UConn Library
Archives and Special Collections BlogThe Archives and Special Collections Reading Room in the Dodd Research Center will be closed December 22, 2014 through January 4, 2015. The Reading Room will re-open on January 5, 2015 with regularly scheduled hours Monday through Friday, 9:00a.m. to 4:00p.m.
For more information about Reading Room hours and policies, contact the Reference Desk in Archives & Special Collections at 860.486.2524 or email us at archives@uconn.edu.
Irena Urdang deTour, 2013
Ninety years ago today, Irena Ehrlich vel Sluszny Urdang deTour was born in Warsaw, Poland, the eldest daughter of Seweryn and Felicia (Lubelczyk) Ehrlich vel Sluszny. Experiencing the tragedies of war first hand, Irena emigrated to the United States in 1947 and has been active involved in many activities ever since. To honor Ms. deTour’s extraordinary ninety years of experiences, Archives & Special Collections has installed a small exhibit illustrating her family heritage, World War II era experiences and interest in documenting and supporting research related to the Holocaust and its survivors. Items on display are from her personal collection as well as materials that have been donated to the University of Connecticut.
Portion of deTour exhibit
Ms. deTour is the widow of Laurence Urdang and the proud mother of two UConn graduates, Alexandra and Nicole, and three grandchildren.
The exhibit is open and available for viewing during posted A&SC Reading Room hours through January 23, 2015.
University of Connecticut Bulletin
Archives & Special Collections has been enhancing access to key University resources for several years. The agendas and minutes of the Board of Trustees were the first to be made available online, quickly followed by the fact books and Commencement programs. With the implementation of our digital repository a year ago, the Libraries’ digital capture lab has worked tirelessly to digitize the Bulletin (course catalog), a frequently consulted and authoritative record of courses offered at the University over the years. As of today, the course listings at the graduate (1942-2010) and undergraduate (1950-1997) level, as well as the School of Social Work catalog (1976-1984), are available and searchable online–with more being added regularly. Check back regularly to see what additional resources have been added!
Birth of Delta Pi, November 1955
On July 26, 2014 the sisters of Delta Pi returned to Storrs to visit, reminisce, share stories and remember those who have passed. In addition to the stories and tours of campus and the Storrs surroundings, a number of the sisters brought with them momentos, photographs, banners, beanies, clippings, notes, patches and other bits of Delta Pi history. Many of these items have been donated to the University Memorabilia Collection in the University Archives, where they are now securely preserved and available for the future. In this regard, Delta Pi is now one of the best documented student organizations in the Archives. Congratulations to the sisters of Delta Pi!
Crowded reunion at the Nathan Hale, July 26, 2014
Founding sisters
Archives & Special Collections has recently enhanced access to historic University films through digitization. In conjunction with the current exhibit, “What’s in a Name?” on display in the Dodd Center Gallery, AS&C is hosting a summer film series. Selected films will be shown around a theme on Fridays from 12-1 in Room 162 of the Dodd Center. So bring your lunch and share a brief moment of UConn’s past, memorialized on film!
6/20 Agriculture on Display
7/11 Teaching the Land
7/18 Diary of a Student Revolution
7/25 Yankee Conference Championship game at UConn, 1970
8/1 Technology and the Farm
Out of the Frame: Alternative Arts of the 1980s
A co-curated gallery exhibition of alternative arts of the 1980s is currently on display at the Dodd Center. This exhibit features selections of dial-a-poems, artists’ books, offset lithography, punk rock, zines, buttons, show flyers, cyberpunk literature, comic books and related ephemera from the Archives & Special Collections. By focusing on underground visual and aural arts of fringe countercultures, our goal is to demonstrate the range of expression found within these distinct cultural enclaves. The show offers materials from three distinct curatorial areas, however the threads that tie these materials together become interwoven through their reactions to the dominant modes of production of the era.
March 3-May 11, 2014
Thomas J. Dodd Research Center
Gallery Hours: 8:30-4:30, Monday – Friday
For more information on the libraries ongoing exhibits, please visit the exhibitions page.
“The Lady of the Castle!—Are we then to journey through deserts waste! Forests drear!—encounter one-eyed giants—destroy fell enchanters—lay waste castles, where ladies fair, and courtly and courageous knights have for centuries remained immured and spellbound—to come at—THE BEGGAR BOY?” (Bellamy 5).
Thus begins Thomas Bellamy’s The Beggar Boy, and to answer his own question, No. Our Mr. Bellamy was avowed to have “no talent for satire” (Baker 33), but has actually tricked us for a moment, led us on to think this is one kind of tale while it is actually another, a contemporary tale of his own time and place: Bellamy was “born in 1745, at Kingston-upon-Thames, in Surrey” (Baker 31), and had “a mind, susceptible to the pleasures of poetry, and indulging in propensities of innate genius. . .[which could] not long relish the business of common life” (Baker 32).
