University Special Collections Research Articles

An Examination of the Real‐World Appraisal Practices of Archivists

ABSTRACTArchives serve as repositories for items of enduring value. Archivists use a process called appraisal to evaluate the value of these items. While various theories and methods have been developed to guide the appraisal and many issues have been identified, little is known about how archivists conduct appraisals or what efforts they undertake to mitigate these issues. As such, this exploratory and qualitative study aims to examine the appraisal practices of archivists in university special collections, the role of the collection policy, and how these policies deal with problematic aspects of appraisal. This study found that university special archivists view appraisal as a complex but systematic process and implement the collection policy's principles and methodologies into their appraisal practices. Moreover, this study revealed that archivists try to establish and maintain effective relationships with donors and communities throughout the entire appraisal process.

Patron of the Past

This essay provided a rare opportunity for an undergraduate history student—doing hands-on research with a copy of a seventeenth-century book held in the Brock University's Special Collections. The essay provides a "way in" to understanding early English book culture. It explores that culture through an investigation of Philemon Holland’s 1635 translation of Pliny’s Natural History.

An Accidental Historian

As everyone in the Mormon History Association knows, on April 6, 1830, the day the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was organized, Joseph Smith was told, “Behold, there shall be a record kept among you” (D&C 21:1). This is the revelation upon which the office of church historian and recorder is based. And I would suggest, it is the statement that sits at the base of this organization.Although many of us feel bad from time to time that we do not have more records about the foundation and early life of the church, we do have an amazing amount, a very rich literary foundation. Joseph Smith soon called Oliver Cowdery to be the first church historian and recorder. Cowdery recorded minutes of meetings, patriarchal blessings, membership information, and certificates of priesthood authority. Both Cowdery and Smith began what might have been a narrative history of the church. The church keeps very impressive records. Look at our genealogical collections. Look at the Mormon History Association that has now celebrated its fifty-seventh annual conference and the many thoughtful records that were presented to us during this conference.I believe that we should all be recordkeepers. I believe that everyone, and especially everyone connected with the MHA, should be in the business of creating primary sources, firsthand accounts. We should all be keeping records. We can't document everything, but we should record something that might be useful in the future. Many people keep excellent photographic histories. Some write notes about every church meeting they attend. Some write their responses to the books they've read. But I think that the basic best is a personal journal. My mother and grandmother were faithful recordkeepers. But for a long time, I just couldn't make myself do it.I was more than forty years old when I was driving to Maryland from Delaware to give a book talk at an old folk's home for the Delaware Humanities Forum, our local National Endowment for the Humanities operation. I was reporting on Mary Chesnutt's Civil War journal. She was an officer's wife based in Washington, acquainted with all the important people. She went out socially, and then came home and wrote about it. A great record. I thought how she, who kept a record, would be remembered, while I, who did not write one, would be forgotten. That was my moment. I came home and began to keep a journal and many, many years later, I still do it.Almost every day I add to a monthly computer document. At the end of the month, I print the document, punch holes in it, and put it in a binder. I have hard and soft copies of the experiences of many years. I write whatever I have to say, maybe a paragraph, maybe a page. I'm a trained historian, in that I have some degrees, but I'm also an accidental historian.Many years ago, I was visiting my father in San Francisco. I had flown from the east. Although it was very late at night for me, Dad wanted to talk about how the church planned to remodel the very nice chapel building that had risen, under his supervision, during the depression when he was the bishop. We all loved the building, just a couple of blocks from our house in the Sunset district. We had been there almost every day of our early lives for some reason or other and now they were going to redo it and my father, who had built it, was helpless to do anything about it. Well, I knew all this. He had been talking about it for a year; all phone calls and letters had discussed this terrible prospect. I could hardly stay awake. But, with a sudden inspiration, I said, “Just a minute, Dad.” I plugged in my little computer and said, “Now, start over.” He talked slowly and I typed fast, and by the time he was ready to go to bed, I had three good, single-spaced pages of the story in his words. We went back to the story every day of my visit and by the time I left, I was writing an article about Sunset Ward.I told how my father—a farm boy from Utah, knowing nothing about construction—was, as a bishop, saddled with this terrible responsibility. How he hopped the train to Salt Lake City one morning and confronted Presiding Bishop LeGrand Richards about the terrible management of building chapels and was told, firsthand, how the church was not building meeting houses—it was building men. How the building, which was to have been constructed by church members, was picketed by union workers after the project was reported by a ward member. How the organ pipes, which arrived before they could be installed, were vandalized. Dad told me how he had managed to hang a huge replica of the Hoffman painting of Christ praying in Gethsemane above the choir seats. How the Mutual Improvement Association had thoughtlessly scheduled a big dance before the hardwood floor was installed in the cultural hall. I knew all these stories, but I got them in his voice and in his words.Then, I described some of the wonders of the building: a ladies’ room with a large primping space—a wraparound mirror and little stools, as in a fancy department store; a baptismal font with an illuminated stained glass window; a bas relief over the front door of a kneeling Joseph Smith painted in pastels; a Relief Society workroom with space for a large loom and a quilting frame, as well as barrels of staples; also the official Relief Society Room, furnished by the ladies themselves—as those rooms were in those days—like a large living room, full of secondhand wooden armchairs, skillfully reupholstered in harmonious fabrics by the clever sisters. I talked about the choral concerts, the three-act plays, the weekly dances for young people, the big balls with formal gowns and live orchestras. What wonderful times we had there.When I next visited, the restoration was complete. The white chapel with red theatre seats, which had been bought from a failed concern for pennies on the dollar, morphed into a quietly handsome new space with tan walls, green carpets, and dark pews, the colors of California's beaches and forests. My father was reconciled. I could appreciate the new beauty though there was nothing in it that said it was a church. Gone was the baptismal font; the primping room; the Relief Society workroom; the stage; the large boy scout room with the knotty pine walls built in an excavated hillside adjacent to the chapel and never on any plans; and the film projection room, high up in the cultural hall, accessible via a metal ladder screwed to the wall. The large picture of Christ in Gethsemane went on a long odyssey from building to building while various people tried to throw it out, before it was eventually rehung in the lobby. What we now had was lots and lots of little bare classrooms.I wrote this all up and it was published in Dialogue, and it's probably the most popular thing I have ever written.1 Someone is always rediscovering it and copying it for people who now worship in that building. I'm proud of myself for realizing that this was a significant thing to write about. By the time the building was completed, I was moving on to gather my father's additional extended memories and experiences that eventually turned into a Kinko published book, The Recollections of Serge J. Lauper. He was involved in this project from the beginning and approved it at every stage. So, I was surprised when, after it was published, he sent me a long page of errors. I decided to do a second edition with corrections and additions, and we printed enough of those that my father could give them out freely. At his funeral, some years later, everyone spoke out of that little book.I later did a similar project about the subdivision I lived in in Delaware named Oaklands. I was teaching Delaware history at the university. I was the president of the local historical society that I had organized. I was working with the wife of the developer, and I wrote up a little origin story that was published in the journal Delaware History and is still copied and given out to new people who move into the neighborhood.2That's one of the kinds of history that I do, whatever falls into my hands. When my mother died, I gathered her papers and submitted them to Brigham Young University's Special Collections Department. I realized that she had mostly kept a series of five-year diaries from the time she was married until the day of her final stroke. It took me a while to realize that those diaries should be transcribed and I eventually copied those little entries over a five-year period of being in Provo for the summers. The entries are brief, but they tell many wonderful stories. I was born and grew up in those pages. My mother spoke a little too freely about some things in her journals, so I only gave those books to my sisters.I had put the extensive papers of my genealogist grandmother into BYU's special collections without reading them at all. One day I could not find a copy of her twelve-page triumphant accounting of her life. She had written this as her calling card and caused it to be reproduced and distributed in great numbers. But I couldn't find it, and so I went to BYU and called for it. I was astounded when the librarian brought out a full-scale, handwritten autobiography. A long document that I had not been aware existed. This much longer document included her triumphs, but also her many heartbreaking sorrows. I decided that this one should be published. I had the manuscript copied and transcribed it. One summer, some cousins and I compared the manuscript to my typewritten transcription and corrected it, telling our own stories along the way. My grandmother's story was eventually published in the Utah State University Press series of life writings of LDS women.3I never expected or wanted to be a historian. I majored in English literature at Wellesley College. When I worked toward a master's at Brigham Young University, I received it in American literature. I read lots of novels and biographies. When it was possible, I applied to a doctoral program in English at Boston University. My husband was a newly hired history professor there, and his department chair was willing to apply pressure to admit me to the doctoral program. The English chair, a single man, did not want me. Although my credentials were good enough, I was already an old lady with five little children at home. As he memorably moaned, “Oh, Mrs. Bushman, why don't you just stay home with your children!” But I was admitted. I enrolled in night school to study Latin, one of the four languages that a doctorate in English required.Richard had been hired to develop a new program in American studies in the history department at Boston University along with David Hall. He came home one evening and reported that the faculty had discussed how many languages to require for an American studies PhD. They had decided that a single extra language would be enough. Within a week, I had dropped out of the English department and was enrolled in the new American studies program.We did lots of new things, reading the popular literature of the past rather than the classics, studying old fashioned household manuals, street maps, advertisements, travel literature, and diaries. We studied material culture, things, the leavings of the past of common people.I decided that I would study women, the first person I ever knew to consider that topic, and I would do women's work, comparing my life to women of the past. My first big project was on the mill girls of New England, the first regularly paid female workers. I added my interests in historical housewifery, women's traditional work, making cheese and soap, growing and processing flax, learning to spin and weave, all those things I am very glad to know how to do and glad that I do not have to do. I worked at understanding real daily life. It was a great program.I wrote my dissertation about a real woman, Harriet Hanson Robinson, using her extensive collection of personal materials available at a library near my house. I could take my youngest child—my sixth child had been born along the way—to nursery school, work at the library for a couple of hours, pick him up and morph back into a housewife for the rest of the day. I had a lot of contemporary women's work to compare to the records of the past.I was at this same time meeting with a group of Latter-day Saint housewives. We were talking about LDS women's domestic lives, their church lives, church structure and so on. For various reasons, we began to undertake projects, and we did many that were very satisfying. One project was that, as a group, we turned out a women's issue of Dialogue—the pink issue.4 We worked hard on that for a long time. We also took on teaching a class at the LDS Institute where each of us researched a topic of LDS women's history and presented a class. We wanted that material to be permanent somewhere so we undertook publication. I took on the editing—receiving much help and encouragement from Leonard Arrington, our MHA patron saint—and eventually we formed a publishing company, Emmeline Press Ltd., and published the book ourselves as Mormon Sisters: Women in Early Utah.5 It was published about the same time as my doctoral dissertation.6 Almost suddenly, I had two books out.These things were not easy, and I don't want to suggest that they were. They were a tremendous effort, and I had plenty of other things to do. But when some idea calls out to us, something suggested by our circumstances, something that we can do, I think we have to do it. Writing a book is an awful thing to have to do. But in continued efforts, it does get done. I have great respect for you who write books because I know what it takes. I would always say, if you feel a call, answer it. Capturing all that thinking and working into a nice, crisp new published volume is very satisfying.When we moved to New York City, more than thirty years ago, I didn't know what to do with myself. I had left a job at the Delaware Heritage Commission where I was very involved in well-publicized statewide activities. We published a whole shelfful of books there, several of which I wrote or edited. Little Delaware, a state of eight hundred thousand people, is widely advertised as a place where you can be somebody. And I was somebody in that little pond.I moved to New York, a city of nine million where I could never be anybody. I had a job for a couple of months, but I was fired because I didn't suit. What was I going to do with myself? Back at the Delaware Heritage Commission, we had been thinking of how to commemorate the first landing in the new world of Christopher Columbus who was getting much more condemnation than celebration at that time. New York City was full of reminders of him. Was I not walking on Columbus Avenue? Auditing courses at Columbia University? Wasn't Columbus Circle, where proud Italian Americans had caused an undistinguished statue of the great navigator to rise, the center for the West Side? I had done a lot of replaying of historical events in Delaware and decided to visit the New York Historical Society to see what I could discover about Columbus. Maybe I could find something useful for Delaware.I ordered up a couple of books, looking for ways that Columbus had been celebrated in the past. The first books had some useful information. I thought it would make an interesting talk. Then I considered an article about Columbus's journey into history. “Wait a minute,” said the enthusiastic I, “there's a book here!” So, I became a scholar again. I returned to the library and soon I was writing a book that became America Discovers Columbus: How an Italian Explorer Became an American Hero,7 a title suggested by Richard. Maybe I could find a place in New York. The Columbus book became my vehicle to feel at home in the city.The conclusion of my book, published in time for the celebration, was that Columbus—a vain, ambitious man who desired honor and riches—deserved to be remembered as the cruel and grasping Hispanic explorer that he was. But he had been rediscovered and celebrated by the American colonists at the birth of the United States because he served the need of a founding grandfather. Washington was the father of the country; Columbus, the grandfather, allowed the new United States to bypass their mother England at the time of the Revolutionary War. Columbus might well have thought that he deserved his honors, but he was drafted.We had not been long in New York when Richard planned a sabbatical. He had a grand scheme to study the agriculture of the Americas. I was going to work on that project too. Then we wondered which of the several large grants he had applied for would come through. The big grant with the National Endowment for the Humanities would give him three years of support. The one in New England would focus our study there. But the one in the south came through first. So, we did Southern farming. We spent a year in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, at the National Center for the Humanities. We studied tobacco culture, learned the Texas two-step, attended pig pickings, and we had a wonderful time.At the beginning, we went to the University of North Carolina's Southern History Library looking for some good primary sources. Right away I found the multivolume journal of John Walker with entries from 1824 to 1832. Walker was a fervent Methodist who began as a shopkeeper and eventually farmed two big family spreads with enslaved labor, growing wheat in King and Queen County in Tidewater Virginia, just up the Mattaponi River, after tobacco growing had moved south. Walker's journal answered a four-part query every day: the weather; what work was done by whom; who was sick and how he had dosed them, treating both family and workers (he had a certificate and some remedies that made him a Thomsonian doctor); and a fervent testimony to his Christian beliefs in which he often referred to himself as “a poor illiterate worm.”8I learned a lot about farming from Walker before I discovered that additional volumes of his diary, taking him through the Civil War, from 1832–1867, were available in Virginia. So, I had a run from 1824 to 1867! And in Virginia I met a man who knew the Walker descendants, still living at Locust Grove where Walked had farmed, and who arranged for Richard and me to visit there and dine with the current owners. So, of course, I wrote a book about Walker.9 That's how my ill-assorted topics come together.I will mention one other of my historical projects. In 2008, I was teaching women's history in the Mormon studies program at Claremont Graduate University in California. We did interesting projects and I reported on some to the Board of Governors of the program at a meeting. A visitor there said she was impressed with what we were doing and donated $10,000 to our program. What to do with that? I specialize in free projects and did not know what to do with real money. We eventually decided to use it to buy equipment to do an extended oral history of contemporary Mormon women. We worked out a questionnaire and eventually completed about two hundred interviews and transcriptions. Some of the students, now experienced, went on to gather material for their own dissertations via oral history. The transcriptions of our interviews are available to read in some libraries and they are very good reading. We did a book about them too.10I want to close with a reading from one of these oral histories, a woman from the islands, who sees LDS gospel principles through a different culture.I cannot tell you how happy it makes me that that little piece of prose was captured and saved. It could easily have been lost. We need to write about the things going on all around us. We need to keep records, to date them, and save them. We need to capture these things and pass them on to others. I hope that we all will create written primary sources for those coming later.

