At a time when the world fought to overcome tyranny, he helped lead the course to victory as the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe. When our nation needed a leader, he upheld the torch of liberty as our 34th president. As a new memorial is unveiled, now is the time for us to meet Dwight David Eisenhower.

An opportunity to get to know this man can be found at the newly unveiled Eisenhower Memorial in Washington, DC, and the all-new exhibits in the Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum in Abilene, Kansas. Each site in its own way tells the story of a humble man who grew up in small-town America and became the leader of the free world.

The Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum is a 22-acre campus which includes several buildings where visitors can interact with the life of this president. Starting with the Boyhood Home, guests discover the early years of Eisenhower as he avidly read history books, played sports, and learned lessons of faith and leadership. The library building houses the documents of his administration. With more than 26 million pages and 350,000 images, researchers can explore the career of a 40+-year public servant. The 25,000 square feet of all-new exhibits located in the museum building is where visitors get to meet Ike and Mamie again…for the first time. Using NARA’s holdings, guests gain insight into the life and times of President Eisenhower. Finally, visitors can be reflective in the Place of Meditation where Eisenhower rests beside his first-born son, Doud, and his beloved wife Mamie. A true encapsulation of his life.

The updated gallery spaces were opened in 2019. The exhibition includes many historic objects from our holdings which highlight Eisenhower’s career through the military years and into the White House. Showcased items include Ike’s West Point letterman’s sweater, the D-Day Planning Table, Soviet lunasphere, and letters related to the Crisis at Little Rock. Several new films and interactives have been added throughout the exhibit including a D-Day film using newly digitized footage from the archives.

In addition to facts and quotes, visitors will leave with an understanding of how his experiences made Ike the perfect candidate for Supreme Allied Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe and the 34th President of the United States.

The Eisenhower Memorial, which opened to the public on September 18, is located at an important historical corridor in Washington, DC. The 4-acre urban memorial park is surrounded by four buildings housing institutions that were formed during the Eisenhower Administration and was designed by award-winning architect, Frank Gehry. In 2011, the National Archives hosted Frank Gehry and his collaborator, theater artist Robert Wilson in a discussion about the creation of the Eisenhower National Memorial. 

As part of the creative process, Gehry’s team visited the Eisenhower Presidential Library and drew inspiration from the campus. They also used the holdings of the Eisenhower Presidential Library to form the plans for the memorial itself. This also led to the development of online educational programs which will have a continued life through the Eisenhower Foundation. Visitors to both sites will learn lasting lessons from President Eisenhower’s life of public service.

Richard spoke with New York Times columnist Paul Krugman on airport security, author James Fallows on the airline industry, Robert Roach Jr. of the International Association of Machinists, and security expert and former New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton as well as WNYC listeners.

While FSU has had an Archive-It account for a while, we hadn’t fully implemented its use yet. Archive-It is a web archiving service that captures and preserves content on websites as well as allowing us to provide metadata and a public interface to viewing the collected webpages. COVID-19 fast-tracked me on figuring out Archive-It and how we could best use it to capture these unique webpages documenting FSU’s response to the pandemic. I worked to configure crawls of websites to capture the data we needed, set up a schedule that would be sufficient to capture changes but also not overwhelm our data allowance, and describe the sites being captured. It took me a few tries but we’ve successfully been capturing a set of COVID related FSU URLs since March.

One of the challenges of this work was some of the webpages had functionality that the web crawling just wouldn’t capture. This was due to some interactive widgets on pages or potentially some CSS choices the crawler didn’t like. I decided the content was the most important thing to capture in this case, more so than making sure the webpage looked exactly like the original. A good example of this is the International Programs Alerts page. We’re capturing this to track information about our study abroad programs but what Archive-It displays is quite different from the current site in terms of design. The content is all there though.

As the pandemic dragged on and it became clear that Fall 2020 would be a unique semester, I added the online orientation site and the Fall 2020 site to my collection line-up. The Fall 2020 page, once used to track the re-opening plan recently morphed into the Stay Healthy FSU site where the community can look for current information and resources but also see the original re-opening document.

We’ll continue crawling and archiving these pages in our FSU Coronavirus Archive for future researchers until they are retired and the university community returns to “normal” operations – whatever that might look like when we get there!

Recently we launched an updated website for the William J. Clinton Presidential Library & Museum. The website, which received more than 227,000 visitors over the past year, now improves access to the Clinton Presidential Library holdings by providing better performance, improving accessibility, and delivering a mobile-friendly experience. The updated website’s platform and design, based in the Drupal web content management framework, enables the Clinton Presidential Library staff to make increasing amounts of resources available online—especially while working remotely during the COVID-19 crisis.

To achieve this website redesign, staff from the National Archives’ Office of Innovation, with both web development and user experience expertise, collaborated with staff from the Clinton Presidential Library to define goals for the new website. Our user experience team first launched the project by interviewing staff of the Clinton Presidential Library to determine the necessary improvements for the updated website to facilitate their work. Next, the user experience team researched the Library’s customers—researchers, students, educators, and the general public—by analyzing user analytics, heatmaps, recordings of real users navigating the site, and top search referrals. Based on the data collected, the user experience team produced wireframes and moodboards that informed the final site design. The team also refined the website’s information architecture to improve the user experience and meet the Clinton Library staff’s needs. 

