Newspaper Clippings Research Articles

Schooner passage: sailing ships and the Lake Michigan frontier

Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, schooner trade was a well-developed system of maritime transport for commodities such as grain, lumber, and iron. The schooner trade was as critical to the development of the Great Lakes region as covered wagons were to the Far West and paddle wheel steamers were to the South.Schooners sailed the Great Lakes in largenumbers and played a formative role in theshaping of pioneer life throughout the region. The schooners that traveled the Lake Michigan basin succeeded in bringing a range of shoreline communities and four separate states into one coherent region. Although schooners successfully competed with steam vessels for more than a half-century, wooden sailing ships could not match the scale of the giant steel bulk carriers that began to emerge from shipyards in the twentieth century. The Mary A. Gregory-one of the last schooners left-was torched, sunk, and buried in LakeMichigan in 1926. Schooner Passage is ahistory of these magnificent sailing vesselsand their role in maritime trade along LakeMichigan.Theodore J. Karamanski shares with the reader the stories of the men and women who sailed on the schooners, their labor issues and strikes, the role of the schooner in the maritime economy along the Lake Michigan basin, and the factors that led to the eventual demise of that economy in the early twentieth century. Karamanski has put together historical accounts from newspaper clippings, historical society archives, and government documents to provide one of the few available histories of schooners. Schooner Passage will interest scholars and students of Great Lakes and American history as well as the general reader interested in nineteenth-century western expansion.

LAURIN: A Distributed Digital Library of Newspaper Clippings

Among the wide range of digital libraries, an interesting, yet quite neglected, subclass is constituted by those exclusively dealing with newspaper clippings. Compared with book-oriented digital libraries, clipping libraries are more difficult to seize, since they are wide and unstructured, and the subjects and content of a clipping are completely heterogeneous. LAURIN is an EU-funded project involving seventeen participants from several countries, including two software companies and a large group of libraries, whose main purpose is to set up a network of digitalized newspaper clipping archives that can be easily accessed through the Internet, for searching and retrieving clippings. The project also provides the libraries with models and methodologies to be used for scanning, digitalizing, storing, indexing, and making accessible newspaper clippings. This paper concentrates on the main architectural features of the LAURIN distributed system, exposing the peculiarities deriving from the diverse users and tasks it supports.

Just What the Doctor Ordered: The Harrison Anti-Narcotic Act, the Supreme Court, and the Federal Regulation of Medical Practice, 1915–1919

