About Melissa Watterworth Batt

Archivist for Literary Manuscripts, Natural History Collections and Rare Books Collections, Archives and Special Collections at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut Libraries

Great Years, Great Crises, Great Impact: Reexamining the Life and Writing of Edwin Way Teale

Posted on November 30, 2016 by Melissa Watterworth Batt

by Richard Telford

Shortly before American natural history writer Edwin Way Teale died in 1980, he agreed, with his beloved wife and working partner, Nellie Donovan Teale, to donate all of his literary and personal papers and related materials to the University of Connecticut. It was an extraordinary gift. Teale documented his working life and his personal life to an astonishing degree, often keeping several journals concurrently, each with a distinct purpose. For example, from 1938 until 1980, Teale kept an annual daily diary. In 1945, of these diaries he wrote, “These books record the days of the great years of our lives.”[i] These were short but highly detailed records. During the same period he kept these diaries, Teale likewise wrote more elaborated journal entries in Adventures in Making a Living, an unpublished, ongoing narrative of his life. This he called the “book of my heart.”[ii] While here, too, he recorded daily events, frequently overlapping those recorded in the diaries, he also reflected on them in deeper ways. Here, he celebrated the triumphs of his life and reconciled the tragedies. Here, he tried to confer order and sensibility on the world of human affairs, a world that often bewildered him. The ninth and final volume of this 43-year journal was dedicated solely to the final days of his life, beginning with his prostate cancer diagnosis in 1974. Even this most personal and final journey he documented in detail and left as a record. And, these two records of a meaningfully-spent life, as rich as they are, represent only a very small fraction of the materials housed in his voluminous papers.

This year, through the generosity of the Administration and the Board of Trustees of Woodstock Academy, where I have taught for two decades, I have been granted a year-long sabbatical to complete research at the Dodd Research Center, research that will enable me to write a book-length work on Edwin Way Teale. This builds upon three years of generous support of my work by the Archives and Special Collections Department at the University of Connecticut, which has provided me financial assistance through the Rose and Sigmund Strochlitz Travel Grant program. I am very grateful for this support, and for the extensive on-site help of the Archives staff, particularly Melissa Watterworth Batt.

John Burroughs, whom Edwin Way Teale admired greatly, wrote in 1902, “The day inevitably comes to every writer when he must take his place amid the silent throngs of the past.”[iii] While this has come to be the case for Edwin Way Teale—and John Burroughs too—I am not convinced it has to be. Teale has much to offer us now, especially as we face an environmental crisis in which our resource exploitation and waste production cannot continue at current rates without grave consequences for the Earth and, ultimately, for ourselves. Now, as I continue my research within the vast holdings of the Teale Papers and begin the book in earnest, I am both awed by the enormity of the task and excited by the opportunity. Teale’s significant body of published work and his profound impact on the modern conservation movement—particularly through his support of and influence upon many of its principle figures, including Rachel Carson and Edward Abbey—merits reexamination.

The generosity of the Archives and Special Collections staff has extended so far as to allow me to publish a series of representative chapter drafts in this forum as the research and writing processes unfold. These will inevitably evolve as I make new discoveries in the collection. Still, even in draft form, I believe that these chapters can play a meaningful part in bringing the contents of the Teale Papers out into the light of public view, perhaps prompting thoughtful reflection on their importance. I am deeply grateful to the Archives and Special Collections staff for this opportunity, and I welcome public comment and insight on my work here, either through the comment forum on the blog or through direct communication (contact information below). .

On a practical note, the first three chapters to be featured in this forum document events in roughly the middle period of Edwin Way Teale’s life. Though I plan to address Teale’s early life in the book as well, my intuition told me to start where I did, during the period when Edwin and Nellie’s beloved son David, their only child, was serving in Europe late in the Second World War, a period that Edwin called “one of the great crises of our lives.”[iv]

Richard Telford teaches literature and composition at Woodstock Academy in Connecticut. He has a BA in English from the University of New Hampshire, an MS in English Education from the University of Bridgeport, and an MS in Environmental Studies from Green Mountain College. Working with the Connecticut Audubon Society, he helped design and found the Edwin Way Teale Artists in Residence at Trail Wood program, which he directs. He was recently awarded a Rose and Sigmund Strochlitz Travel Grant by the University of Connecticut to support his manuscript for a book-length work on naturalist, writer and photographer Edwin Way Teale.

References

Burroughs, John. Literary Values and Other Papers. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company,1902.

Teale, Edwin Way. Adventures in Making a Living: Volume II, unpublished journal, February 1944 to May 1946. Box 113, Edwin Way Teale Papers 1799-1995, Archives and Special Collections, Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut Libraries.

Teale, Edwin Way. Guild diary, 1945. Box 99, Edwin Way Teale Papers 1799-1995, Archives and Special Collections, Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut Libraries.

Footnotes:

[i] Teale, Edwin Way. Adventures in Making a Living, Vol II. 3 January 1945.

[ii] Teale, Edwin Way. Adventures in Making a Living, Vol II.18 April 1945.

[iii] Burroughs, John. Literary Values and Other Papers. 1

[iv] Teale, Edwin Way. Guild diary 1945. 4 April 1945.

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

Posted on November 18, 2016 by Melissa Watterworth Batt

Archives 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

Human Rights, Children’s Literature, and the Art of Youth Activism

Posted on November 10, 2016 by Melissa Watterworth Batt

Join us for the presentation of the 2016 Raab Associates Prize and a discussion of Human Rights, Children’s Literature, and the Art of Youth Activism featuring Professor Jonathan Todres, Author of Human Rights in Children’s Liteature: Imagination and the Narrative of Law (Oxford University Press, 2016), Pegi Deitz Shea, author of numerous books for young people including Abe in Arms (PM Press, 2010) and The Carpet Boy’s Gift (Tilbury House, 2003), and Reven Smith Spoken word poet, musician, writer, social activist, and UConn student.

TODAY, November 10, 2016
4:00pm to 6:00pm
Konover Auditorium, Thomas J. Dodd Research Center
University of Connecticut

Public reception to follow. Directions to the Dodd Research Center and event details can be found at Thomas J. Dodd Research Center Events.

