Category Archives: What’s New in the Archives

Items newly acquired by the Archives & Special Collections at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center

UConn Archives & Special Collections Acquires the Papers of Lottie B. Scott

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Lottie Bell Scott

Archives & Special Collections of the UConn Library has recently acquired the papers of Lottie B. Scott, UConn alumna (‘86), author, civic organizer, and civil rights advocate from Norwich, Connecticut. Ms. Scott’s papers [1969-present] include records from her work with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Norwich chapter, from the 1960s-2010. A founding member of the chapter, Ms. Scott held multiple positions including arts liaison, first vice president, and president.

Ms. Scott’s civic involvement is documented through her service in various positions (often as the first woman of color) with the Norwich Arts Council and the Rotary Club, as a board member of Backus Hospital, and in her work for the Commission for Human Rights and Opportunities over 22 years. Her ongoing contributions to her community are also documented through the various awards and recognition she has received from local and national organizations and individuals of distinction. Ms. Scott’s 2018 memoir Deep South – Deep North: A Family’s Journey is included in the collection, chronicling her family history during the Great Migration from Longtown, South Carolina to Norwich.

For more information on accessing the Lottie B. Scott Papers, contact the UConn Archives: archives@uconn.edu

Now on view: WRITE ON, FIGHT ON – Continuing Strategies of the Second-Wave Feminist Movement

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The Women’s March, the #Metoo movement, even Hulu’s remake of The Handmaid’s Tale, these events all have their roots in a movement that began, and ended, decades ago.

On view from November 26 through December 14, 2018 in the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, Archives & Special Collections Reading Room, the exhibition Write On, Fight On: Continuing Trends and Strategies of the Second-wave Feminist Movement features banners, buttons, graphics, magazines and periodicals from the second wave feminist movement’s independent presses and media outlets.

Curated by Anna Zarra Aldrich, undergraduate in UConn’s Department of English Writing Internship Program, the exhibition highlights, through historic artifacts preserved in the archives, the strategies feminist activists used to achieve their goals. The exhibition also brings into focus the shortcomings of the movement and how modern feminists are responding.

“The second wave achieved a lot, but by the time the movement started to fall apart, there was still a lot of work for women’s equality to be done and that’s where we get these later events,” Aldrich said.

Aldrich, an English, political science and journalism major at the University of Connecticut, had conducted an internship in Spring 2018 in which she studied and blogged about feminist publications from the collections of Archives and Special Collections.

This exhibition is free and open to the public Monday through Friday 9:00am to 4:00pm.

Presented by: Archives & Special Collections, UConn Library

For more information please contact archives@uconn.edu

 

 

d’Archive on Display!

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Logo by Melica Bloom

This summer the Dodd Research Center Gallery exhibits Season 1 of d’Archive, the archives podcast hosted by WHUS campus radio.  After wrapping up a 15 episode season over the course of Fall 2017 and Spring 2018 semesters, which is available on itunes or wherever you catch podcasts, materials featured on the show are currently on display.

 This exhibition will run from May 14th – July 7th, 2018 in the Dodd Research Center Gallery, Monday – Friday 9-5pm   Continue reading →

Dana T. Leavenworth – A Connecticut Soldier’s Experience

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Dana T. Leavenworth was born 25 June 1888, presumably in Roxbury, Connecticut.

Dana T. Leavenworth

He attended  Yale College and graduated in 1910.  Like many of his generation, Leavenworth joined the Army in 1914 and saw action along the U.S. –  Mexico border prior to joining the American Expeditionary Force in  France in 1918.

 

While in France he served as an officer and the documents in his papers reflect the range of his responsibilities as part of the “Fighting Yankee Division.”

Plans for action in the field

 

While he was abroad, Leavenworth received correspondence from friends and family.  Sentiments throughout the correspondence he received, from 1917 until his return to the States, resonate with the unified effort the entire country was undergoing to support the war effort, both home and abroad.

Many wrote of their personal contributions to the war effort while others conveyed pride and gratitude for Dana’s service. His future bride applied for service in both the Red Cross and Y. M. C. A. War Service, similar to other women, anxious to do their part.

Marie Schmitz’s application to the Red Cross, 1917

15 September 1918, Carlton Redmond having moved to the Washington, D.C. area writes, “I simply got desperate, while I was giving considerable of my spare time to war work for the past year, I wanted to do more…”  And in another letter on 24 October 1918,  “I am working very hard to aid in the production of Ordnance for you boys.”

Another friend wrote on 18 November 1917, “Everyone is busy—Ladies with their knitting and at Present the men are in the throes of a YMCA campaign raising money to promote them in the army corps and at the front for in them we figure is the big saving influence of the men.”