Just What the Doctor Ordered: The Harrison Anti-Narcotic Act, the Supreme Court, and the Federal Regulation of Medical Practice, 1915–1919 Kurt Hohenstein (bio) Kurt Hohenstein Kurt Hohenstein is a doctoral candidate studying American legal and political history at the University of Virginia. His article won the 2001 Hughes-Gossett Student Essay Award. ENDNOTES 1. Newspaper clippings relating to the Harrison Narcotic Act, 1915–1946: “Federal Agents Claim Harrison Act Violated Extensively Here,” Atlanta Constitution, June 15, 1915, General Records of the Bureau of Narcotics, Department of the Treasury; Record Group 170 (RG 170), National Archives Building, College Park, MD (NACP). This record will be referred to as Newspaper Clippings, Record Group 170. It consists of two threadbare scrapbooks of newspaper articles, opinion pieces, and editorials about the enforcement of the Harrison Anti-Narcotic Act of 1915. Many of the articles have personal notes on them, being referred from or to a particular person in the Bureau of Narcotics. There is no indication of who kept the scrapbooks, but it is clear that they were maintained by officials who were making enforcement policy for the Bureau of Narcotics. 2. William E. Clayton, Jr., “Federal Government Plans to Counteract States’ New Drug Laws,” Houston Chronicle December 30, 1996, 1. 3. 38 Statutes at Large 785, Chapter 1, December 17, 1914. 4. Ibid., Section 2. 5. Ibid., Section 2(a). 6. See, generally, James C. Mohr, Doctors and the Law: Medical Jurisprudence in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford University Press: New York, 1993). 7. William Butler Eldridge, Narcotics and the Law: A Critique of the American Experiment in Narcotic Drug Cases, 2d. ed., rev. (The University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1967), 9. 8. David F. Musto, The American Disease, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 122. 9. 241 U.S. 394 (1916). 10. Ibid. at 399. 11. 249 U.S. 86 (1919). 12. 249 U.S. 96 (1919). 13. Ibid., 98. 14. Ibid., 99–100. 15. Musto, 133. 16. Ibid., 134. 17. Eva Bertram, Morris Blachman, Kenneth Sharpe, and Peter Andreas, Drug War Politics: The Price of Denial (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 70–71. 18. R. Alton Lee, A History of Regulatory Taxation (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1973), 119. 19. For general histories of the Harrison Act, see Charles E. Terry, The Opium Problem (New York: Bureau of Social Hygiene, Inc., 1928); W.W. Willoughby, Opium as an International Problem: The Geneva Conferences (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1925); Musto; Ansley Hamid, Drugs in America: Sociology, Economics, and Politics (Gaithersburg, MD: Aspen Publishers Inc., 1998); and Mike Gray, Drug Crazy (New York: Random House, 1998). 20. For a full discussion of the Mann Act and the enforcement of its provisions by the Department of Justice, see David J. Langum, Crossing Over the Line: Legislating Morality and the Mann Act (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). There are interesting social and legal parallels between the passage and enforcement efforts of the Mann Act and the Harrison Act. For the purposes of this paper, the only issue considered is Representative Mann’s influence on the floor debate of both bills. 21. U.S. Congressional Record (63/1), June 26, 1913, 2193. 22. Ibid., 2194. 23. Lee, 1. 24. United States Constitution, Article I, Section 8. 25. Lee, 9. 26. Ibid., 9–10. 27. Musto, 70. Quoting Dr. Jonathan Pereira, from his standard medical British text, The Elements of Materia and Medica and Therapeutics, published in 1854 and widely used in America. The medical profession believed that opium was “undoubtedly the most important and valuable remedy in the whole Materia Medica” (1036–1046). 28. Musto, 100. 29. Terry, 631. 30. Musto, 31. 31. Terry, 649–650. The ten nations that did not sign the convention were Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey, Switzerland, Austria-Hungary, Norway, Sweden, Roumania, Montenegro, and Serbia. 32. Musto, 43–44. It is likely that this appeal had the perhaps unintentional effect of causing some southern congressmen and senators to reconsider their traditionally strong view of states’ rights in the areas of police power regulation, since their vote for the Harrison Act could be seen in the light of this discourse as protection against the rampant and...

Arkansas's Minister of Hate: A Research Odyssey

GERALD L. K. SMITH IS KNOWN TO MANY Arkansans as the creator of the Christ of the Ozarks statue, the Passion Play, and other tourist attractions at Eureka Springs. To some outside Arkansas, he is known for having been national organizer of Louisiana senator Huey P. Long's Share Our Wealth clubs and as a collaborator with Father Charles Coughlin in the 1936 Union Party challenge to Franklin D. Roosevelt. But many more probably know Smith as one of the most notorious figures of the American far right and the dean of American anti-Semites from the 1930s through the mid1970s. In the 1930s and 1940s he could fill football stadiums with crowds who came to hear his anti-Semitic message. He had drawn his hatred of Jews from books and tracts such as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (a notorious forgery), as well as from such figures as Coughlin, Henry Ford, and William Dudley Pelley. After Long's death, he briefly joined Pelley's Silver Shirts and would eventually be investigated by the FBI for his fascist sympathies. He created anti-Semitic organizations such as the Committee of One Million and the Christian Nationalist Crusade as fundraising vehicles, was a principal in the America First Party, and ran for president three times as candidate of the Christian Nationalist Party. In 1942, Smith began to publish an anti-Semitic monthly, The Cross and the Flag, which appeared until his death in 1976. Smith lived in Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, Oklahoma, and California, but for the last decade of his life he considered Arkansas his summer home. Arkansas was the site of his proudest accomplishments, his Christian shrines, which revived tourism in Eureka Springs and the surrounding area and helped make it a leading destination of visitors to Arkansas. In Arkansas, Smith could relax, shielded from the national press, and play the role of kindly Christian gentleman. If his antiSemitic outbursts were never entirely suppressed, they were at least subdued there. He never permitted any of his anti-Semitic tracts and pamphlets to be sold in Eureka Springs. Researching a biography of Smith occupied fifteen years of my academic career. From 1973 to 1988, I traveled the United States collecting information on Smith, organizing it, and finally shaping it into a narrative published as Gerald L. lK. Smith: Minister of Hate. The book was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography and won several lesser awards. I had become interested in Smith while in New Orleans in 1973 working on the final stages of my Ph.D. dissertation on Leander H. Perez, the arch-segregationist of Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana. Both Smith and Perez had been cogs in Huey Long's political machine and a biography of Smith seemed a natural sequel to my nearly-completed biography of Perez. After defending my Ph.D. dissertation in the summer of 1973 and accepting a position as assistant professor of history and associate editor of Louisiana History at the University of Southwestern Louisiana (now the University of Louisiana-Lafayette), I pushed forward with my research on Smith, collecting newspaper clippings about his life. Eventually, I obtained clippings from most major cities with papers that had covered Smith extensively, including Shreveport, Baton Rouge, New Orleans, Tulsa, New York, Detroit, St. Louis, Los Angeles, Eureka Springs, and Little Rock. I traveled to each city to photocopy the files, or hired someone native to the city to do it for me, usually a graduate student at a local university. Some papers were reluctant to permit photocopying, but ultimately I succeeded at all the major dailies, as well as the Eureka Springs weekly. While collecting clippings, I also began corresponding with Smith, telling him that I was interested in writing a book about his life and that I taught Louisiana history and was interested in Huey Long. Proud of his apprenticeship under Long, Smith proved receptive from the start and invited me to come to Eureka Springs to visit him. …