ABOUT THE RAAB PRIZE:
The Raab Associates Prize has been given since 1999 to give University of Connecticut students the opportunity to learn about illustrating for children and the children’s literature field. The competition was created and sponsored by Susan Salzman Raab, founder and co-owner of Raab Associates, a children’s book marketing agency based in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania.

This year, for the first time, the prize has focused on human rights, and specifically children’s rights, and represents a joint effort between UConn’s Thomas J. Dodd Research Center and the School of Fine Arts. Ms. Raab, who is also a 1980 UConn alumna with a degree in English, especially wants to encourage and support people who have interests in the arts and in human rights. The competition is held annually and the prize is awarded to students enrolled in the University of Connecticut’s School of Fine Arts’ illustration courses.

Talk Today: Our Rivers on Drugs – Pharmaceuticals and Personal Care Products as Agents of Ecological Change

Posted on November 3, 2016 by Melissa Watterworth Batt

Today at 4:00pm, UConn’s Edwin Way Teale Lecture Series on Nature and the Environment presents Our Rivers on Drugs: Pharmaceuticals and Personal Care Products as Agents of Ecological Change in Aquatic Ecosystems, a talk by Dr. Emma Rosi-Marshall, Senior Scientist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York.

Dr. Rosi-Marshall’s research focuses on land-use change and restoration, agriculture, hydropower, and urbanization and their impact on freshwater ecosystems. Her studies recently published, and covered by CNN, investigate the impact of pharmaceutical and personal care product pollution on our nation’s freshwaters. These include an array of contaminants and compounds that are often not removed by wastewater treatment facilities, from prescription medications and over-the-counter drugs to the antimicrobials found in detergents and cosmetics. When they enter streams and rivers from our households, they can harm aquatic life and compromise freshwater quality.

In her talk, Dr. Rosi-Marshall will discuss her research and outline what is needed to combat the growing problem. Join us today,Thursday, November 3, 4:00 pm, in Konover Auditorium, at the Dodd Research Center.

The Edwin Way Teale Lecture Series, named for Pulitzer-Prize-winning author and naturalist Edwin Way Teale whose papers, photographs, and publications are preserved in Archives and Special Collections, brings leading scholars and scientists to the University of Connecticut to present public lectures on nature and the environment. All lectures are free, open to the public

Graphic Novelist Gene Luen Yang at UConn

Posted on October 24, 2016 by Melissa Watterworth Batt

This Thursday, October 27 at 4 pm, acclaimed author and illustrator Gene Luen Yang will give a talk in the Student Union Theater on the UConn campus. Recently named a MacArthur Genius Fellow, Yang is presently the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, an appointment given by the Library of Congress, Every Child a Reader, and the Children’s Book Council.

Yang’s first book, American Born Chinese (2006), was the first graphic novel to be nominated for a National Book Award and the first to win the American Library Association’s Printz Award. The book was also the recipient of the Eisner Award for Best Graphic Album-New. His second book, Boxers and Saints (2013), was nominated for a National Book Award and won the L.A. Times Book Prize. A leading figure in contemporary comics, Yang has been affiliated with Dark Horse Comics’ continuation of Avatar: The Last Airbender and D.C. Comics Superman!.

Mr. Yang’s books can be found in UConn’s Archives and Special Collections in the Northeast Children’s Literature Collection, together with a large and growing collection of graphic novels. Visitors to the Archives’ Reading Room are welcome Monday through Friday, 9:00am to 4:00pm.

For more information about the author talk and event, contact the Asian American Cultural Center or cathy.schlund-vials@uconn.edu.

Black Experience in the Arts: Poet and Activist Jayne Cortez

Posted on October 4, 2016 by Melissa Watterworth Batt

Guest blog post by Marc Reyes, doctoral student at the University of Connecticut and 2016 Summer Graduate Intern in Archives and Special Collections.

If you think poetry recitals are dull, then you haven’t heard Jayne Cortez read her work. Her poem, “Dinah’s Back in Town” (dedicated to blues singer Dinah Washington), begins:

“You know, I want to be bitchy. I said I want to be a bitch. Cause when you’re nice, true love don’t come into your life. You get mistreated, mistreated and abused by some no good man who don’t care nothing about no blues.”

After declaring that “…true love don’t come into your life,” the audience laughed and hooted their approval of the sentiment. The rest of Cortez’s tribute to Dinah Washington cautioned about the promises fast-talking men make to women. And if women struggled to find the courage to stop shady men in their tracks, they only need to look to the titular heroine for inspiration. Cortez described Washington as an assertive, tough-as-nails woman with no patience for schemers and scoundrels. And when a bad man comes around, just tell him, “Dinah’s back in town.”

Cortez read this and several others poems on May 12, 1972. This 1972 performance was the first of a dozen individual visits she made to the University of Connecticut. Her twelve trips to Storrs were all for the same reason: she was invited to speak to the undergraduates enrolled in the School of Fine Arts course, Black Experience in the Arts. The class, which operated under this title for over two decades, heard directly from a variety of talented musicians, actors, dancers, singers, artists, and writers. Cortez was an ideal candidate to speak to UConn students. Her acclaimed poetry and spoken word performances, often with musical accompaniment, made her a leading figure in the Black Arts Movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Besides her considerable talents as a writer, Cortez was also a teacher, a publisher, founder of Los Angeles’ Watts Repertory Theater Company, and an activist who dedicated her adult life to ending racial and gender discrimination in American society.

When Cortez spoke in the spring of 1972, she read selections from her 1971 poetry collection, Festivals and Funerals. The delivered poems touched on ideas about loneliness, anger, and love. Others addressed how black Americans adjusted to living in northern cities compared to life in the rural South. Another, “Watching a Parade in Harlem,” described the frenzy generated by a local Harlem parade and compared the appearance of many New York City policemen to a colonizing force. Her tribute to Dinah Washington was not the only work that addressed struggles women encounter. Her composition, “I Am a Worker,” was dedicated to “all my sisters in the garment industry.” The women depicted in this poem are garment workers who toil under harsh conditions for low pay. Her words make vivid the swollen legs, stiff hands, and back-breaking labor these women undertake in pursuit of “survival money.” After listing the many bills and fees that make “survival money” less a reality and more a dream, the narrator asks, “Do you think a revolution is what I need?”