Antoinette Pierce wrote on 14 November 1917, “You don’t know how you soldiers are the center of all our thoughts nor how proud we are that our defenders in these hard times are of the sort we can safely rely upon in every need.”

Letter from Antoinette Pierce, 14 November 1917

The activity on the home front is highlighted in the 6 December 1917 letter from Pastor Charles A. Dinsmore, “Waterbury is about the same as usual. We are very busy, raising money most of the time for the Red Triangle, the Red Cross, and just now it is the Knights of Columbus.  Personally, I am kept pretty busy as chairman of the Waterbury Red Cross, as a member of the local Council of Defense…the girls are all working in the Red Cross.  There seems to be no fun going on anywhere.”

Chalmers Holbrook writes on 9 January 1918, “Who knows but by this time you are tasting the trenches and the wildest stretch of the imagination cannot see it as you do because we never know what reality is until we actually experience it.”

And even representatives of his employers at the Connecticut Mutual Life Insurance contacted him, “It is very gratifying that, in spite of the fact that you left us early to go into the service, you had accomplished enough to qualify you for the year’s Leaders List.” [2 February 1918, Superintendent of Agencies, Connecticut Mutual Life Insurance]

Dana was one of the fortunate ones to survive the war, returning to the States in 1919 and resuming his civilian life. In 1924, he married  Marie Christina Schmitz, daughter of  Charles W. Schmitz of Waterbury and continued his employment as an estate councilor at  Connecticut Mutual Life Insurance Company.  Dana and Marie established their household at 25 Staples Place in  West Hartford, Connecticut. There they raised three sons, Robert, Donald and Alden.

 

Dana T. Leavenworth and Marie Schmitz

Dana T. Leavenworth — A Connecticut Soldier’s Experience

is one of several World War I themed exhibitions on display in Babbidge Library and the Dodd Research Center this Spring, marking the centennial of the official involvement of the United States in World War I. The United States Congress declared war on the German Empire on 6 April 1917.

The Land-Grant College at War

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 The following guest blog post is by Allison Horrocks, Ph.D. ’16. Dr. Horrocks received her B.A. in History and American Studies from Trinity College and her M.A. in History from the University of Connecticut. Her research explores the history of Home Economics in higher education in the twentieth century.

 

One hundred years ago, students at the Connecticut Agricultural College were trudging through campus to attend spring classes and to take part in one or many extracurricular activities, most of which would still be familiar today. While some co-eds might seek out or even play basketball, others could pass the time by writing for the school paper, acting in a drama club, or attending social meetings at a fraternity.

But the spring of 1917 was also charged with a feeling of anticipation. These same students were gearing up for war.

30 April 1917 Connecticut Campus

Between March and April of 1917, students and faculty members at Connecticut Agricultural College, hereafter cited as CAC, saw their futures change dramatically within a matter of weeks. On April 6, 1917, the United States formally entered the global conflict known as the Great War. How the people of Connecticut, and those at CAC in particular, mobilized to “do their part” in order to win the war is the subject of a new retrospective exhibition hosted in the galleries of the Dodd Center.

When considering how the people of Connecticut contributed to the war, service in the armed forces is usually what comes to mind. A small, but proportionally significant number of male students from CAC (and other in-state institutions, of course) would be called up for military service. But this was not the only way that Nutmeggers or CAC students demonstrated their loyalty. This focus on student life at CAC between 1917 and 1918 shows a much wider concept of service to the war effort, work that did not marshal guns as its weapon of choice.

Grove Cottage

Though war had loomed for years, the US’s official entry changed campus life rather dramatically. By April 30, the student paper, The Connecticut Campus and Lookout was filled with news of student departures and other adjustments to be wrought on campus. In addition to those who would be called overseas, there was a buildup of forces to do work on the agricultural front in the fields and farmlands of Connecticut. Each age group, indeed every citizen, male and female, was thought to have a special role in serving the warring nation. Throughout the state, youth grew corn and managed crops for the Junior Food Army and adult women joined up with a farming program known as the Women’s Land Army. Meanwhile, faculty at CAC taught thousands how to conserve food and agents traveled to provide demonstrations on food conservation. The central thread with all of this work was the notion that food and crop management were vital to winning the war. For contemporaries, the notion of a “homefront” was expansive, including domestic spaces as well as on-campus laboratories, farms, and civic halls where families learned proper food saving methods.

In addition to shedding new light on the war effort in Connecticut, the objects curated for this exhibition offer a wide view of what life on campus was like a century ago. Alongside propaganda posters from the period, photographs of dormitory rooms, dance cards, and other student belongings will be put on display. Other objects from throughout the state, including letters from “the front” in France and images of youth activities with the Food Army will also be on view.