Collection Development Policies for Special Collections at Selected Academic Libraries

ABSTRACTCollection development policies for university special collections and archives guide archival appraisal, which is the process by which archivists determine the value of an item. Much has been written about appraisal theory, but little is known about archivists' actual appraisal practice and how collection policy guides such practice. The object of this paper is to explore the appraisal practices of archivists by examining collection development policies. As a preliminary examination, this study analyzed the collection development policies of seven Texas tier‐one institutions. The most common component of the policies was a statement on the types of items collected or excluded. The study also found that the language used for these formats varied considerably with no standardization. The policies themselves also varied widely in detail.

Bibliomania and Marginalia: Unexpected Histories in the Margins of the Salisbury Library, Special Collections And Archives at Cardiff University

This article highlights the significance of books in the personal library of Enoch Robert Gibbon Salisbury (1819–90), now the Salisbury Library at Cardiff University's Special Collections and Archives. The article outlines the research potential of the library. It considers examples of marginalia in the collection and what these reveal about how books were read and consumed. Salisbury's personal inscriptions provide a unique and untapped insight that goes beyond the book, encompassing the histories of reading and the growth of printing in Wales, as well as the motivations and mind-set of an astute collector. A study of these books' marginalia, authors' corrections and the revealing notes and jottings of their collector has major implications for the history of 'book culture', printing and the art of collecting in Wales.