Cortez continued speaking to the Black Experience in the Arts course over the next twelve years, her visits becoming almost an annual occurrence. Her lectures did not recycle content or repeat poems because she was producing so much new and original work. Between the years of 1972 to 1984, Cortez released four books of poetry, five spoken word recordings, and founded the publishing company, Bola Press. But there was more to Jayne Cortez than her work and in a February 1984 lecture, she discussed more personal matters including her childhood, her first battles against racial injustice, and her decision to became a writer.

In this lecture, students learned about Cortez‘s birth in Arizona and growing up in postwar Los Angeles. She recounted how she studied to be an actress and then a director, but found writing to be her true calling. While studying art, music, and drama in high school and college, Cortez became involved in the civil rights movement. In the early 1960s, she spent two summers working for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), registering black voters in Mississippi. She told students that this edifying work inspired her to produce art, infused with integrity, which mixed “political language with the poetic.”

After explaining how her writing career started, Cortez informed students about the opportunities a writing career can produce. Because of her success, she received invitations to speak at international poetry festivals throughout Europe and Africa. She described the artistic affirmation experienced by performing at Carnegie Hall or having her books reviewed in The New York Times or The Washington Post. Lastly, Cortez concluded her presentation by bringing to the stage her band, the Firespitters, who provided musical accompaniment to her poetry. Cortez’s use of music to emphasize her work was not a gimmick; Cortez and the Firespitters played together for over three decades and released thirteen albums. By incorporating music into the reading of her poetry, Cortez became a pioneer in the field of poetic performance art.

This summer, additional Jayne Cortez lectures debuted on the Archives and Special Collections digital repository. Now, six of Cortez’s twelve Black Experience in the Arts lectures can be easily accessed online with plans to digitize the rest. In addition, Archives and Special Collections possesses physical copies of Cortez’s work in book and audio form. For scholars interested in poets like Jayne Cortez or the broader Black Arts movement, Archives and Special Collections has many resources available to researchers. Stay tuned as we continue to make these valuable materials more widely known and available as well as additional blog posts highlighting other prominent lecturers who visited the university and spoke to Black Experience in the Arts students.

Marc Reyes is a doctoral student in the Department of History at the University of Connecticut. He received his B.A. in History from the University of Missouri and his M.A., also in History, from the University of Missouri-Kansas City. His research investigates the United States and its interactions – diplomatically, economically, and culturally – with India. As a 2016 graduate intern, Marc is excited to gain additional experience working in a university archive and will be exploring the history of the Black Experience in the Arts course here at UConn as well as the broader movement of 20th century black expression in the arts.

Chasing History through Annotations

Posted on September 21, 2016 by Melissa Watterworth Batt

The following guest blog post is by Daniel Allie, a 2014 graduate of the University of Connecticut’s English Program. While a student, Mr. Allie worked in Archives and Special Collections for two years as a Student Library Assistant. Since graduation, he has turned to the field of History, and volunteers his time at the Mansfield Historical Society and the Connecticut Historical Society as well as researching and writing pieces like this one for Archives and Special Collections.

George L. Rosebrooks's signature as it appears on the side of Experimental Physics

George L. Rosebrooks’s signature as it appears on the side-edge of the book Experimental Physics

What can a book tell you?

Quite a lot, though not necessarily in the way you would immediately suppose. You can read the text, certainly, but sometimes minor annotations to a volume tell a more compelling story than that.

This is the case for a collection of late nineteenth and early twentieth century textbooks recently donated to Archives and Special Collections. By most estimations, this is dry stuff—titles include Milk and its Products; Elements of Chemistry; and The Beginner’s American History among others—but it was not this specific content that is what is most interesting. The true story lies with the annotations within these volumes, a story of the early University of Connecticut and the surrounding community of Mansfield.

The annotations within the books indicate two separate collections, those of George L. Rosebrooks and of Harold L. Storrs, respectively. It is clear from name alone that Harold L. Storrs is part of the family that founded the University, though this does not necessarily indicate a connection, and is unrelated to what we can learn from his books. We can immediately tell from the books that Harold L. Storrs was likely a generation younger than George L. Rosebrooks, as his books were later-published texts for younger students. While Rosebrooks owned Elements of Chemistry (1881), Storrs owned The Beginner’s American History (1902). I was able to confirm this in a genealogical record of the Storrs family, which indicated that Harold L. Storrs was born on October 2, 18951, while the Commemorative Biographical Record of Tolland and Windham Counties confirms that George L. Rosebrooks was born September 21, 18792. A document in Archives and Special Collections indicates that Storrs was an employee of the university in 19313.

As interesting as it is to learn that Harold L. Storrs was a university employee, though, the books from the Rosebrooks family provide a more compelling story. At the beginning of the project, we knew from the donor of the collection that George L. Rosebrooks was an 1899 graduate of Storrs Agricultural College, and we knew that George L. Rosebrooks’s brother Fred Rosebrooks (also a Storrs Agricultural College graduate) ran the Mansfield, Connecticut poor house.

Fred Rosebrooks’s report card, Spring 1889. (Ethel Larkin Papers, Mansfield Historical Society)

Knowing that the Rosebrooks family was related both to the early university as well as the Mansfield Poor House raised questions worth investigating about the collection: Could any of these volumes be related to George L. Rosebrooks’s education at the Storrs Agricultural College? Are any of the other volumes in the collection from the the poor house, books meant for the education of resident children?

To answer the latter question, some of the books in the collection which are signed by neither George L. Rosebrooks nor Harold L. Storrs, are in fact didactic texts, earlier dated schoolroom readers such as An Introduction to the Study of English Grammar (1856) and Hillard’s The Sixth Reader (1866). Since these books were not directly connected to any Rosebrooks family member, it seemed possible that they had come from a potential Poor House library.