Memorial Oak

In all, this exhibition draws from a range of archival materials from the Archives & Special Collections at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut Libraries. In addition to objects from the University of Connecticut Memorabilia Collection, photographs and other artifacts from the Connecticut Soldiers Collection and Augustus Jackson Brundage Papers (among others) will also be on display.

 

The Land-Grant College at War is one of several World War I themed exhibitions on display in Babbidge Library and the Dodd Research Center this Spring, marking the centennial of the official involvement of the United States in World War I. The United States Congress declared war on the German Empire on 6 April 1917.

Bibliotherapy: From library war service to science

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The following guest blog post is by Mary Mahoney, doctoral candidate in the Department of History at the University of Connecticut. Ms. Mahoney received her B.A. in History and English from Trinity College and her M.A.  in History from the University of Connecticut. She is currently completing a dissertation on the history of bibliotherapy, or the use of books as medicine.

 

Have you ever read a book and felt healed by it?

Most readers can think of a novel that offered some comfort, a poem that presented

Distributing books to wounded veterans

direction, or even a biography that provided inspiration. The notion that books can heal is as old as reading itself but, during World War I, doctors and librarians joined together to apply reading as a form of therapy.

 

A new exhibit at the Dodd Center, “From Library War Service to Science: Bibliotherapy in World War I” tells that story.

When the United States entered World War I in 1917, troops travelled to the front with the help of massive mobilization efforts to provide weapons, food, and books. The Library War Service, formed by the Library of Congress and the American Library Association, created a national system to collect and distribute books to troops at home and abroad during and after the war. Between 1917 and 1920, the Library War Service distributed approximately 7­10 million books and magazines. The Service built 36 camp libraries to incorporate reading into daily life, and provided library collections to over 500 locations, including military hospitals.

At camps, military hospitals, YMCA huts and other relief stations, librarians distributed books believing that reading played a vital role in the war effort. Books could provide education, entertainment, war training, vocational training and therapy.

Ward Library Service, Base Hospital, Camp Pike, Arkansas

In 1918, the Library War Service stationed librarians in military hospitals to provide dedicated service to the sick and wounded. By 1919, the Service established libraries of approximately 1000 volumes in hospitals without dedicated librarians, and collections of roughly 3,500 in hospitals where a librarian lived and worked on site. There the mostly female librarians wore specially designed uniforms intended to help them fit in among doctors and nurses, and equate their work with the authority of medical professionals. This was important as doctors were often sold on the necessity of books for their patients, but not librarians. “All the army hospitals wanted books,” one librarian noted, “but not all wanted librarians.”

In these hospitals, librarians noted that fiction circulated at an estimated rate of 3 to 1 (to non­fiction). As one hospital librarian noted, “The epidemic of authors is more common than that of disease. Periods of Zane Greyism will be followed by feverish cravings for ‘Tarzanry.” Using the language of disease, this librarian spoke to the desire patients had for books that offered escape, entertainment, and in some cases, consolation. While books in camp libraries primarily offered information about the war or resources to prepare for postwar careers, books in hospital libraries were put to a different use. Yes, books could educate and entertain, but they could also serve as medicine.

“Stories are sometimes better than doctors,” one wartime librarian noted. “Men were brought in from the front, self-control gone, nerves shattered, sleep impossible. A compelling story would often calm them and start them on the road to recovery,” another noted.

Hospital librarians developed this emerging “science” with physicians during the war. “The librarian is often asked by a doctor or nurse to “prescribe” for a patient who is in need of a stimulation which can come from a good book,” one article on the hospital library service explained. But how should librarians prescribe books? What genres made the best medicine?

“Books that take the mind off the war are frequently prescribed by the physicians, and selected reading of a crisp, bright variety proves very helpful,” one librarian observed at the front.

Connecticut’s military hospitals played a role in this history. Louise Sweet, the hospital librarian stationed at United States Army General Hospital No. 16 in New Haven, Connecticut, experimented with matching the right literary prescription to her patients’ needs. Her work posed multiple challenges. During and after the war, the hospital exclusively treated soldiers suffering from tuberculosis.

To “prescribe” books of therapeutic value to these patients, librarians like Louise Sweet

Serving convalescents, U. S. General Hospital, Bronx, New York.

had to consider several potential dangers. Some librarians feared that certain genres, such as detective stories and westerns, could raise the temperature of TB patients or quicken their pulse rates. There was also considerable debate as to whether TB patients should be allowed to read fiction or non­fiction that referenced their disease in any way. Was a healing book one that offered escape from illness, or one that allowed a reader to confront it?

This question, along with the challenge of matching book to patient, continued to shape the emerging practice of what became known as bibliotherapy.