Bellamy thus became a writer, but “from this prospect of happiness he was summoned by death, after an illness of four days, Friday, August 29, 1800” ( Baker 33). Then was the unfinished Beggar Boy without a home, though Bellamy’s “good qualities secured him many friends” (Baker 33), one of whom—Elizabeth Sarah Villa-Real Gooch—completed the novel out of “a sincere friendship for Mr. Bellamy, which commenced many years ago, and continued, without interruption, to the day of his death” (Bellamy 3).
We are thus left with quite a story: after a complex first volume—in which Dame Sympkins, “the lady of the Castle,” dies; her husband remarries, then dies; his new widow Fanny remarries to a man named Goodwin, whom she abandons, while her brother at sea is thought dead (leading to their mother’s death) and returns after being wrecked on French shores and meeting a sympathizer who knows his mentor Admiral Sydney, who has died; and Sydney’s daughter Louisa has disappeared, so that it is necessary for their friend Mr. Lucas, the curate, to go and find her—“’Well!” says the reader, ‘and now we have travelled through one volume, out of three—and no Beggar Boy!’” (Bellamy 101).
Ay, where is he? “The child of misery is on his way,” the narrator assures us, “refuse not, fair and gentle country-women, your commiseration for—The Sorrows of Alfred!” (101), and so: Louisa Sydney runs away from home, falls into debt, marries, runs away, gives birth to Alfred, and dies; Alfred is abducted by Gypsies, and Martha, his new guardian, rescues him; Alfred is sent to Jamaica; Alfred returns and rescues a rich lady from a band of thugs; the rich lady is employing Martha; knows an admiral M’Bride, who knows Mr. Lucas, and knew Admiral Sydney; Alfred’s father pops up as a robber and M’Bride kills him out of self defense; M’Bride and Lucas get Alfred his grandfather’s estate back, and Alfred marries the rich lady’s daughter, surprising us all that he has now grown up.
The End. Finis. What are we to make of this? If things aren’t already clear enough: this 
is a moral tale, just as we would expect from a man with “an acute moral perception and an invariable affection for the best graces of the heart” (Baker 33), and so the novel concludes, “thus terminated the sorrows of ALFRED, whose infancy and youth had hitherto been marked by calamitous vicissitudes, resulting from the imprudence of a mother, involving herself in the fashionable dissipations of the time; while his own conduct had invariably claimed the protection of that providence, which pays no respect to persons” (340).
Gentle reader, harken then: Alfred is happy because of “the virtuous principles, and rectitude of heart, which had uniformly distinguished [his] character” (340), securing providence. Note, reader, the constant manner in which virtue is rewarded and vice is punished: coerced into “the abominable vice of drunkenness” (252), “[Alfred’s] ruin was 
accomplished and inevitable” (251): he is conscripted against his will, and sent to Jamaica. Such incidents abound throughout, echoing similar sentiments towards drink in American pamphlets found in our archives: “The Advantages and Disadvantages of Drunkenness” (1821), says “if you would effectually counteract your own attempts to do well, be a Drunkard ; and you will not be disappointed” (Collins 3); Nathaniel Gage’s “An Address on Intemperance. Pronounced at Nashua Village, N.H. April 4, 1829,” warns that “intemperance is destroying the fruits of intelligence, the strength of the people” (Gage 12).
So always in moderation, reader. Note, too, though, Bellamy’s main message, on providence. Providence is the unseen force guiding the novel, illustrated as both human and divine. At some point in the history of our volume, a reader highlighted the passage “alas! My friend, we are apt to murmur at the painful events which nature, in its appointed round, is sure to produce” (Bellamy 65), lamenting cruel fate, yet for Bellamy, providence can be secured through moral action. Alfred behaves well, and is so rewarded. Yet his fortune is due mainly to the people around him acting providentially on his behalf, making providence non-divine: Admiral M’Bride works to get Alfred his inheritance, and explains to others “that Alfred should remain ignorant of the object of the present journey, in case it should prove fruitless of any good to that young man” (Bellamy 297), personally enacting providence in Alfred’s life.
