolution of the agricultural sector on a local and national level over the course of more than a century! It covers the intersection of agriculture and massive historical events such as World War II and the labor shortage created as a result of the Selective Service draft and how the State of Connecticut and the University of Connecticut worked together to create the Emergency Farm Labor Department in response to this crisis.
The Emergency Farm Labor Department established the Woman’s Land Army as well as nine farm labor camps for housing and training new agricultural workers. These farm laborers included urban youth and women, soldiers, white collar professionals, displaced Japanese Americans, returning war veterans, workers from other states, migrant workers from Mexico and Jamaica, and even German prisoners-of-war.
This collection also includes correspondence documenting UConn’s Agricultural Department’s growing responsibility as part of the Emergency Farm Labor Committee and their work with the United Stated Department of Agriculture.
When I came across this small collection, I knew I had to shine some light on it as it covers many of my interests, children’s literature, illustration, and natural history. This collection contains materials relating to Margaret Waring Buck’s self-illustrated books that often detail the lives of animals in the wild through black-and-white drawings of the flora and fauna of the outdoors. These books are often geared towards young naturalists who are just starting their dive into ecology and natural history.
I think it is important to note Margaret Waring Buck’s interest in physiognomy, also known as face reading and anthroposcopy, a pseudoscience now considered to be a form phrenology. I feel analyzing her work through this lens could yield interesting discoveries regarding the various influences on her work.
In this collection you will find many different types of materials from Margaret Waring Buck’s personal papers, correspondence, and photographs from the early history of photography, as well as original notes and sketches. I highly recommend reading through this collection’s finding aid and inventory and visiting our reading room if anything in the finding aid catches your eye.
Charles Pease was a Connecticut-born businessman who worked as a printer and editor of the Connecticut Western News in Canaan Connecticut. Pease had a love for beekeeping that turned into a small but profitable side hustle.
This tiny collection (only 2 linear feet) is largely comprised of his own handwritten journals documenting his beekeeping activities (cutely named Pease’s Beeses) from 1919 through 1949. Pease also documented his observations of birds, flowers, and the natural world in his hometown of Canaan, Connecticut.
We also have another collection, the Hewitt Bee Collection, that complements Pease’s and is comprised of over 300 books and 40 different periodical titles on beekeeping and bee culture.
If you are an avid beekeeper, looking to start your own honey-selling business, or simply interested in Pease’s activities as a naturalist, I recommend experiencing these collections in person by visiting our reading room.
The Connecticut Digital Archive is a collaborative member organization that supports digital preservation and access for all Connecticut’s people. Established in 2013, the CTDA has become the digital repository for multiple cultural heritage institutions across the state, including Archives & Special Collections (ASC).
As one of the inaugural members of the CTDA, the ASC digital collections have grown and expanded over the years. The original seven categories have expanded to ten but the addition of thousands more resources has pushed the limits of these categories.
In the intervening years, ASC has also enhanced access to our collection finding aids and the ability to create direct links between the finding aids and the digitized collection materials has expanded discoverability, access, and availability of materials to researchers across Connecticut and beyond.
With the historic upgrade of the CTDA undertaken in 2022-2023 and expanded capabilities, ASC will also be revamping its space and collection presentation in the CTDA. All the content currently available digitally will retain their URLs (handles) but the categories in which they “live” will be expanded to mirror the collection areas under which our finding aids are categorized (https://archivessearch.lib.uconn.edu/classifications ).
We believe this restructuring will make it easier to identify and locate our digital and digitized collections and ask for your patience as this migration unfolds in the New Year.
If you have any questions or have difficulty locating our digital content during or after this transition, please contact us at archives@uconn.edu for assistance.
Students encountering materials from the Alternative Press Collection in the John P. McDonald Reading Room, image by Zoey England.
Come visit – a lot is new!
On Thursday, March 28, 2024, from 3-5 pm, Archives & Special Collections will host an open house to welcome our community into our newly-renovated John P. McDonald Reading Room. More information about how to find us is available on our website.
We have recently updated our reading room to enhance patron services, instruction, and exhibition for our unique and diverse collection. This open house will feature curated materials on display and staff archivists to engage with about the work we do.
Learn about the 1974 Black student sit-in
In conjunction, the archives will be opening a new exhibition in the Schimmelpfeng gallery to mark the 50th Anniversary of the 1974 Black student sit-in at Wilbur Cross Library. During the sit-in, 370 students occupied the library at varying times across three days. The sit-in was the culminating event during a semester-long campaign of student organizing to demand representation and resources for students of color at the University of Connecticut.