Speaking of Ella Deloria: Conversations with Joyzelle Gingway Godfrey, 1998-2000, Lower Brule Community College, South Dakota

Joyzelle Godfrey (Teton/Yankton Dakota/Ottawa) is a professor of Lakota Studies at the Lower Brule reservation community college (an affiliate of Sinte Gleaska University on the Rosebud reservation in South Dakota). In the intricate Dakota web of extended kinship, Ms. Godfrey is a social granddaughter of Ella Deloria (1888-1971), the outstanding Yankton Sioux ethnographer and linguist whose only novel Waterlily was posthumously published by the University of Nebraska Press in 1988. Ms. Godfrey, who lives on the Crow Creek reservation, has twice been a grant recipient at the Dakota Indian Foundation in Chamberlain SD, where a considerable body of Ella Deloria's known manuscripts (almost all unpublished) is housed. At present she is completing her preparation for publication of Ella Deloria's unpublished ethnographic manuscript Dakota Way of Life, referred to in the conversation below, as well as Speaking of Ella Deloria, which examines her grandmother's complex position within the academe that simultaneously enabled and exploited her. This explores three components of Deloria's ethnographic work: her responses to the writings of James R. Walker, his Lakota informant George Sword, and anthropologist H. Scudder Mekeel in the first third of the twentieth century. 1 Probably no one knows the Ella Deloria papers better than Godfrey does, as she was responsible for cataloguing and copying them (the originals, some in poor condition, are stored in a vault at the Norwest Bank in Chamberlain). Previously the papers had been held by the Ella Deloria Project at the University of South Dakota, Vermillion (where Ella Deloria worked as assistant director of the W. H. Over Museum during the last years of her life). After her death, her brother, the Reverend Vine Deloria Sr., granted custodianship of the papers to the Dakota Indian Foundation, a grant- and scholarship-funding agency. 2 I became interested in Ella Deloria's astonishing body of work from a nonlinguistic, non-ethnographic perspective in 1992, when attending Oglala Lakota College's Lakota Studies Summer Institute. 3 Waterlily was my airplane reading [End Page 456] en route to the Pine Ridge reservation. In August 1993, during a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)/Newberry Library documentary seminar on Native American autobiography at the D'Arcy McNickle Center for the History of the American Indian, a comment by its convener Kate Shanley caught my attention: the Nebraska edition is known to be an abridged version of Deloria's original intentions. What would those intentions have been? What kinds of materials had been cut? Why? Then, when my graduate students and I participated in an oral history project sponsored by the American Indian Heritage Council of Charlotte, North Carolina--interviewing Native Carolinian Indian elders in their seventies and eighties--I happened across a reference to a pageant that Ella Deloria had written and produced for the amalgamated tribe of remnant Indian peoples now known as the Lumbee Indians. Numbering nearly fifty thousand, they are the ninth-largest Indian tribe in the United States, as well as one of the most fascinating: although recognized by the state of North Carolina as Indians since 1885, they have unsuccessfully pursued full federal acknowledgement for over a century. Sponsored by the Farm Security Administration and the then Office of Indian Affairs, Miss Deloria and her sister Susan Mable Deloria lived with these Indians for six months in 1940. The pageant, "The Life Story of a People," was so successful that it excited applause from the federal and state governments; it was repeated in 1941. But World War II turned the Indians' world upside down. Apart from a scrapbook of newspaper clippings, programs, and a few pages of stage directions, the pageant was lost for the next sixty years. After unsuccessfully searching for it from 1995-98 in Robeson County, North Carolina--the Lumbee homeland--I remembered the note on Deloria sources at the...

