“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.” (CT Heritage Gateway, entry by Herbert F. Janick, http://www.ctheritage.org/encyclopedia/ctsince1929/bailey.htm

The collection of the Democratic giant from Connecticut , John M. Bailey, is now available at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center. 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:
http://doddcenter.uconn.edu/findaids/bailey/MSS20070002.html

An incredible collection of Spanish periodicals and newspapers from the Archives are now available online at http://doddcenter.uconn.edu/collections/spanwomen.htm. 

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 by the end of May, 2010. We welcome you to enjoy this unique and colorful collection.

For more information, contact Marisol Ramos
(860) 486-2734
marisol.ramos@uconn.edu

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 http://doddcenter.uconn.edu/collections/apc/brochure.htm

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

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.

The UConn Nutmeg, 1982

UConn alums who have misplaced their copy of the yearbook now have the capability of reliving their college years online. In collaboration with the Nutmeg staff and the Division of Student Affairs, the UConn Libraries announces the availability of the 1915-1989 electronic Nutmeg. Anyone can access individual issues of the Nutmeg from the Archives & Special Collections website at: http://doddcenter.uconn.edu/collections/nutmeg/index.htm

Summer vacation for school children around the country will soon be upon us, a time when we look forward to the excitement that summer brings.  It is also a good time to reflect on the importance of our educational instutions, and today we will do that with a brief look at the Montessori school system.   

Copyright Cowles Magazines and Broadcasting, Inc. publishers of LOOK Magazine

 

Nearly 100 years ago Dr. Maria Montessori, an Italian physician, inspired the birth of this worldwide educational movement. Dr. Montessori, one of Italy’s first female physicians, became interested in education while caring for mentally challenged children in a psychiatric clinic in Rome. There she combined sensory-rich environments and hands-on experiential techniques in the hopes of reaching children previously labeled “deficient and insane.” The experiment was a resounding success and with it the start of what today is a network of nearly 1,200 schools across the country that have incorporated core elements of her model—multi-age classrooms and early childhood education.

The Dodd Center holds the records of the American Montessori Society, which was founded in 1960 and since that time has succeeded in reviving the Montessori method in the United States and gaining recognition for it as a valid educational system. The society has become the foremost resource in America for Montessori education and teacher training. Check out more information at http://doddcenter.uconn.edu/findaids/ams/MSS20060230.html

An excerpt from Connecticut Campus, May 9, 1945.

So in this moment of triumph in Europe, when human nature practically compells us to feel that the worst is over and apathy is now in order, let us stop and consider. If ever America and the world needed moral, physical, and financial support – it is now.  Now is the time to dig in the hardest for there is a long torturous road ahead.

It is so easy to delude ourselves into feeling anything we could do would make no perceptible difference, but if anything we can do even helps shorten the war by one second and save one boy’s life – it should not have been in vain.