UConn Library
Archives and Special Collections Blog
If you liked the “Ramnapping” post from February, you’ll be happy to know that you can now watch more live action UConn football and basketball games from the 1930s and 1940s. Games can be accessed from the Archives & Special Collections, Digital Collections site. See more matches against Rhode Island, Massachusetts State and New Hampshire. View the list of films.
Don’t forget our open house is today from 4-6. We just heard that Sam and Ann Charters will be our guests and will be spinning 78’s on the Victrola. I know you don’t want to miss that!
4-6pm
John P. McDonald Reading Room
Please join us for an Open House at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center. The event will include interactive displays, presentations and one-on-one conversations to facilitate the discovery of the rich resources in the Archives that will help with your classes and your own personal research.
Wednesday, April 14
4:00-6:00pm
Dodd Research Center
You are welcome to come and go as your schedule allows, but if you have a particular interest in the presentations, the schedule is as follows:
4:15-Welcome
4:30-Exploring the collections with our new search feature
4:45-New tools for using our digital resources
5:00-The distinctive sounds of the Victrola
Refreshments will be provided.
An Act establishing Storrs Agricultural School, 1881
Following the offer of land and funds from the Storrs brothers, the General Assembly officially established the state agricultural school in Storrs, Connecticut on April 6, 1881. The following fall, the buildings were prepared and 12 boys enrolled for classes. The inaugural class included: Frederick B. Brown (Gilead), Frank D. Case (Barkhamste), Charles H. Elkins (Brooklyn, NY), Charles S. Foster (Bristol), John M. Gelston (East Haddam), Samuel B. Harvey (Mansfield), Henry R. Hoisington (Coventry), Burke Hough (Weatogue), Arthur S. Hubbard (Glastonbury), Andrew K. Thompson (West Cornwall) and F. M. Winton (Bristol). The formal public opening of the school was October 7, 1881.
An Act Establishing Storrs Agricultural School (p.2), 1881
'The Dancer', 1951, poem by Joel Oppenheimer, drawing by Robert Rauschenberg, printed at Black Mountain College by Oppenheimer and Jonathan Williams, Jargon 2.
Found among the literary broadside collection in Archives and Special Collections are works that represent unique, unusual and innovative collaborations between poets and artists. Poetry broadsides produced between the 1950s and early 1970s offer some of the most diverse examples of poem and picture combinations. Visual artists, printmakers, typesetters, and graphic artists emerging from American schools and cities experimented with forms and techniques influenced by their association with other artists, writers, and performers.
Black Mountain College in the 1950s is often described by those that attended and taught there as a laboratory for artistic collaboration. The print shop at the small college in the foothills of North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains was a space where experimentation and collaboration were encouraged, producing small-run editions of poetry and poetry broadsides alongside the works of print-makers and visual artists. Joel Oppenheimer partnered with the painter Robert Rauschenberg, both students at the time, and the poet and emerging small-press publisher Jonathan Williams, to create ‘The Dancer’.
Join us in celebration of the exhibition ‘Poem and Picture’ at the Benton Museum at the University of Connecticut featuring ‘The Dancer’ (“The Dancer”, 1951, poem by Joel Oppenheimer, drawing by Robert Rauschenberg, printed at Black Mountain College by Oppenheimer and Jonathan Williams, Jargon 2), and National Poetry Month.
The exhibition, “Poem & Picture,” at the William Benton Museum of Art at the University of Connecticut is holding an opening reception on April 1, 2010 from 5 to 7:00pm. The exhibition is curated by Eve Perry, Assistant Curator at the William Benton Museum, and features collaborative works between 20th century poets and artists found in rare editions, little magazines, broadsides, and artists books, the bulk of which are from the Dodd Research Center collections. The event marks one of the largest loans of materials ever arranged between the Benton and the Dodd Research Center.