George Washington and Slavery: A Documentary Portrayal.

No history of racism in America can be considered complete without taking into account the role that George Washington - the principal founding father - played in helping to mold the racist cast of the new nation. Because General Washington - the universally acknowledged hero of the Revolutionary War - in the postwar period uniquely combined the moral authority, personal prestige, and political power to influence significantly the course and the outcome of the slavery debate, his opinions on the subject of slaves and slavery are of crucial importance to understanding how racism succeeded in becoming an integral and official part of the national fabric during its formative stages. Relying primarily on Washington's own words - his correspondence, diaries, and other written records - supplemented by letters, comments, and eyewitness reports of family members, friends, employees, aides, correspondents, colleagues, and visitors to Mount Vernon, together with contemporary newspaper clippings and official documents pertaining to Washington's relationships with African Americans, Fritz Hirschfeld traces Washington's transition from a conventional slaveholder to a lukewarm abolitionist.

Sol Tax and Tribal Sovereignty

Nancy Oestreich Lurie is curator emerita of anthropology, Milwaukee Public Museum (MPM). This article draws upon her first-hand knowledge of the American Indian scene including ongoing research with the Ho-Chunk Nation (formerly Winnebago) that began in 1944; lasting friendships made with Indian people across the country while serving as assistant coordinator to Sol Tax during the American Indian Chicago Conference; and association as an action anthropologist in the founding of the Wisconsin Winnebago government under the Indian Reorganization Act, the Menominee's drive to repeal their termination, and the establishment of the Milwaukee Indian Community School and the Potawatomi Bingo-Casino enterprise in Milwaukee. Her work as an expert witness in cases before the U.S. Indian Claims Commission and federal and state courts familiarized her with the history and effects of federal Indian policy. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 1998 meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology, where the results of discussion enriched and helped to clarify the present version. In addition to published sources cited, this account rests in large part on personal recollections, particularly of the American Indian Chicago Conference, and on the Indian affairs file of newspaper clippings and tribal and intertribal newspapers maintained since 1972 in the Anthropology Department at the Milwaukee Public Museum.

Interorganizational linkages in the delivery of local leisure services in Canada: responding to economic, political and social pressures

Due to the complex and dynamic economic, political, and social pressures in their environment, local governments are having to change the way they do business. According to a number of organizational theorists, organizations are increasingly developing linkages with other organizations in order to deal with environmental pressures. The purpose of this research is to examine how senior managers of local government leisure services interpret economic, political, and social pressures in their environment and how these pressures are leading to the development of interorganizational linkages with other public, nonprofit, and commercial organizations. Interviews with key individuals working in three leisure services departments of local governments located in a large metropolitan area in Canada were conducted and relevant documents (i.e. local government reports, newspaper clippings) were analysed. The results revealed that environmental pressures (economic, political, social) are forcing local governments to develop new partnerships in order to acquire important resources aimed at maintaining or enhancing the quality of service delivery to the public.