I was able to further confirm this as a possibility at the Mansfield Historical Society. The book The Mansfield Poor House: A Forgotten Institution includes a transcription of the House’s founding document, which reads, in part: “the said Barrows [founder of the Poor House] further agrees to send all children of a suitable age to school and to furnish them with suitable books”4, thus establishing Poor House provenance as possible, though I would caution that the fact that the books could possibly have been part of the Poor House’s collection is by no means a confirmation that this is true for these specific examples. Any schoolchild of the time could have possessed them.

Far more certain, though, is the books’ connection to the Storrs Agricultural College. Already well documented is the Rosebrooks family’s relation to the early university, a fact attested by an item from the Mansfield Historical Society, Fred Rosebrooks’s report cards. The Ethel Larkin Papers, comprising documents collected by a late Historical Society member, contains the student records of Fred Rosebrooks. Dated to 1888 (a decade earlier than his brother George’s textbooks), these records show Fred Rosebrooks taking such courses as Chemistry, Arithmetic, Physics, and English, out of a possible fifteen subjects offered on the report card at that time5.

With the Rosebrooks family’s connection to the early university already clearly established, it is unsurprising to find that the new collection’s copy of Elements of Chemistry by Elroy M. Avery includes an annotation inside the cover reading “G.L. Rosebrooks Jr., Storrs, Conn. SAC [Storrs Agricultural College]. 97.,” indicating that Rosebrooks had this book for one of his college courses. The Connecticut College of Agriculture and the Mechanic Arts Catalogue 1899-1900 partially confirms this, albeit with a different book of the same title. The description of their course in “General Chemistry” has as its text “Williams’ Elements of Chemistry”6.

George L. Rosebrooks’s signature, accompanied by the annotations ‘Storrs, Conn’ and ‘SAC. 97’, in Elements of Chemistry.

The coursebook connection is even clearer in the case of the book Milk and its Products. The description of the course “Dairying” in the Storrs Agricultural College Catalogue: 1898-1899, reads “A short winter course in dairying. . . including composition of milk, conditions of creaming, milking for market, butter making, washing, salting, packing, etc. Breeding, feeding, and diseases of dairy cattle are subjects also treated in this course, with such texts as ‘ Milk and its Products,’ ‘ Bacteriology,’ and ‘Feeds and Feeding’”7, thus confirming the actual use of one of the books owned by George L. Rosebrooks in a Storrs Agricultural College course.

So those are a few things a book can tell you. Individually, these texts would perhaps have said little beyond their original subjects. Together, they form a context with each other, through their original owners, illustrating a history, be it local, academic, or familial. What one will find when conducting historical research is never certain, but in searching through the collections of two institutions, the University of Connecticut Archives and Special Collections as well as the Mansfield Historical Society in the search for this collection’s history and significance, I found far more significance to this collection than one would ever expect to find from a collection of century-old textbooks and readers.

-Daniel Allie

1 Durand, Robert. Storrs Family Pedigree Chart. Mansfield Historical Society digital record. Accessed 13 July 2016.

2 “George L. Rosebrooks.” In Commemorative Biographical Record of Tolland and Windham Counties. (Chicago: J.H. Beers & Co, 1903), 420.

3 “Financial Summary: Farm Receipts: Poultry, 1931.” University of Connecticut Agricultural Economics Records, Series VII, Subseries B, Box 42. University of Connecticut Archives and Special Collections, Thomas J. Dodd Research Center.

4 “Contracts.” In The Mansfield Poor House: A Forgotten Institution. (Mansfield: History Workshop of The Mansfield Historical Society, 1985), 7.

5 “Storrs Agricultural School: Report of F. Rosebrooks, For the Term Ending Mar. 29, 1889.” Ethel Larkin Papers, Mansfield Historical Society, Mansfield, Connecticut.

6 Connecticut College of Agriculture and the Mechanic Arts Catalogue 1899-1900, 25. University of Connecticut Archives and Special Collections, Thomas J. Dodd Research Center.

7 Storrs Agricultural College Catalogue: 1898-1899, 13. University of Connecticut Archives and Special Collections, Thomas J. Dodd Research Center.

The Fight for the Gun Control Act of 1968

Posted on September 15, 2016 by Melissa Watterworth Batt

This guest blog post is by Gabrielle Westcott, doctoral student in the Department of History at the University of Connecticut. Ms. Westcott received her B.A. in History from Whitman College and her M.A. in History from the University of Connecticut in 2015. Her research examines the influence of emotions and personality on twentieth-century U.S. foreign policy. As a 2016 graduate intern, she spent the summer learning about archival work and exploring the many political collections held at Archives and Special Collections.

In August 1963, after two years of investigation by the U.S. Senate’s Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency and three months before President Kennedy’s assassination, Senator Thomas J. Dodd introduced legislation to amend the Federal Firearms Act of 1938. The bill, S. 1975, addressed the ease with which juveniles and criminals could anonymously purchase mail-order guns and thus circumvent state laws regarding the sale of firearms. As it was first proposed, the bill sought to require individuals who wished to purchase a handgun to submit an affidavit, testifying to their eligibility to purchase a weapon in their home state. The seller would then send a copy of this affidavit to local law enforcement, who would have to authenticate the affidavit before the weapon could be sold. This was later amended so that the seller would simply provide notification of the intended delivery of the firearm to local law enforcement, without having to get police approval of the sale. After the death of President Kennedy, who was shot with a mail-order rifle purchased under a false name, Dodd amended the bill to require an affidavit for both handguns and long guns.

Yet, Kennedy’s assassination inspired criticism of Dodd’s bill on the grounds that it was nothing more than a hysterical reaction to the president’s death. Responding to these claims, Dodd emphasized in speech after speech that the provisions of the bill were the outcome of a two-year investigation, in which the Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency worked with arms manufacturers, arms dealers, law enforcement, sportsmen’s groups, the Department of Justice, and the Treasury Department. Furthermore, the bill had the support of each of these groups, and the executive vice president of the National Rifle Association testified to his organization’s support of the bill on multiple occasions.