Throughout the project, the team used Agile project management development processes to deliver iterative changes focused on constant improvement. To be Agile, specific goals were outlined, defined, and distributed among team members for mutual agreement. Work on website designs and features was broken into development “sprints”—two-week periods to complete defined amounts of work. At the end of each development sprint, the resulting designs and features were demonstrated to the Clinton Presidential Library staff stakeholders for feedback which helped further refine the website.

The project to update the Clinton Presidential Library and Museum website was guided by the National Archives’ strategic goals—to Make Access Happen, Connect with Customers, Maximize NARA’s Value to the Nation, and Build our Future Through our People. By understanding the needs of the Clinton Library’s online users and staff, and leveraging the in-house expertise of our web development and user experience staff, the National Archives is providing an improved website experience for all visitors. Please visit the site, and let us know what you think!

“Inevitably, official thoughts early turned to the time when Scotland would be granted the honour of acting as hosts. Thought was soon turned into action and resulted in Scotland pursuing the opportunity to be host to the Games more relentlessly than any other country has.”

From foreword to The Official History of the IXth Commonwealth Games (1970)

In our last blog post we left the campaigners working to bring the Commonwealth Games to Edinburgh reflecting on the loss of the 1966 Games to Kingston, Jamaica. The original plan of action sketched out by Willie Carmichael in 1957 had factored in a renewed campaign for 1970 if the initial approach to host the 1966 Games proved unsuccessful.

The choice of host cities for the Games were made at the bi-annual General Assemblies of the Commonwealth Games Federation. The campaign to choose the host for 1970 began at a meeting held in Tokyo in 1964 (to coincide with the Olympics), with the final vote taking place at the 1966 Kingston Games.

In 1964 the Edinburgh campaign presented a document to the Federation restating its desire to be host city for the Games in 1970. Entitled ‘Scotland Invites’ it laid out Scotland’s case:

“We are founder members of the Federation; we have taken part in each Games since the inception in 1930; and we are the only one of six countries who have taken part in every Games, who have not yet had the honour of celebrating the Games.”

From Scotland Invites, British Empire and Commonwealth Games Council for Scotland (1964)

Edinburgh faced a rival bid from Christchurch, New Zealand, the competition between the two cities recorded in a series of press cutting files collected by Willie Carmichael. Reports in the Scottish press presented Edinburgh as the favourites for 1970, with Christchurch using their bid as a rehearsal for a more serious campaign to host the 1974 competition. However, the New Zealanders rejected this assessment, arguing that it was the turn of a country in the Southern Hemisphere to host the Games.

The 1966 Games brought the final frantic round of lobbying and promotion for the rival bids as members of the Commonwealth Games Federation gathered in Kingston. The British Empire and Commonwealth Games Council for Scotland presented a bid document entitled ‘Scotland 1970’ which included detailed information on the venues and facilities to be provided for the competition along with a broader description of the city of Edinburgh.

At the General Assembly of the Commonwealth Games Federation held in Kingston, Jamaica, on 7 August 1966 the vote took place to decide the host of the 1970 Games. Edinburgh was chosen as host city by 18 votes to 11.

The Edinburgh campaign team kept a souvenir of this important event. At the end of the meeting they collected together the evidence of their success and put it in an envelope marked ‘Ballot Cards – which recorded votes for Scotland at Kingston 1966.’ The voting cards and envelope now sit in an administrative file which forms part of the Commonwealth Games Scotland Archive.

In an effort to enhance remote research opportunities for students to engage with the oldest materials housed in Strozier Library, a research guide to Ancient Texts at FSU Libraries has been created by Special Collections & Archives staff.

The Ancient Texts at FSU Libraries research guide provides links to finding aids with collections information, high-resolution photos of the objects in the digital library, and links to articles or books about the collections.

Research guides can be accessed through the tile, “Research Guides,” on the library’s main page. Special Collections & Archives currently has 11 research guides published that share information and resources on specific collections or subjects that can be accessed remotely.

While direct access to physical collections is unavailable at this time due to Covid-19, we hope to resume in-person research when it is safe to do so, and Special Collections & Archives is still available to assist you remotely with research and instruction. Please get in touch with us via email at: lib-specialcollections@fsu.edu. For a full list of our remote services, please visit our services page.

At the hearing, PIDB Member John Tierney responded to questions from committee members about recommendations in the PIDB’s May 2020 Report to the President. He stressed the need for modernizing information security systems and the critical importance of sustained leadership through a senior-level Executive Agent (EA) to oversee and implement meaningful reform. In addition to Congressman Tierney, Greg Koch, the Acting Director of Information Management in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), testified in response to the SSCI’s concerns about the urgent need to improve how the Executive Branch classifies and declassifies national security information. Much of the discussion focused on the PIDB recommendation that the President designate the ODNI as the EA to coordinate the application of information technology, including artificial intelligence and machine learning, to modernize classification and declassification across the Executive Branch.

Senator Jerry Moran (R-KS), and Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), who is a member of the SSCI, joined the hearing to discuss the bill they are cosponsoring to modernize declassification. Their proposed “Declassification Reform Act of 2020” aligns with the PIDB Report recommendations, including the recommendation to designate the ODNI as the EA for coordinating the required reforms. The Board would like to thank Senators Moran and Wyden for their continued support and attention to this crucial issue. Modernizing the classification and declassification system is important for our 21^st century national security and it is important for transparency and our democracy.

Video of the entire hearing is available to view at the SSCI’s website, and from C-SPAN.  The transcript of prepared testimony submitted to the SSCI by Mr. Tierney is posted on the PIDB website.