Sonic Ecologies

A visionary composer, virtuoso cellist, and interdisciplinary performer, Seth Parker Woods has been challenging audiences for nearly two decades. His works synthesize a polyglot musical upbringing in Houston with his training in cello and electronics at institutions throughout the U.S. and Europe, combining materials from custom, frozen instruments to archival recordings, visual projections, and spoken-word poetry. He speaks here of his concept of “unabashed adornment,” relating it to the notion of self-care during this time of collective uncertainty. His compositions, including Difficult Grace (2020), which uses Jacob Lawrence's paintings from The Migration Series (1940–41) as a visual background, and Iced Bodies (2017), a work inspired by the legacy of the cellist and performance artist Charlotte Moorman, have been performed at numerous international venues, such as the Tate Modern, Seattle Symphony, Basel Ballet, and the Berlin Staatsballet. These works comprise a unique, rich dialogue with the explorations of the mid-century avant-garde. Woods is currently a distinguished visiting scholar at the University at Buffalo. This conversation took place in October and November 2021.◼Origin stories are always overdetermined—all the way to the ostensibly perfect circle drawn by Giotto's shepherd boy in the late-thirteenth century. But because your musical upbringing is so distinctive, I’d love to begin with you sharing a little about your early life.I grew up in Houston, Texas in a family of artists and entrepreneurs. My dad was a gospel and jazz vocalist and his quartet used to rehearse a studio in the basement; they used to rehearse pretty much every week. I have fond memories of my mom bringing me downstairs during their rehearsal breaks to sit behind my godfather's drum kit. I also remember my parents hosting my aunts, uncles, and close friends, and every once in a while they would wake me and my siblings to have us perform Jackson 5 songs—it was the eighties!And how did the cello enter the picture?Another very eighties nod—from my fascination with Susan Sarandon's character in The Witches of Eastwick who played the cello! From there, I went on to study at an elementary school with a wonderful music program, and then to Kinder High School for the Performing and Visual Arts (HSPVA). Credit goes to my early teachers, like Mrs. Parker and Mr. Clancey, as well as my exposure to the wide variety of music that was being showcased in Houston: R&B, classical, ballet, jazz at the Menil Collection, and the (ever ubiquitous) mariachi music.My grandfather, Cheyenne, comes from a long line of Black cowboys. He grew up in Weimar, the first German settlement in Texas; he carried that tradition with him after fighting in the war and making his way to Houston. That history and lineage stays with me today as I find ways to keep telling the stories of the South and those linked to it. I have fond memories of him riding the trail and joining up with the cowboys in the rodeo that would convene at the Astrodome in Houston. For many years after his passing, I felt that I lost touch with that side of my heritage, but through my mom those stories of who we are remains vibrant.Houston, whether I knew it or not, was a great bedrock for me, and after all these years I continue to find interesting connections to the place I call home, and the place from which I started out on a more traditional route in music. If we look deeper, the area I grew up in, Third Ward, has historically been a vibrant breeding ground for Black artists and thinkers. Interestingly, it feels as if I was meant to come out of Third Ward, given my project Difficult Grace and my work with migration and ideas of adornment. It is no coincidence.That happens with history, it has all been there the entire time. It also seems to presage the subsequent polyglot nature of your work. I’d love to learn more about your route from Houston to the shadows of “canonical” mid-century art and avant-garde music.That's a funny way of putting it, but yes, it explains how I started and ventured from the traditional classical route and became the artist I am today. When I was sixteen, I attended a winter intersession at Juilliard. While there, I met the late cellist Andre Emelianoff, who later became a very influential teacher and mentor for me. That experience set me on a path to become a professional musician. Mr. E. exposed me to what was possible beyond the traditional path. From Houston, I wound up making my way to Chicago, and then eventually landed back in New York City many years later, working with the great cellist Frederick Zlotkin of the New York City Ballet. During this time, I met Ursula Oppens and Tania Leon, two iconic artists who became hugely influential mentors and colleagues to me.I also had a long interlude in Switzerland and Germany where I ping-ponged between Baroque and interactive electronic music, which was an ideal setting to think through this very Eurocentric nexus of Stockhausen and Fluxus—the canonical intermedia of the midcentury. By 2012, I was studying for my doctorate in the UK, and I received a performance invitation from Tate Modern, which was putting up the first large scale retrospective of the late Aldo Tambellini. It wound up being a pivotal event.You have had the good fortune of working directly with some of your most important art-historical and musicological antecedents, both through personal relationships and sustained archival engagements. This is a bit of a broad question, but how do you construct your own relationship with (living) history?To think about that, I’ll need to rewind a bit. During my years in Switzerland, I was working closely with the American performer and composer Mike Svoboda, who had been living in Europe since the 1970s and worked very closely with Karlheinz Stockhausen. During those years with Mike, I had the opportunity to begin learning about a new world of experimentalism that I had never been introduced to during my training in the United States. I was introduced to the worlds of Dada and Fluxus, and had the opportunity to work with seminal composers like Georges Aperghis, Helmut Lachenmann, and Giorgio Netti. The pedagogical and creative revelations I was experiencing were a direct result of being given space to explore and experiment with forms of performative practice that I did not know existed. Through learning experimental works, I discovered Charlotte Moorman. To be honest, when I first saw a photograph of Moorman, who was a cellist, I had no idea who she was. That image, which I would later discover was her performing Jim McWilliams's Ice Music for London, set in motion my fascination with her, which eventually lead to me creating Iced Bodies.In 2012, I was invited to take part in two seminal works of artist Aldo Tambellini at Tate Modern in the Tanks. Prior to arriving, I barely knew who Tambellini was, let alone his extensive back catalogue. In looking through Tambellini's archives, I discovered this large-scale work, titled Black Zero, which I would later recreate for Art Frieze Week in London as part of his retrospective. Black Zero, for improvising cellist, seven projectors, a recording of Ishmael Reed reciting his poetry, layered electronics, and weather balloon, was originally presented at the Black Gate Theatre, which Tambellini founded in New York City in 1967. Upon reflection, Tambellini's raw genius exposed me to new ways to imagine immersive polyphony through interdisciplinary collaboration that continues to shake me to my core. So, to answer your question, I was less interested in constructing an active awareness of relationship building, and more interested in trying to be present and deliver the stories as best as I could, not realizing that I too was carving out a space within these extended histories. The fact that I can do so continues to serve my practice and surprise me to this day.And that provides the perfect lead up to Iced Bodies. I’d love for you to share a bit more about this work. The image of you clad in a wetsuit, wrapped around a carbon black, ice-clad cello, was a searing introduction to your work for me.Yes, exactly. The work I studied during my years in Switzerland, alongside the collaboration with Tambellini, freed me and provided a space to rethink the ways in which artists and musicians—as well as poets, dancers, etc.—could express themselves. In past interviews, I’ve stated that I never sought to become an activist or create politically aligned work. To be honest, I still feel uncomfortable and scared at times when presenting Iced Bodies, due to the vulnerable and charged state I must inhabit, and my “proximity” to these very important sociopolitical issues and stigmas, which are all in service of commenting on the truths of past and present histories.When I returned to the States, I was met with sobering truths surrounding police brutality and corruption within Chicago and other major cities. The many thousands of court cases and complaints filed against police departments, the settlements of which total more than twenty-eight million dollars in Chicago alone, speak to the endemic mental trauma and wrongful deaths at the hands of rogue police officers. Faced with this realization, I felt emboldened to say something, and that is when I decided to create Iced Bodies as an ode to those neglected bodies, and those that have now gone through to a space for all to reflect and heal. Around the same time, I discovered that Charlotte Moorman's archive had recently been acquired by Northwestern University's Special Collections Library, and that the Block Museum was in the midst of launching the largest retrospective to date of Moorman and her beautiful contribution to the fields of art and music. By a chance introduction, I was given the opportunity to meet the curators of Moorman's archive and to help organize the work around McWilliams's Ice Music for London, which provided me with ample resources to begin conceptualizing and creating Iced Bodies. From there, I enlisted the composer and sound artist, our mutual friend, Spencer Topel, as creative collaborator.And from Moorman's frozen archive came the germ of the piece? I am continuously struck by your rigorous engagement with archival sources, something I was trained to do as an art historian, but is far from universal among creators. Not that it should be, but it simply strikes me that you have a decidedly historical, or maybe even historiographic, way of working.That's very kind of you! As we studied the original work to understand where Moorman and McWilliams were trying to take Ice Music for London in 1978, we found a path to both continue its legacy and diverge from it at the same time. Conversations with McWilliams, Joan Jeanrenaud, who was the second cellist to perform Ice Music for London, and archival letters between the creative duo shed light on two things: the use of color in the ice sculpture and the attempts at amplifying its sound. From 1973 to 1978, McWilliams would request via telegram that Moorman have a colored dye added to the ice sculptures that would match the flowers she’d adorn herself with in performance. In speaking with McWilliams, there was no direct significance to the color choices other than embellishment. When I learned of this, we decided to dye the entire cello obsidian, partially because the color had yet to be used by Moorman, and also to reflect the visual of the black body on display seen through objectification, fetishization and fear mongering, with references to lynchings and the bruised, uncovered, and neglected bodies that were broadcast in the aftermath of the Ferguson protests in 2014.The other creative element that informed so much of this work was the sound. By 1978, McWilliams and Moorman attempted to amplify the decaying ice cello with minimal success. Spencer and I decided to imbed hydrophones and piezo pickups inside the cellos we’d freeze, which would both allow us to sonify the playing of the cello and broadcast sound back through it, which was informed by experiments conducted by Adrien Mamou-Mani in Paris and a collaboration with composer Patricia Alessandrini. In addition to playing the cello, I recorded a few poems by Nayyirah Waheed from her book Salt, with the hope that those words, coupled with the processed sounds of the ice cello, would give voice to those struggling with auditory hallucination and serve as a commentary on schizophrenia and those suffering from isolation and neglect.Can you share a bit more about the work itself?Iced Bodies is an interactive performance installation for cellist and electronic instrumental ice sculpture that seeks to dramatize the ephemerality of matter in phase transition. The inherent vulnerability of a melting ice sculpture—with its eventual destruction—serves as a commentary to overlooked and undocumented cases of mental disability within underrepresented populations. This work serves as an ode to these struggling minds, and bruised, tattered, and broken bodies on display. Vocal emanations from within the cello serve to bridge sociopolitical themes in this work to the introspective and personal experience of the audience. In addition to sounds captured and activated through the ice, a disembodied male voice is heard reciting poetic phrases diffused through spatialized glass sculptures. The sounds of scrapping, carving, mimetic gestures of cello playing, and stuttering fragmentation of Waheed's words serve as sonic feedback loops, evoking the isolation and neglect of voice hearers who are battling mental disorders. The audience at the end is left to revel in the visual image of freed bodies, represented by shards of ice, electronic entrails, and the sounds of an unrestrained voice liberated from the ice, symbolized by the performer clutching a sound- emitting transducer.There are many complex layers folded inside this work that make it a social experience. Two important layers highlight Moorman's ice cello legacy and her feminism, and also seek to amplify inherently silenced voices. The work sadly has an eerie sense of timeliness about it, but it also encourages those who show up to experience it to come together and unite. It has, I think, become a site of reflection and healing for a lot of people, and we are eager to bring the work to Minneapolis in January 2022.In the interval, you have been completing a major new work entitled Difficult Grace. This piece again exemplifies your substantial archival engagement with sources ranging from visual art to music and poetry—this time with a decided focus on creators of the African diaspora. I’d love to learn more about the genesis of that piece.I officially premiered that show when I was artist-in-residence with the Seattle Symphony from 2018 to 2020. That residency coincided with the opening of a new concert hall, Octave 9: Raisbeck Music Center, and I was delighted to have the chance to create a series of interactive works for myself and to program for the symphony. In retrospect, by working with all these distinctive artists I commissioned through the symphony, we birthed a very interesting world of projects run through with themes of translation, migration, and self-introspection. I’ll never forget that night. It was electric, and I felt so proud of what we had created. Sadly, that would be my last performance for a live audience for more than a year, due to the pandemic.The title of the piece is taken from a line by Dudley Randall's poem “Primitives,” which appeared in a collection of his titled Cities Burning. In the poem, Randall vividly evokes a state of unrest and poses a scenario where people are forced to destroy society in order to rebuild it more justly and more beautifully, having been faced with a society that was built to destroy lives. That act of rebuilding via revolt—all the while extending grace—is never easy, but if people can imagine the beauty that could come from it, then maybe it might be worth it. While I was creating this work with the composer Fredrick Gifford, I was also exploring the artwork of Jacob Lawrence. The panels from Lawrence's iconic The Migration Series form an important part of the visual backdrop and inspiration for the show. Difficult Grace also included the artwork of Barbara Earl Thomas, a protégé of Lawrence, with whom I’d begun working at the start of my tenure with the Seattle Symphony.The piece is informed by what I have begun calling “unabashed adornment”—pouring into oneself over and over as a means of what others call self-care. The idea that we can layer ourselves in such a beautiful way, even in the midst of uncertainty, and maybe give ourselves and those around us a moment of grace and respite.I love that concept—the kind of baroque maximalism of this piece contrasts so vividly with the austere neo-minimalism of Iced Bodies. How does Difficult Grace unfold, particularly your hybrid role at the center of the action?Within the work, I am more than a cellist. I am narrator, preacher, scared child, looking and searching. There is an immersion in speech, electronics, and live cello, with a kind of intimate spotlight that holds it all together. As a concert experience, you hear me before you see me, reciting the text from Randall, and the rest unfolds slowly over time. Shortly after the initial entrance, recorded layers of my voice and cello enter and begin to swirl around the room. As the polyphonic voices cadence, a coda begins with the luminous appearance of Barbara Earl Thomas's stunning work Grace, which is a portrait of a paperboy holding up a sign with the word “grace” strewn across it.The concert continues on a journey through pieces by the British composer Monty Adkins, which is framed around a film by Zoe McLean. That segues into music composed by Nathalie Joachim, a Haitian American composer who deeply engages with sonic ecologies, migration, and diasporic narratives. Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series panels, chosen from the split collection housed at the Museum of Modern Art and the Phillips Collection, create the backdrop for my recitation of texts drawn from the Chicago Defender, which was once the nation's most influential weekly newspaper printed by a Black publishing house. One of the most interesting discoveries that was made during the composition of Difficult Grace was that in 1915, an important change took place in terms of the self-description of journalists writing for the Defender, as “the race” suddenly replaced all other descriptors for Black people. So over and over within the work, you’ll hear me continuously speak about “the race, race woman, race farmers.” It is an incredible reclaiming of language in a way that barely existed prior to 1915. The power of reciting these words in a concert setting has impacted my psyche, and it remains a challenge to separate myself as a performer from the human on display. Something I am still considering while working on the piece is the way I position myself within this text, which still feels sobering and relevant. It's very knotty to work in this way.What's on the horizon for you? Making plans in a perpetual state of mid-Covid has begun to feel like an exercise in futility.Well, Difficult Grace is available through digital platforms, but I will presenting it for the first time in Toronto this March. It worked out quite well because there are two Canadian composers on the program, so it is kind of a homecoming for them. The larger, revamped version of Difficult Grace will premiere in November 2022 at the 92nd Street Y, and then we will begin a formal tour of the show.You know, I have struggled a lot with what the future might have in store for me. I think this pandemic has given me space to decompress from an unhealthy amount of working and creating, and it has afforded me time to extend grace to myself while I figure out what I really want and need in this moment. A partial answer to your question is that academia (in its fullest sense) probably does not need to be a part of my life right now, and that I need to fold more into the world as an independent artist. Between the academic obligations, the development of the final commissioned works in this iteration of Difficult Grace, planning a tour, and recording my upcoming album, I’m finding it hard to answer the question: “How does one be a fully present and functioning academic and also a full-fledged artist?” For now, this searching has led me to pour myself into the narratives and storytelling found in Difficult Grace. This feels like the most sound-oriented project I have done in a very long time; the source material and personal stories have directly informed a creative path for me. I continually find deeper links to my own personal and family history in bringing this work to life.Right now, I am just trying to run with it and continue telling stories of the people. I think Difficult Grace is a work for the people that is directly derived by the stories of the people—it's social art and commentary. Coming up, I am looking forward to diving into additional archives and historical bodies of work that will inform new pieces as part of an unfolding narrative—maybe trying to address the collective stories of a nation?