Despite widespread support, by the end of 1964 the bill was stalled in the Senate Commerce Committee. “What seems to be influencing some members of the Committee to withhold action on this bill,” Dodd noted, “are the protests of people who are either misinformed or bamboozled. In most cases these misinformed protesters have been misled by those who have financial interests in gun running, and by those who have suspect motives which are cloaked under the false cover of anti-Communism, or patriotism, or Constitutional liberties.”[1] Witnesses testifying before the Commerce Committee during the hearings on S.1975 expressed concern that the bill would lead to the registration of firearms. Because sellers would be required to send information about the purchaser’s identity and a description of the weapon to local law enforcement, one witness argued that “whatever regulatory body is chosen to interpret this requirement and draft the applications or forms involved will most assuredly ask for the serial number of the firearm involved. We submit that this is registration.”[2] The Washington Post reported that the National Wildlife Federation and the National Rifle Association opposed the bill’s requirement that the serial number of a gun be reported to law enforcement, while constituents writing to Dodd and members of the committee expressed concern over the “gun registration provisions” of the bill. Yet there were not, and never had been, gun registration provisions in the bill. Dodd testified to this fact in front of the Committee, noting, “My bill is not aimed at the weapon, it is aimed at the unfit user. . . . There is no requirement that the serial number of a gun purchased by mail order be recorded at any time by any agency.”[3] In the face of such opposition, S. 1975 died in committee. Determined to press on, Dodd reintroduced the bill to the 89^th Congress on January 6, 1965 under the title S. 14.

Two months later, on March 8, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson spoke to Congress and proposed a program to wage a war on crime that included controls on mail-order weapons. Seizing the opportunity for a stronger gun control bill provided by the president’s speech, Dodd introduced two bills on behalf of the administration, which Dodd noted, “call[ed] for controls more comprehensive and stringent than I dared to hope for.”[4] The proposed legislation prohibited mail-order sales to individuals, such that persons wishing to purchase a mail-order firearm would have to place their order through a licensed dealer. Furthermore, federally licensed importers, manufacturers, and dealers were prohibited from selling firearms, with the exception of rifles and shotguns, to anyone who was not a resident or businessman of the state in which the seller was located. Finally, federally licensed importers, manufacturers, and dealers were prohibited from selling any type of firearm to an individual under 21 years of age, although rifles and shotguns could be sold to individuals over the age of 18.

It would be three years before Dodd’s legislation prohibiting the interstate mail-order sale of handguns would finally pass in the form of Title IV of President Johnson’s Omnibus Crime Bill. The intervening years would be marked by increasing racial tension, the outbreak of riots in cities across the country, mass shootings, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Dodd_1994_0065_SeriesIII_AdministrativeandLegislativeFiles_Box205_5425-1 Kennedy.

On August 1, 1966, a student at the University of Texas in Austin climbed to the top of the University of Texas Tower and opened fire, leaving 14 people dead and 31 people injured. It was the first mass campus shooting in the United States. The following day, Dodd urged Congress to take action on his firearms legislation, noting, “It is tragic indeed that those of us who call for stronger firearms control laws must rest our case on such headlines as these. How many times will we stand witness to such atrocities before we act? How many more people must die before the American public, the Federal Government and the Congress call in unison for effective firearms legislation?”[5] When two mass shootings occurred in New Haven in that same month, Dodd once again appealed to Congress. “It happened last week. It happened this week. It will happen next week. And it will continue to happen until there are stricter gun laws.”[6] 50 years later, in the wake of Aurora, Sandy Hook, Charleston, Orlando, and countless others, Dodd’s words should haunt us.

While much of the debate surrounding gun control focused on preventing “criminals, drug addicts, mental defectives, and irresponsible juveniles” from purchasing firearms, racial tension undoubtedly played a role in who was deemed fit to own a gun. In 1966, a group in California calling themselves the Black Panther Party for Self Defense began openly carrying firearms to protect African American communities against police brutality. At the time, there was no law prohibiting the open carry of a weapon in a public space. Responding to the actions of the Black Panthers, the California legislature proposed the Mulford Act, which would make it illegal to openly carry loaded weapons. The NRA, it should be noted, supported the legislation. On May 2, 1967, a group of armed Black Panthers entered the chamber of the California State Assembly and interrupted a legislative session to protest the Mulford Act. Speaking to the Senate, Dodd called the incident “a striking example of the need for effective gun control legislation. . . . These armed men serve as a chilling reminder that legislation should be passed swiftly to keep firearms out of such irresponsible hands.”[7] That same month, the NRA encouraged their members to arm themselves to act as “a potential community stabilizer” in the case of urban rioting.[8]

On June 6, 1968, the day after Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated, Johnson signed into law the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act. Title IV of the Act prohibited the interstate mail-order sale of handguns; however, the amendment to prohibit the mail-order sale of rifles and shotguns was defeated. In the wake of Kennedy’s death, and with the support of the Johnson administration, Dodd introduced four new firearms control bills, calling for the inclusion of rifles and shotguns in the Omnibus Crime Control Bill, strict control over the sale of ammunition, the registration of all firearms, and the licensing of all firearms owners. Despite widespread public support for licensing and registration, opponents of gun control managed to remove those provisions from the final legislation. Signed into law on October 22, the Gun Control Act of 1968 was the culmination of five years of legislative effort and seven years of investigation on the part of Senator Dodd and the Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency.

-Gabrielle Westcott, August 2016

[1] “Press Release Concerning Interstate Weapons Traffic,” August 6, 1964, Thomas J. Dodd Papers, Box 200:5080, Archives and Special Collections, University of Connecticut.

[2] Interstate Shipment of Firearms: Hearings Before the Committee on Commerce, United States Senate, 88^th Cong. 194 (1964), ProQuest Congressional Publications (Permalink: http://congressional.proquest.com:80/congressional/docview/t29.d30.hrg-1963-com-0043?accountid=14518) (accessed August 3, 2016).

[3] “Statement of Senator Thomas J. Dodd Before the Senate Committee on Commerce,” March 4, 1964, Thomas J. Dodd Papers, Box 198:5002, Archives and Special Collections, University of Connecticut.

[4] “Press Release Concerning Amendments to Federal Firearms Act,” March 22, 1965, Thomas J. Dodd Papers, Box 201:5180, Archives and Special Collections, University of Connecticut.

