Commemorating the Flood of 1936

Posted on March 16, 2016 by Laura Smith

In March 1936, after experiencing heavy storms that swept from Ohio to Maine and as far south as Virginia, the Connecticut River, swollen beyond its banks, spilled over into Hartford, Connecticut, flooding over one-fifth of the city. Adding to that was the late winter melting of snow and ice, causing the river to crest at 8 1/2 feet, the highest ever recorded at that time. Other cities and towns along the Connecticut River were equally affected — in Springfield, Massachusetts, 20,000 townspeople lost their homes.

You can find photographs of the devastation of the Flood of 1936 on our digital repository, mostly from the Southern New England Telephone Company Records.

Introducing Our New Website

Posted on March 11, 2016 by Laura Smith

We have a new website! There you’ll find links to the digital repository, our finding aids, and to information for researchers about our collections and services. It all begins at http://lib.uconn.edu/libraries/asc/

We’re also moving our finding aids into the digital repository so they will look a bit different from what you’re used to. A search in the digital repository on any name or keyword can bring up a photograph, an audio file, or a document, as well as a finding aid.

We also have online forms for our Application for Use of Materials and for Reproduction Requests, to make it easier to let us know when you’re coming to visit the reading room or to tell us about reproductions you may want from the collections. Whenever there is any doubt about our collections or services you can always contact us at archives@uconn.edu.

Let us know what you think of the new website! and have a great time exploring Archives & Special Collections.

http://archives.lib.uconn.edu/islandora/object/20002%3A199701587

TODAY! Archives Reveal, Archives Inspire, Archives OPEN

Posted on March 10, 2016 by Melissa Watterworth Batt

Don’t miss the grand opening event today March 10 between 4:00 and 6:00 PM – a special Open-House to mark the opening of Spring exhibitions in Archives and Special Collections, located in the McDonald Reading Room at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center. The event is free and open to the public. Follow the event at #ArchivesReveal

Hear talks and commentary by exhibition curators, browse collection materials first-hand, and catch up on news happening behind the scenes with the archivists. Spring 2016 exhibitions include:

Seeing Comes Before Words: Artists’ Use of the Male Nude

Elizabeth Barbeau (curator)

Inspired by the collection of artist and teacher Roger Crossgrove, and drawing from materials across the Archives’ holdings, this exhibition explores collaboration and the creative process through the lens of the male nude. Featuring photography, artists’s books, broadsides, and posters from Archives and Special Collections, materials on display emphasize the relationships between (and among) artists and their models, and art and its audiences, and illustrate ways “the male nude” is used in different mediums for a variety of political, social, and cultural purposes.

Woman a Machine: Gender, Automation, and Created Beings

Giorgina S. Paiella (curator)

Featuring a variety of materials sourced from Archives and Special Collections, and archives external to the University of Connecticut, Woman a Machine will explore the intersection of gender and automation from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century. This exhibition will explore the intertwined history of female created beings and human female embodiment, including representations of eighteenth and nineteenth century female android automata, the twentieth-century mechanized housewife, and cyborg imagery in twentieth and twenty-first century visual culture.

We’ll see you in the Archives!

Sponsored by the UConn Libraries and the Office of Undergraduate Research IDEA Grants Program.

International Women’s Day

Posted on March 8, 2016 by Laura Smith

This photograph of a Chadian woman displaced by violence, from 2007, is from the Mia Farrow Collection.

March is Women’s History Month!

Posted on March 1, 2016 by Laura Smith

This photograph from 1918 shows women previously employed as telephone operators for the Southern New England Telephone Company getting ready to serve in the United States Army during World War I as Signal Corps operators in Europe. These women, all of them operators in Hartford, were specifically chosen for their positions because they were fluent in French.

On April 28, 1918, this Signal Corps class marched in a Liberty Bond parade in Hartford, holding the flags of the United States, France, Belgium, and Great Britain. The SNET company magazine, The Telephone Bulletin, cheered the women for their patriotism and bravery in preparing to go to the war front, writing “…the enthusiastic reception given these young women was wholly deserved, for with heads erect, shoulders thrown back and with martial tread, they made a striking appearance as they marched past the dense crowd on the sidewalks.”

We are celebrating Women’s History Month by showcasing a photograph from our digital repository each day on our Facebook page! Check out our posts each day to see the history and awesomeness of women at UConn and around our beautiful state of Connecticut.

“Our Community at Winchester” — an exhibit that evokes an era of union and community solidarity

Posted on February 24, 2016 by Laura Smith

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“Our Community at Winchester: an Elm City Story,” is an exhibit, created by the Greater New Haven Labor History Association (GNHLHA), that reminds us of how communities are formed within and around factories and industrial workshops, as well as the impact and rippling effect that the disintegration of these industries have on the lives of their workers and the greater communities, towns and cities where they are located. The exhibit is currently available for viewing in the Norman Stevens Gallery in Homer Babbidge Library until early June.