Collaborative Curation: Best Practices for Student Exhibits with Large Classes

As college and university special collections become more invested and successful in campus outreach, the demand for intensive instruction services, particularly student-curated exhibits, has increased. Supporting this type of experiential learning for large classes is particularly challenging. The authors of this paper suggest specific, practical steps for best practices in implementing student-curated exhibits with large classes by drawing on their experiences with four such exhibits at the University of Michigan, curated by classes ranging from twenty-five to one hundred students. Crucial elements include advance communication, collaboration across library units, the use of scaffolded instruction sessions, pre-selection of materials, and integration of assessment into the learning experience.

Inspiring a Passion for the Medieval in the Present: Student-led Activities with Manuscripts at Southeast Missouri State University

Inspiring a Passion for the Medieval in the Present:Student-led Activities with Manuscripts at Southeast Missouri State University Roxanne Dunn and Vicky McAlister The authors of this article collaborated at Southeast Missouri State University, a comprehensive, Midwestern regional university. Our goal was to engage students with the medieval period and to encourage them to draw similarities between the challenges of that period with modernity. Roxanne Dunn is an archivist and Vicky McAlister is a medieval historian. This article will demonstrate how working with medieval manuscripts in a classroom setting was able to prove the value and importance of humanities coursework while promoting and strengthening the institution's archival collections. Specifically, this paper explores how our collaboration led to the successful incorporation of medieval manuscripts into the classroom: first as "show-and-tell" class visits, then to active-learning hands-on activities, and finally to a student-led collection development activity where students were able to select medieval manuscripts and defend their reasoning for purchase. This article will provide background on the types of students we serve at Southeast and the collections held by Southeast Missouri State University's Special Collections & Archives. We will highlight how the existing collections were parlayed into the purchase of additional materials to develop an extensive teaching collection of medieval fragments and leaves. There were many successful impacts of this collaboration including the development of further experiential activities, library administrator buy-in, and additional monies being allocated to support continued growth of this teaching collection. It is the hope that some of these ideas can be used by other historians and archivists in a variety of settings to promote the importance of humanities coursework and continued collection development in this area. [End Page 113] Background Southeast Missouri State University is a comprehensive, public, regional university that attracts many first-generation college students. The campus has nearly twelve thousand students, between traditional and nontraditional students, undergraduate and graduate students, and online and in-person student learners. As a consequence, we engage with a diverse student body who come from a range of backgrounds and enter college with differing levels of preparedness. Students from the St. Louis metro region are often heard commenting that Cape Girardeau is the smallest place they have ever lived in, while for another large portion of our students coming from rural areas mainly to our south, Cape is the largest "city" they have ever lived in. Students in history classes mirror the wider student population. They tend to be motivated and flexible and respond positively to experiential learning. The Department of History and Anthropology has a reputation for incorporating hands-on learning techniques and the medieval history classes are no exception. Here we try to breach the gap between students' personal experiences and those of medieval people to encourage effective learning. Because of student background upon entering college, they can struggle with medieval history, which feels very alien and distant to them, both in terms of geography and time period. Therefore, we consistently work to improve our communication of the medieval period. One successful method has been to collaborate with Special Collections & Archives to use tangible heritage to assist with learning goals. Special Collections & Archives is within Kent Library, Southeast Missouri State's main library. It is a typical, small-to-medium academic archives that was only very recently established in 2001. Special Collections & Archives acquires, preserves, and makes accessible research materials that document the historical and cultural experience of the region of Southeast Missouri and the history of Southeast Missouri State University. While the holdings of the unit are developed in relation to instructional and research interests within the university, all holdings are available for use by visiting scholars and the public, as well as by Southeast faculty, staff, and students. Special Collections & Archives has over nine hundred processed collections in its holdings, which make up approximately 5,200 linear feet. The unit staff have also digitized and made available over ten thousand historical images and textual documents via an online platform with free public access. The unit also conducts ten to twenty "one-shot" primary sources and archival literacy instruction sessions each semester, depending on which classes are taught in...

Gold Wings and Brown Boots: The Organization of the Army ROTC at Marshall University

Gold Wings and Brown Boots:The Organization of the Army ROTC at Marshall University Nathaniel DeBruin The 1902 Marshall College catalog contains a photograph of young men in uniform standing in front of Old Main, the College's academic and administrative building. The caption reads, "Cadet Corps in front of College Hall." Other photos of student organizations and "boarding clubs" in the catalog show young men in the same uniform. A single paragraph in the Herald Advertiser relates that college president L. J. Corbly was petitioning state legislators to form a corps of cadets at the college.1 In the May 1902 edition of the Parthenon, the college student newspaper, another few sentences relate the arrival of the cadets' uniforms and the fact that one of the colleges' female boarding clubs enjoyed coming to campus to watch the "boys drill.'"2 One last mention is made of the corps of cadets greeting the train to welcome the winning Marshall College baseball team on May 31, 1902.3 And that is where the story ends – as suddenly as it appears, the corps vanishes. No further mention is found in the local or student newspapers after 1902, and the college catalogs after 1902 contain no mention or photographs of the corps or students in uniform. In 1934, Marshall College had another brief interaction with the military when the opportunity arose to host an Army Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) unit. Support for the unit was found among the student body; but the faculty was opposed, and the opportunity for a unit was lost. The Civilian Pilot Training Act of 1939 designated federal funds to create a Civilian Pilot Training Program (CPTP), which emulated the civilian pilot training programs in European countries. Marshall was selected to participate in the CPTP; the program included classroom instruction in aeronautics on campus and flight instruction at the Chesapeake (Ohio) Airport.4 It was not until 1943, when the US Army Air Force selected colleges and universities across the United States to provide academic training for aviation [End Page 1] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Marshall Catalog, 1902 (Marshall University Special Collections) cadets, that Marshall College and the military would finally come together. In February 1943, after meeting the criteria to host a unit, Marshall College was selected to become the home of the 47th College Training Detachment (CTD) (Aircrew). The 47th CTD became an integral part of the campus and the Huntington community until it was disbanded in April 1944. In 1950, Marshall applied for and was selected to host an official Army ROTC unit, and the Thundering Herd Battalion was created in September 1951. The desire for a military presence on the college's campus prior to World War II was mixed. However, as the United States moved toward entering the global conflict, Marshall actively sought and accepted an Army Air Force unit during the war. These changing attitudes toward education and the experiences of veterans returning to campus, both students and faculty, were instrumental in creating an atmosphere of increasing acceptance of the military that was absent prior to World War II. This presence of the armed forces on campus during the war and the changing attitudes toward veterans by faculty and other students contributed to the creation of an ROTC unit on Marshall's campus. The Early Years At the founding of the United States, it was a widely shared belief among the framers of the Constitution that "standing armies in time of peace are [End Page 2] inconsistent with the principles of republican government, dangerous to the liberties of a free people, and generally converted into destructive engines for establishing despotism."5 The result of this sentiment was a recurring cycle of expanding the military during times of crisis, and then just as quickly dismantling it when the threat or conflict had ceased. The Civil War made it apparent that the US Military Academy was not capable of meeting the demand for the large number of officers needed for a protracted conflict; thus a new method of training officers was needed.6 The debate over public funding of colleges and universities had also been ongoing prior to the...