To help you with your mental health and wellbeing this semester, we’ve teamed up with the Chaplaincy to provide students new and returning with a diary where you can keep your thoughts and feelings, process your new environment, record your joys and capture what the University was like for you in this unprecedented time.

Diaries will be stationed at the Welcome Lounges from 12th September and we encourage students to take one for their personal use. Please be considerate of others and only take one diary each.

Inside each diary is a QR code which will take you to our project page where you can learn more about the project and where we will be creating an online resource for you to explore the amazing diaries that we keep in Archives and Special Collections. We will be updating this page throughout semester with information from the Archives and events for you to join. Keep an eye out for #StirDiary on social media for all the updates!

At the end of semester, you are able to donate your diary to the Archive where it will sit with the University’s institutional records and form a truthful and creative account of what student life was like in 2020. You absolutely don’t have to donate your diary if you don’t want to, the diary belongs to you and you can keep it, throw it away, donate it or anything else (wreck it?) as you like.

If you would like to take part in the project but you have missed the Welcome Lounges, don’t worry! Contact Rosie on archives@stir.ac.uk or Janet on janet.foggie1@stir.ac.uk

SSCI members Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Jerry Moran (R-KS) have cosponsored the proposed “Declassification Reform Act of 2020,” which aligns with recommendations of the PIDB’s latest report to the President, A Vision for the Digital Age: Modernization of the U.S, National Security Classification and Declassification System (May 2020). In an Opinion-Editorial appearing today on the website Just Security, Senators Wyden and Moran present their case for legislative reform to address the challenges of outmoded systems for classification and declassification.

At the hearing tomorrow, Mr. Tierney will discuss how the PIDB recommendations present a vision for a uniform, integrated, and modernized security classification system that appropriately defends national security interests, instills confidence in the American people, and maintains sustainability in the digital environment. Mr. Greg Koch, Acting Director of the Information Management Office for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, will also testify at the hearing.

The PIDB welcomes the opportunity to speak before the SSCI and looks forward to discussing the need for reform with the Senators.

After the hearing, the PIDB will post a copy of Mr. Tierney’s prepared testimony on its website and on this blog.

Below you’ll see a map covered in red and blue pins. These represent all of the listed buildings and monuments that are covered by the Wiki Loves Monuments competition, blue pins are places that already have a photograph and red pins have no photograph at all. The aim of the campaign is to turn as many red pins blue as possible, greatly enhancing the amazing bank of open knowledge across the Wikimedia platforms.

The University of Stirling sits within the black circle. The two big clusters of red pins on the map are Stirling and Bridge of Allan – right on your doorstep! We encourage you to explore your local area. Knowing your surroundings, finding hidden gems and learning about the history of the area will all help Stirling feel like home to you, whether you’re a first year or returning student.

Of course, this year we must be cautious and safe while taking part in this campaign and you should follow social distancing rules and all government coronavirus guidelines, such as wearing facemasks where appropriate, while you are out taking photographs. We encourage you to walk to locations you wish to photograph, or use the NextBikes which are situated on campus and in Stirling rather than take excessive public transport purely for the purposes of this project. Walking and cycling will help you to get a better sense of where everything is in relation to where you live and keeping active is beneficial to your mental health and wellbeing.

We hope you’ll join us for this campaign – we have a session planned for 4-5pm on Thursday 17th September on Teams where we’ll tell you more about Wiki Loves Monuments and show you how to upload your images. Sign up to the session on Eventbrite.

If you cannot make our own University of Stirling session then Wikimedia UK have their own training session on the 21st September which you can join.

Please note that if you want your photographs to be considered for the competition prizes then they must be submitted before midnight on the 30th September. Photographs in general can be added at any time so you can carry on exploring for as long as you like!

Finally, just to add a little incentive, this year we’re having a friendly competition between the University of Stirling and the University of St Andrews students to see who can make the most edits so come along to a training session, pick up some brilliant digital skills and let’s paint the town green!

For this post, I interviewed Kate McCormick in order to get a better understanding of the dynamics of Special Collections & Archives. Katie is one of the Associate Deans and has been with SCA for about nine years now (here’s a video of Katie discussing some of our collections on C-SPAN in 2014!). As a vital part of the library, and our leader in Special Collections & Archives, I wanted to get her opinion on how the division has progressed thus far and how they plan to continue to do so in regards to diversity and inclusion. 

How would you describe FSU SCA when you first started?

“…People didn’t feel comfortable communicating [with each other]… There was one person who really wrote for the blog, and maybe it would happen once every couple of months. When I came on board, my general sense was that we were a department and a group of people with a lot of really great ideas and some fantastic materials, who had come a long way from where things has been, but who hadn’t gotten to a place to be able to organize to change more or to really work more as a team… We were definitely valued as (mostly) the fancy crown jewel group. Really all that mattered was the stuff… it didn’t matter what we were doing with it.”

How do you feel the lapse in communication affected diversity and inclusion?

“While I don’t have any direct evidence that it excluded people or helped create an environment that was exclusive, I do know that even with our staff at the time, there were times where it contributed to hostilities, frustrations, an  environment where people didn’t feel able to speak or be comfortable in…Everybody just wanted to be comfortable with the people who were just like them that it definitely created some potentially hostile environments. Looking back, I recognize what a poor job we did, as a workplace and a community truly being inclusive, and not just in ways that are immediately visible.”

How diverse was SCA when you started? 

“In Special Collections there was minimal diversity, certainly less than we have now… [For the libraries as a whole] as you go up in classification and pay, the diversity decreases. That was certainly true when I got here and that remains true.”