Poem & Picture features the collaborative visions of twentieth-century artists and poets, works that combine the disciplines of art and poetry in a way that each is complimented and enhanced by the other. They are poems and pictures intended to be experienced together, whether they are bound side-by-side in a limited edition book or as image and script integrated into a single work. Included in the exhibition are pages from the Russian literary avant-garde book Igra v adu (A Game in Hell) (1914) by Olga Rozanova and Kazimir Malevich. Selections from 21 Etchings and Poems (1960) present collaborations by Willem De Kooning and Harold Rosenberg, Peter Grippe and Dylan Thomas, and Franz Klein and Frank O’Hara. The Ariel Poems (1927-1954), a collection of limited edition illustrated poems, is represented by T.S. Eliot and E. McKnight Kauffer, and D.H. Lawrence and Althea Willoughby, among others.
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. 
The American Libraries Association (ALA) chose Connecticut History Online as the Digital Library of the Week, for the week of February 25th. Following is the press release from ALA:
Connecticut History Online is a digital collection of over 15,000 digital primary sources, together with associated interpretive and educational material. Now in its 10th year, CHO is embarking on a collaboration with the Encyclopedia of Connecticut History Online to serve the needs of scholars, teachers and students, genealogists, and the general public. This new initiative builds upon a very successful collaboration of libraries and museums carried out in two IMLS National Leadership grant-funded phases (1999–2007) that focused on digital capture of historical artifacts, including photographs, maps, broadsides, oral histories, manuscripts, and oral histories. These document events, people, and places that are part of the fabric of Connecticut and American social, business, political, educational, cultural, and civic life. The four current CHO partners (the Connecticut Historical Society, Connecticut State Library, Mystic Seaport, and the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center) represent three major communities that preserve and make accessible historical collections within the state of Connecticut. Their combined assets include book and periodical volumes, manuscript materials, photographs and graphics, oral histories, maps, artifacts, and broadsides.
Check out Connecticut History Online today!
The rich resources of the Archives & Special Collections, which encompass holdings as diverse as human rights, the alternative press, 20th century American poets and authors, and Connecticut’s history, are now easier than ever to discover online.
Our new online tool enables users to search, either by key word or subject, the inventories and detailed descriptions of over 600 collections housed here in the Center.
For example, a search of the word “ecology,” returns the papers of the Connecticut Citizens Action Group, the first state-based consumer interest group created in 1971 by Ralph Nader, the poem, “The Ecology of the Soul,” by Joel Oppenheimer, a poet affiliated with the experimental Black Mountain College, as well and the papers of Walter Landauer, a professor in animal genetics at UConn’s Experiment Station, best known for his research on chickens.
Delivering Chickens
The inventories reveal the strength and variety of our holdings which extend to railroad history, Connecticut business, labor and industry, ethnic heritage, immigration, politics, and social movements throughout the world.
Try out the new tool by visiting: http://doddcenter.uconn.edu
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
New Haven Railroad map of Hartford, Connecticut, 1915
For some time now Archives & Special Collections has been working with MAGIC, the UConn Libraries’ map library, to present online the railroad maps we hold of the New Haven Railroad system. One of our latest digital projects, New Haven Railroad Valuation Maps, is now available through the UConn Libraries’ Digital Mosaic at http://images.lib.uconn.edu/.
This set of maps was created by the railroad for the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1915 and consists of detailed trackplans of the railroad’s property with historical information on when and from whom the property was purchased. Currently we have 1710 maps from the entire collection of over 2400 available. The maps you see now include all the Connecticut maps (note that there are gaps in the routes — our map collection is not absolutely complete), about all but a handful of the Rhode Island maps, and about 600 maps of central Massachusetts.
The original plans were already one of our highest use collections and the digital version is proving to be even more popular. We are currently at work getting the remaining maps to you — keep checking the Digital Mosaic for updates!
For more information about the New Haven Railroad and the Railroad History Archive visit http://railroads.uconn.edu/.
“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
