Archives and Special Collections at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center is pleased to announce the literary manuscripts and personal papers of writer and artist Allen Polite have been made available for research. 

Recently donated to the Dodd Research Center by Allen Polite’s widow Helene Polite, the collection dates from 1955 to 1993 and contains unpublished manuscripts of his poetry, prose, songs, and a play for voices, early writing and student work, notebooks including drafts and notes, transcriptions of poetry by Helene Polite, as well as a selection of his published works.  This rich collection offers researchers ample source material for exploring Polite’s extensive body of work, for illuminating his life as an expatriate artist and his affiliations with the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, and for revealing his contributions to African-American literature and culture.   An inventory to the collection can be viewed here.

Born in 1932 and raised in Newark, NJ, Allen Polite was drafted into the United States Army in 1952.  After serving in Korea and Japan, Polite settled in Greenwich Village and between 1954 and 1956, studied philosophy at Columbia University.   The writer LeRoi Jones acknowledged Polite as his ‘mentor’ in Jones’ Autobiography and first published Polite’s poetry in 1958 in the little magazine Yugen.  In the early 1960s, Polite worked on a novel, which he never completed, and a long cycle of poetry and prose called “The Dead Seeds”.  He refused, however, to publish his work. 

Polite’s writing was included in Sixes and Sevens, An Anthology of New Poetry (1962) and in Langston Hughes’ New Negro Poets, U.S.A. published in 1964.  In 1963 Polite left New York for Paris, London, and eventually Stockholm, where he visited his friend the painter Harvey Cropper.  He decided to settle in Stockholm, where he joined an international group of artists centered around a small community of African-Americans already resident there.  Polite began a life of drawing and painting, in addition to his writing, and in 1964 organized and sponsored the exhibition “10 American Negro Artists Living and Working in Europe” at Den Frie, the largest gallery in Copenhagen.  In Sweden he met Helene Etzelsdorfer who remained his companion, and later his wife, from 1963 until his death in 1993. 

The Dodd Research Center at the University of Connecticut welcomes visitors, students, and scholars between the hours of 10:00am and 4:00pm, Monday through Friday.  Travel grants are available to researchers interested in using the Center’s collections and are awarded on a rolling basis; see application details for more information.

Melissa Watterworth Batt, Curator of Literary, Natural History and Rare Books Collections

This afternoon, Ken Davis will be signing copies of his new book University of Connecticut Basketball Vault, The history of the Huskies, published by Whitman Publishing.  Davis will sign copies of the book at the UConn Co-op on Friday, Oct. 15, beginning at 4:30 p.m., just before the 2010-11 basketball season kicks off with First Night activities at Harry A. Gampel Pavilion.

University of Connecticut Basketball Vault, The history of the Huskies

The book is part of The College Vault series and features a “time capsule” approach, including historic images and reproductions of ephemera that are part of the team’s history, such as game programs, statistics sheets, and other items that enhance the comprehensive narrative about each team.  A considerable portion of the research was conducted in the University Archives and items from the collection have been reproduced as part of the publication.  More information about the author and the book in the UConn Today article by Kenneth Best (10/15/2010).  Details about the book signing are available on the Co-op website.  A copy of the publication has been added to the collection in the University Archives.

“Bailey looked and often acted like the traditional ward politician. Tall and rumpled with an ever-present cigar in his mouth, his glasses pushed up on his forehead and speaking in a hoarse confidential tone, he was at home in the smoke-filled rooms of convention hotels. He was an artist at balancing a ticket to conform to Connecticut’s ethnic composition. He worked hard at disguising the facts that he was the son of a well-to-do-physician, had been educated at Catholic University and Harvard Law School, and maintained a lucrative Hartford law practice. Yet in reality he was a new-style boss who combined mastery of parochial political detail with astute knowledge of the legislative process and enough national vision to become one of the members of President Kennedy’s inner circle of advisors,” Herbert F. Janick.

The collection of the Democratic giant from Connecticut, John M. Bailey, is now available.. Bailey worked for John F. Kennedy’s successful presidential campaign in 1960, and then went on to serve as chairman of the National Democratic Party from 1961-1968. The collection includes boxes of correspondence from the 1960s including letters with Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, speeches at numerous conferences nationwide, as well as photographs, press releases, and travel schedules.