Bellamy’s moral? A sort of golden rule: do well unto others, and others will do well unto you, or, perhaps simply do well to yourself, and others will do well unto you. Take this away if you will, but I take away something more: a novel that through its haphazard plotting enacts its moral, and so a deeper understanding of the form of the moralistic novel, and an appreciation for their apparent absurdity; a closer look at more popular writing of this time period, from a forgotten novelist; and some perspective on the concerns of the time. And what a story! There may be no Deserts Waste! Forests Drear! Fell Enchanters! Castles! or Knights and Ladies! yet where else can you find a story where two ostensible protagonists die within the first ten pages; where our real protagonist shows up late; is kidnapped repeatedly; and can cross the Atlantic and come back in the space of ten pages as if nothing happened?
I think it’s safe to say, only in The Beggar Boy.
Daniel Allie is a senior undergraduate student in English. For his blog series Hypocrite Lecteur he will spend the Spring 2014 Semester exploring nineteenth-century literature in a variety of genres from the Rare Books Collection housed in Archives and Special Collections at the Dodd Research Center.
Works Cited
Baker, David Erskine. “Bellamy, Thomas.” Biographia Dramatica: or, a Companion to the Playhouse. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, et al. 1812. 31-33. Web. Google Books. Accessed 16 February 2014.
Bellamy, Thomas. The Beggar Boy: A Novel. Alexandria: Cottom and Stewart, 1802. Print. [Dodd Center Call Number: A619]
Collins, F. “The Advantages and Disadvantages of Drunkenness.” Cambridge: Trustees of the Publishing Fund, 1821. Print. [Dodd Center Call Number: WHV 25]
Gage, Nathaniel. “An Address on Intemperance. Pronounced at Nashua Village, N.H. April 4, 1829.” Dunstable: Thayer &Wiggin, 1829. Print. [Dodd Center Call Number: WHV 56]
Studying literature means anthologies. There’s no way around it. If you are enrolled in a college literature course, you’ll have an anthology. These are large and heavy textbooks, with thin pages and flimsy covers, so delicate that the pages wrinkle at the touch and the corners crush or bend during normal use.
Perhaps even more fragile, though, are the contents. The canon of British Literature, or of American Literature, or of poetry, or drama, or the short story, will never be the same from one year to another. We still read Samuel Taylor Coleridge in our anthologies of Romantic-era British literature, but where now is Robert Southey, his once more-popular contemporary?
Point is, the canon is always changing. Our nineteenth century canon is different from the twentieth century’s nineteenth century canon. We constantly change our perspective of what literature was in a given time and place. Anthologies reflect current views of a time and place, shaped by scholarship, cultural tastes, and social or institutional values of the time period.
The Rare Books Collection here in Archives and Special Collections does not have this problem. Here are thousands of books, none of which have been placed there by an editorial committee, or singled out to fit a specific idea or interest. Here we have the opportunity to be that editorial committee ourselves, 
to find our own scholarly ideas or interests, to find what past literature has to offer to us, without mediation or abridgment. Why should we not read The Poetical Works of Joseph Addison (1805), or learn how life is to be lived from John Anstey’s The Pleader’s Guide, A Didactic Poem (1803)? While we are looking more at women writers, why not consider Jenny Fenno’s Original Compositions in Prose and Verse (1803)?
All of these works have something valuable to offer. By engaging in a conversation with the text and by putting the texts in conversation with each other, we can find that value. To the reader these texts may at first seem obscure, irrelevant, or even silly, but the purpose of this blog series is to guide you through this process, to come to appreciate the non-canonical and the forgotten, and to question our assumptions.
Writing in the mid-nineteenth century, Charles Baudelaire wrote the phrase I use now to title this series, Hypocrite Lecteur. In “Au Lecteur,” (“To the Reader”) the preface poem to Les Fleurs du Mal (1857), Baudelaire accuses his readers of a common indifference to art and the world, a lack of critical thought which endangers us all, finally naming the cause of this menace, ennui:
It’s BOREDOM. Tears have glued its eyes together.
You know it well, my Reader. This obscene
beast chain-smokes yawning for the guillotine—
you—hypocrite Reader—my double—my brother! (Trans. Robert Lowell)
Let us take Baudelaire’s warning in hand and question the canon and our own former thoughts. In my blog series Hypocrite Lecteur, I will leave anthologies, leave even Baudelaire, and discover the literarily obscure for myself, on a journey through what the Rare Books Collection has to offer. Over a series of months, I’ll be reading and reporting back.
Come along, this will be fun.
Daniel Allie is a senior undergraduate student in English. For his blog series Hypocrite Lecteur he will spend the Spring 2014 Semester exploring nineteenth-century literature in a variety of genres from the Rare Books Collection housed in Archives and Special Collections at the Dodd Research Center.