How would you rank SCA’s diversity and inclusion when you first started?

“…Squarely a 5, possibly in some arenas a 4. Not nothing, but I feel like no one was really thinking of it.”

And how would you describe it now?

“Maybe we’re approaching a 7, I feel like there’s been progress, but there’s still a long way to go in my opinion.”

What are some ways we can start addressing these issues? What are some tangible ways you are planning to enact?

“For me, some of the first places [is] forming the inclusive research services task force in Special Collections, pulling together a group to look at descriptive practices and applications, and what we’re doing with creating coordinated processing workflows. Putting these issues on the table from the beginning is really important… Right now because we’re primarily in an online environment, i think we have some time to negotiate and change our practices so when we are re-open to the public and people are physically coming in to the spaces, we have new forms, new trainings, people have gone through training that gives them a better sense of identity, communication, diversity.”

After my conversation with Katie, I feel optimistic about the direction we are heading in. Knowing how open Special Collections & Archives is about taking critique and trying to put it into action brought me comfort. I’m excited to see how these concerns are addressed and how the department will be putting Dynamic Inclusivity, one of Florida State University’s core values, at the forefront of their practice. I would like to give a big thank you to Katie McCormick for taking the time to do this post with me and for having these conversations!

Born in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, in 1915, Terry Frost KBE RA did not become an artist until he was in his 30s. During World War II, he served in France, the Middle East and Greece, before joining the commandos. While in Crete in June 1941 he was captured and sent to various prisoner of war camps. As a prisoner at Stalag 383 in Bavaria, he met Adrian Heath who encouraged him to paint.

After the war he attended Camberwell School of Art and the St. Ives School of Art and painted his first abstract work in 1949. In 1951 he moved to Newlyn and worked as an assistant to the sculptor Barbara Hepworth. He was joined there by Roger Hilton, where they began a collaboration in collage and construction techniques. In 1960 he put on his first exhibition in the USA, in New York, and there he met many of the American abstract expressionists, including Marc Rothko who became a great friend.

Terry Frost’s career included teaching at the Bath Academy of Art, serving as Gregory Fellow at the University of Leeds, and also teaching at the Cyprus College of Art. He later became the artist in residence and Professor of Painting at the Department of Fine Art of the University of Reading.

Frost was renowned for his use of the Cornish light, colour and shape. He became a leading exponent of abstract art and a recognised figure of the British art establishment. These two prints were purchased in the early days of the Art Collection at the beginning of the 1970s.

Terry Frost married Kathleen Clarke in 1945 and they had six children, two of whom became artists, (and another, Stephen Frost, a comedian). His grandson Luke Frost, also an artist, is shown here, speaking about his grandfather.

A full agenda, as well as information on how to pre-register, and how to submit questions and comments to the PIDB prior to the virtual meeting, will be posted soon to Transforming Classification.

The PIDB looks forward to your participation in continuing our public discussion of priorities for modernizing the classification system going forward.

Digital collections migration:

After more than a year’s delay, the migration of our collections into a new and more user-friendly (and mobile-friendly) platform driven by the Islandora open-source content management system is in the home stretch. This has been a major undertaking and has given us the opportunity to reassess how our collections work. We hope to be live with the new platform in November. 30,000 items (over 380,000 digital images) have already been migrated.

2019-2020 Projects:

We’ve made significant progress on most of this year’s projects (see link for project descriptions), though many of these are currently not yet online pending our migration to the Islandora platform:

Grant-funded projects:

• Temple Emanuel Project: We are working with the Public History department and a graduate student in that program. Several hundred items have already been digitized and more work is being done. We are also exploring grant options with the temple to digitize more material.
• People Not Property: NC Slave Deeds Project: We are in the final year of this project funded by the National Archives and hope to have it online as part of the Digital Library on American Slavery late next year. We are also exploring additional funding options to continue this work.
• Women Who Answered the Call: This project was funded by a CLIR Recordings at Risk grant. The fragile cassettes have been digitized and we are midway through the process of getting them online in the new platform.

Library-funded projects:

• Poetas sin Fronteras: Poets Without Borders, the Scrapbooks of Dr. Ramiro Lagos: These items have been digitized and will go online when the new platform launches.
• North Carolina Runaway Slaves Ads Project, Phase 2: Work continues on this ongoing project and over 5700 ads are now online. This second phase has involved both locating and digitizing/transcribing the ads, and we will soon triple the number of ads done in Phase One. We are also working on tighter integration of this project into the Digital Library on American Slavery.
• PRIDE! of the Community: This ongoing project stemmed from an NEH grant two years ago and is growing to include numerous new oral history interviews and (just added) a project to digitize and display ads from LGBTQ+ bars and other businesses in the Triad during the 1980s and 1990s. We are also working with two Public History students on contextual and interpretive projects based on the digital collection.