Contributors’ Notes

Tymon Adamczewski is assistant professor at the Department of Anglophone Literatures of Kazimierz Wielki University in Bydgoszcz, Poland, where he teaches literary and cultural studies. He is the author of Following the Textual Revolution: The Standardization of Radical Critical Theories of the 1960s (McFarland 2016) and of several articles (in AVANT, Image [&] Narrative, NJES, Theoretical Practice, among others) which address diverse aspects of critical theories in various contexts. He has recently edited a monograph titled All Along Bob Dylan: America and the World (Routledge 2020) and is interested in the critical discourses of contemporary humanities, music and ecocriticism.Christine Bacareza Balance is Associate Professor of Performing & Media Arts and Asian American Studies, and core faculty in the Southeast Asia Program (SEAP) at Cornell University. Her writings on former Philippine First Lady Imelda Marcos, Asian American YouTube artists, Bruno Mars, Glee’s karaoke aesthetics, and spree killer Andrew Cunanan have been published in various journals. Balance is the author of Tropical Renditions: Making Musical Scenes in Filipino America (Duke University Press, 2016) and currently is working on a book titled Making Sense of Martial Law that analyzes the 21-year dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos and how U.S.- and Philippines-based performances and events critique the “Marcosian imaginary.” With Lucy San Pablo Burns (UCLA), she co-edited the recently published artist-scholar collection, California Dreaming: Movement & Place in the Asian American Imaginary (University of Hawai’i Press, 2020).Erin Bauer is assistant professor of musicology at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. Her research examines the construction of sociocultural identity through systems of globalization. In particular, she explores the interconnection between genre and identity as a contemporary implication of global processes (media/migration, hybridization, and appropriation). Her current book project addresses the worldwide spread of Texas-Mexican accordion music, called conjunto, a regional tradition historically forming a symbol of working-class cultural identity. Her writing appears in Rock Music Studies, several essay collections, the Latin American Music Review, and Latino Studies. Bauer holds a Ph.D. in musicology from Claremont Graduate University.Sophie A. Brady is a Ph.D. candidate in musicology at Princeton University. Her scholarly interests include music and decolonization, twentieth-century experimental composition, global popular music, and the history of sound reproduction technology. Her dissertation examines the history of the musical avant-garde outside of Europe and North America, focusing on experimentation and recording at Radio Dakar and other Francophone African radio stations in the second half of the twentieth century.Zack Bresler is a Ph.D. Fellow in the Department of Popular Music at the University of Agder, Norway, supervised by Professor Stan Hawkins. Motivated by an obsession with immersive and interactive media, such as surround and 3D sound, virtual reality, and interactive art, Bresler is a popular musicologist whose research focuses primarily on pop music as it is presented in audio-visual new media with an eye towards the aesthetics of music productions, compositional design, listener experience, and staging.Steacy Easton is a writer and visual artist, living in Hamilton, Ontario. They have been published across North America, in commercial and academic spaces, about what Country means, for the past 15 years.Julia Ehmann is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Hamburg and holds a scholarship from the German Research Foundation. Her research interests include the study of popular music histories, cultural heritage, as well as issues in fandom and reception studies.Natalie Farrell is a Ph.D. student in music history/theory at the University of Chicago. Her work has been published in Music and Letters, The Journal of Popular Music Studies, and The Flutist Quarterly. Her research on neoliberal trauma and musicians’ unions has been funded by grants from the Mellon Foundation and the Eastman School of Music’s Paul R. Judy Center for Innovation and Research. Her other research interests include Northern Irish prison music, affect theory, and popular music. In her free time, she likes to knit and spend time with her dog (who is named after Leonard Bernstein).Kate Galloway is a faculty member at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where she teaches in the Electronic Arts, Music, Games and Simulation Arts, and Sciences/Critical Game Design programs. Her research and teaching address sonic responses to environmentalism, sound studies, digital culture, sound art, and interactive media.Eric Harvey is an associate professor in the School of Communications at Grand Valley State University. His book Who Got the Camera? A History of Rap and Reality will be published by the University of Texas Press in October 2021. His scholarship has appeared in Black Camera, The International Journal of Cultural Studies, Cultural Industries Journal, and Convergence; and he has also written about music, media, and culture for Pitchfork, Slate, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, the Atlantic, the New Republic, and The Village Voice.Antoine Haywood is a doctoral student and Presidential Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication. A scholar of media, Antoine’s research focuses on understanding the contemporary relevance of public, educational, and governmental (PEG) access media. Using ethnographic methods and drawing on his 15 years of experience working in community media, he evaluates how local governments, nonprofit organizations, and citizens use geographically defined communication infrastructures to enhance civic participation, democratic communication, collective learning, and care. Haywood’s current projects focus on understanding how social impact occurs when Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities in Philadelphia use community-based info hubs to access digital platforms and tell stories about local issues. He is also a musician, vinyl record collector, video maker, and a proud native of Palm Beach County, Florida.Stephanie Hernandez is a Ph.D. student of English literature and music at the University of Liverpool. Using an interdisciplinary approach, she is researching the echoes of Romanticism in the popular music of the 1960s and 1970s. While completing her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in English literature, she worked at both The Beatles Story and Handel & Hendrix in London, which fostered her interest in the cultural legacy of historically musical spaces. Stephanie is also a music journalist, whose recent publications include Ultimate Classic Rock, Warner Music UK, Rhino Entertainment, and others.Kristina Jacobsen is an ethnographer, singer-songwriter and cultural anthropologist. An associate professor of ethnomusicology and anthropology (ethnology) at the University of New Mexico and a faculty affiliate in American studies, her research focuses on language reclamation, expressive culture, popular music, and arts-based research methodologies. Her first book, The Sound of Navajo Country: Music, Language and Diné Belonging (UNC Press, 2017), is based on two and one-half years of singing and playing lapsteel guitar with Navajo (Diné) country western bands on the Navajo Nation and was the winner of the 2018 IASPM-US Woody Guthrie Award for Outstanding Book on Popular Music. Jacobsen is a touring singer-songwriter, fronts the all-female honky-tonk band Merlettes, and is the founder and co-facilitator of the UNM Honky-Tonk Ensemble. Supported by the US-Italy Fulbright Commission and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, she recently completed one year of ethnographic fieldwork on the Mediterranean island of Sardinia for the book project, “Sing Me Back Home: Ethnographic Songwriting and Language Reclamation in Sardinia, Italy.” While in Sardinia, she also recorded an album (her fourth) of original songs collaboratively written with Sardinian songwriters and language activists, House on Swallow Street (released in spring 2021) with the Sardinian label, Talk About Records.Vincent Jenewein is graduate student in philosophy at Freie Universität Berlin. He is also a music journalist and a DJ/producer of electronic dance music.Steve Jones is UIC distinguished professor of communication, research associate in the UIC Electronic Visualization Laboratory and adjunct professor of computer science at the University of Illinois—Chicago, as well as adjunct research professor in the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was founding editor in 1987 of Tracking: Popular Music Studies, later renamed The Journal of Popular Music Studies. He is currently editor of New Media & Society, an international journal of research on new media, technology, and culture, and co-editor of Mobile Media & Communication, a peer-reviewed forum for international, interdisciplinary academic research on the dynamic field of mobile media and communication.Maria Kouvarou holds a Ph.D. in music from Durham University. Her research interests include popular music and society and critical theory, among others. As independent researcher she has published articles in Popular Music and Society, Historia Critica and Popular Music. She is also a creative writer and a performer.Jonathan Leal is a scholar-musician and post-doctoral fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities (and in Fall 2022, assistant professor of English) at the University of Southern California. He is the co-creator of Wild Tongue, an album of original music by nine Latinx bands from South Texas, and Futuro Conjunto, a Chicanx transmedia album named one of the best Latinx music releases of 2020 by Pitchfork, Texas Highways, and Raymus Media magazines. His arts and culture writing has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, Air/Light Magazine, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, The San Francisco Classical Voice, and elsewhere. He is currently completing his first book, Dreams in Double Time, on music, race, and interiority.John Macintosh is a lecturer in English at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he completed his Ph.D. in 2019.Kimberly Mack is an associate professor of African American literature and culture at the University of Toledo. She’s the author of Fictional Blues: Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack White (University of Massachusetts Press, 2020). Mack is writing her second book, The Untold History of Early American Rock Criticism (under contract with Bloomsbury Academic), about the Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, and white women who helped develop American rock criticism and journalism during the 1960s and 1970s. She has contributed her work to various music publications, including Music Connection, Relix, No Depression, PopMatters, and Hot Press.Andrew Mall is an avid record collector and associate professor of music at Northeastern University in Boston, where he teaches courses in ethnomusicology, popular music, and music industry studies. He is the author of God Rock, Inc.: The Business of Niche Music (University of California Press, 2021) and co-editor of Studying Congregational Music: Key Issues, Methods, and Theoretical Perspectives (Routledge, 2021). He is also book review co-editor of the journal Ethnomusicology, and vice president of IASPM-US.Jennifer Messelink is a Ph.D. candidate in musicology at McGill University. Her research focuses on race and gender in postwar easy-listening music. In particular, she examines generic formations, stylistic differences, and the historical significance of mood music and exotica—distinct types of popular instrumental music of the 1950s. Her research is supported by the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada.José Vicente Neglia is a lecturer in the Department of Music at the University of Hong Kong. An ethnomusicologist by training, his current research concerns the politics of memory in popular music, for which he has conducted extensive research in Japan and North America on a genre of rock called garage rock. He is currently working on a project funded by the Research Grants Council (RGC) of Hong Kong on reissue recordings as a distinct form of media in rock music.Ryan H. Nelson is clinical ethics fellow at Baylor College of Medicine. He completed his Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Utah in 2019.Matthew T. Phillips is a writer and artist based in Melbourne Australia. He has completed a Ph.D. in anthropology at Deakin University. He writes about the intersections of music, technology and consciousness.Elliott H. Powell is Beverly and Richard Fink Professor in Liberal Arts and associate professor of American studies and Asian American studies at the University of Minnesota. His work sits at the intersections of race, sexuality, and popular music. He is the author of Sounds from the Other Side: Afro-South Asian Collaborations in Black Popular Music (University of Minnesota Press, 2020). His work can also be found in many journals and edited volume, such as GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, The Routledge History of American Sexuality, Jazz Research Journal, and The Black Scholar.Emmett G. Price III is executive editor of the Encyclopedia of African American Music (Greenwood, 2010) and editor of The Black Church and Hip Hop Culture: Toward Bridging the Generational Divide (Scarecrow, 2011). He Dean of Africana Studies at Berklee College of Music and is the founding executive director of the Institute for the Study of the Black Christian Experience (ISBCE).Francisco E. Robles is an assistant professor of English, Latino studies, and gender studies at the University of Notre Dame. His work appears in Latino Studies; MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States; Post45: Peer Reviewed; Post45: Contemporaries; ASAP/J; sxsalon; Killing the Buddha; and in Decolonizing Latinx Masculinities (University of Arizona Press, 2020).Jonathan Sterne teaches in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. He is author of Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment (Duke, 2021); MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Duke 2012), The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Duke, 2003); and numerous articles on media, technologies and the politics of culture. He is also editor of The Sound Studies Reader (Routledge, 2012) and co-editor of The Participatory Condition in the Digital Age (Minnesota, 2016). With co-author Mara Mills, he is working on Tuning Time: Histories of Sound and Speed. He also has a new project cooking on artificial intelligence and culture. Visit his website at http://sterneworks.org.Marco Swiniartzki is associated lecturer at the professorship for Western European History, Institute for History, Friedrich Schiller University of Jena. He has written the book The German Metalworker’s Union 1891-1933 (2017; translation) and many articles exploring the history of work, workers, industry and capitalism in Germany and Europe. Currently he works on his project Glocal Metal. Metal Communities in International Comparison and Transfer (1978-1995), supported by the Gerda Henkel foundation. In 2021/22 he will become fellow of the Historisches Kolleg, Institute for Advanced Study in History, in Munich. He was executive secretary of the Historical Commission for Thuringia, worked as an editor and reader, and has organized the thematic year 2018 about social movements for the Free State of Thuringia.Karen Tongson is the author of Why Karen Carpenter Matters (2019), and Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries (2011). In 2019, she received Lambda Literary’s Jeanne Córdova Award for Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction for her body of work to date. She is chair and professor of gender and sexuality studies at USC. Her contributions have appeared in NPR, LARB (Los Angeles Review of Books), The Los Angeles Times, The AV Club, Entertainment Weekly, L.A. Weekly, BuzzFeed Reader, Süddeutsche Zeitung and Public Books, among other public and scholarly venues. She co-hosts and executive produces the podcasts Waiting to X-Hale with Wynter Mitchell-Rohrbaugh, and the limited series, The Gaymazing Race with Nicole J. Georges.Mikkel Vad is a musicologist, specializing in jazz and popular music history. He is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota, where he is wrapping up a dissertation titled April in Paris, Autumn in New York: European Jazz in the US, 1945-1970s. He teaches problem-based courses on historiography, cultural theory, and sound, where students learn to think critically about music across genres, time periods, and cultures. His research and publications revolve around the themes of history (especially reception history and historiography), space and place (especially cultural geography and transnational music), technology and media (especially theory and analysis of the recording), and race and ethnicity (especially whiteness studies).Melissa A. Weber is a writer, researcher, and educator whose areas of interest include twentieth-century Black popular music, New Orleans music, and histories of hip hop and Washington D.C. go-go. She currently teaches history of urban music at Loyola University New Orleans and serves as curator of the Hogan Archive of New Orleans Music and New Orleans Jazz with Tulane University Special Collections. She has written for Red Bull Music Academy, Wax Poetics, and liner notes projects for labels such as Vinyl Me, Please; and has presented papers at Pop Conference and annual meetings for IASPM; the National Council for Black Studies; the Society for Ethnomusicology, Southeast and Caribbean Chapter; and the Dayton Funk Symposium at University of Dayton. Weber continues to host her Soul Power radio show at WWOZ FM New Orleans, as she has for the past 25 years.Eric Weisbard is professor of American studies at the University of Alabama and co-editor of The Journal of Popular Music Studies. His books include Songbooks: The Literature of American Popular Music; Top 40 Democracy: The Rival Mainstreams of American Music; and Use Your Illusion I and II (2007) in the 33 and 1/3 series. He organized the Pop Conference from its inception in 2002 through 2018, editing three books of conference writing: This Is Pop, Listen Again, and Pop When the World Falls Apart. Before that, he was a rock critic: music editor of the Village Voice, record reviews editor for Spin, editor of the Spin Alternative Record Guide, and a writer for Spin, the Voice, and other alt-weeklies—some of that work is collected on Rock’s Backpages.Clinton Bryce Williamson is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature. His dissertation, Nebulous Figures: A Cultural History of an American Riotocracy, 1848-1929, explores the ways in which a so-called lumpenproletariat crafted refusals to work as strategies for restaging value and assembling improvisatory commons in America during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Assembling a broad, multi-genre cultural archive, it argues that representations of and from those living on the margins of the wage modeled potential worlds rooted in wage labor’s absence.