[5] “Press Release Concerning Need for Stronger Gun Control Legislation,” August 2, 1966, Thomas J. Dodd Papers, Box 204:5363, Archives and Special Collections, University of Connecticut.

[6] “Press Release Concerning a Shooting in New Haven, CT,” August 26, 1966, Thomas J. Dodd Papers, Box 204:5370, Archives and Special Collections, University of Connecticut.

[7] “Stronger Gun Laws Needed,” May 31, 1967, Congressional Record, Thomas J. Dodd Papers, Box 207:5550, Archives and Special Collections, University of Connecticut.

[8] “No Vigilantes, Please,” May 31, 1967, Congressional Record, Thomas J. Dodd Papers, Box 207:5501, Archives and Special Collections, University of Connecticut.

Charles Olson and Henry Murray: Projective Verse and the Projective Test

Posted on September 6, 2016 by Melissa Watterworth Batt

Lucy Burns is a PhD candidate in English and American Studies at the University of Manchester. Her thesis is on Black Mountain College and postwar American poetry, with a focus on the relationship between poetry and psychology, and the development of the creative writing program. She is an assistant editor at the Manchester Review, the online journal from the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester. Lucy was awarded a Strochlitz Travel Grant to further her PhD research in the Charles Olson Research Collection in Archives and Special Collections.

In May I was fortunate enough to spend a week with the Charles Olson Research Collection at Archives and Special Collections in the Thomas J. Dodd Center, principally examining the unpublished correspondence between Charles Olson and Henry Murray. This seemingly unlikely link between Olson, the larger-than-life poet turned pedagogue and rector of experimental arts college at Black Mountain – and Murray, a personality psychologist and director of the Harvard Psychological Clinic – is the focus of my current research, through their concurrent work on projection and the projective: Olson’s “Projective Verse,” a poetics essay published in 1950, and Murray’s projective psychological test, the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT).

This link between Olson and Murray has previously been neglected: Tom Clark’s biography of Olson brackets Murray’s influence to his Harvard years when Olson was a PhD candidate on the new American Civilization program [1], while Olson scholarship tends to reference Murray in terms of their shared interest in Herman Melville (Olson’s study, Call Me Ishmael was published in 1947, while Murray’s introduction to Melville’s Pierre; or, The Ambiguities was published in 1949). Forrest G. Robinson’s excellent biography of Murray also gives very little space to Olson, and figures their relationship as a practical and limited one. [2] Even George F. Butterick, the first curator of the Charles Olson Research Collection, long-time editor of Olson’s work, and author of the definitive Guide to the Maximus Poems of Charles Olson, dismisses any significance in Murray and Olson’s concurrent uses of projection and the projective:

“Not insignificantly, it [the Thematic Apperception Test] is also known as a “projective” test although Olson experienced it after his well known “Projective Verse” essay was already in press, so there probably was no connection.” [3]

My research considers not only the extent to which the relationship between Olson and Murray’s work has been overlooked, but the ways in which a link between projective verse and the projective test may provide new ways to read both Olson’s writings and his interdisciplinary curriculum at Black Mountain College. This current work on the Olson-Murray correspondence thus forms part of my wider research into the shared networks of American poetry and psychology, and, building on Mark McGurl’s work on the postwar fiction program, how these networks may have informed or shaped the postwar poetry program. [4]

Sixty-eight letters survive from Murray and Olson’s near twenty-year correspondence; fifty-nine of these are held at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, while the Henry Murray Papers at Harvard University Archives holds nine. The correspondence spans several key events in both men’s lives: Olson’s departure from Cambridge and the PhD program, his Guggenheim Fellowship, and his move to Black Mountain College; the end of Murray’s directorship at the Harvard Psychological Clinic and the start of his work for the Office of Strategic Services, and the publication of his first study to make use of the TAT, Explorations in Personality. It appears that Murray financially supported Olson’s family during the late 1940s, until Olson was invited to teach literature and writing at Black Mountain College in 1948. Olson hurriedly wrote to Murray an hour before they were due to leave for North Carolina with news of the appointment, writing that Murray’s support was a “talisman” that had “enabled us to start back to life.” [5] In 1953 Olson accepted the rectorship of the college until its closure in 1956, and this time not only marks a period of manic productivity for Olson, but a new period in the life of Black Mountain College. [6] Olson and Murray’s most frequent exchanges are during the first two years of Olson’s appointment at the college: Olson often sent Murray poems and essays that he was working on, and they exchanged letters on a number of potential collaborations bringing together their experience. Though these projects were never fully realized or completed, they continued to occupy Olson well into the 1950s and after the college’s closure. I hope to continue working on these proposed collaborations and their link to Olson’s poetry and poetics in my thesis.

By the end of 1950 Olson had written the first two “letters” of his near three-hundred poems sequence, The Maximus Poems, and published his most influential work, “Projective Verse,” in Poetry New York magazine which he eagerly sent to Murray. [7] The essay called for a new, kinetic poetics modeled on “the breathing of the man who writes” in accordance with the three principles of composition by field: first, the “kinetics,” that “the poem must, at all points, be a high-energy construct and, at all points, an energy-discharge”; second, the “law,” that “FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT,” and third, the “process,” that “ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION.” [8]

FIGURE 1

Olson’s essay, and its deployment of projection and the projective appears at first to have little in common with Murray’s projective psychological test. The TAT was co-developed with Christiana D. Morgan in the 1930s and was founded on the psychoanalytic mechanism of projection, whereby a subject expels thoughts or wishes that are too unpleasant or uncomfortable to recognize in themself into or onto another object. The projective psychological test utilizes this movement from the unreadable, interior space of the unconscious to an exterior object, by asking the participant to interpret an unstructured stimulus, like a suggestive image or single word. The TAT was designed to “stimulate literary creativity” and “creative imagination” and asked participants to respond to a series of painted cards, usually depicting one or more persons in an ambiguous setting. [9] While I was in America I was also able to visit the Murray archive at Harvard University to examine the wide range of TAT images that were designed and used by Murray and his team. Here is a fairly typical card depicting a young couple [see Figure 1], which the participant would be asked to narrate with the following prompts: “What is the relation of the individuals in the picture? What happened to them? What are their present thoughts and feelings? What will be the outcome?” [10]