 

For more information on this exhibit, and on the history of bibliotherapy in Connecticut during the war, please visit the website accompanying the exhibit: http://www.booksasmedicine.com

There, along with more information about the exhibit, you can try your hand at writing your own literary prescription, just like Louise Sweet and other librarians during the war.

From war service to science: Bibliotherapy is one of several World War I themed exhibitions on display in Babbidge Library and the Dodd Research Center this Spring, marking the centennial of the official involvement of the United States in World War I. The United States Congress declared war on the German Empire on 6 April 1917. This exhibit will be on display in Babbidge Library through May 15, 2017.

[Images Courtesy of American Library Association Archives.]

Commemorating the Centennial

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Known as “The Great War” and “The War to end All Wars”, World War I triggered by the diplomatic crisis brought about by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria by Gavrilo

Adventure and action, Library of Congress WWI Poster Collection

Princip in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914. On 25 July Russia began mobilization and on 28 July, the Austro-Hungarians declared war on Serbia. Germany presented an ultimatum to Russia to demobilize, and when this was refused, declared war on Russia on 1 August. Germany then invaded neutral Belgium and Luxembourg before moving towards France, leading the United Kingdom to declare war on Germany on 4 August.

At the outbreak of the war, the United States pursued a policy of non-intervention, avoiding conflict while trying to broker a peace. In the face of repeated attacks at sea and unsuccessful attempts to mediate a settlement, President Wilson warned the German government that the United States would not tolerate unrestricted submarine warfare, in violation of international law.

Grove Cottage, Connecticut Agricultural College

In January 1917, Germany resumed unrestricted submarine warfare, realizing it would mean American entry. The German Foreign Minister, in the Zimmermann Telegram, invited Mexico to join the war as Germany’s ally against the United States. In return, the Germans would finance Mexico’s war and help it recover the territories of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. The United Kingdom intercepted the message and presented it to the US embassy. From the embassy it was passed to President Wilson who released the Zimmermann note to the public, and Americans saw it as casus belli. Wilson called on antiwar elements to end all wars, by winning this one and eliminating militarism from the globe. He argued that the war was so important that the US had to have a

Field message on the front, 1918

voice in the peace conference. After the sinking of seven US merchant ships by submarines and the publication of the Zimmermann telegram, Wilson called for war on Germany, which the US Congress declared on 6 April 1917. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I#Entry_of_the_United_States]

In commemoration of the centennial of the involvement of the United States in this historic and world changing event, Archives & Special Collections has installed five World War I themed exhibitions located in Homer Babbidge Library and the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center. Two of the exhibits highlight the research of UConn graduate students Allison Horrocks (History, Ph.D., 2016) and Mary Mahoney (History, Ph.D candidate). The exhibitions are scheduled to be open from 6 April – 15 May 2017.

Please join our guest curators for a gallery talk on Thursday 6 April 2017 from 11:30-12:30.  The talk will begin in Homer Babbidge Library in the West Alcove and then walk over to the Dodd Center.  Light refreshments will be served after the talk in the Dodd Center.

Exhibitions in this series include:

Posters of World War I from the collections of the Library of Congress illustrate the need for men, resources and financing necessary to support the efforts of the United States in its support of its allies. [Dodd Center, West Corridor]

The Land-grant College at War: A Centennial Retrospective traces the turn-of-the-century activities and role of Connecticut Agricultural College through its involvement in food production, research, military training, and the active participation of its staff and students. [Horrocks, Dodd Center Gallery]

From Library War Service to Science: Bibliotherapy in World War I outlines the implementation of a theory that books can heal. Put in practice in Connecticut during World War I, doctors and librarians joined together to apply reading as a form of therapy. [Mahoney, Homer Babbidge Library, West Alcove]

Dana T. Leavenworth – A Connecticut Soldier’s Experience from the Leavenworth Family Papers, the documents highlight the concerns of an officer serving in France as well as the activities and emotions of those serving on the home front.  [Dodd Center, Reading Room]

Commemorating the Centennial utilizes archival materials selected from the holdings of Archives & Special Collections.  The individual cases each represent a format or range of activity unified to illustrate the variety of perspectives, activities, emotions and consequences of the United States actively participating in the war effort. [Homer Babbidge Library, Gallery on the Plaza]

Throwing Bricks at the Temple: Reexamining the Life and Writing of Edwin Way Teale

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by Richard Telford

Author’s Note: Though the product of many hours of research, writing, and revision, this chapter is nevertheless a draft; it will be subject to revision as the larger book in which it will appear takes shape. The chapter published below, “Throwing Bricks at the Temple,” follows a previous one published last month, “The Lonely Suffering of the Fallible Heart,” which can be viewed here. For greatest clarity, these chapters should be read in order. I welcome critical response, either in the comment section here or through direct e-mail. I am grateful to the Archives and Special Collections staff for providing me the opportunity to share this work, and to the Woodstock Academy Board of Trustees for awarding me a sabbatical for the 2016-2017 school year so that this work could be undertaken.  Contextual information about the project and manuscript can be found here.