Review Essay: Kent State at Fifty

The grassy hill sat empty and an eerie silence hung over the grounds. Every year for the past half-century, hundreds had gathered in mourning and commemoration, speaking the names of those who had died or suffered wounds. In these remembrances often rang a call to action, to continue the struggle for a better world. However, this day, those voices did not echo through the campus or roar through the crowds. This year, despite all the planning, logistics, and anticipation, a global pandemic had made public gatherings dangerous and forced the commemoration to move online and in this virtual world Kent State remembered and the world remembered Kent State.It should come as little surprise that in the fiftieth year of commemoration several new books on Kent State and the tragedy of May 1970 would appear. Susan Erenrich's The Cost of Freedom, James A. Tyner and Mindy Farmer's Cambodia and Kent State, and Howard Ruffner's Moments of Truth add new perspectives and interpretations that help to flesh out a sprawling historiography. With so much written about May 4, it seems fair to wonder what new questions can be asked, what new lessons can be learned, and what is left to reflect upon that we have not ruminated on before? The works contributed here shed new, different, and compelling lights on the story of Kent State, the Vietnam War, and the tragedy of spring 1970 that both scholars and the casual reader will find worthwhile.In 2015 a PBS special declared May 4, 1970, as “The Day the 60's Died.”1 For many in the baby boom generation, this was the day “the war came home,” and the tumult of the preceding half-decade reached its apex. Assuredly, antiwar protest did not end that spring day in Kent, Ohio. We tend to see moments such as this as break points in history, dividing time into “pre-event” and “post-event” constructions. In doing so, they create a false sense of definition that serves to frame later understandings. The tragic events whereby members of the Ohio National Guard fired sixty-seven shots in thirteen seconds on student protesters at Kent State in May 1970 did not end one era and usher in a new; they serve as a bridge between times drifting apart from each other.Sixties student activism was multifaceted and cross-causal in its construction and actions. Attempting to talk about student antiwar activism without linking it to the struggle to end in loco parentis or various forms of discrimination (both on and beyond campus) fails to acknowledge the breadth and depth of student engagement. Most of the earliest scholarship on Sixties student activism came from participant narratives, especially from the white, male, middle-class students who populated New Left organizations at elite universities and focused on individuals like themselves. The memoirs of Todd Gitlin and Tom Hayden, former leaders of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)—the quintessential New Left student organization of the 1960s—reinforced this basic narrative of an explosive, radical Sixties.2 As scholars pushed beyond these limiting frameworks, they sought to incorporate new actors and new locales, finding that students around the nation engaged in a wide range of activism. Kenneth Heineman's Campus Wars (1992) serves as model for many of the studies that came after, as he shifted the historic gaze toward non-elite state universities (including Kent State) and demonstrated that the lived experiences of millions of Sixties college students may have differed from those at UC, Berkeley, and Columbia but they were not bystanders to the tumult of the day.3Heineman's Campus Wars also stood at the crossroads of scholarship on the events of Kent State. Campus Wars connects the accounts written by participants and contemporaries with those works created by historical scholars. Several books appeared very quickly after the events of May 1970, offering ways of framing and understanding what had happened. They served to focus the shock, anger, and despair of the moment toward action—either in the sense of ending the war or punishing those responsible for the events that day.4 Scott Bills's Kent State/May 4: Echoes through a Decade, though published in 1982, still carried the primacy of participant voices like the texts from the immediate aftermath. Bills had been an active student demonstrator at West Virginia University and had been part of the Morgantown 7—a group accused of organizing a protest to destroy school property in the wake of the Kent State killings. Bills went to Kent State as a graduate student and his book is as much a reflection of his own activist spirit as an attempt at historical contextualization. Thomas Grace's Kent State: Death and Dissent in the Long Sixties (2016) serves to link Kent State's tragedy to the wider historiography of student antiwar activism. While he was a wounded survivor of that day, Grace's monograph offers a degree of academic detachment and analysis that many of the more personal accounts dominating the scholarship have lacked. Rather than tell his truth in a memoir, Grace used the tools of a professional historian to contextualize the tragedy and help his reader better understand how it fits within this period of protest and social unrest.Even as Heineman's work served to move the event from memory to history, oral history served as the central pivot point for the bulk of the scholarship. Scholars in recent years have benefited greatly from the wealth of sources available through Kent State University's May 4 Collection within the university's Special Collections and Archives, the Kent State Shootings Oral History Project, and the very active May 4th Task Force composed of survivors and supporters. Recently, Craig Simpson and Gregory Wilson's Above the Shots: An Oral History of the Kent State Shootings (2016) has mined these resources as well as adding to them to gain a deeper insight into the events of that day. Their work draws together the memories of that day with the analytical tools of academic historians to produce an excellent example of the power of oral history as a method of historical scholarship. Further, their book explores the creation of Kent State commemorative efforts, connecting the history of the events with their memory.If the stories and memories of the event are the key factor in how scholars write its history, the central questions that organize much of the historiography are: what happened and why? This was the directive at the heart of the President's Commission on Campus Unrest, which published its conclusions in a report only a few months after the tragedy. Despite its flaws, the report offers scholars a thorough starting point to retrace the events of early May 1970 in Kent. It remains essential reading for anyone who wants to understand this moment, although it is incomplete without the vast scholarship that has grown up over the past five decades. A handful of later books attempted to fill in the gaps of the report or offer competing theories, sometimes exonerating but most often geared toward asserting blame for the shootings squarely on the shoulders of the Ohio National Guard.5As Simpson and Wilson have shown, if one stops with the actions on May 4, 1970, one gets only a limited view of the importance of this event. The commemorations, which began in 1971, represent an important part of the Kent State story and scholars should not overlook them when attempting to wrestle with and contextualize the tragedy. Through yearly observances, both public and private, the memory of May 4 continues to grow. Maggie Anderson and Alex Gildzen edited an anthology of commemorative poetry, A Gathering of Poets (1992), which anticipated in some ways the collection put together by Susan Erenrich. Another way in which people have commemorated, analyzed, and attempted to make sense out of the 1970 tragedy is David Hassler's May 4th Voices (2010), a play written using the Kent State Shootings Oral History Project and exploring the lived experience of May 4 and its aftermath. Fifty years after the shooting stopped, people still return to that same hill, walk the same grounds, and try to find meaning and purpose.Howard Ruffner's Moments of Truth: A Photographer's Experience of Kent State 1970 does not offer any new or pathbreaking interpretations of the events of early May 1970; however, his images offer an eyewitness view of the tragedy. Ruffner's photographs, many never published before, help provide visual context for the growing number of scholarly works that seek to explore the many unanswered questions surrounding the events of May 4, 1970. Through Ruffner's work, readers gain a sense of his view of the days leading up to the shootings and the immediate aftermath. Ruffner situates the images among a narrative retelling of his experiences, offering up his recollections and memories. In all, the book is a highly personal memoir of an individual reflecting on his connection to a moment that touched the lives of a generation. His story is one of hundreds from that day and offers readers a unique perspective. However, the work's single most important contribution is without question the images.Ruffner provides over 150 images, the majority of which deal with the events in and around May 4, 1970, at Kent State University. Ruffner had secured a National Guard press pass and worked both as a photographer for the Daily Kent Stater and a stringer for Life magazine. The President's Commission on Campus Unrest used some of his images in their investigation into the shootings at Kent State as well as in two different civil trials brought by survivors and family members against the Ohio National Guard. The images are powerful and provocative. They transport viewers into those chaotic moments as Guardsmen advanced on the students, fired, and the aftermath as individuals lay dead and bleeding. The images evoke a strong emotional response, even from those who are not members of this generation. They capture and document the experience of those moments with such abruptness and clarity that viewers feel themselves a part of that moment, not simply viewing it from beyond.James Tyner and Mindy Farmer set out an ambitious project in Cambodia and Kent State: In the Aftermath of Nixon's Expansion of the Vietnam War. They want to have people recognize the connections between events at Kent State in May 1970 and those in Cambodia. The concept of this book is phenomenal: a globalized context of the Kent State shootings. The authors' contention that many Americans do not have strong grounding in what happened in Cambodia before or after America's invasion seems warranted. Furthermore, linking discussions of how America remembers this moment—through the tragedy at Kent State—and Cambodian memory construction is a fascinating juxtaposition. However, the execution here misses the mark substantially and never fully delivers on the thought-provoking ideas it initiates. The faults of this book arise from one central flaw that the authors do not address: why is it so short?Cambodia and Kent State is roughly sixty pages of text, which severely limits detailed discussions of the book's key ideas. While brevity can be good and can help hold the attention of a general reader, there is simply too much left out of this narrative. Many questions go unanswered, thoughts not followed to logical conclusions, and details missing about events in Kent, the antiwar movement more broadly, as well as about Cambodia and the tragedies they faced. Stronger use of explanatory footnotes would significantly improve the quality of this text.The ultimate result is a book that does not help specialists in any particular field and is of limited use to a general audience. The discussion of Sixties activism, drawing on none of the vast amounts of scholarship on the topic, not only does not offer new understandings, it also does not effectively relate existing understandings. A general reader attempting to figure out what happened in the Cambodian genocide must seek out random passages and footnotes and stitch together the narrative for themselves, as the authors offer no coherent singular narrative.The authors argue that the Cambodians failed to achieve reconciliation through their memory construction; however, they never really demonstrate how American efforts at memorializing the May 4 shootings have generated reconciliation. There is still a great deal of debate and antagonistic sentiment regarding the events of May 4; reconciliation has been, at best, incomplete. Yet, the authors do not dwell on this, rather, they focus on the political nature of Cambodian memory construction. They lament the commercialized nature of the Choeung Ek site (that represents one of the “killing fields” of the Khmer Rouge) without even a hint of the commercialization of American historical sites. Furthermore, there is absolutely no mention of the politicized nature of America's Civil War history in its many Confederate monuments and statues; rather, they leave the reader with the impression that America does not politicize its history.This book has great potential, yet the authors squander much of it. Restructuring the text and expanding its page count would greatly improve this work as it would afford space in which to develop the authors' ideas more thoroughly. Rather than three chapters with various subsections, they could make each subsection a chapter and flesh them out with additional details, analysis, and sources. The structure and length of this book make it very difficult to achieve what is a much-needed component of America's discussion of the Vietnam War era: actively linking the domestic with the global.In The Cost of Freedom: Voicing a Movement after Kent State 1970, Susan Erenrich brings together a wide panoply of different cultural products that demonstrate the ways in which people have attempted to wrestle with the realities of the Kent State tragedy. The volume contains stories, images, poems, songs, memories, and so much more. It is alive with the voices of those directly and indirectly affected by the bloodshed and carnage. In some of the passages and images, readers gain a sense of the agony and pain so many survivors and family members walk through each day carrying with them. In others, there is a calmness, a feeling of resolution, or a near-cathartic expression of one's journey to find peace. Other works on the Kent State tragedy have lifted up the voices of those there that day, such as Simpson and Wilson's Above the Shots, which also focused attention on the commemorative aspects, yet Erenrich's volume makes this its central theme. Through Erenrich's edited volume readers gain access to a wider set of voices that carry us beyond the moment of chaos and into the long moments after the shooting has ended and people are left to deal with its impact.Erenrich entered Kent State in 1975 and joined the May 4th Task Force while still a student. One of the Task Force's central goals is to commemorate the events of May 4, 1970, the people who died, and the lives shattered that day. Through her years with the Task Force, Erenrich forged connections with many people who were attempting to address their trauma and grieve through creative means. By collecting several of these constructions together in a single volume, she demonstrates that there is no “right” way to process tragedy and that through commemoration comes peace and renewed purpose. Many of the pieces in this collection leave the reader/viewer with a sense of mission to continue to struggle for justice and a better society. It is a powerful anthology for those interested in social justice and peace studies, while also demonstrating to all the power of memory and for historians a reminder that the aftermath of an event can be as important, thought-provoking, and worthy of study as the event itself. As time pulls us further away, the commemorative efforts such as those provided in The Cost of Freedom keep us tethered, able to connect our past and present.Together, these three texts highlight the benefits and issues that come from memory. Tyner and Farmer offer up a reminder that as long as the collective memory focuses on the tragic deaths of four (white) students in America's heartland it misses a significant portion of the story surrounding the Cambodian Invasion. They demand of us to remember that local and national events exist within an international context, that we cannot separate the deaths in Ohio from the deaths in Cambodia. Furthermore, they demonstrate the political usage of memory construction and how quickly individuals can manipulate (or commercialize) an event and its memory.Erenrich's collection and Ruffner's memoir demonstrate the many ways that individuals construct memories. Their works raise an interesting question about commemorations in general, as to whether they are cathartic, allowing one to come to terms with past trauma, or whether such actions keep the trauma present and prevent healing by locking people into reliving those moments repeatedly. These two volumes also provide researchers with a wealth of sources, voices, and ideas that can help to flesh out the existing narratives as well as point to new questions for research.Moments of Truth offers up some of the clearest examples of the potential problems with memoirs. It seems that Ruffner did not keep a diary or journal during May 1970 or in subsequent months or years. His photographs serve as a visual diary of sorts; however, as Ruffner describes the photos, the events, and his views it is hard to tell whether these memories represent what he was thinking at the time or based upon his years of reflection. Ruffner became one of the chief witnesses in the civil trials against the National Guardsmen who fired on the students. He tells his readers quite clearly that he believes the justice system should hold them responsible for their actions that day. Furthermore, he tells his readers that he has studied his images, contemplating them and their meaning for many years because of his participation in these trials. As a result, how much have his later views influenced his memories of May 1970? Obviously, the photographs themselves represent what he thought was worthy of capturing in the moment and as the individual curating the images that appear in the text, Ruffner controls the editorial construction thoroughly. Thus, we are left with the realization that memoirs are not histories, but intentionally constructed reflections.“Inquire. Learn. Reflect.” These words appear engraved in the stone walls that make up the May 4 memorial outside of Taylor Hall on the Kent State University campus. The memorial calls on visitors to remember what happened and find whatever meaning they can in the tragic and chaotic events of spring 1970. Over the years, participants have recounted their lived experiences while scholars have written a growing litany of articles, chapters, and monographs attempting to wrap our collective arms around those brief moments when, for many, the Vietnam War came home. The works of Erenrich, Ruffner, and Tyner and Farmer have expanded the existing scholarship, yet there are still many more voices calling out.