Faculty-involved projects:

• Black Lives Matter Collections: This is a community-based initiative to document the Black Lives Matter movement and recent demonstrations and artwork in the area. Faculty: Dr. Tara Green (African America and Diaspora Studies);  Stacey Krim, Erin Lawrimore, Dr. Rhonda Jones, David Gwynn (University Libraries).
• Civil Rights Oral Histories: This has become multiple projects. We are working with several faculty members in the Media Studies department to make these transcribed interviews available online. November is the target. Faculty: Matt Barr, Jenida Chase, Hassan Pitts, and Michael Frierson (Media Studies); Richard Cox, Erin Lawrimore, David Gwynn (University Libraries).
• Oral Contraceptive Ads: Working with a faculty member and a student on this project, which may be online by the end of the year. Faculty: Dr. Heather Adams (English); David Gwynn and Richard Cox (University Libraries).
• Well-Crafted NC: Work is ongoing and we are in the second year of a UNCG P2 grant, working with a faculty member in eth Bryan School and a brewer based in Asheboro. Faculty: Erin Lawrimore, Richard Cox, David Gwynn (University Libraries), Dr. Erick Byrd (Marketing, Entrepreneurship, Hospitality, and Tourism)

New projects taken on during the pandemic:

• City of Greensboro Scrapbooks: Huge collection of scrapbooks from the Greensboro Urban Development Department dating back to the 1940s. These items have been digitized and will go online when the new platform launches.
• Negro Health Week Pamphlets: 1930s-1950s pamphlets published by the State of North Carolina. These items are currently being digitized and will go online when the new platform launches.
• Clara Booth Byrd Collection: Manuscript collection. These items are currently being digitized and will go online when the new platform launches.
• North Carolina Speaker Ban Collection: Manuscript collection. These items are currently being digitized and will go online when the new platform launches.
• Mary Dail Dixon Papers: Manuscript collection. These items are currently being digitized and will go online when the new platform launches.
• Ruth Wade Hunter Collection: Manuscript collection. These items are currently being digitized and will go online when the new platform launches.

Projects on hold pending the pandemic:

• Junior League of Greensboro: Much of this has already been digitized and will go online when the new platform launches.
• UNCG Graduate School Bulletins: Much of this has already been digitized and will go online when the new platform launches. 

David Gwynn (Digitization Coordinator, me) offers kudos to Erica Rau and Kathy Howard (Digitization and Metadata Technicians); Callie Coward (Special Collections Cataloging & Digital Projects Library Technician); Charley Birkner (Technology Support Technician); and Dr. Brian Robinson (Fellow for Digital Curation and Scholarship) for their great work in very surreal circumstances over the past six months.

But we’ve decided to postpone both the Fellowship and our annual Exhibition & Program Series by six months due to the coronavirus. The annual exhibition will now open on October 1, 2021 (which is 13 months away, but we’re still hard at work planning!).

The new due date for Fellowship proposals is April 1, 2021. We’ve adjusted the timeline and due dates in the call for proposals accordingly.

It is such a beautifully written letter that I still can’t tell whether or not it’s satire. Do you think the author is being serious or sarcastic? Leave a comment below telling us what you think!

Back in February, I posted about five Black students from the 1870s and 1880s — Black Men of Amherst, 1877-1883 — and now we’re moving into the early 20th century. A small clue in The Olio has revealed another Black student that was not included in Harold Wade’s Black Men of Amherst. Robert Sinclair Hartgrove (AC 1905) was known to Wade, as was Robert Mattingly (AC 1906), but we did not know about Robert Henry Meriwether. These three appear to be the first Black students to attend Amherst in the twentieth century.

Robert Sinclair Hartgrove, Class of 1905

The text next to Hartgrove’s picture in the 1905 yearbook gives us a tiny glimpse into his time at Amherst. The same yearbook shows Hartgrove not just jollying the players, but playing second base for the Freshman baseball team during the 1902 season.

Freshman Baseball Team, 1902

The reference to Meriwether sent me to the Amherst College Biographical Record, where I found Robert Henry Meriwether listed as a member of the Class of 1904. A little digging into the College Catalogs revealed that he belongs with the Class of 1905.

College Catalog, 1901-02

Hartgrove and Meriwether are both listed as members of the Freshman class in the 1901-02 catalog. The catalog also notes that they were both from Washington, DC and the Biographical Record indicates that they both prepped at Howard University before coming to Amherst. We find Meriwether’s name in the catalog for 1902-03, but he did not “pull through” as The Olio hopes Hartgrove will; Meriwether returned to Howard University where he earned his LLB in 1907. Hartgrove also became a lawyer, earning his JB from Boston University in 1908 and spending most of his career in Jersey City, NJ.

Robert Nicholas Mattingly, Class of 1906

Mattingly was born in Louisville, KY in 1884 and prepped for Amherst at The M Street School in Washington, DC, which changed its name in 1916 to The Dunbar School. Matt Randolph (AC 2016) wrote “Remembering Dunbar: Amherst College and African-American Education in Washington, DC” for the book Amherst in the World, which includes more details of Mattingly’s life.

The Amherst College Archives and Special Collections reading room is closed to on-site researchers. However, many of our regular services are available remotely, with some modifications. Please read our Services during COVID-19 page for more information. Contact us at archives@amherst.edu.

The goal received a variety of reactions from people across the archival profession, our colleagues and our staff. Some were excited to work on the effort and wanted particular sets of records to be first in line to scan. Some laughed out loud at the sheer impossibility of it. Some were angry and said it was a waste of time and money. Others were fearful that digitizing the records could take their jobs away.

We moved ahead. Staff researched emerging technologies and tested them through pilots in order to increase our efficiency. We set up a room at our facilities in College Park to transfer our digital copies from individual hard drives to new technology from Amazon, known as snowballs.

We worked on developing new partnership projects in order to get more records digitized. We streamlined the work in our internal digitization labs and we piloted digitization projects with staff in order to find new ways to get digital copies into the Catalog. By 2015, we had 10 million in the Catalog.