 

Chapter 10: Throwing Bricks at the Temple

Again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to the men of skill; but time and chance happen to them all.[1]

Ecclesiastes 9: 11

When it occurs to a man that nature does not regard him as important, and that she feels she would not maim the universe by disposing of him, he at first wishes to throw bricks at the temple, and he hates deeply the fact that there are no bricks and no temples.[2]

Stephen Crane, “The Open Boat,” 1897

 

Box 219 of the Teale Papers in Archives and Special Collections at the University of Connecticut houses only one object, a Nazi flag measuring roughly 88 inches by 46 inches. Its folds through 71 years of storage have become deeply ingrained, and the viewer is hesitant to pull and flatten it too much. The remaining half of its red field, torn along a diagonal axis, is still bold. It is a monument to a long-dead empire—a Reich, in its own anachronistic parlance—and it is a monument to the fifteen young men who signed their names in the four quadrants formed by the perpendicular bars of the angled cross that forms the center of the black swastika sewn to the circular white central field. Laying the flag down horizontally, as its signers clearly did 72 years ago, the viewer’s eyes are drawn first to bold green script: “Tiger Patrol 346th Infantry.” The four components of this inscription, staggered across the white field, step down the dark lines of the debased Hindu symbol, the second and the third occupying the horizontal pockets formed by the swastika’s angled tails. The capital letters T, P, and I are drawn in rough, oversized calligraphy, and the infantry numbers are drawn with like flourish. Pride, hope, just action for a just cause—all are expressed by the added insignia of this captured flag.

Just as the swastika divides the patrol and regiment designations, so too does it roughly divide the names of the signers. In the north quadrant of the white central field we see the signatures of Antonio J. Alvear, John A. Thompson, Eugene B. Pings, Frank Minnis; along the north-facing tail of the swastika are the signatures of George W. Muschinske, Roy Salame, and Edwin A. Stroh. In the west quadrant are the signatures of Lester L. Snider and Merle H. Patison; adjacent to them and to the right of the scripted “346th” are those of Mahlon Angstead, Billy Richardson, and Ernest Sachau. In the south quadrant, there is only one signature, that of John Steele. Finally, in the east quadrant, moving south to north, are the signatures of Irving J. Greenfield, Harold F. Gould, Jr., Bill Cummins, and, finally, David A. Teale. One can readily imagine Edwin and Nellie Teale intently searching for David’s signature—for any evidence of their only child, declared Missing in Action “somewhere in Germany” five weeks earlier—when the flag arrived to their Baldwin, Long Island home on May 9, 1945. Noting the flag’s arrival in his Guild diary for 1945, Edwin expressed the hope that he and Nellie might “get in touch with those near here” to learn more of the events leading up to David’s disappearance.[3]

Five weeks earlier, on April 3, the day after receiving the first War Department telegram, Edwin wrote, “For so many days, since [leaving Popular Science Monthly in] 1941, I have been awakening to happy dreams in the work I love—Now we wake to the reality of a nightmare we have dreaded—we are hoping and believing that Davy is ‘safe’ as a prisoner.”[4] Both Edwin and Nellie clung tenuously to such hope and belief as bulwarks against waves of grief that now defined “one of the great crises of our lives.”[5] Three days later, on April 6, Edwin wrote, “Little by little, like an island eroding and disappearing in the flood, our standing-space has decreased—our hopes are now basing themselves on other hopes. Grief comes in waves.”[6] Still, the Teales armored themselves with “thoughts of hope: that patrols are likely to be captured; that the wars may end soon and all prisoners will be released.”[7] David’s work in the Tiger Patrol, conducted mostly near and behind enemy lines, justified this hope, but it likewise placed him in greater danger, and Edwin wrote on April 6 that such hopes were “only small, shining stars in the universal darkness.”[8] Expressing the despair that was the constant counterpoint of such hopes, he wrote, “The sun is gone from the sky.”[9]

Nearly thirty years later, in 1974, coming to terms with his newly received prostate cancer diagnosis, Edwin would reflect back on the agonizing uncertainty of the 132 days during which David was declared missing and his fate unknown to them: “Remembering the year David was missing in action and contemplating my current condition, it occurs to me that, in some ways, it is easier to face the inevitable than the uncertain.”[10] In the early days of April 1945, however, uncertainty was exceedingly more palatable than relinquishing hope to the certainty of David’s death.

The Teales straddled a thin, ever-shifting line between despair and hope, and the fragmental evidence of David’s fate that came to them throughout that dark spring was alternately palliative and jarring. David’s final letter, written March 14, arrived on April 5, thirty-three days before the delivery of the Nazi flag. “How precious and how hard to read,” Edwin wrote of the March 14 letter in the Guild diary, adding, “The date on the outside was March 19th and the postboy thought that meant he was all right”[11]—a thin ray of hope. Edwin found “relief from the pain in my heart reading Thoreau’s journals all afternoon,”[12] a practice he would continue in the coming weeks. In Thoreau’s writings and those of W.H. Hudson, he found sanctuary. On April 5, Edwin noted, “’Newsday’ as well as ‘Review-Star’” had “long announcement[s]” on David’s MIA status. “What a joyous day it would be,” he added, “to see the write-ups changed for the better! I alternate between confidence of hope and the depth of black despair.” Still, he was determined to “hope to the end!”[13]

On the following day, April 6, Edwin finished reading the first volume of Thoreau’s journals. Continue reading →

World War Two Newsmap Collection Added to the Archives

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Just a few months after its transfer from the main library’s Federal Documents Collection, the World War Two Newsmap Collection is now available for patron use! The finding aid can be found here: https://archivessearch.lib.uconn.edu/repositories/2/resources/1040

For me, processing this new acquisition was a real pleasure; while I consider myself fairly well-versed in the history of the Second World War, I had never heard of the Newsmaps, and welcomed the opportunity to educate myself on them.

Newsmaps would often feature informational lay-outs for service members, like this one from the July 5, 1943 edition.

These large, two-sided posters were first published in the spring of 1942 by the U.S. Army’s Information Branch. At a minimum, they were meant to inform American service members on the progress of the war in the various theaters of conflict, and expose them to information on both enemy and friendly equipment and tactics. By 1943, many of them followed a common format: brief snippets of war news accompanied by maps and photographs on one side, and either a full-page detailed map or illustrated informational lay-out (how to prevent disease, how to avoid unexploded ordnance, the layout of a German infantry regiment, etc.) on the reverse. As the war progressed and Allied victory seemed more and more certain, the themes for these lay-outs transitioned to topics like the GI Bill, post-military life, and U.S. occupation policies.

Several versions of Newsmaps were produced. Large posters like the ones in this collection were distributed to military installations in the United States, while smaller Newsmaps were sent to units overseas. An industrial version was also published for display in war production facilities. In total, Newsmaps were published weekly from April 1942 until March 1946, with an additional eight issues produced after that.

An example of the large-scale maps featured on many of the posters. From the October 25, 1943 edition.

Our collection consists of forty-four posters, most of them two-sided, measuring 36 by 48 inches each. Publication dates range between 1943 and 1946, with the bulk of the posters dating from 1943. It should be noted that this represents only a fraction of the entire run, as more than two hundred posters were eventually published. If you’d like to see the entire set, or can’t make it in to examine our physical collection, check out this page from the University of North Texas Digital Library, which has digitized the entire run of Newsmaps for online use.

This Week: Rachel Carson The Film and Elizabeth Kolbert Speaks at UConn

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Rachel Carson, a new documentary film produced for the PBS series American Experience, is now available to watch online marking its debut broadcast on CPTV Connecticut public television.

Archives and Special Collections contributed collection materials to be included in the production of the film and we have been eagerly awaiting its release.

According to PBS, the film draws heavily from Carson’s writings and letters and incorporates recent scholarship: “Rachel Carson illuminates both the public and private life of the woman who launched the modern environmental movement and revolutionized how we understand our relationship with the natural world.”

The film features photographs and letters by the naturalist Edwin Teale from the Edwin Way Teale Papers held here in the Archives and Special Collections. [Read more about the correspondence between Teale and Carson on the blog post “Nature, Wondrous and Fragile” by Richard Telford.]

Silent Spring was published in September 1962 and became a national bestseller.  The film features rarely-seen images and home movies, unpublished letters and writings, and explores the science and public debate surrounding pesticide-use ignited by the book. Special features can be found on the American Experience website, including an introductory essay, bonus video, and an interview with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and science writer Elizabeth Kolbert.

Join us on Thursday, February 2 at 4:00pm to hear Elizabeth Kolbert’s lecture “The Sixth Extinction” at UConn in the Dodd Research Center.  The event is FREE and open to the public, no registration is required.  The event will be live-streamed, details can be found here.

Elizabeth Kolbert is a staff writer for The New Yorker and won the Pulitzer for The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History and Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change in 2015. Her series on global warming, The Climate of Man, from which the book was adapted, won the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s magazine writing award and a National Academies communications award. She is a two-time National Magazine Award winner.

The Edwin Way Teale Lecture Series brings leading scholars and scientists to UConn to present public lectures on nature and the environment.  Since 1995, the UConn Library has sponsored the award-winning Edwin Way Teale Lecture Series in partnership with several UConn departments.  The Lecture Series is named in honor of the Pulitzer-prize winning naturalist and author, Edwin Way Teale, whose vast archive of literary manuscripts, letters, diaries and photographs is preserved and accessible at Archives and Special Collections.

 

Stop the Presses: UConn’s Student Newspaper is Now an Online Resource

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Viewing a newspaper issue in the digital repository

Have you ever wondered when the first female editor-in-chief of the UConn newspaper was elected? Or wanted to examine student reactions to the attack on Pearl Harbor? Have you ever desperately needed to know the time and location of the Philosophy Club meeting on November 28, 1945? Thanks to an ongoing project here at Archives & Special Collections, the answers to these and other questions concerning campus history will soon be just a few clicks away. Several staff members, myself included, have been working since last summer on uploading past issues of the campus newspaper, from its inception in 1896 until 1990, to the Archives’ digital repository, a component of the Connecticut Digital Archive (CTDA).

To date, everything up to the 1942-1943 school year has been completed, as well as some years in the 1970s and late 1980s. Once uploaded, every issue becomes a permanent digital object that is searchable within the repository. Associated metadata includes publication date, editor, genre, and, when applicable, a short description that lists any errors particular to that issue (i.e. a mislabeled volume or issue number or date.) Users can conduct term searches within each issue, and there’s also the option to download and print a PDF version.

Prior to this project, access to most of the student newspaper archive was available only through the use of paper copies, like this one from 1940

Want to check out what we’ve completed so far? Visit the digital repository here.

Access to UConn’s student newspaper archive, in both physical and digital form, is relatively old news (pun intended.) Researchers who visit Archives & Special Collections have been able to examine bound volumes or microfilm reels for years, and the UConn Digital Commons has offered online access to some copies of the newspaper since early 2012. Frequent use and the passage of time, however, have begun to show their effects on both the physical copies and the microfilm, and although plans were made to make all issues available online through the Digital Commons by the end of 2012, the project was never completed. Finally having the collection completely digitized will address these concerns and essentially make the newspaper a “self-serve” resource, available at any time and from anywhere.

Completing the project is no small task, in part because there is so much material to process. For the paper’s first eighteen years, for example, it was published monthly during the school year with an occasional summer issue. That works out to approximately 170 issues produced for the years 1896-1914. At an average of 20-25 pages per issue (although some, like the Commencement Issue, ran much longer), the total number of pages is more than 4,000! The numbers only increase as the years progress and the paper becomes a semi-monthly, weekly, biweekly, and finally a daily in 1953.

Editorial staff, Connecticut Campus, 1924

Another challenge has been tracking the changes undergone by the paper to ensure that the proper metadata is created and recorded for each individual issue. Just as the university has changed its official name several times over the course of its existence, so too has the campus newspaper gone by a number of different titles: the S.A.C. Lookout­ (1896-1899); the C.A.C. Lookout/Lookout (1899-1914); The Connecticut Campus and Lookout (1914-1917); the Connecticut Campus (1917-1955); the Connecticut Daily Campus (1955-1984); and finally the Daily Campus (1984-Present). There is also the Connecticut Scampus, an annual satirical issue first published in the 1920s. In addition, a new editor-in-chief was elected at least annually, and sometimes more frequently than that.

Luckily, the necessary groundwork had already been completed before we began the project. Realizing the historical significance of the newspaper, the UConn Libraries funded the scanning of the entire collection onto microfilm in the early 1990s. The Library again offered its support in 2012 when that microfilm was scanned and .txt, .jp2, and .pdf files were created for each individual page. It was from this cache of digital images that the Digital Commons issues were produced, and it is from there that we’ve been doing the majority of our work, grouping the individual pages into zip files (each one representing a single issue), ingesting them into the repository, and then adding the necessary metadata and PDF files.

Quality control is an important step throughout this process. The editors of yesteryear were far from perfect, and there are plenty of instances where volume and/or issue numbers are mislabeled and page numbers are out of order (or omitted entirely.) There are also errors from the microfilm scanning that need to be accounted for, like removing duplicates resulting from the same page being scanned more than once.

Challenges notwithstanding, progress has been steady, and we are looking forward to completing our work. In its entirety, the newspaper represents an integral part of UConn’s historical record, and is an ideal complement to the several excellent histories of the university that have been written (the out-of-print Connecticut Agricultural College: A History by Walter Stemmons, Bruce Stave’s Red Brick in the Land of Steady Habits, and Mark J. Roy’s University of Connecticut) which, owing to limitations of space and other factors, can never hope to include everything. When finished, the online archive will span more than a century and include thousands of pages. In using it, researchers will be given a unique perspective into the everyday nuances of campus life, and the reactions of students, staff, and the Storrs community to events, both major and mundane, that affected the campus, the nation, and the world.