“Gotta Get a Gimmick”: The Burlesque Career of Millie De Leon

can pull all stops out Till they call cops out Grind your behind till you're banned But ya gotta get a gimmick If you wanna get a hand .... You Gotta Get a (Sondheim) Although Stephen Sondheim's lyrics were sung by a fictitious burlesque performer of late 1920s in musical Gypsy, they may have just as easily come from mouth of Millie De Leon several decades earlier. De Leon, billed as Girl in Blue, would have been more accurately billed as Gimmick Girl. Arrested numerous times from 1903 to 1915, Mlle. De Leon was a master of stirring public scandal and thereby gaining free publicity at a time when newspapers were clamoring for sensational stories. Over seventy-five newspaper clippings at Theatre Collection of New York Public Library (NYPL) chronicle De Leon's success at attracting both press and an audience with her controversial behavior inside and outside of theatre. Extolled as the first real queen of American (Toll 230), burlesque's first truly national sex symbol (Toll 226), the reigning burlesque 'classic' (Zeidman 13), and the best in her line (New York Clipper 30), De Leon is too often forgotten by theatre and dance historians.1 Well before Gypsy Rose Lee started stripping with style, Millie De Leon became a prominent figure in battle over public decency in entertainment. Among other interesting facets, Millie De Leon's career provides a provocative glimpse at character of burlesque dancing in early twentieth century, limits of so-called public decency at that time, and use of newspapers as a tool for sensationalistic self-promotion. More importantly, this study demonstrates that De Leon deserves to be remembered for her role as a figure (quite literally) in public spotlight. The Origin of Cooch Dancing in Burlesque history of American burlesque begins with a Greek classic and ends with a leg show, according to Bernard Sobel (Burleycue 3). Although parody, original intent of burlesque, can be traced back to Aristophanes, nearest cousin to modem burlesque is linked to Lydia Thompson and her British Blondes, who brought Americans a combination of clever parody and shapely feminine legs in 1860s and '70s. As with music halls and vaudeville, burlesque of 1890s incorporated a variety of entertainment, including comic sketches, songs, and dances. However, by turn of century, became scandalous, with advent of belly dance, or dance, as it came to be called. The advent of cooch was integral to decline of burlesque; by mid to late 1920s, burlesque had degenerated to little more than raunchy jokes and striptease.2 Cooch dancing first caught attention of American audiences when Little Egypt and others danced at Chicago World's Fair of 1893. The fair featured exhibits of various world cultures, ranging from primitive African and Indian cultures to civilized White City. Somewhere in between lay Middle Eastern and Asian exhibits, complete with belly dancers. In his book Horrible Prettiness, Robert C. Allen explains what made cooch dance taboo to American audiences: The cooch, or cootch, or hootchy-kootchy phenomenon-as belly dancing quickly came to be called-points out contradictory nature of fair's construction of femininity. Inside White City, women's accomplishments were granted a more prominent place than at any previous international exposition.... At same time, on other, side of fair, all that had been suppressed in White City's representation of female body as frozen, solemn, and chaste reemerged in undulations of cooch dancer... a reminder of atavistic nature of women in a semi-civilized state. (228) Burleque and cooch appeared to be a perfect match. Very quickly, cooch dancer became a highly popular feature of burlesque, and imitators of Little Egypt flourished with their Oriental dances and Salome dances of seven veils. …

Injury reporting in Connecticut newspapers

Objectives—To describe how newspapers report injury events and how often they contain information about injury prevention measures. Methods—A commercial service provided all newspaper clippings reporting unintentional injury events between July...

Oklahoma firearm-related injury surveillance

Context: The magnitude of firearm-related deaths is known, but few studies have evaluated the magnitude and epidemiology of nonfatal firearm-related injuries. The circumstances resulting in fatal versus nonfatal injury are likely very different. No single data source provides complete details on nonfatal shootings. Objective: To establish a surveillance system to define the epidemiology of fatal and nonfatal firearm-related injuries. Design: Data were collected on fatal and nonfatal firearm-related injuries that occurred in 1995. Setting: State of Oklahoma. Participants: Medical Examiner, Vital Statistics, hospital emergency and medical records departments, police departments, newspaper clipping service. Main Outcome Measures: Incidence rate of firearm-related injuries; case-fatality rate; demographic, medical, and epidemiologic data; sensitivity of each reporting source; completeness of reporting. Results: The incidence rate of firearm-related injuries was 45.5 per 100,000 population. The case fatality rate was 35%. Injury rates were highest among adolescents, young adults, males, and African Americans. The Medical Examiner and Vital Statistics reported 87% and 98% of fatal cases, respectively. Passive surveillance of hospital emergency departments identified 72% of patients seeking hospital treatment. Among inpatients, 81% were identified by medical records departments. Newspaper clippings were obtained for 31% of cases. Information on the victim-perpetrator relationship and the type of firearm was available for 79% and 80% of cases, respectively. Conclusions: Statewide surveillance of firearm-related injuries using multiple data sources is possible and provides a picture of the overall firearm-related injury problem. Strategies to enhance computer linkages of medical and police data should be pursued to maximize the sensitivity of reporting and minimize the costs of surveillance.