We persisted. In 2017, we added more digital objects, with their metadata, to the Catalog in a single year than we had for the preceding decade of the project. Late in 2019, we surpassed a major milestone by having more than 100 million digital copies of our records in the Catalog. And yes, it has strained our technology. The Catalog has developed growing pains, which we continue to monitor and mitigate.

We also created new finding aids that focus on digital copies of our records that are now available online: see our Record Group Explorer and our Presidential Library Explorer. So now, anyone with a smart phone or access to a computer with wifi, can view at least some of the permanent records of the U.S. Federal government without having to book a trip to Washington, D.C. or one of our other facilities around the country. The descriptions of over 95% of our records are also available through the Catalog, so even if you can’t see it immediately, you can know what records exist. And that is convenient for the millions of visitors we get each year to our website, even more so during the pandemic.

We are well on our way to 500 million digital copies in the Catalog by FY24. And yet, with over 13 billion pages of records in our holdings, we know, we have only just begun.

Headline from The New York Age, August 12, 1944, pg. 10.
(WNYC Archive Collections)

Hayes also made time to produce a short but notable run of WNYC programs, which she hosted and performed on the home front. Her November and December 1943 broadcasts were part of a rotating half-hour time slot designated for known recitalists. She shared the late weekday afternoon slot with sopranos Marjorie Hamill, Pina La Corte, Jean Carlton, Elaine Malbin, and the Hungarian pianist Arpád Sándor. Hayes’ series, Tone Pictures of the Negro in Music, sought to highlight African-American composers and was frequently referred to as The Negro in Music.

The following outline of 1943 and 1944 broadcasts was pieced together from the WNYC Masterwork Bulletin program guide and period newspaper radio listings. Details on the 1943 programs are sparse. We know that Hayes’ last broadcast in 1943 featured the pianist William Duncan Allen (1906-1999) performing They Led My Lord Away by Roland Hayes and Good Lord Done Been Here by Hall Johnson, and a Porgy and Bess medley by George Gershwin.

Excerpt from “Behind the Mike,” November/December 1944, WNYC Masterwork Bulletin.
(WNYC Archive Collections)

The show was scheduled again in August 1944 as a 15-minute late Tuesday afternoon program and in November that year as a half-hour Wednesday evening broadcast. The August programs began with an interview of soprano Abbie Mitchell (1884-1960), the widow of composer and choral director Will Marion Cook (1869-1944). The composer and arranger Hall Johnson (1888-1970) was her studio guest the following week. The third Tuesday of the month featured pianist Jonathan Brice performing “songs of young contemporary Negro composers,” and the August shows concluded with selections from Porgy and Bess and Cameron Jones. The November broadcasts focused on the work of William Grant Still, “the art songs, spirituals and street cries” of William Lawrence, as well as the songs and spirituals of William Rhodes, lyric soprano Lillian Evanti, and baritone Harry T. Burleigh. Hayes also spent airtime on the work of neo-romantic composer and violinist Clarence Cameron White. The November 29th program considered “the musical setting of poems by Langston Hughes and reportedly included the bard himself. “Langston Hughes was guest of honor and punctuated his interview with a reading from his opera Troubled Island.”[2]

This was not the first time the poet’s work was the subject of Hayes’ broadcast. Below is a rare copy of her script from a program airing eight months earlier when she sat in for the regularly scheduled host, soprano Marjorie Hamill.

The script for Tone Pictures of the Negro in Music hosted by Lola Hayes on March 24, 1944.
(Image used with permission of Van Vecten Trust and courtesy of the Carl Van Vechten Papers Relating to African American Arts and Letters. James Weldon Johnson Collection in the Yale Collection in the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)[3]

It is unfortunate, but it appears there are no recordings of Lola Hayes’ WNYC program. We can’t say if that’s because they weren’t recorded or, if they were, the lacquer discs have not survived. We do know that World War II-era transcription discs, in general, are less likely to have survived since most of them were cut on coated glass, rather than aluminum, to save vital metals for the war effort.

After the war, Hayes focused on voice teaching and coaching. Her students included well-known performers like Dorothy Rudd Moore, Hilda Harris, Raoul Abdul-Rahim, Carol Brice, Nadine Brewer, Elinor Harper, Lucia Hawkins, and Margaret Tynes. She was the first African-American president of the New York Singing Teachers Association (NYSTA), serving in that post from 1970-1972. In her later years, she devoted much of her time to the Lola Wilson Hayes Vocal Artists Award, which gave substantial financial aid to young professional singers worldwide.[4] 

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[1] The Manual Training and Industrial School for Colored Youth in Bordentown, New Jersey

[2] “The Listening Room,” The People’s Voice, December 2, 1944, pg. 29. The newspaper noted that the broadcast included Hall Johnson’s Mother to Son, Cecil Cohen’s Death of an Old Seaman and Florence Price’s Song to a Dark Virgin, all presumably sung by host, Lola Hayes. 

Troubled Island is an opera set in Haiti in 1791. It was composed by William Grant Still with a libretto by Langston Hughes and Verna Arvey.

[3] Page two of the script notes Langston Hughes’ grandmother was married to a veteran of the 1859 Harper’s Ferry raid led by abolitionist John Brown. Indeed, Hughes’ grandmother’s first husband was Lewis Sheridan Leary, who was one of Brown’s raiders at Harper’s Ferry. For more on the story please see: A Shawl From Harper’s Ferry.

[4] Abdul, Raoul, “Winners of the Lola Hayes Vocal Scholarship and Awards,” The New York Amsterdam News, February 8, 1992, pg. 25.