A Brief History of the Student Newspaper:

1896 — Students of the Storrs Agricultural College establish a student newspaper, the S.A.C. Lookout.  It begins as a monthly, and the first issue is published on May 11, 1896. The cost of a subscription? 50 cents a year, paid in advance.

1899 — The school is re-named Connecticut Agricultural College, and the paper becomes The C.A.C. Lookout.

1902 — The paper transitions to the simpler title the Lookout.

1914 — The paper changes its name to the Connecticut Campus and Lookout, and is published semi-monthly during the college year.  It also takes on the standard newspaper format.

1917 — The paper simplifies its name to the Connecticut Campus beginning with the October 30, 1917 issue.

1919 — The paper begins publishing weekly with the October 3, 1919 issue.

1942 — The Connecticut Campus is published semi-weekly, on Tuesdays and Fridays. It will revert to a weekly two years later.

1946 — The paper again becomes a semi-weekly.

1950 — The paper is published three times a week.

1953 — Beginning with the September 21, 1953 issue, the Connecticut Campus becomes a daily.

1955 — The paper is renamed the Connecticut Daily Campus, and is published every weekday morning.

1984 — The school paper again simplifies its name, becoming the Daily Campus.

Major Gift of Victorian Illustrated Children’s Literature to be Preserved in the Northeast Children’s Literature Collection

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DoyleREVArchives and Special Collections at the University of Connecticut Libraries has acquired a major collection of illustrated children’s books by prominent Victorian authors from Melissa Dabakis, Professor of Art History at Kenyon College, Mt. Vernon, Ohio and wife of the late Daniel P. Younger.  For thirty-five years, Daniel Younger collected rare nineteenth and early twentieth-century children’s illustrated books.  Hand-selected by Younger for donation to the Northeast Children’s Literature Collection, this generous gift includes one-hundred and forty-four illustrated books for children published between 1841 and 1935.  Included in the gift are works by authors such as Lewis Carroll, Charles Kingsley, Edward Lear, Christina Rossetti, John Ruskin, and Robert Louis Stevenson.

Many of the works selected by Younger for the gift represent the origins of the fairy tale in children’s literature.  The early period of children’s literature that was characterized by stories intended to teach morality, gave way to the magic of fairy tales designed to provide an alternative to ordinary life.  This shift in story-telling was also accompanied by improvements in the quality of illustration in children’s books.  Books by the illustrator George Cruikshank, who worked in copperplate etching, and Richard Doyle, founder of Punch, are examples of the detailed, imaginative style developed during the Victorian period. The collection includes George Cruikshank’s Fairy Library, 1865 and The Princess Nobody: a tale of fairy land, illustrated by Richard Doyle, 1884.  The donation includes an American edition of [Hans Christian] Andersen’s Tales for Children published in 1861.  In 2001, Younger, who served as Director of Olin Art Gallery at Kenyon College, featured many of the works in the collection in an exhibition Once Upon A Time: Victorian Illustrated Children’s Books dedicated to the memory of puppeteer and children’s book collector Herbert Hosmer..

In August 2015, Younger contacted Kristin Eshelman, archivist for the Northeast Children’s Literature Collection, “looking for a good home” for a collection of one hundred and fifty titles. The works, Eshelman discovered later, were hand-selected by Younger especially for Archives and Special Collections at UConn.  “Dan wanted to know why we didn’t have these important illustrated children’s books in our collection,” said Eshelman.   The history of the children’s literature collection at UConn goes back to 1965, when then Director of Special Collections Richard Schimmelpfeng began collecting works from the period 1860 to 1900, a period that had been overlooked by other regional collections.  Illustrated material was also of particular interest. The establishment of the NCLC in 1983 shifted the emphasis to the archives of twentieth-century artists and writers working and residing in the Northeast and East coast.  Younger saw a way to fill the gap created by this shift in collecting focus through his gift of illustrated children’s books by prominent Victorian authors.

Younger’s interest in children’s literature and connection to UConn dates back to a 1979 graduate internship at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts.  It was there that he met the puppeteer and collector of children’s books and toys, Herbert Hosmer.  Hosmer knew Francelia Butler, who taught children’s literature at UConn. Younger noted, “Butler was an informal board member of Hosmer’s all-things-juvenile enterprise, as was I.”  Younger was also mentored by William E. (Bill) Parker, UConn Emeritus Professor of Art in the history of photography during his graduate studies in photography and photographic history.  Younger’s wife, Melissa Dabakis, is also an alumna of UConn.

Kristin Eshelman, Archivist