Anza-Borrego Desert by Edwin Way Teale from his 1965 book Wandering Through Winter.

“The dirt road we followed led us through a region of arroyos, desert washes and tilted plains scarred by runoff.  Clouds of fine dust trailed behind and billowed around us when we stopped.  And we stopped often.  Here we examined the purple-red of the Mexican rose prickly pear cactus, there the trails of wild burros crossing the road on their way to the water.  … We paused to watch red-tailed hawks hunting among the yuccas,” wrote Edwin Way Teale in Wandering Through Winter, his Pulitzer Prize-winning book from 1965 documenting a  20,000 mile journey from Silver Strand, California to Caribou, Maine.  Teale, a writer, naturalist and enthusiastic photographer, thrilled his readers with his discoveries and depictions of places and people he encountered along the way.  Many photographs from his travels have never been published.  Browse nearly 100 of Teale’s pictures now available in the Dodd Research Center’s digital collections.

In this month’s edition of “item of the month”, we take a look at a unique collection of Spanish magazines and newspapers that was assembled by renowned Spanish bibliophile Juan Perez de Guzman y Boza, Duque de T’Serclaes. Born in 1852 in the town of Jerez de los Caballeros, the Duke was well known by antiquarian booksellers in Spain for his exquisite taste and voracious appetite for all types of Spanish books and publications. His ability to find and acquire unique and rare materials was legendary and it was not uncommon to find specialized bibliographies of Spanish materials citing that the only copy available was in the hands of the Duke. Toward the end of his life, the Duke collection was in deposit at the National Library in Spain, but after his death in 1934, his collection was sold in sections by his heirs. In the 1960s the Special Collections Department at the Wilbur Cross Library (the predecessor to Archives & Special Collections at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center) acquired this collection of periodicals and newspaper through the famous rare book dealer and bibliophile, Hans Peter Kraus, known for being one of the few private people to own a Gutenberg Bible way back in the 1970s. Learn more

Italian immigrants studying English

Similar to other states, a significant portion of Connecticut’s population came from somewhere else.  The variety of available employment attracted immigrants from all over the world who came, worked, stayed and contributed their peice to the state’s rich ethnic mosaic.  The resulting mix of traditions, cultures and languages has been documented in several oral history projects beginning with the WPA Federal Writers’ Project in the 1930s, continued  in the mid 1970s by the Peoples of Connecticut project at UConn and, more recently, the Waterbury Area Immigrant Oral History Collection.  The transcripts for the Waterbury collection are available online and can be accessed via the finding aid for the collection at  http://doddcenter.uconn.edu/findaids/watbimmig/MSS20090014.html.

Related Connecticut WPA era oral histories can be found electronically on the Library of Congress’ American Memory website at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/wpaintro/ctcat.html.  Transcripts of the Peoples of Connecticut and WPA oral histories are available in the Reading Room of the Dodd Research Center.

You have so many memories, if you were old enough and lived close enough and knew enough to get to the Newport Folk Festival in its great days in the 1960s….And, just as certainly, you remember the blues, which was one of the richest strands in the rich weave of music and culture that was the Festival….Part of the emotional response to the blues singers was that most of them had been forgotten in the years since they’d made their handfuls of recordings for the old ‘race’ labels of the 1920s….It’s true that memories can sometimes be insubstantial, or that time can change what you heard or saw, and maybe you’ve romanticized the playing you remember or the singers you shouted for — but here on this collection of live recordings from the Newport Festival blues concerts you can hear that the music was as great as you remember it was. And if you’re hearing it for the first time — this is what it was like to be there. — Sam Charters

Blues at Newport is a compilation of blues performances recorded live at the Newport Folk Festivals, 1959-1964, produced by Samuel Charters for the Vanguard Records label. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Newport Folk Festival, founded in 1959 by Theodore Bikel, Oscar Brand, Pete Seeger and George Wein. Check out Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival, performing Big Bill Broonzy’s standard Key to the Highway, available on the live recording.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMZzAGAao58]

Blues at Newport is part of the Samuel and Ann Charters Archives of Blues and Vernacular African American Musical Culture, donated in 2000 to Archives & Special Collections at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center. For a detailed listing of the contents of the Charters Archives, visit http://doddcenter.uconn.edu/findaids/charters/MSS20000105.html .

It was reported in the Wall Street Journal today that the Eastman Kodak Co. will discontinue Kodachrome color film manufacture this year due to falling sales. The Wall Street Journal also noted that the last roles of Kodachrome film would be donated to the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film in Rochester, New York. There are a number of archives that have posted Kodachrome galleries online. To see more brilliant Kodachrome film check out Bound for Glory at the Library of Congress.