As one of New Haven’s most important employers in the latter half of the 20^th century, the Olin-Winchester Repeating Arms plant had an enormous impact on the Newhallville community and the city of New Haven, Connecticut. During this time, workers created a variety of social outlets, from the Winchester Club to bowling to musical performances, plays and gatherings of all kinds, creating a community within a community. But the struggle to achieve better, more equitable, working conditions was ongoing and often met with brutal resistance from the company. Later, with the introduction of Science Park, employment at the plant was repeatedly downsized until accessible work opportunities for people in the community no longer existed. The plant closed in 2006, throwing its remaining 198 employees out of work.

The stories of Winchester’s workers and the impact of this important employer throughout the 20th and early 21st centuries are told in this exhibit through the use of oral histories, photographs and documents. The exhibit utilizes materials from the records of the International Association of Machinists Local 609, now held by the GNHLHA, which represented workers at the plant beginning in 1956, as well as articles, donated images and personal recollections from those who were involved with the plant.

The photographs above show some of the panels in the exhibit as well as Greater New Haven Labor History Association director Joan Cavanagh and member Monica McGovern.

Celebrate People’s History

Posted on February 22, 2016 by Graham Stinnett

Currently on display at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, a recently acquired set of Celebrate People’s History Poster Series from the Justseeds artists cooperative. The Archives & Special Collections has added this poster series to its collection because of the strong linkages to the Alternative Press Collection which contains posters, flyers, pamphlets and newspapers about the movements depicted in the series.

This collection was organized and curated by Justseeds founder Josh MacPhee for distribution to all corners of public and social spaces:

“The Celebrate People’s History posters are rooted in this do-it-yourself tradition of mass-produced and distributed political propaganda, but detoured to embody principles of democracy, inclusion, and group participation in the writing and interpretation of history. It’s rare today that a political poster is celebratory, and when it is, it almost always focuses on a small canon of male individuals: MLK, Ghandi, Che, or Mandela. Rather than create another exclusive set of heroes, I’ve generated a diverse set of posters that bring to life successful moments in the history of social justice struggles. To that end, I’ve asked artists and designers to find events, groups, and people who have moved forward the collective struggle of humanity to create a more equitable and just world. The posters tell stories from the subjective position of the artists, and are often the stories of underdogs, those written out of history. The goal of this project is not to tell a definitive history, but to suggest a new relationship to the past.

CPH posters have been pasted up in the streets of over a dozen cities. Each time I receive emails from people wanting to know more. Our streets can be a venue for asking these questions, and the CPH posters can play a role in answering them. Soon after the first poster was printed, educators began asking for posters for their classrooms. It’s been great to see the posters become part of curriculum, and to see lessons built around them. Once when giving a talk about CPH, I was approached by a student in training to become a teacher. She was first introduced to the posters when they hung in one of her grade school classrooms, almost a decade earlier. Now she intends to use them in her future classes. I hope that these posters can continue to act as some small corrective to the dominant narratives told in schools, and that more teachers engage students in alternative ways of understanding the past.”

This exhibition will be up in the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center from February 1st – April 15th, 2016.

Archives Reveal, Archives Inspire, Archives OPEN

Posted on February 22, 2016 by Melissa Watterworth Batt

Join us for an after-hours Open-House to mark the grand opening of Spring exhibitions in Archives and Special Collections, Thursday, March 10, 4:00 – 6:00 pm in the McDonald Reading Room at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center.

Archives Reveal, Archives Inspire, Archives Open is a special invitation to explore the new and the rarely-seen assembled and animated by guest curators. Hear talks and commentary by exhibition curators, browse collection materials first-hand, and catch up on news happening behind the scenes with archivists from UConn’s Archives and Special Collections. Sponsored by the UConn Libraries and the Office of Undergraduate Research IDEA Grants Program, the event is free and open to the public. Spring 2016 exhibitions include:

Seeing Comes Before Words: Artists’ Use of the Male Nude

Elizabeth Barbeau (curator)

Woman a Machine: Gender, Automation, and Created Beings

Giorgina S. Paiella (curator)

#ArchivesReveal

We look forward to seeing you in the Archives!

Interference Archive’s Our Comics, Ourselves Features Archivist Graham Stinnett

Posted on February 15, 2016 by Melissa Watterworth Batt

This week Graham Stinnett, Archivist for Human Rights and Alternative Press Collections, will be featured as a Guest Curator and blogger on the Interference Archive’s Curated Tumblr site for the exhibition Our Comics, Ourselves: Identity, Expression, and Representation in Comic Art. For the duration of the exhibition — on view now through April 17 at 131 8th Street, No. 4, in Brooklyn, New York — guests will curate selections of comic works on a weekly basis and post to the blog. Each curator selects works contained within their personal comics collections — identity-based works that either ignited their curiosity in the medium, inspired them, angered them, or at least motivated them enough to want to start making or writing about comics.