In conjunction with the Dodd Center, the Archives & Special Collections has acquired NYC artist Seth Tobocman’s The World Is Being Ripped, a series of 14 narrative posters. This limited edition is the last spray art version which Tobocman released, making its unique street art aesthetic a historical document of design and propaganda. These stenciled graphics were originally created in the early 1980s to critique the militaristic individualism of the American Cold War economy and its impact on society:
The World is Being Ripped was originally a response to the Cold War, but it came to address a larger question: In a society as predatory and self destructive as this one, can there be any basis for morality? Is ethical behavior even possible in such a context? I like to think that in adopting these images as their emblems, people are answering that question in the affirmative.
– Seth Tobocman
The stencil art form was created to be an accessible, reproducible, inexpensive and temporary demonstration of design and often political critique or message. This collection provides a unique glimpse of street art yet intended for the gallery with its rich use of color and linear narrative. To see this collection in the reading room, contact the curator of Alternative Press Collections.
They say you are who your friends are. To anyone reading Mary Clark’s 1835 signature album, this statement is almost literally true. Presumably a resident of Lowell, Massachusetts in the 1830s, we know very little about Mary’s life, except what friends wrote about her and to her in her signature album, now a part of the Diaries Collection.
Signature albums, more commonly referred to as autograph albums, are pieces of nineteenth century ephemera, commonly owned by women. In the analogous spirit of a modern high school yearbook, signature albums were used to collect personal sentiments from friends. During the nineteenth century, these sentiments “while rarely original,” generally took the form of transcribed poems about friendship, or Bible verses.[1] Friends signed, dated, and included their hometown at the bottom of each entry.[2]
The entries in Mary Clark’s signature album are not chronological. They are scattered throughout the album, separated by empty pages; all date between 1834 and 1838. Though Mary does not seem to have written in her own album, her book includes items that appear to have been created or collected by her, including a carefully drawn map of Eurasia (pictured). Female friends wrote most of the entries, though her album includes an entry from an “Oliver Brooks,” presumably a male friend.
Historian Anya Jabour thinks that autograph albums were particularly important to women during moments of transition in their lives, such as following commencement from school or in the weeks leading up to a marriage, allowing “young women’s friendships with each other to survive separation and even death.” [3] Mary’s album includes an undated “Quarterly Bill” (report card) from Bradford Academy, an institution in Bradford, Massachusetts, which operated as a women’s college between 1836 and 1931. Most of the entries are written by friends from Lowell, suggesting that perhaps Mary’s signature album was a way for her to stay connected with friends from home while she was attending Bradford.
The content of the entries in Mary’s album reflects this purpose. 
An 1836 entry from an “S.J. Messinger” of Lowell (pictured) includes the following handwritten poem borrowed from a Scottish author:
Though many a joy around thee smile
And many a faithful friend you meet
Whose love may cheer[e] life’s dreary way
And turn the bitter cup to sweet
Let memory sometimes bear thee back
To other days almost forgot
And where you think of other friends
Who love thee well Forget, me not!
Other entries, expressed in common language of Christian “virtue” suggest how these women conceived of, and dealt with such separations. An 1834 entry from Eliza Brooks of Lowell, MA, potentially the wife or sister of the aforementioned Oliver Brooks includes a poem, copied from an unknown source, that imagines a world where “virtue round us ever shed/The influence of her gentle light.” The poem’s author then goes on to admit that such a world will never be possible, nor desirable, for if the world was always virtuous:
We then might never thoughtful turn
Our minds to nobler scenes above,
Nor let within our bosoms burn,
Aught purer than an earthly love.
But Dearest Friends [author’s emphasis] are from us riven,
And pleasures gayest hours are brief;
And hope by stern misfortune driven,
Will wither like the Autumn leafe.
Then may we seek an endless Friend
Whose smiles are never shaded,
And hope for life that never shall end
Nor fade, as earthly scenes have faded
And calmly on life pathway move
To those Blest Mansions far above.
Eliza Brooks underlined “Dearest Friends,” in the fourth line, suggesting that this sentiment refers to Mary specifically. The “endless Friend” in this poem is assumed to be God. This poem is then one of several entries in Mary’s album recommending religion and investment in virtue, charity, and humility as ways to transcend the reality of being separated from friends, and the pain that comes with that separation. Other entries refer to virtue, Godliness, and eternal blessings outside of the context of friendship, suggesting a shared common experience and concern with upholding Christian values.
Presumably, Mary read these entries. This considered, her album becomes a dialogue between friends and herself, a place to receive and reflect on shared sentiments regarding friendship, separation, Christian virtue, and happiness.