FIGURE 2

Olson participated in the test in 1950 along with twenty-eight other poets and writers, including William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell. The test was administered by Murray’s student, Robert N. Wilson as part of his PhD thesis, “The American Poet: A Role Investigation,” and Wilson continued to work on the relationship between the poet and projection. Olson appears to have written about the test in an unpublished poem, “Gli Amanti,” which the Thomas J. Dodd Centre has in four annotated drafts. Here is the first draft [see Figure 2]:

The Olson-Murray correspondence in the Charles Olson Research Collection not only helps us to begin to understand the ways in which Olson and Murray’s concurrent uses of projection and the projective might be related. It also reveals the ways in which Olson extended this understanding to his own poetry, chiefly, The Maximus Poems 1-10 (published in 1953 while Olson was still at Black Mountain College), and Olson’s teaching practices at Black Mountain College, including his interdisciplinary writing courses, which ran sporadically from 1948 to 1956. Despite the correspondence beginning over their shared academic interests and Cambridge circles, it is clear that they developed a close friendship, and at times the exchanges are intensely personal. In this particular note from 1951, Olson announces the birth of his daughter [see Figure 3].

FIGURE 3

Alongside the correspondence I also had a chance to look at Olson’s journals and notebooks, in which he kept meticulous notes of his dreams and his own lay analysis to use in his poetry, Olson’s personal library, and most significantly his various materials related to Black Mountain College. These are especially useful to my thesis and, combined with research completed last year in the Black Mountain College archive at Western Regional, are slowly beginning to build a bigger picture of the life of the college. Though the Olson-Murray letters make up just a fraction of the research collection, these small discoveries are enormously rewarding, and I would highly recommend making use of this rich collection.

– Lucy Burns

References

[1] Tom Clark, Charles Olson: The Allegory of a Poet’s Life (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2000), 44; 122; 135.

[2] Forrest G. Robinson, Love’s story told: a life of Henry A. Murray (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992) 315; 334.

[3] George F. Butterick, “Charles Olson and the Postmodern Advance,” The Iowa Review 11 (4) (1980): 4, http://ir.uiowa.edu/iowareview/vol11/iss4/3.

[4] Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2009).

[5] Charles Olson, letter to Henry A. Murray (October 10, 1948); Box 194, Folder 13 (Series II: Correspondence), Charles Olson Research Collection, Thomas J. Dodd Research Centre.

[6] This change in the life of the college is summarized by Martin Duberman: “Not until the fifties, with the advent of Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan and the Black Mountain Review, was the emphasis to shift; then writing moved to the center and visual arts to the periphery.” Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1972), 228.

[7] Charles Olson, letter to Henry A. Murray (August 2, 1950); Box 194, Folder 14 (Series II: Correspondence), Charles Olson Research Collection, Thomas J. Dodd Research Center.

[8] Charles Olson, “Projective Verse,” in Selected Writings of Charles Olson, ed. Robert Creeley (New York: New Directions, 1967), 15; 16; 17.

[9] Henry A. Murray, Explorations in Personality: A Clinical and Experimental Study of Fifty Men of College Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 1938), xii-xiv.

[10] Murray, Explorations in Personality, 532.

Figures

(1) TAT image; Box 4, Folder 0 (Series: Research), HUGFP 97.43.2: Thematic Apperception Test Pictures and Other Papers, 1940-1960, The Papers of Henry A. Murray, Harvard University Archives.

(2) Charles Olson, letter to Henry A. Murray (October 28, 1951); Box 194, Folder 15 (Series II: Correspondence), Charles Olson Research Collection, Thomas J. Dodd Research Center.

(3) “Gli Amanti” (ca. 1950); Box 21, Folder 929 (Series I: Works), Charles Olson Research Collection, Thomas J. Dodd Research Center.

Bibliography

Butterick, George F. 1978. A Guide to the Maximus Poems of Charles Olson. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Butterick, George F. 1980. “Charles Olson and the Postmodern Advance,” The Iowa Review 11 (4): 3-27. http://ir.uiowa.edu/iowareview/vol11/iss4/3.

Clark, Tom. 2000. Charles Olson: The Allegory of a Poet’s Life. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books.

Duberman, Martin. 1972. Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co.

McGurl, Mark. 2009. The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Melville, Herman. 1949. Pierre; or, The Ambiguities. Edited by Henry A. Murray. New York: Hendricks House, Inc.

Murray, Henry A. 1938. Explorations in Personality: A Clinical and Experimental Study of Fifty Men of College Age. New York: Oxford University Press.

Olson, Charles. 1966. Call Me Ishmael. San Francisco, California: City Lights Books.

Olson, Charles. 1967. Selected Writings of Charles Olson. Edited Robert Creeley. New York: New Directions.

Olson, Charles. 1983. The Maximus Poems. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Robinson, Forrest G. 1992. Love’s story told: a life of Henry A. Murray. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Wilson, Robert N. 1990. The American Poet: A Role Investigation. New York: Garland Publishing.

Black Experience in the Arts: Playwright Leslie Lee

Posted on August 15, 2016 by Melissa Watterworth Batt

-Guest blog post by Marc Reyes, doctoral student at the University of Connecticut and 2016 Summer Graduate Intern in Archives and Special Collections.

“Now, I am a black playwright; I am not a playwright who happens to be black…I am very happy writing about black people. I do not have to write about anybody else.”

Those words were spoken by dramatist Leslie Lee, a renowned writer of stage and screen. When Lee was not scripting Tony Award-nominated plays or acclaimed television programs, he spoke to students about his life, writing career, and creative process. Lee visited the University of Connecticut on September 29, 1987 as a guest speaker for the university’s course, Black Experience in the Arts. The class, offered through the School of Fine Arts, debuted in the Fall semester of 1970 and lasted under this name until the mid-1990s. During the course’s lifetime, UConn undergraduates heard from hundreds of black artists, representing fields such as music, dance, poetry, sculpture, and architecture. Many of the invited presenters were performers with a myriad of memories and achievements as well as thoughts about what it meant to be a black artist in America. Course notes, typed lecture transcriptions, and over three hundred audio recordings are some of the materials found in Archives and Special Collections’ Black Experience in the Arts collection. This collection offers researchers an exciting look into a course dedicated to highlighting the contributions of black artists and the power of art as a mechanism for social change and racial expression. From this vantage point, scholars of the American experience gain a richer understanding of the black arts movement of the 1960s and 1970s and how black artistic expression was a crucial element of the civil rights and later black power movements.