Special Collections as a catalyst for flexible pedagogical approaches: three case studies

University Special Collections are increasingly being recognised as a valuable pedagogical resource in higher education teaching and learning. The value of historic artefacts as a cross-disciplinary tool to promote higher order thinking processes such as criticality, questioning and narrative construction is well-established in the museum education literature and is gaining increasing attention in teaching and learning development. In this paper, we present three case studies in which we explore the application of Special Collections in a range of learning development contexts, in order to help students engage with their discipline and discipline-specific higher order skills. Our case studies are explorative in the sense of ‘trialling’ the use of historic artefacts in the classroom, to inform our next steps and development of our method. We conclude with our reflections on the process and outcomes of our explorations, to inform our practice and that of other educators looking to apply this method.

A Constructivist Approach to Using University Special Collections to Explore Legal Principles

Journal of Legal Studies EducationVolume 36, Issue 1 p. 5-30 Article A Constructivist Approach to Using University Special Collections to Explore Legal Principles Julie Furr Youngman, Julie Furr Youngman youngmanj@wlu.edu Assistant Professor of Business Law at Washington and Lee University and Adjunct Professor of Law at W&L School of Law. I thank Tom Camden, Associate Professor and Head of Special Collections and Archives at W&L, and his staff for their invaluable help in curating and implementing the exercise described herein.Search for more papers by this author Julie Furr Youngman, Julie Furr Youngman youngmanj@wlu.edu Assistant Professor of Business Law at Washington and Lee University and Adjunct Professor of Law at W&L School of Law. I thank Tom Camden, Associate Professor and Head of Special Collections and Archives at W&L, and his staff for their invaluable help in curating and implementing the exercise described herein.Search for more papers by this author First published: 20 February 2019 https://doi.org/10.1111/jlse.12082Citations: 1 Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume36, Issue1Winter 2019Pages 5-30 RelatedInformation

AV Archaeology: Excavating Film in University Special Collections

AV Archaeology: Excavating Film in University Special Collections

Guest Editor's Foreword: Archives and Pedagogy

Guest Editor’s Foreword: Archives and Pedagogy Alice Lovejoy (bio) This issue’s special focus on archives and pedagogy responds to a series of recent, intersecting developments in the fields of film and media studies and film and media archiving, among them the expansion of graduate programs in moving image preservation and archiving, the central role of archives to film and media history’s increasingly broad media and historical purview, the current interest in bringing production of various kinds into the “studies” classroom, and the growth of digitized collections. All of this has presented pedagogical opportunities: ways for archivists and scholars to collaborate, for scholars to reconceive how archival materials enter the classroom, and for students to engage with media and its histories. The importance of these opportunities is evident in the attention they have received in recent years, in, among other publications, Kate Fortmueller and Laura Isabel Serna’s Journal of Cinema and Media Studies Teaching Dossier “Teaching with Primary Sources: Media Studies and the Archive.”1 Similarly, the articles collected here present case studies of recent pedagogical experiments that bring archivists and archives into the classroom and turn archives into classrooms— not just for undergraduate students but also for those at the K–12 and graduate levels. K–12 education is at the heart of the first feature, Vincent Longo’s “Model Archives: Pedagogy’s Role in Creating Diverse, Multidisciplinary, Archival Users.” Critiquing the notion that digitization automatically results in expanded access to archival materials and greater diversity among users, Longo argues that pedagogy is an essential first step to broadening access. He does so through the cases of two digital archival projects carried out in the Orson Welles Collections at the University of Michigan Special [End Page x] Collections Research Center: one for K–12 educators and students, focusing on the War of the Worlds broadcast, and one for university users, focusing on Welles’s planned adaptation of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Colin Williamson, in his feature “ ‘Pagan Constellations in the Sky’: (Re)Animating Muybridge in the Film History Classroom,” examines the complex question of how to teach the history of early cinema to undergraduates inclined to see the material as “primitive,” surpassed by contemporary media in quality and sophistication. Over the course of a semester, Williamson approached this question by directly integrating digital media and media production into curriculum on early cinema. Taking cues from Andreas Fickers’s and Annie van den Oever’s experimental media archaeology, he devised ways to help twenty-first-century students understand not only the cinema of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but also, in his words, “what the archival remains of early cinema and proto-cinematic visual culture can teach us about our digital moment.” Experimental media archaeology is also central to Bregt Lameris and Barbara Flueckiger’s “Teaching the Materiality of Film,” which describes the authors’ course on analog film, taught at the University of Zurich’s Department of Film Studies in collaboration with the Lichtspiel/Kinemathek in Bern. Teaching students directly in the Lichtspiel/Kinemathek— an institution that foregrounds analog film and its technologies— Lameris and Flueckiger brought them into contact with, among other things, film chemistry, film color, and film laboratories, focusing throughout on the senses: “touching, smelling, and hearing the technologies that form part of our cinema heritage.” In “AV Archaeology: Excavating Film in University Special Collections,” Trent S. Purdy and Jennifer L. Jenkins describe another collaboration between film scholars and archivists, this time in the authors’ media archaeology course at the University of Arizona, which gave graduate students the opportunity to work closely with Arizona’s 16mm nontheatrical collections. Challenging the typical model of archival–scholarly collaborations, in which an archivist might spend only a single class session working with film history students, Purdy served as the course’s “embedded archivist,” allowing students not just to learn research methods and study topics in film, media, and local history but also to gain skills in handling, understanding, and categorizing media objects. Philip Hallman and Matthew Solomon’s course Authorship and the Archive: Exploring the Film, Theater, and TV Collections of the U of M Special Collections Library is also a semester-long collaboration...