But is this a journal? So far, I have been unintentionally vague about what I mean by a journal or diary, assuming (until now) that the term didn’t really need a definition. In my first entry, I described diaries as “something extremely personal, a continuous letter to self.” Mary’s signature album differs from previous diaries I’ve discussed in that she did not write in it, and other people did; it is not “a letter to self,” but a series of entries written to Mary by others. But it is personal, in the same way that a scrapbook or a signed yearbook is personal. The entries she collects from friends are a physical manifestation of existing friendships and interests.
Furthermore, this album differs from, let’s say, a collection of letters, in that it is contained in an album, and Mary’s presence is discernible through materials she’s intentionally inserted into it, including her map and a typed, published entry intended “For an Album” that has been removed from a primer or magazine and carefully glued to her album’s opening pages. Though Mary was not this album’s scribe, she was its owner and curator. Her album then, though not a journal, serves many of the same purposes, reminding us that diaries, in the traditional sense, are not the only self-curated historical documents that were used to record and reflect on the intimate details of a person’s life.
Rebecca D’Angelo is a senior undergraduate student in History and Anthropology. In her blog series For Private Eyes Only she studies diaries available in Archives and Special Collections at the Dodd Research Center to explore the history of journal writing and reasons why we write journals.
[1] Anya Jabour, “Albums of Affection: Female Friendship and Coming of Age in Antebellum Virginia,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 107 (1999): 128.
[2] Lisa Ricker, “Performing Memory, Performing Identity: Jennie Drew’s autograph Album, Mnemonic Activity, and the Invention of Feminine Subjectivity” (Proquest, UMI Dissertation Publishing, 2011).
[3] Ibid.
John P. McDonald Reading Reading Room, Archives & Special Collections
Below is a list of collections that are now open and available for research (links to finding aids provided), arranged by broad collecting area. Researchers are encouraged to contact the staff with any questions.
Business Collections:
Somersville Manufacturing Company Records
https://archivessearch.lib.uconn.edu/repositories/2/resources/931
Children’s Literature:
David M. Carroll Collection
https://archivessearch.lib.uconn.edu/repositories/2/resources/287
Anna Kirwan Papers
https://archivessearch.lib.uconn.edu/repositories/2/resources/918
Barbara McClintock Papers
https://archivessearch.lib.uconn.edu/repositories/2/resources/945
Labor Collections:
AFSCME, Council 4 Records
https://archivessearch.lib.uconn.edu/repositories/2/resources/897
Railroad Collections:
Max Miller Collection of the Connecticut Valley Railroad
https://archivessearch.lib.uconn.edu/repositories/2/resources/937
University Archives:
Center for Economic Education Records
https://archivessearch.lib.uconn.edu/repositories/2/resources/185
Environmental Health and Safety Records
https://archivessearch.lib.uconn.edu/repositories/2/resources/189
Josef Gugler East African Survey Collection
https://archivessearch.lib.uconn.edu/repositories/2/resources/900
Walter R. Ihrke Papers
https://archivessearch.lib.uconn.edu/repositories/2/resources/452
Louise T. Johnson Papers
https://archivessearch.lib.uconn.edu/repositories/2/resources/33
Irene and Merle Klinck Papers
https://archivessearch.lib.uconn.edu/repositories/2/resources/933
Puerto Rican/Latin American Cultural Center Records
https://archivessearch.lib.uconn.edu/repositories/2/resources/905
School of Allied Health Records
https://archivessearch.lib.uconn.edu/repositories/2/resources/190
School of Nursing Records
https://archivessearch.lib.uconn.edu/repositories/2/resources/668
University Communications Office Records
https://archivessearch.lib.uconn.edu/repositories/2/resources/113
The Somersville Manufacturing Company, maker of fine heavy woolen cloth, was established in 1879 in Somersville, a village in the town of Somers, Connecticut, by Rockwell Keeney. For the company’s entire 90 year history it was owned and run by Rockwell’s descendents.
Advertisement for woollens made by the Somersville Manufacturing Company in Somersville, Connecticut, ca. 1950s
Last year Mr. Timothy R.E. Keeney, Rockwell’s great great-grandson, contacted Archives & Special Collections to discuss the donation of the company’s records, which were stored in his home in Somersville. We found the records to be unique, accounting for the entire history of the company from its founding in 1979 to the point where it shut its doors in 1969. The documents themselves were a treasure trove, ranging from administrative and financial files and volumes to marketing material, photographs and scrapbooks, detailing not only the life cycle of the company but also the Keeney family. Mr. Keeney graciously gave us plenty of details about his family’s extensive and affectionate family; one fascinating aspect of the collection includes hundreds of letters written in the late 1930s and World War II years by his grandfather Leland Keeney to various members of the family.
The finding aid to the records is available at https://archivessearch.lib.uconn.edu/repositories/2/resources/931.