Special thanks to Valeria Martinez for research assistance.

A handwritten note dated 10^th April 1957 sits on the top of a file marked ‘Scotland for 1970 Host’. The document forms part of a series of files recording the planning, organisation and operation of the 1970 Edinburgh Commonwealth Games, the first to be held in Scotland. Written by Willie Carmichael, a key figure in Scotland’s Games history, the note sets out his plans to secure the Commonwealth Games for Scotland. He begins by noting that Scotland’s intention to host the Games was made at a meeting of Commonwealth Games Federations at the 1956 Melbourne Olympic Games. Carmichael then proceeds to lay out the steps required to make Scotland’s case to be the host of the Games in 1966 or 1970.

The steps which Carmichael traced out in his note can be followed through the official records and personal papers relating to the Games held in the University Archives. The recently catalogued administrative papers of Commonwealth Games Scotland for the period provide a detailed account of the long process of planning for this major event, recording in particular the close collaboration with Edinburgh Corporation which was an essential element in securing the Games for Scotland (with major new venues being required for the city to host the event).

Further details and perspectives on the road to the 1970 Games can be found in the personal papers of figures associated with Commonwealth Games Scotland also held in the University Archives including Sir Peter Heatly and Willie Carmichael himself.

The choice of host city for the 1966 Games was to be made at a meeting held at the 1962 Games in Perth, Australia. The first target on Carmichael’s plan, the Edinburgh campaign put forward its application as host city at a Federation meeting held in Rome in 1960. A series of press cutting files collected by Carmichael trace the campaigns progress from this initial declaration of intent through to the final decision made in Perth.

Edinburgh faced competition both within Scotland, with the press reporting a rival bid from Glasgow, and across the Commonwealth, with other nations including Jamaica, India and Southern Rhodesia expressing an interest in hosting the 1966 competition. When it came to the final decision in 1962 three cities remained in contention: Edinburgh, Kingston in Jamaica, and Salisbury in Southern Rhodesia. The first round of voting saw Salisbury eliminated. In the subsequent head-to-head vote Kingston was selected as host city for the 1966 Games by the narrowest of margins (17 votes to 16).

As Carmichael had sketched out in his 1957 plan if Edinburgh failed in its attempt to host the 1966 Games it would have another opportunity to make its case to hold the 1970 event. Carmichael and his colleagues travelled to Kingston in 1966 confident of securing the support required to bring the Games to Scotland in 1970. In our next blog we’ll look at how they succeeded in making the case for Edinburgh.

During a series of visits to China a few years ago, Kate Downie was brought into contact with traditional ink painting techniques, and also with the China of today. There she encountered the contrasts and meeting points between the epic industrial and epic romantic landscapes: the motorways, rivers, cityscapes and geology – all of which she absorbed and reflected on in a series of oil and ink paintings. As Kate creates studies for her paintings in situ, she is very much immersed in the landscapes that she is responding to and reflecting on.

The artwork shown above, ‘Nanbei’, which was purchased by the Art Collection in 2013, tackles similar themes to Downie’s Scottish based work, reflecting both her interest in the urban landscape and also the edges where land meets water. Here we encounter both aspects within a new setting – an industrial Chinese landscape set by the edge of a vast river. Downie is also obsessed with bridges. As well as the bridge that appears in this image, seemingly supported by trees that follow its line, the space depicted forms an unseen bridge between two worlds and two extremes, between epic natural and epic industrial forms. In this imagined landscape, north meets south (Nanbei literally means North South) and mountains meet skyscrapers; here both natural and industrial structures dominate the landscape. This juxtaposition is one of the aspects of China that impressed the artist and inspired the resulting work.

After purchasing this work by Kate Downie, the Art Collection invited her to be one of three exhibiting artists in its exhibition ‘Reflections of the East’ in 2015 (the other two artists were Fanny Lam Christie and Emma Scott Smith). All artists had links to China, and ‘Nanbei’ was central to the display of works in the Crush Hall that Kate had entitled ‘Shared Vision’.

Kate Downie studied Fine Art at Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen and has held artists’ residencies in the USA and Europe. She has exhibited widely and has also taught and directed major art projects. In 2010 Kate Downie travelled to Beijing and Shanghai to work with ink painting masters and she has since returned there several times, slowly building a lasting relationship with Chinese culture. On a recent visit she learned how to carve seals from soapstone, and these red stamps can now be seen on all of her work, including on her print ‘Temple Bridge’ above, which was purchased by the Collection at the end of the exhibition.

Kate Downie recently gave an interesting online talk about her work and life in lockdown. It was organised by The Scottish Gallery in Edinburgh which is currently holding an exhibition entitled ‘Modern Masters Women‘ featuring many women artists. Watch Kate Downie’s talk below:

Friday August 28th marks the 65th anniversary of the abduction and murder of Emmett Till. Till’s murder is regarded as a significant catalyst for the mid-century African-American Civil Rights Movement. Calls for justice for Till still drive national conversations about racism and oppression in the United States.

In 2015, Florida State University (FSU) Libraries Special Collections & Archives established the Emmett Till Archives in collaboration with Emmett Till scholar Davis Houck, filmmaker Keith Beauchamp, and author Devery Anderson. Since then, we have continued to build robust research collections of primary and secondary sources related to the life, murder, and commemoration of Emmett Till. We invite researchers from around the world, from any age group, to explore these collections and ask questions. It is through research and exploration of original, primary resources that Till’s story can be best understood and that truth can be shared.