Through curated documents this exhibition will feature the perspectives of the student organizers, the Afro-American Cultural Center, the University and its administration to remember this campus-wide call to action which resonates to our present day. This 50th anniversary is also an opportunity to highlight approaches to student activism and the centrality of the library as an institutional setting both for democracy and also one vulnerable to upholding systems of oppression.
Talk with an archivist
Have a question about your research interests? Want to learn more about Zine making? All are welcome to explore the archives and hear from archivists about how we can connect you to your history!
We hope you join us
This event is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served. If you have further questions or accommodation requests, we are eager to have you contact us archives@uconn.edu
We’re excited to announce that a new researcher registration and request system is now available in Archives and Special Collections!
If you’ve done research in the Archives previously, you’ll be familiar with our online booking form through a platform called Springshare, as well as our separate reproduction request form. We are introducing a new system, Aeon (created and supported by Atlas Systems), which will be taking the place of these online forms, so you’ll be able to do everything research-related through one online platform, including:
Registering as a researcher (a one-time process)
Making appointments
Making requests for materials for both in-person visits and reproductions.
Viewing your request history so you have full citation information for all the materials you’ve consulted
Viewing the status of your reproduction requests and downloading reproductions you’ve requested
If you are a UConn affiliate (student, staff, or faculty), you’ll be able to use NetID single sign on to create and sign into your Aeon account. If you are a researcher who has created an Aeon account previously at another institution, you won’t need to make a new account, and can use your pre-existing account. All other researchers will create a new account.
When using the “book an appointment” or “request reproductions” buttons from the Archives and Special Collections homepage, you’ll now be directed to sign into your Aeon account or create a new account if you don’t yet have one.
ASC staff have prepared a guide for patrons to help you register for and navigate your new Aeon account. For more information or for help setting up your account, please email us at archives@uconn.edu.
Sometimes it is hard to recall that the Connecticut of not too long ago was an industrial powerhouse. From the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s the state was a major producer of brass, tools, textiles, clocks and household goods that were valued throughout the nation, and the world. While Connecticut today is still an industrial engine, we remember a time when large factories teemed with workers and railroad lines traveled into almost every town and city in the state.
There is a mix of emotions when we view images of abandoned factories and railroad stations. There is a nostalgia for the past, one that we know through old photographs or movies, a time we somehow imagine was simpler. Or there is a curiosity in the creepy side of the structures, covered in vines, roofs sagging, broken windows, old equipment splayed about the factory floor, and, if we’re lucky, perhaps a spray of graffiti on the walls.
Now available in the Richard Schimmelpfeng Gallery in the Dodd Center for Human Rights is an exhibit that shows photographs from the Railroad History Collections and the Connecticut Historic Preservation Collection, both held in the UConn Archives.
The foundational collection for the Railroad History Archives are the corporate records of the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad, better known as the New Haven Railroad, which was established in 1872 from the merger of smaller lines throughout Connecticut, Rhode Island, southern Massachusetts and eastern New York, and spanned from Grand Central Terminal in New York City to Boston. Other collections, from photographers, collectors and historians, supplement the corporate records and provide resources that illustrate the impact of the railroad on the industry and culture of the region until it was absorbed into Penn Central in 1969.
While the railroad collections provide documentation on the entire New Haven Railroad region, for purposes of this exhibit we have focused exclusively on Connecticut sources.
The Connecticut Historic Preservation Collection (CHPC) is comprised of architectural and archaeological surveys, maps and documentation studies of historic buildings and sites in the state. They are provided to the UConn Archives by the State Historic Preservation Office. The CHPC materials you see in the exhibit are almost solely those in the documentation studies series, which were created by professional industrial historians to document historical properties that were planned for demolition or renovation.
The exhibit is available Mondays through Fridays, 8:00a.m. to 4:30p.m., until October 13.
Several historians have graciously aided us with this exhibit, by either providing their advice or expertise of railroad properties, or by allowing the use of photographs they have taken of abandoned sites.
Robert Joseph Belletzkie has done extensive research into the history of Connecticut railroad stations. He created and maintains a website – Tyler City Station, at http://www.tylercitystation.info/ — that details the history of virtually every station and depot in Connecticut.
Matthew Chase is dedicated to a project to document the deterioration of the Cedar Hill Rail Yard, located in New Haven. His Facebook page, Friends of Cedar Hill Yard, has hundreds of photographs of the yard, both historical and in its deteriorating condition in the present day.