When Lee spoke in the Fall of 1987, he was one of the few playwrights that addressed the class. Most of the speakers who represented black theater were actors or directors, but Lee offered insights into how a writer expresses their creative vision through different mediums. Of all the ways his writing was expressed – through films, television, and novels – his first love was theatre because it was the most verbal. He explained, “But in the theater it is my play and it is my vision, and those persons who are directing, or the set designers, or the costume designers, the lighting designers, the actors are an extension of me…”

Besides discussing his career, Lee told students about his middle-class upbringing in Pennsylvania and how family members, like his grandmother, were inspirations for some of his play’s most memorable characters. He also explained how his interest in writing and the arts was not predestined, in fact, Lee confided to his audience that his artistic journey started later in life. Growing up he wanted to be a doctor and even spent years as a cancer researcher, but his passion for writing overwhelmed all else and he returned to school to study playwriting at Villanova University. After graduating, Lee worked as a writing instructor at several colleges and adapted for television Richard Wright’s Almos’ a Man. But his big break came with the staging of his 1975 play, “The First Breeze of Summer.” The production won three Obie Awards (the top honor for Off-Broadway productions) including Best New American Play and then moved to Broadway where it was later nominated for a Tony Award in the Best Play category.

In his lecture, Lee stressed to the students that to be a successful writer, one must have something important to say. Their voice must communicate a message that can even reach international audiences. With his voice, Lee strove to produce works that celebrated blackness and displayed the beauty of black bodies. He lamented seeing blacks thin their lips, alter their noses, and bleach or peel their skin to appear lighter. He remembered marching in the 1960s to the chants of “Black is Beautiful” and how the collective faith in that message erased the doubts he had about the beauty of black bodies. From that moment, he wanted his work to produce a similar feeling in black Americans. As for the characters found in Lee’s works, his heroes are the everyday black man or woman “who struggle daily against racism and against other things that are constantly impinging upon their consciousness.” Finding theatre to be the best avenue for exploring black consciousness, Lee developed an array of three-dimensional black characters that tackled issues such as systematic racism and the horrors of war.

Beyond individual depictions, Lee was also concerned in the ways black families were depicted in the arts. He believed black families, like the ones found on The Jeffersons and Good Times, were almost always portrayed in comic lights, making it easier to not take black people, and their concerns, seriously. He recounted a story about a reviewer who saw his play “Hannah Davis,” which centered on the actions of an upper-class black family. Although the work received many positive reviews, one critic panned the play. The critic found the piece problematic because he could not envision that a well-to-do black family like this existed. Lee rejected the shallow criticism and informed the reviewer that the family in the play was based on a real black family, but the experience reinforced in Lee the need to project stronger images of black people and their families than the depictions usually found on television or motion pictures.

Leslie Lee’s September 1987 visit to UConn’s Black Experience in the Arts class discussed the personal and artistic fulfillment that can be found in the performing arts and encouraged students to consider a career in drama and make a home in black theatre. For interested students, he referred to the Negro Ensemble Company which produced many of Lee’s plays and has been a training ground for black actors such as Lawrence Fishburne, Angela Bassett, and Denzel Washington. Lee asserted that more black writers and actors were needed to produce multi-dimensional and complex black characters. He also wished black students would pursue theatre criticism because he believed black critics would bring greater insights when evaluating the works of black playwrights.

There are many more exciting ideas and profound lessons found in Lee’s lecture which can be explored in the Black Experience in the Arts collection at Archives and Special Collections. Stay tuned as we continue to make these valuable materials more widely known and available as well as additional blog posts highlighting other prominent lecturers who visited the university and spoke to students about the Black Experience in the Arts.

Reading Room Closed Monday July 4

Posted on July 1, 2016 by Melissa Watterworth Batt

The Archives and Special Collections Reading Room, and the University, will be closed this Monday, July 4 for the federal holiday. Regular Reading Room hours of 9:00am to 4:00pm resume on Tuesday, July 5.

Bill Berkson, Poet, Teacher, Art Critic, Archivist and Friend: 1939-2016

Posted on June 22, 2016 by Melissa Watterworth Batt

We are saddened to learn that Bill Berkson died last Thursday in San Francisco at the age of seventy-six. Berkson, a prolific American poet, art critic, and teacher, was also a muse, a world traveler, a lifelong gatherer and archivist, and to many of us in Archives and Special Collections at UConn, home of the Bill Berkson Papers, a literary giant, a generous collaborator and donor, and a friend.

The Bill Berkson Papers comprise over one hundred linear feet of literary manuscripts, letters, drafts of poetry, notebooks, lecture notes, interviews, Big Sky Books and Press records, photographs, audio recordings, broadsides, rare publications, family papers, and personal ephemera.

Used by students and scholars alike, the archive spans from 1959 to 2016 and documents the poet’s extensive body of work, his collaborations in and among the realms of visual art, media, and literature, and his affinities with the poets and artists of the New York School.

Mr. Berkson wrote more than twenty collections of poetry, beginning in 1961 with “Saturday Night: Poems 1960-61.” His most recent book, “Invisible Oligarchs: Russia Notebook, January-June 2006 & After,” a travel journal, was published this year. He is survived by his wife, curator Constance Lewallen; son Moses Berkson and daughter Siobhan O’Hare Mora Lopez, from his first marriage, to Lynn O’Hare Berkson; stepchildren Jonathan Lewallen and Nina Lewallen Hufford; and six grandchildren.

According to San Francisco Chronicle, donations in Mr. Berkson’s name may be sent to Foundation for Contemporary Arts and Poets in Need.

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