Injury occurrence in developing countries Can valid and prevention-oriented information on injury occurrence be obtained from existing data sources in developing countries? An example from Nicaragua

Background Access to valid and prevention-oriented data is a prerequisite for solid and systematic preventive work in any setting. In Nicaragua, like in most developing countries, injury is rapidly emerging as one of the leading causes of death at levels clearly exceeding that in most industrialized countries. Objectives As the first component of a long-term strategy to develop safety promotion efforts in Nicaragua, this study includes a comparison of existing nationwide data sources on injury with respect to validity and prevention-relevance. Methods Four sources have been used in this study: traffic police records, newspapers, health records, and occupational statistics. Validity was estimated by comparing the different sources, and the relevance for prevention was assessed in terms of the amount of available information on injury mechanisms and pre-injury circumstances. Results The main causes of death according to both newspaper clippings and health statistics were intentional injuries and traffic accidents. National Health Statistics (MINSA) report more deaths than the newspapers. In contrast, traffic statistics report more traffic deaths than the National Health Statistics. None of the sources was found capable of producing valid estimates of the true injury situation, either concerning mortality or morbidity. However, some sources were found to include better prevention-oriented information than others, such as traffic police and INSSBI on traffic and occupational hazards, respectively. Valuable case descriptions can also be found in newspapers, including productrelated information.

Mary Hemenway: A Woman Ahead of Her Time

The purpose of this paper is to give historical insight into the progressive thinking of nineteenth century American philanthropist, Mary Hemenway (1820-1894), and why she was interested and believed in physical education for females. Also interesting is how her integrated thinking is compatible with the thinking in present-day education reformThe presentation of the findings will include a brief background of Mrs. Hemenway’s family life, and a brief description of her philanthropic contributions and activities. These include: 1) public education in America, particularly female education, 2) physical education and home economics education, 3) Native-American research, and 4) other significant issues and philanthropic activities in American education. The major focus will be her contributions to physical education and her founding of the Boston Normal School of Gymnastics, and influences that persuaded her interests in these pursuits.The sources used include early normal school catalogues, minutes of meetings, course syllabi and lecture synopses, written papers, early and recent bulletins, personal correspondences, government reports, college documents, pamphlets, memorial pamphlet, one new and several old books, and old newspaper clippings and professional journals.

More than a Looking Glass

Part of a larger study on women and local politics in Israel between 1950 and 1989, this article focuses on media strategies. It claims that reporting by Israeli media on women in local politics, even if sympathetic, is shaped by the basic exclusionary social frames that rest on the dichotomous notion of masculine/public/political versus feminine/private/apolitical. Using textual strategies, such as compartmentalization, protective chivalry, and framing women in traditional women's roles, the press reproduces a gendered world and an exclusionary perception of politics. These findings are based on a qualitative analysis of press coverage of local women in three leading national newspapers and women's magazines and on local newspaper clippings.

The World of Villa-Lobos in Pictures and Documents

Presents photos, letters, newspaper clippings, and other documents from the life of the Brazilian composer. Surveys the influence of his contemporaries in music, literature, and history, and describes the theaters where his music was originally performed and the national institutions that played an