Richard A. Fleischer is a historian, writer and photographer with a broad and deep knowledge of the history of New England’s railroads.
J.W. Swanberg is a former railroad employee, photographer and historian of the New Haven Railroad, with a lifetime of knowledge about railroads in Connecticut, the region and the world. He is the author of the seminal history of the New Haven Railroad’s locomotive fleet, New Haven Power, and has written extensively on topics related to railroads in the region.
The artists and scientists presented in this exhibition began observing their natural surroundings at a young age. One is the daughter of a draftsman, one a trained portrait painter, one a self-described “doodler and daydreamer” who loved the sea. Either formally or informally, all have used art to communicate through visual representation what they systematically observed. Each shared their observations in non-fiction books for children in the hope of instilling a strong desire to learn and a curiosity about the world.
On view are paintings, drawings, sketches and notes answering the question “what do I see around me?” These artists responded to what the author of The Beginning Naturalist, Gale Lawrence, encouraged her readers to do, “begin to look at what’s around you, ask yourself questions about what you see, and find answers. Only in this way will you establish a meaningful and lasting relationship with the natural world – of which you, too, are an important part.”
This exhibition is being shown to complement Raid the Archive: Edwin Way Teale and New Works on view at the William Benton Museum of Art, University of Connecticut, from January 17 to March 10, 2023.
Archives & Special Collections announces the opening of a new exhibition, “The Many Faces of Vivien Kellems,” featuring the life and achievements of the inventor, activist, businesswoman, political candidate, and philanthropist, Vivien Kellems. The exhibition marks the completion of a multi-year project to digitize the Kellems Papers; generously funded by Suzy Kellems Dominik over the past several years.
Vivien Kellems was born 7 June 1896 in Des Moines, Iowa, to David Clinton and Louisa Flint Kellems. Shortly after her birth, her parents, both Christian Ministers, moved their family to the west coast and settled in Eugene, Oregon. The only girl of a family with seven children, Vivien developed a rugged and competitive personality from an early age. Attending the University of Oregon, she made her mark as the only female on the debate team. Vivien Kellems obtained a bachelor’s degree in 1918 and a master’s degree in economics shortly thereafter. After graduation, she moved to New York City pursuing a doctorate from Columbia University and then, nearer the end of her life, University of Edinburgh.
While she resided in New York, her older brother, Edgar E. Kellems, invented a significant improvement to an existing cable grip, which he patented in the late 1920s. With the patent as a foundation, Ms. Kellems founded Kellems Cable Grips, Inc. in 1927, moving the new company to Stonington, Connecticut. In the early years, the company’s devices were used most notably during the construction of the Chrysler Building, George Washington Bridge, and later played a vital role in production of wire and artillery shell grips used during World War II. Her thirty-year tenure as president of the Kellems Company brought many challenges, travel, and opportunities for expansion. For example, during WWII, Kellems’ business interests and travels converged with her personal life—bringing unwanted attention and controversy. Vivien’s connections and subsequent relationship with Count Frederic von Zedlitz, a German national from a prestigious family, was scrutinized by the U.S. Congress because of her “love letters” to a “Nazi agent.”
In addition to her business interests, Vivien Kellems was actively engaged in various struggles for justice as she fought for women’s equality, equal suffrage along party lines, and tax reform. As a member of the Liberty Belles, Vivien led by example as the group encouraged equality of women in the home, workplace, and society. Running as an independent candidate for U. S. Senate, Ms. Kellems protested strict party line voting that only required a single lever pull rather than voting individually for a preferred candidate. She made several bids for United States Senate, for the Connecticut Governorship in 1954, and, in 1964, led the Barry Goldwater Presidential Campaign in Connecticut.
Vivien Kellems practiced active civil disobedience to support her positions on state and government practices, particularly those of taxation and party voting. She famously sat in a voting booth for nine hours straight before fainting from exhaustion in her protest of the party lever. With her degree in economics, unfair taxation by the government was a frequent and long fought battle. In 1948, alongside her business partner and brother David Kellems, she protested the “requirement” of withholding taxes from her employees’ checks claiming, “if they wanted me to be their (tax) agent, they’d have to pay me, and I want a badge.” A lengthy court battle ensued, during which it was determined that the Kellems Company would go bankrupt if taxes were not withheld and paid. Admitting defeat on this issue, Kellems turned her focus to the inequality of taxes paid by single individuals compared to married couples. The income tax law enacted after World War II required unmarried citizens to pay twice the amount of income tax than did those citizens of equal earnings who were married. In protest, from 1965 until her death, Vivien Kellems would send in blank tax forms with her signature. Coming close to victory many times in the United States Supreme Court during the first half of the 1970s, Ms. Kellems’ fight in this case came to naught. She died before her final appeal was heard in 1975. On this issue, she traveled the country speaking at numerous events and appearing on television to highlight the cause of the singles income tax. She amassed a nationwide fanbase who wrote to her extensively in support and admiration for her campaign against unfair taxation.