The exhibition presents the graphic stories that describe the complexity and diversity of our collective experience, and examines the social and historical contexts within which they emerged. Through comics we are not only able to recognize ourselves and our own experiences, but also the experiences of others. We can deepen our understanding of the world around us by reading these stories and engaging with their intricacies.

Organized by Jan Descartes, Ethan Heitner, and Monica McKelvey Johnson, Our Comics, Ourselves includes comic books, graphic novels, DIY comics, and various comics paraphernalia primarily from the United States, 1945 to present. The works range from autobiographical to sheer fantasy, and explore feminism, abortion, racism, cultural identity, social activism, labor unions, veterans of war, sexual abuse, student debt, immigration, public health, civil rights, gender and sexual identity, and a lot more.

An all-volunteer organization, the Interference Archive is both a collecting archive and a public programming center based in Brooklyn, New York. It’s mission is to explore the relationship between cultural production and social movements. “This work manifests in an open stacks archival collection, publications, a study center, and public programs including as exhibitions, workshops, talks, and screenings, all of which encourage critical and creative engagement with the rich history of social movements,” according to their website. The archive contains objects that are created as part of social movements by the participants themselves: posters, flyers, publications, photographs, books, T-shirts and buttons, moving images, audio recordings, and other materials.

Water: Pollution / Protection and Play

Posted on February 11, 2016 by Melissa Watterworth Batt

On display now in the McDonald Reading Room, and through February, a new exhibition by Archivist Graham Stinnett examines the role that water plays in our daily lives. From consumption and utility to containment and disposal, clean water relies heavily on human impact on the ecosystem. As archival documents reveal, water protection and access to clean drinking water has been a rallying cry for decades, long before it made national headlines, again, last month.

Since the breaking news of the Flint Water Crisis began, a state of emergency within the city of Flint, Michigan was called on January 5, 2016. The city had incorporated its drinking water from the nearby contaminated Flint River which led to the corrosion of aging lead pipes in the city’s waterworks. This leaching of lead began in April of 2014, exposing the population to health risks associated with drinking and bathing in the water unbeknownst to them.

This exhibition draws from collections in Archives and Special Collections, including the Connecticut Citizens Action Group Records and the Alternative Press Collection, relating to water and our demands upon it as a resource and a necessity. The materials document that water protection is not a new social issue in the US. Since the 1960s, as the historical record illustrates, failing economies, and lack of investments in cleanup in the long term, have lead to crises for already marginalized communities. Materials in the exhibition, encompassing photographs, leaflets, serials, clippings, and government documents, examine how people in those communities have responded through time.

Watch movie online Rings (2017)

Posted on February 9, 2016 by Melissa Watterworth Batt

Quality : HD
Title: Rings
Director : F. Javier Gutiérrez.
Release : 2017-02-01
Language : English
Runtime : 117 min
Genre: Horror.
Synopsis :

Movie ‘Rings’ was released in February 1, 2017 in genre Horror. F. Javier Gutiérrez was directed this movie and starring by Matilda Anna Ingrid Lutz. This movie tell story about Julia becomes worried about her boyfriend, Holt when he explores the dark urban legend of a mysterious videotape said to kill the watcher seven days after viewing. She sacrifices herself to save her boyfriend and in doing so makes a horrifying discovery: there is a “movie within the movie” that no one has ever seen before.

Today: Of Mice and Men – Emerging Infectious Disease in a Warmer, More Fragmented World

Posted on February 4, 2016 by Melissa Watterworth Batt

Today February 4 at 4:00pm in UConn’s Konover Auditorium, the Edwin Way Teale Lecture Series on Nature and the Environment presents disease ecologist Dr. Richard S. Ostfeld of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies for his lecture “Of Mice and Men: Emerging Infectious Disease in a Warmer, More Fragmented World.”

We are living in an age of emerging infectious diseases, scientists and health officials agree. Most of these diseases are transmitted from wildlife to humans, but scientists are only beginning to understand the ecological causes of disease emergence in the 21^st Century. In this talk, Ostfeld will describe the ecology of three emerging tick-borne diseases in the northeastern United States, most prominently Lyme disease. He will show how small mammals, such as white-footed mice, are instrumental in fostering both blacklegged ticks and the pathogens they transmit.

More than 20 years of ecological research in Ostfeld’s lab reveal how anthropogenic environmental changes, such as reduced biodiversity and global warming, affect our risk of exposure to infectious diseases both locally and globally. The presentation will demonstrate the importance of ecology as a health science.

Co-sponsored by UConn’s Junior Faculty Forum of the Humanities Institute, the Dodd Research Center, and several UConn departments, the event is free and open to the public.

Since 1995, UConn presents the award-winning Edwin Way Teale Lecture Series that brings distinguished speakers to the University to speak in public lectures on various aspects of nature and the environment. The Lecture Series is named in honor of the Pulitzer-prize winning naturalist and author, Edwin Way Teale, whose vast archive of literary manuscripts, letters, diaries and photographs is preserved and accessible at UConn’s Archives and Special Collections.