Deep in the Piney Woods: Southeastern Alabama from Statehood to the Civil War, 1800-1865 by Tommy Craig Brown

Reviewed by: Deep in the Piney Woods: Southeastern Alabama from Statehood to the Civil War, 1800-1865 by Tommy Craig Brown Martin T. Olliff Deep in the Piney Woods: Southeastern Alabama from Statehood to the Civil War, 1800-1865. By Tommy Craig Brown. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2018. xv, 245 pp. $39.95. ISBN 978-0-8173-1997-7. Because so few scholars have studied the southeastern corner of Alabama, Deep in the Piney Woods is a very welcome addition to that scant literature. Tommy Brown, archivist at the Auburn University Special Collections and Archives Department, expanded his 2014 Auburn dissertation into this book, building it around white settlement, secession politics, and local prosecution of the Civil War. Within these parameters, he has produced a necessary examination of this slice of the state's history. In addition to noting the gap in the historical literature of southeastern Alabama, Brown claims that the existing interpretation—that leading up to the Civil War "the southernmost counties . . . [were] nothing more than isolated backwoods where poverty reigned, slavery was often inconsequential, Unionism was . . . strong, . . . raiders [End Page 239] and bushwhackers created havoc, . . . and deserters outnumbered the faithful . . ."—is incorrect. The real story is much more complicated, and he sets himself the goal of telling it through "the region's social, political, cultural, and economic institutions" (xii). The organization of Deep in the Piney Woods is methodical. Its first two chapters provide background to the central story that Brown later tells. Chapter One concerns white and enslaved settlement of the richer, more arable land east of the Federal Road that arched from Columbus, Georgia, to St. Stephens, Alabama, and along the piney woods' rivers. He discusses such settlement over forty years, personalizing his story by tracking individuals as examples of larger trends. This is an effective device for engaging the reader. Chapter Two applies Joseph Glatthaar's class analysis of the Army of Northern Virginia to the people of the piney woods just prior to the Civil War. Brown describes and quantifies the economic activities of the poor who "participated in the cotton economy on a limited basis" (27), the "yeoman or middle-class" (30) who grew enough cotton to allow owning a few enslaved people, and the "wealthiest families who controlled the vast majority of the region's slave population" (32) and who often were both planters and professionals. Brown parses his class distinctions among whites based on ownership of the enslaved, but he is able to insert stories of some individual slaves, like Dinah and Bob of Barbour County, through legal records (44-45). Chapters Three through Seven show Brown at his most confident, for here he gets to argue that the piney woods' people fully participated in the state's antebellum political controversies and that they supported the Confederacy during the Civil War. He devotes two chapters to politics. From 1819 to 1845, Henry Hilliard dominated the region's rivalry between Democrats and Whigs, but from 1845 to 1861 that rivalry gave way to unification over expansion of slavery and, ultimately, secession. Here, Brown digs deeply into the standard stuff of political history—party platforms, political personalities, vote totals, and legislation. In the succeeding three chapters he closely examines the piney woods at war. Chapter Five convincingly demonstrates that large [End Page 240] numbers of local men served in Confederate units that fought during some of the hardest campaigns in the western and eastern theaters as well as those units which saw dull duty along the Gulf Coast. Chapters Six and Seven examine the way "the war was taking a toll on families in the piney woods" during 1862 (137), and how the interval between 1863 and1865 became a slow-rolling but unmitigated disaster on the home front. Brown ends with a short epilogue about postbellum events in the piney woods rather than a conclusion that summarizes his argument. Carrying his story to the end of Reconstruction is satisfying for a narrative history but makes his work less functional as an academic tool or for classroom use. On the other hand, he offers extensive footnotes, a thorough bibliography, and a well-crafted index. He also includes images, tables, and maps...

“We Are Not Bound by Traditions”: Women's Collections at Virginia Commonwealth University Special Collections and Archives

Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) Libraries Special Collections and Archives has focused its manuscript collecting around women's collections since the department's inception in 1975. By happenstance, VCU's predecessor institutions, the Medical College of Virginia (1838) and the Richmond Professional Institute (1917), had accumulated research materials through their traditionally female-oriented courses of study, such as nursing and social work. Capitalizing on the rising popularity of women's history and the subject strengths found in its institutional archives, VCU began acquiring the papers of local women and the records of historically female organizations during the late 1970s and 1980s. This collection focus aligned with the urban, community-centered mission of the university and set VCU apart from other libraries and cultural institutions in central Virginia. The collecting area was expanded a decade later to include voices that were missing from the materials. Today, the collections are broad based and intersectional with wide-ranging representations of women.

2. Recreating 19th-Century Stereography for a Scholarly Public

Current digital archives of stereocards, a popular form of early photography, offer only 2D scans of the cards' fronts. Such archives make large numbers of stereocards accessible, retrievable and searchable, but lack the informed, interpretive guidance that non-specialist users might expect. They also omit the information on stereocards' backs and privilege the photographs on the stereocards without attention to context or interpretation. Drawing on techniques of new media "edutainment," my virtual exhibit contextualizes and interprets stereocards from the Queen's University Special Collections Library in a way that is friendly to non-specialist audiences while organically promoting humanities research through features such as textual popups and hyperlinks to sources (where available online or in QCAT). Animated GIFs of the stereographs allow users to see the image in three dimensions—something that was available to a 19th-century audience but not necessarily to a 21st-century one. My project looks beyond the popular assumption that new media seeks, or should seek, to uncritically reproduce the experience of past media. Rather, I examine how new media allows us to be critical of past perspectives and biases in ways that were previously unavailable—while still remaining critical of my project's own limitations and potential biases. With the advent of digital media and the Digital Humanities, I argue that the time is ripe to rethink new media's relationship to old media and the past, as well as how to communicate this knowledge in ways that push beyond traditional notions of an academic digital archive.

Playing in the Wunderkammer

In 2009 Manchester-based collaborative artists Carson & Miller were invited by Manchester Metropolitan University Special Collections and the North West Film Archive (UK) to curate an exhibition which explored the museum and archives varied collections, ranging from pots, toys and Victorian ephemera to scrapbooks and albums. The exhibition was called 'The Story of Things'. Drawing on the tradition of the Wunderkammer and surrealist explorations of it, the curatorial selection and arrangements of 'The Story of Things' (or rather dis-arrangements) were based on contingency - a word which designates ‘chance’, ‘accident’, ‘a fortuitous happening’, but which also stems from the Latin word tangere ‘to touch’, implying ‘con-tact’, connection, affinity. This curatorial process took as its premise the Wunderkammer, displaying the “deliberately random and undisciplined journey” (Carson & Miller, 2009) taken by Carson & Miller. Roaming through the collections and archives available to them, the artists began to cross-reference the materials they found there, sometimes, as they explain, “relating things by type, sometimes throwing the unlikely together, sometimes remembering something they already knew, sometimes uncovering things unknown to them” (Carson & Miller, 2009). This paper will argue, by exploring Carson & Miller’s exhibition through both theoretical and practice-based perspectives, that the Wunderkammer opens up alternative, playful curatorial strategies (of placing and misplacing, joining and dis-joining, relating and separating objects from each other), “systematic bewilderments”(Ernst, 1948) in Max Ernst’s terms, which draw heavily on notions of childhood play and playfulness. The notion of play is present in a number of ways in the concept of the Wunderkammer, ranging from the Wunderkammer’s early association with an exclusive leisure activity to its later association with an activity which “anyone could master” (Gordon, 2006); from the significance of toys in collections to the similarity of children’s collecting patterns, to the surrealist understandings of the cabinet of curiosities. These playful strategies construct narratives through producing ‘fortuitous encounters’ and tease out the element of ‘wonder’ in objects and play with curatorial conventions and viewer’s expectations. The paper will argue that the Wunderkammer opens up spaces of what Gilles Deleuze termed ‘ideal game’, where one begins when one wishes and stops at will. This approach disrupts linear narratives and fixities of definitions, immanent in Western ideology and conventional curatorial strategies seeking genealogy, unfolding the meaning of the displayed objects and their relations as unfixed, rhizomic, shifting, spreading, wandering. Here ‘things’ and their meanings slip, and reveal what Bill Brown terms “misuse value” of objects, leading us back to the “tactile tryst” (Brown, 1998) of a child, a primal state of exploring and seeing the world. It will be argued that this playful approach, inherent in the structure of the Wunderkammer, challenges conventional optic vision associated with the exhibition environment, introducing haptic vision which does not move in one direction but is exploratory or ‘all-over-the-place’, focusing on the material details rather than the narrative line. The sense-making invited here has shifted from the conventional exhibition environment which focuses on genealogical, chronological, biographical or thematic matter, to making-sense, to an exploration which leaves linear narratives behind (an exploration which becomes sensory) and in which the playful juxtaposition of things reveals new links and relations, forming new poetic constellations, like Alice’s “world of twisted logic and nonsensical rhymes” (Carroll, 1865).

Las Historias de Latinos en Oregón: Canby, Oregón An Oral History Project Collaboration Between A Librarian and an Archivist

In the spring of 2015, I began the oral history project Latinos en Oregon to document the stories of Oregon’s Latino/a communities. As the curator and archivist of the Oregon Multicultural Archives (OMA) at the Oregon State University (OSU) Special Collections and Archives Research Center, my job is to assist in preserving the histories and sharing the stories that document Oregon’s African American, Asian American, Latino/a, and Native American communities (Oregon Multicultural Archives, 2005). There are gaps in the historical record as it pertains to people of color in Oregon, and the OMA seeks to address those gaps and empower communities to share their stories. Because oral histories are the recorded life stories of the people who lived them, they are a unique addition to the historical record. Oral histories enable interviewees to share their perspectives, thoughts, and opinions about their lives and the communities in which they live. Latinos en Oregon began in Jefferson County as a collaboration between the OMA and OSU’s Juntos Program, an after-school program that aims to prepare Latino/a high school students and their families for college. The project expanded to Yamhill County in 2016 as part of a yearlong county grant project. The grant included partnerships between the local historical society and the community-based, non-profit organization, Unidos Bridging Community. It was in the spring of 2016 that I embarked on a small, short-term oral history project in collaboration with the Canby Public Library, a collaboration that began through REFORMA Oregon. In this article, I will share the background history about the Natalia Fernandez Natalia is the Curator and Archivist of the Oregon Multicultural Archives (OMA) and the OSU Queer Archives (OSQA) at the Oregon State University Special Collections and Archives Research Center. Fernandez’s mission for directing the OMA and the OSQA is to work in collaboration with Oregon’s African American, Asian American, Latino/a, Native American, and OSU’s LGBTQ+ communities to support them in preserving their histories and sharing their stories. Her scholarship relates to her work as an archivist, specifically best practices for working with communities of color. Fernandez has been published in the Oregon Historical Quarterly, Journal of Western Archives, The by Natalia Fernandez Curator and Archivist, Oregon Multicultural Archives & OSU Queer Archives, OSU Libraries: Special Collections and Archives Research Center natalia.fernandez@oregonstate.edu American Archivist, and Multicultural Perspectives. Fernandez holds an M.A. in Information Resources and Library Science from the University of Arizona (U of A). She graduated from the U of A Knowledge River Program, a program that focuses on communitybased librarianship and partnerships with traditionally under-served communities. 13 Latinos en Oregon project, detail the collaboration between the OMA and the Canby Public Library, and provide information about the Canby oral history interviews and the stories the interviewees shared.