Vivien Kellems left a vibrant legacy, documented in an impressive collection of photographs, business records, legal and tax documents, political ephemera, and memorabilia that is available for research and study in the University of Connecticut’s Archives & Special Collections. Come and explore the story of a trailblazing firebrand who faced great odds but refused to back down.
The exhibit is scheduled to run through 13 January 2023 and features highlights from Vivien Kellems storied life, focusing on her activist causes, business achievements, and political aspirations. The installation of exhibit documenting the life of this remarkable woman is also in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the University of Connecticut Women’s Center.
On March 16, 1891, the opulent White Train, a luxury passenger train of the New York and New England Railroad, pulled out of Summer Street station in Boston on its first run, set to arrive in Grand Central Station in New York City in six hours. The Boston Herald reported that people lined the route through the city and suburbs “and gazed with mingled curiosity and delight at its handsome appearance.”
The train was pure Gilded Age splendor – its parlor cars were fitted with velvet carpets, silk draperies, and white silk curtains. The chairs were upholstered in gold plush; full-length glass mirrors were installed at each end of the cars. The coaches were heated with steam piped directly from the locomotive, an improvement over the fat-bellied stoves used in ordinary coaches. Pintsch gas lights brightly illuminated the coaches, replacing oil burning lights normally in use.
The dining car’s menu included baked striped bass with Italian sauce, roasted spring lamb, ribs of beef, sauté of chicken with mushrooms, and a wide array of vegetables, salads and desserts, with every fine wine and liquor available. There is no question that this luxury train was meant to serve the exquisite tastes of the robber barons and financial kings of the time.
The White Train’s name was literal – all of the cars were painted white. On its first run the crew, which included the famous locomotive engineer Gene Potter, wore white coats or overalls, white caps and white gloves. As time passed, when the white cars traveled through the countryside, particularly at dusk or in the evening, observers came to refer to it as an “eerie apparition.” Thus the White Train was soon better known as the Ghost Train.
In 19th century America, the railroad train held a place of prominence as the fastest mode of transportation. As the century progressed and more railroad lines were formed throughout the country, the railroad companies competed on which could produce the fastest trains. Prior to the 1880s travel between the financial centers of New York City and Boston usually involved steamships along Long Island Sound, connecting with trains in New London, Connecticut, or Fall River, Massachusetts. It wasn’t until 1893, when the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad completed its Shore Line Route, that passengers could ride uninterrupted between the two cities.
The New York and New England Railroad (NY&NE) was one of several inland routes, running from Boston to the Hudson River. Despite promoting itself as the “Air Line Route,” a reference to a route that cut through Connecticut and central Massachusetts on a diagonal, giving the impression it was faster than the Shore Line routes, it had to contend with the region’s many grades, curves and lightly constructed bridges. That did not deter the NY&NE’s goal of dominating passenger service between New York City and Boston.
The NY&NE debuted its first high-speed train along the Air Line Route in November 1884. Named the New England Limited, it was initially successful but by the late 1880s began to lose ridership to the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad’s Shore Line trains, which included the The Gilt Edge and the Shore Line Flyer.
In an effort to bring back customers to its inland route the NY&NE transitioned the New England Limited into the White Train, which was touted as the height of luxurious travel. The White Train was actually two trains, each leaving New York or Boston at 3 p.m., arriving at the other city at 9 p.m.
When leaving from Boston the train traveled 86 miles through central Massachusetts into Connecticut, on a right-of-way owned by the NY&NE, with no stops until it arrived in Willimantic, where it changed engines. The train then went on to Middletown and New Haven, completing its journey into Grand Central on right-of-way owned by the NYNH&HRR.
The NY&NE found the cost of keeping the white cars clean to be exorbitant, and the Ghost Train lasted just four and a half years. Its last run was on October 20, 1895, and was succeeded by the Air Line Limited. That same year the NY&NE was taken over by the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad. The Air Line Limited ran until 1902, and passenger service ended on the old Air Line route by 1937.
The Ghost Train lives on in legend as one of the Gilded Age’s most opulent and noteworthy trains. This poem was distributed to its passengers on its first run in 1891, and well describes its impact at the time.