For more information please see: https://archivessearch.lib.uconn.edu/repositories/2/resources/400

An incredible collection of Spanish periodicals and newspapers from the Archives are now available online at http://hdl.handle.net/11134/20002:NewspapersSpain

In the early 1970s, the Archives acquired this rich collection from the famous bibliophile, Juan Perez de Guzman y Boza, the Duque de T’ Serclaes, which reflects the complex history of Spain through its periodical and newspapers during most of the 19^th century.  Of great interest and research value is the wide selection of women magazines written by men to appeal to a female elite audience. The range of materials you can find in these literary and general interest magazines is limitless.  Full of things such as short historical stories, poems, good advice for both men and women about the proper behavior of ladies at any age, beautiful colored and engraved images with the latest news of Paris fashion, music sheets of polkas and other music specifically composed for the magazines, and patterns for needlework to name only a few. These magazines are an amazing window to understand the social dimensions of women in 19^th century Spain.

Because of their significance to international researchers unable to travel to the University, the Dodd Research Center has been digitizing many of the titles in the collection.  Nine titles, including Correo de las damas o poliantea instructiva, curiosa y agradable de literatura, and ciencias y artes published in Cadiz, Spain have been digitized with 12 or more titles to  be completed.

But Some of Us Are Brave:  30 Years of Black Feminist Writing

The Thomas J. Dodd Research Center announces a new display in the McDonald Reading Room highlighting Black feminist publications written between 1970 and 1999 from the Alternative Press Collection at the Dodd Center. The exhibit includes books by Barbara Smith, Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, bell hooks, Toni Morrison, Patricia J. Williams, Alice Walker, Gloria T. Hull, and Patricia Hill Collins, as well as pamphlets from the Combahee River Collective, and multi-racial feminist newspapers, including off our backs, RAT, and Sojourner.

The display will run through the month of February.  The reading room at the Dodd Research Center is open Monday-Friday from 10 AM- 4 PM.

More information on the Alternative Press Collection is available at https://lib.uconn.edu/location/asc/collections/alternative-press/

December 1 marks World AIDS Day, first established by the World Health Organization 20 years ago to raise awareness and focus attention on the global AIDS epidemic.   Since the first cases of AIDS were identified in 1981, over 25 million people worldwide have died from AIDS.  Worldwide, the number of people currently living with AIDS is 33.4 million, with an estimated one million in the United States. 

The Thomas J. Dodd Research Center and the University of Connecticut Libraries are commemorating World AIDS Day with an exhibit on the plaza of Homer Babbidge Library featuring early publications, artists books, poetry, and health reports on HIV and AIDS from the Alternative Press and Human Rights Collections. 

World AIDS Day Newsletter, 1994. From the Human Rights Internet Collection, Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut Libraries.

In 2008, 2.7 million people became newly infected with HIV.  Since 1996, funding for the response to AIDS in low- and middle-income countries rose from US$300 million annually to US$10 billion in 2007.  This increase in financing for HIV programs in low- and middle-income countries is beginning to bear fruit, with many countries making major progress in lowering AIDS deaths and preventing new infections.  Progress remains uneven, however, and the epidemic’s future is still uncertain, underscoring the need for intensified action to move towards universal access to HIV prevention, treatment, care, and support. There have been many successes in the AIDS response in recent times including increases in HIV treatment coverage and prevention of mother-to-child transmission services, and an indication of decline in HIV incidence in some regions. However, at the moment globally five people are becoming infected with HIV for every two people accessing treatment.

In the countries most heavily affected, HIV has reduced life expectancy by more than 20 years, slowed economic growth, and deepened household poverty. In sub-Saharan Africa alone, the epidemic has orphaned nearly 12 million children aged under 18 years. The natural age distribution in many national populations in sub-Saharan Africa has been dramatically skewed by HIV, with potentially perilous consequences for the transfer of knowledge and values from one generation to the next. In Asia, where infection rates are much lower than in Africa, HIV causes a greater loss of productivity than any other disease, and is likely to push an additional 6 million households into poverty by 2015 unless national responses are strengthened (Commission on AIDS in Asia, 2008). According to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), HIV has inflicted the “single greatest reversal in human development” in modern history (UNDP, 2005).

At the same time, the epidemic has heightened global consciousness of health disparities, and brought forth unprecedented action to confront some of the world’s most serious development challenges. No disease in history has prompted a comparable mobilization of political, financial, and human resources, and no development challenge has led to such a strong level of leadership and ownership by the communities and countries most heavily affected. In large part due to the impact of HIV, people throughout the world have become less willing to tolerate inequities in global health and economic status that have long gone unaddressed. 

Source:  UNAIDS, The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS