The Dodd Center, CT Center for the Book, CT State Library, CT Library Association, CT Commission on Culture and Tourism, UConn Coop, and CT Humanities Council have formed a coaltion to plan the first statewide book festival to take place at the Greater Hartford UConn Campus on May 21-22, 2011.  The goal of the festival is to bring together writers and readers with a target age of young adults and older.  Connecticut author Wally Lamb, pictured below, has agreed to serve as honorary chair and approximately 25 Connecticut authors will be featured.  There will be readings and signings, presentations and events for children.  All programs will be free and open to the public.  For more information contact Terri J. Goldich at 860.486.3646 or send an email to ctbookfestival@gmail.com. 

Please join the Human Rights Institute and the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center for the March film for the 2009-2010 Human Rights Film Series: Human Rights in the USA.

Film: “SiCKO” (2007)
Directed by Michael Moore

Tuesday, March 16, 2010
4:00 pm, Konover Auditorium
Thomas J. Dodd Research Center

The words “health care” and “comedy” aren’t usually found in the same sentence, but in Academy Award winning filmmaker Michael Moore’s film ‘SiCKO,’ they go together hand in (rubber) glove. While Moore’s ‘SiCKO’ follows the trailblazing path of previous hit films, the Oscar-winning BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE and all-time box-office documentary champ FAHRENHEIT 9/11, it is also something very different for Michael Moore. ‘SiCKO’ is a straight-from-the-heart portrait of the crazy and sometimes cruel U.S. health care system, told from the vantage of everyday people faced with extraordinary and bizarre challenges in their quest for basic health coverage. Watch the film trailer at http://sickothemovie.com/dvd/trailer.html

For more information on the full film series, including upcoming films, a downloadable poster is available on our website at http://doddcenter.uconn.edu/events/hr_usa_film_series.htm

Due to the snow last week, the movie showing of Devil Got My Woman: Blues at Newport 1966 was postponed until tonight, Wednesday, February 17 at 4:00 p.m. in the Konover Auditorium, Dodd Research Center

The film captures the blues experience in its first and truest milieu, the 1966 Newport Folk Festival, one in which African-American men and women drink, dance, and share their troubles and triumphs.

Part of the African American Music Film Series hosted by the Dodd Research Center

Imagine you’ve stumbled into a juke joint where the mentor of Robert Johnson and the idol of the Rolling Stones, Howlin’ Wolf, “dis” one another. Picture a place where Wolf taunts Bukka White and the spectral Skip James weaves his haunting Devil Got My Woman. It’s an archetypal blues “crossroads” where legends of the 1920s Delta and 1950s Chicago share the same musical space, suspended out of time in a super-real present, a non-specific “bluestime.”

The film captures the blues experience in its first and truest milieu, the 1966 Newport Folk Festival, one in which African-American men and women drink, dance, and share their troubles and triumphs.

Devil Got My Woman: Blues at Newport 1966
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
4:00 p.m.
Konover Auditorium, Dodd Research Center

As a scientist, a writer, an activist, and a woman, Rachel Carson has inspired generations. Through her scientific integrity and elegant prose she became one of the 20th centuries most prescient scientific authors. And as an individual she battled economic adversity, family tragedy and gender stereotyping. She also reminds us that we each have not only the ability to make a creative difference in this world-we also have the responsibility to do so.

This Thursday, February 4th the film “A Sense of Wonder“, a film about Rachel Carson, will be shown as part of the Edwin Way Teale Lecture Series.  Using many of Miss Carson’s own words, actress Kaiulani Lee embodies this extraordinary woman in a documentary-style film, which depicts Carson in the final years of her life.  Struggling with cancer, Carson recounts with both humor and anger the attacks by the chemical industry, the government, and the press as she focuses her limited energy to get her message to Congress and the American people.

A Sense of Wonder
Thursday, February 4, 2010
4:00pm
Konover Auditorium, Dodd Research Center

Rachel Carson was born in Springdale, PA on May 27, 1907. She graduated from Pennsylvania College For Women (now Chatham College), worked several summers at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory, then earned her masters in zoology from John Hopkins University. Carson worked for what was to become the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as a writer and biologist for nearly 16 years. While there she published her first two books, Under the Sea Wind, and The Sea Around Us. The latter became a best seller, winning her numerous literary award. Her next book, The Edge of The Sea, completed her sea trilogy.

In 1962 came Carson’s seminal work, Silent Spring, which alerted the world to the dangers of chemical pesticides and launched our modern environmental movement. Controversy swirled around the book as the chemical industry tried to suppress publication with a lawsuit. In 1963 Miss Carson testified before Congress, speaking out in an effort to protect human health and the environment from the cascade of poisons unleashed by the chemical industry. On April 14, 1964, Carson died from breast cancer.

But her legacy lives on. She was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor the U. S. government can award a civilian. Her determined labors led directly to the passage of such important laws as the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the National Environmental Policy Act and the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act. These laws remain the pillars of U.S. environmental law today.

The Dodd Research Center was among more than 100 public colleges and universities in all 50 states that contributed to the 2010 City University of New York’s (CUNY) calendar, website and curriculum project by sharing historic images and milestones from their own past.

Entitled, “Investing in Futures: Public Higher Education in America,” the 2010 calendar project is the sixth such collaboration bringing together CUNY, the LaGuardia and Wagner Archives and The New York Times Knowledge Network, with support provided by founding sponsors JPMorgan Chase and TIAA-CREF.

War Effort on Campus, from the University of Connecticut Archives

The calendar will have two photographs from the Archives, one that will appear on the page that highlights the efforts on college campuses during World War II and another they have labeled “milestones”, which will include our own Huskies women’s basketball team at the final game of the N.C.A.A. tournament. 

The LaGuardia and Wagner Archives, which produced the calendar, is housed at CUNY’s LaGuardia Community College in Queens, New York. You can visit the Investing In Futures calendar/curricula website at http://www.cuny.edu/publichighered

Dec. 1, 2009, marks the 54th anniversary of the day Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, to make room for a white passenger. Many depictions of Parks show her as elderly, or frail, when in fact she was 42 years old and “tired of giving in.” Her subsequent arrest led to the beginning of the Montgomery bus boycott, during which African-Americans and some whites walked to work, school, church, and everywhere else they needed to go. City buses ran nearly empty for a total of 382 days before the Supreme Court’s ban of Jim Crow laws made segregation illegal in December 1956. Some of the greatest names in the civil rights movement such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., were involved in the boycott.

From Boycott Blues: How Rosa Parks Inspired a Nation by Andrea Davis Pinkney, illustrated by Brian Pinkney

The illustration pictured here is by Brian Pinkney for the 2008 work Boycott Blues: How Rosa Parks Inspired a Nation, written in rhythmic text by Andrea Davis Pinkney and published by Greenwillow Books. Other recent works for children in the Dodd Research Center’s holdings include Nikki Giovanni’s Rosa, illustrated by Bryan Collier and published by Henry Holt in 2005, and The Bus Ride that Changed History: the Story of Rosa Parks, by Pamela Duncan Edwards, illustrated by Danny Shanahan and published by Houghton Mifflin in 2005.

For more information on the Northeast Children’s Literature Collection, see www.nclc.uconn.edu

The 2009 Raab Associates Prize in Illustration was another opportunity for the Dodd Research Center to partner with the School of Fine Arts and Professor Cora Lyn Deibler.  Now in its 11th year, the competition which was initiated in 1999 by alumni Susan Salzman Raab and her husband David, gives students of illustration a poem to illustrate, which again this year was an original work by Jane Yolen.    This year’s winner is Katelyn Fox.

The poem is as follows:

Bug Games
Grasshopper,
Dragonfly,
Lady bug,
Flea,

How many
Bugs
Hopscotch
On a tree?

Centipedes,
Crickets,
Earwigs,
Flies,

Who plays
Tag,
Who wins the
Prize?

Cabbage Worm,
Beetle,
Earwig,
Grub,

When games
Are over,
Who’s first
In the tub?

Katelyn Fox, UConn President Mike Hogan, John Allie

Today is day two of the CT Children’s Book Fair and it’s amazing to think that we have been a part of this for 18 years!  So why is it that we are still doing it, along with so many of our original volunteers?  The Connecticut Children’s Book Fair is a unique opportunity for the Dodd Research Center to reach out and be involved in promoting literacy.  Reading to children for just a small amount each day nets amazing results.  It helps them open doors to a big, exciting world and develop a love of stories and poems.  When children become readers, their world is forever wider and richer.  

Over the 18 years of the Fair, we have moved three times, had conferences for teachers, character breakfasts, speakers for 5th year students in the Neag School of Education, and partnered with wonderful organizations such as the UConn Co-op and School of Fine Arts.   We have met over 350 absolutely wonderful authors and illustrators, and forged relationship that have helped us with programming and enrichment of the Northeast Children’s Literature Collection archives. 

There is still some time today to check it out for yourself.  See you there. http://bookfair.uconn.edu/

Armistice Day bonfire, Connecticut Agricultural College, 1919

This year marks the culmination of the University of Connecticut Alumni Association’s yearlong effort to craft a fitting tribute to honor our alumni who have fallen while serving in the armed forces of our nation.  In November 2008, the Ultimate Sacrifice Memorial was dedicated.  Located on the Lawn to the east of the Wilbur Cross Building, the Memorial is constructed of brick, limestone and marble, and features a patio and handcrafted “eternal flame.” The marble headstone is drawn from the same quarry used for Arlington National Cemetery and the Lincoln Memorial. The headstone is a replica of that used at Arlington National Cemetery. 

The Roll of Honor was unveiled and dedicated during Reunion weekend activities on June 6, 2009.  The ceremony, which included the reading of  the names of 131 University of Connecticut alumni collected to date, was especially poignant as it was also the 65th anniversary of D-Day, the allied invasion of Europe during World War II.  The list of names is a collaborative effort of many people but the resources available in the University Archives provided a substantial portion as well as assisting in the research for the profiles intended for the planned website.

On November 10, 2009, as part of this year’s Veteran’s Day Observance, the Alumni Association announces the Roll of Honor website (http://uconnalumni.com/rollofhonor/) which provides a history of the project, photographs of associated events, the list of the fallen and information on how to submit additional names.

And to all our veterans, alumni or not, Thank you.

"What's in a brain?"

Norman D. Stevens, Director of University Libraries Emeritus at UConn, is, among other things, an amateur library historian with an interest in such subjects as the image of the librarian, library humor, and what he defined as librariana. In his book A Guide to Collecting Librariana (1986), he identified that term as “Those artifacts, including but by no means limited to printed materials, that depict any aspect of librarians, librarianship, and/or libraries; such artifacts, which are most typically of an ephemeral nature, may be those produced or used by librarians or libraries as well as those produced and used by others; they include, in particular,representations of librarians, librarianship, and/or libraries in the popular culture of society.” That book grew out of his own collection of over 25,000 postcards of library buildings, and much other material, that is now housed in the Canadian Centre of Architecture in Montreal. While building that collection, Dr. Stevens developed a broader interest in postcards and has established contacts with numerous major postcard collectors and collections. That led him to edit Postcards in the Library: Invaluable Visual Resources (1995). As part of that process, he conducted a thorough analysis of major scholarly articles in a number of fields that were based on the use of postcards.

To talk more about this, Norman will be the featured speaker for the UConn Humanities Institute Faculty Lecture Series on Wednesday, November 4 at 4:00pm.  His presentation, located here in the Dodd Center’s John P. McDonald Reading Room, will focus on his own experiences with using postcards for research purposes, his knowledge of substantial postcard collections, and the extent to which such seemingly unimportant materials can be truly valuable research resources. The program will conclude with a short visual presentation of postcards depicting books and reading from another of his collections.

Please reserve seating by contacting (860) 486-9057 or uchi@uconn.edu

Dorothy Q. Thomas spoke to an engaged crowd at the 18th Sackler Distinguished Lecture in Human Rights last week.  The lecture, titled “Are American’s Human: An Ex-Patriot’s Guide to the Future of Progressive Politics in the U.S.” also served as the keynote to the Human Rights Institute’s conference, “Human Rights in the USA.”  

Thomas, a self-described progressive, gave the audience a personal, and at times moving look at the journey that has shaped her into the highly respected independent human rights consultant of today.   Those personal insights, coupled with her undeniable sense of humor, engaged the crowd into a conversation about what it means to be progressive in the United States.  Ms. Thomas, who often posed questions to the crowd, asked if a progressive could also be a patriot? 

She used her personal stories, including the early days of her professional career working for the civil rights movement up through today where she works on behalf of human rights in the United States, to challenge the crowd to consider what being a patriot means, how the continued struggle for human rights can be a catalyst for inclusion of differing views, and whether those with progressive views will be able to find friendlier times ahead where they are not to be made to feel like traitors to their own land.  At the end of the lecture, a first year law school student who is also serving in the military, thanked Ms. Thomas for her views.  As a member of the military, he said, it is difficult to be progressive and still be accepted by your peers.