List, oh list to the railroad bard, Our new “White Train’s” the latest card; List to the poets’ dulcet rhyme, This train is always in on time!
Spread the glad news wide and fast The White Train’s come to Town at last! Such beautiful cars have never been seen, Outshining in splendor the sun’s bright sheen.
Without a jar, or roll, or antic, Without a stop to Willimantic, The New England’s Limited takes its way, At three o’clock each and every day.
One half the glories have not been told, Of that wonderful train of white and gold, Which leaves every day for New York at three, Over the scenic NY & NE!
Special thanks to historian Richard A. Fleischer for his help in clarifying the many confusions involving 19th century New England railroads, editing this writing and providing research and photographic materials.
Over the past six months, I have had the privilege of working to digitize the Alternative Press Collection (APC) here at the University of Connecticut Archives and Special Collections. While the APC contains publications created by all kinds of people that discuss all kinds of topics, a large portion of the collection focuses on activist movements during the 1960’s and 1970’s. I began working to digitize files from the APC after I graduated from UConn and have thus looked at a lot of different materials dealing with many different forms of activism.
When studying the history of activism in the United States, a lot of sources will focus on the groups and movements that were either created by or largely consisted of young adults, particularly those in college. This is hardly surprising, given that college communities are most often structured in a way that encourages students to spend substantial amounts of time together and discuss current events, which often leads to like-minded individuals coming together over specific topics. College students also have easier access to resources such as printing which makes spreading awareness easier than it otherwise would be. When all these things are put together, they create a recipe for large activist groups that can leave behind tangible evidence of their activities and their beliefs.
One branch of activism that is less frequently discussed, however, is high school activism. This is, again, not unexpected. High school students have access to fewer resources than their college-level counterparts and are often subject to more restrictions around where and when they’re able to assemble. But teenagers across the country have always been a part of activist movements. Within the Alternative Press Collection here at the UConn Archives and Special Collections, there are several different publications created by High School activists who had hoped to give students access to points of view other than what they might get from their parents and teachers, and to spread awareness of movements and events that they might not otherwise hear about.
The different publications come from across the country and cover topics ranging from nationwide movements all the way down to local issues, from an investigation into the legal rights of American high school students to a discussion about an income tax versus a sales tax in Windsor, Connecticut. Some of these publications also claim that the administration at their schools have explicitly forbidden them from writing and publishing these articles, yet they have decided to do so anyway, despite the possible consequences. In an issue of ‘The Brick; A Really Heavy Paper,’ for example, an anonymous contributor describes the pushback this publication received from school boards and administrators in various schools in Nassau County, New York.
“In one school, (we cannot mention its name in print) the Brick has been forced underground. Having been refused permission by the principal and distribution off campus is impossible we must do it in school. Our aim is to reach the students and we will do whatever is necessary to achieve this.”
Publications like The Brick serve as important reminders that activism has no age limit. To see more examples of High School activist publications, follow this link to the Alternative Press Collection High School Publications folder.
With so many primary sources available online researchers don’t necessarily have to travel to an archives to find what they need. Academic and cultural heritage institutions have spent the last many years scanning large swaths of their collections and making them available in digital repositories, or have highlighted their collections in online exhibitions. Given the vast amount of primary sources held in the institutions’ physical spaces the resources that are available online are often just a drop in the bucket, but for many researchers the materials now available online have been as helpful as if they had made the trek to the research institution.
These databases are some of the best we know to provide primary sources to any researcher:
How to find archival materials in the UConn Archives:
The UConn Library digital repository holds holds scanned items from the archives. Note that while there are over 1,000,000 scanned items from the UConn Archives this represents only a small percentage of our overall collections: http://hdl.handle.net/11134/20002:UniversityofConnecticut
Information about all of our collections, some of which may be digitized but most of which are not in the digital repository: https://archivessearch.lib.uconn.edu/
If you’re not finding what you’re looking for from the UConn Archives please contact us directly, at archives@uconn.edu, to discuss your research with our staff.
How to find sources in other archives in Connecticut:
The Connecticut Digital Archive has digital collections from dozens of cultural heritage institutions in the state (including the UConn Library), at https://ctdigitalarchive.org/
How to find archival collections at archives in the United States:
The Digital Public Library of America provides access to digital collection across the United States, https://dp.la/. It also provides themed primary source sets and online exhibits at http://dp.la/primary-source-sets and http://dp.la/exhibitions. If there is any one source to go to for comprehensive information about digital collections this is it!