The Fonds Schoelcher: History and Contents

The French writer and politician Victor Schoelcher is well known to scholars of George Frideric Handel's life and works as author of an important biography of the composer, The Life of Handel (London, 1857). Schoelcher was also a cataloguer and avid collector of Handel's music. His catalogues, though never published, have served as a basis for subsequent efforts, and his collection of manuscripts, printed editions, and librettos must be counted as one of the major Handel collections. Schoelcher's Handel library, now at the Bibliotheque nationale, Paris, has lain in relative obscurity: there is only one scholarly study of it in the literature (1) and there is no published catalogue. The collection, however, merits much greater attention. A summary, manuscript listing of part of its contents can be found at the Bibliotheque nationale, and that list, combined with Schoelcher's own catalogue of his library and with a rough estimate of as yet uninventoried portions of the collection, shows that the Fonds Schoelcher numbers more than three thousand items, including eighteenth- and nineteenth-century manuscripts, first and early editions, arrangements, opera and oratorio librettos, newspaper clippings, programs, tickets, and even posters. I am presently cataloguing the collection and offer here a preliminary report on its history and contents. I emphasize the fact that this report is preliminary: so far, I have catalogued about 1,300 items. Nonetheless, it is already clear that this is an important collection that deserves to be better known. VICTOR SCHOELCHER (1804-1893) The son of a porcelain manufacturer, Schoelcher first made his mark as an art critic, but it was during a voyage to the Caribbean and the southern United States in 1829-30 that he found his true calling, when he encountered slavery for the first time. From that date on, Schoelcher was a tireless champion for the slaves of the French territories, publishing numerous pamphlets and books based on research conducted in many of the countries where involuntary servitude was practiced. When he was appointed Under-Secretary of State for the colonies in 1848, he wrote, and succeeded in passing, the law abolishing slavery in the French colonies. For that, Schoelcher is still revered in the Caribbean today: in Guadeloupe, Martinique, and French Guyana monuments evoke his memory, his portrait graces the majority of town halls, and the esprit schoelcherien is referred to almost daily in the press. (2) Schoelcher opposed the coup d'etat of December 1851 and, like his friend Victor Hugo and many others, was exiled. Schoelcher spent the next eighteen and one-half years in England. In August 1870 he returned to France and directed a legion of artillery during the siege of Paris. In 1871 he was elected to the National Assembly, where he served until being voted a senator for life in December 1875. Schoelcher was a prolific author; many, but by no means all, of his writings concern the abolition of slavery. (3) He also campaigned for prison reform and revocation of the death penalty, fought for the rights of women and children, chronicled various historical events of his time, and wrote essays and two books on music, the Life of Handel and La Modernite de la musique (Paris, 1881). Finally, he was a distinguished collector. His library, a point of pride, was noted by more than one contemporary. Over the course of his long life, Schoelcher amassed a remarkable collection that was generously given before his death to a variety of libraries and museums. (4) To the Bibliotheque nationale he gave several thousand books in 1884 and, according to one author, a further 18,000 volumes after his death in 1893. (5) Between 1879 and 1885 he donated to the Ecole des Beaux Arts a collection of more than 9,000 engravings along with 500 reference works and a detailed, six-volume manuscript catalogue he co-authored with his colleague Wundt. …

Photographs and favours in thePotfiriato

Abstract Porfirio Diaz ruled Mexico from 1876 to 1910, a period known as the Porfiriato. The dictator's power was absolute, and he was perceived as an almighty father figure capable of resolving any problem placed before him. As a result, he was often sent letters asking him to intercede direcdy in granting economic assistance, scholarships, pardons and protection. These letters were sometimes accompanied by materials which offered ‘proof’ of the economic needs or moral qualities of the petitioners: newspaper clippings, maps, sketches and photographs.1 Of these, photographic portraits were considered the most effective because they were believed to be technological representations in which the human hand did not intercede. Photographs also offered the opportunity to introduce oneself direcdy to the president; senders believed that the personal relation they hoped to establish through the photographic image bettered their chances of receiving the favours they requested.

Computer‐based vertical files

Suppose you had a vertical file and wanted to convert it to a computer‐based file. What would you need? In a computer‐based vertical file system, documents such as pages of text, booklets, newspaper clippings and photographs are stored in files that can be accessed by computer. A scanner is used to enter documents into the system. The documents are indexed by manual indexing, automatic full‐text indexing or both, and they are kept in computer disk storage. Document management software is used for indexing and document retrieval. Vertical file users can view stored documents on a computer screen, copy page images to a floppy disk, or print the images.

Over spilt coffee

I spilt my coffee over the newspaper at breakfast this morning while cutting out news items of medical interest—which I obsessively save but rarely use. I now have in front of me newspaper clippings as crisp as potato chips, as embrowned as Thomas Hardy's Egdon Heath in November, but not half as exciting as shutting down the government, pursuing Whitewater and Travelgate, or following the Chicago Bulls or New Hampshire primaries. The first item, of particular interest to anyone struggling with Cerberus-like gatekeepers in Canadian emergency rooms (see my Soundings of 30 September 1995), is about a group of doctors in New Brunswick setting up a public telephone …

MotherTongue by Demetria Martínez

Reviews 169 blur of childhood and subjectivity, the personal and idiosyncratic minutiae that call back lost moments from which memory springs can resemble fiction as much as memoir. Ona Siporin’s collection has entered this territory of mosaic and memoir, winding memory around history in an act of recording that becom es the central, redemptive necessity of the collection. Using the natural world both to ground and associate im pressions, Siporin takes us from rural Iowa to the austere beauty of the canyons in Utah’s Wasatch Range. Geography serves not only as backdrop to visceral experience, but also triggers associations with the past. In these vignettes, most aired previously on Utah Public Radio, the natural world, with its insistent rhythms, transports Siporin from landscape to memory to meaning. Looking out her kitchen win­ dow at the scrub oak and rocky slopes of the Wasatch Range, for example, a more embedded memory surfaces of M azar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan, where Siporin lived briefly before the Russian invasion. She m oves deftly from the private intimacy evoked by a silver pitcher given to her as a gift to piece together place, history, and loss. The more com plex associations happen in the juxtaposition of pieces rather than through dialectic, as in “I stood in the doorway of the synagogue kitchen,” which records the bomb blast in a B oise, Idaho, synagogue in 1984, follow ed by a short meditation on mule deer in which Siporin’s fam ily works for “perfect trust” with the deer. Because the pieces are as loosely connected as the erratic associations memory makes, the evocations of experiences or events are less w ell drawn and dim ensionalized than in full-blown personal essays or analytic meditations. Siporin calls these memories her “only weapon” against forgetting, and, as the title suggests, the necessity here is in gathering fragments together. JODI VARON Eastern Oregon State College M otherTongue. By Demetria Martinez. (Tempe, Arizona: Bilingual Press, 1994. 128 pages, $17.00/$10.00.) This fine first novel, winner of the 1994 Western States Book Award for Fiction, adds to the ongoing, richly creative production of Chicana literature that inhabits the borderlands of genre, language, and identity. Like Helena Maria Viramontes’ “The Cariboo C afe,” MotherTongue also searches for con­ nections across geopolitical borders through its dual focus on the 1980’s sanc­ tuary movement and the relationship between Mary, a naive nineteen-year-old Chicana in Albuquerque whose “Spanish is rusty,” and José Luis, a traumatized Salvadoran political refugee. Fusing M artinez’s twin vocations of poetry and journalism into a lyrical exploration of love, politics, remembrance, and storytelling, the novel deftly 170 Western American Literature intertwines reminders of recent U. S. support for “death squad democracy” with a narrative journey toward self-understanding. Self-defined as apolitical but hoping to be “rescued from my ordinary life,” Mary agrees to shelter José Luis, w hile he view s her as an escape from the guilt and ambivalence that shad­ ow him for leaving his country. Their subsequent love affair, his abrupt return to El Salvador, and his twenty-year “disappearance” from her life reveal both the tenuous creation of “bridges by which we transcended borders of culture, language, and history,” and their collapse amid the indelible imprints of differ­ ent national experiences. By showing us how storytelling can freely cross borders “without pass­ ports or permits,” Martinez leads us to the larger scope of her novel, suggested by its dedication “to the memory of the disappeared.” Echoing much contem ­ porary ethnic American fiction, M otherTongue meditates on the collective process of piecing together a story, whether personal or national, that is threat­ ened by erasure. As the central narrative voice, joined at times by José Luis and later by their son, Mary self-consciously re-members her story by gathering newspaper clippings, love letters, and journal entries. Interweaving past and present narration, the novel displays the wounding as w ell as healing proper­ ties of a story that ultimately must include “unspeakable” revelations about Mary’s childhood as w ell as José Luis’s experiences in El Salvador. Reminded that the “worst thing is not remembering,” Mary in turn...