As noted in our Emmett Till birthday post this year, an interview with Emmett Till’s family, conducted by civil rights filmmaker Keith Beauchamp in 2018, is now available through the FSU Digital Library in two parts. Willie Wright, Thelma Wright Edwards, and Wilma Wright Edwards were kind enough to share their perspectives with Beauchamp and in a panel presentation at the FSU Libraries Heritage Museum that Spring. Soon after this writing, original audio and video files from the interview will be also be available to any visitor, researcher, or aspiring documentary filmmaker through the FSU Digital Library.

A presentation by a Till scholar in 2019 led to renewed contact with and a valuable donation from FSU alum Steve Whitaker, who in a way was the earliest contributor to Emmett Till research at FSU. His seminal 1963 master’s thesis, completed right here at Florida State University, is still the earliest known scholarly work on the kidnapping and murder of Till, and was influential on many subsequent retellings of the story. The Till Archives recently received a few personal items from Whitaker documenting life in mid-century Mississippi, as well as a small library of books on Till, Mississippi law, and other topics that can give researchers valuable context for his thesis and the larger Till story.

In the future, the newly-founded Emmett Till Lecture and Archives Fund will ensure further opportunities to commemorate Till through events and collection development. FSU Libraries will continue to partner with Till’s family, the Emmett Till Memory Project, Emmett Till Interpretive Center, the Emmett Till Project, the FSU Civil Rights Institute, and other institutions and private donors to collect, preserve and provide access to the ongoing story of Emmett Till.

Sources and Further Reading

FSU Libraries. Emmett Till Archives Research Guide. https://guides.lib.fsu.edu/till

Wright Family Interview, Keith Beauchamp Audiovisual Recordings, MSS 2015-016, Special Collections & Archives, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida.
Interview Part I: http://purl.flvc.org/fsu/fd/FSU_MSS2015-016_BD_001
Interview Part II: http://purl.flvc.org/fsu/fd/FSU_MSS2015-016_BD_002

Mr. Gowdy was appointed by the Minority Leader McCarthy on August 24, 2020. He is serving his first three-year term on the Board. His appointment was announced on August 25, 2020 in the Congressional Record https://www.congress.gov/116/crec/2020/08/25/CREC-2020-08-25-house.pdf

“Teresa Sterne,” it read, “who in 14 years helped build the Nonesuch Record label into one of the most distinguished and innovative in the recording industry, will be named Director of Music Programming at WNYC radio next month.” The piece went on to promise that Ms. Sterne, under WNYC’s management, would be creating “new kinds of programming -including some innovative approaches to new music and a series of live music programs.” 

This was incredible news. Sterne, by this time, was a true cultural legend. She was known not only for those 14 years she’d spent building Nonesuch, a remarkably smart, serious, and daring record label —but also for how it had all ended, with her sudden dismissal from that label by Elektra, its parent company (whose own parent company was Warner Communications), two years earlier. The widely publicized outrage over her termination from Nonesuch included passionate letters of protest from the likes of Leonard Bernstein, Elliott Carter, Aaron Copland —only the alphabetical beginning of a long list of notable musicians, critics and journalists who saw her firing as a sharp blow to excellence and diversity in music. But the dismissal stood. 

By coincidence, only three weeks before the news of her hiring broke, I had applied for a job as a part-time music-host at WNYC. Steve Post, a colleague whom I’d met while doing some producing and on-air work at New York’s decidedly non-profit Pacifica station, WBAI, had come over from there to WNYC, a year before, to do the weekday morning music and news program. “Fishko,” he said to me, “they need someone on the weekends -and I think they want a woman.” My day job of longstanding was as a freelance film editor, but I wanted to keep my hand in the radio world. Weekends would be perfect. In two interviews with executives at WNYC, I had failed to impress. But now I could feel hopeful about making a connection to Ms. Sterne, who was a music person, as was I. 

Soon after her tenure began, I threw together a sample tape and got it to her through a contact on the inside. And she said, simply: Yeah, let’s give her a chance. And so it began. 

Tracey—the name she was called by all friends and colleagues — seemed, immediately, to be a fascinating, controversial character: she was uniquely qualified to do the work at hand, but at the same time she was a fish out of water. She was un-corporate, not inclined to be polite to the young executives upstairs, and not at all enamored of current trends or audience research. For this we dearly loved her, those of us on the air. She cared how the station sounded, how the music connected, how the information about the music surrounded it. Her preoccupations seemed, even then, to be of the Old School. But she was also fiercely modern in her attitude toward the music, unafraid to mix styles and periods, admiring of new music, up on every instrumentalist and conductor and composer, young, old, avant-garde, traditional. And she had her own emphatic and impeccable taste. Always the best, that was her motto —whatever it is, if it’s great, or even just extremely good, it will distinguish itself and find its audience, she felt. 

Tracey Sterne, age 13, rehearsing for a Tchaikovsky concerto performance at WNYC in March 1940.
(Finkelstein/WNYC Archive Collections)

She had developed her ear and her convictions, as it turned out, as a musician, having been a piano prodigy who performed at Madison Square Garden at age 12. She went on to a debut with the New York Philharmonic, gave concerts at Lewisohn Stadium and the Brooklyn Museum, and so on. I could relate. Though my gifts were not nearly at her level, I, too, had been a dedicated, early pianist and I, too, had looked later for other ways to use what I’d learned at the piano keyboard. And our birthdays were on the same date in March. So, despite being at least a couple of decades apart in age, we bonded. 

Tracey’s tenure at WNYC was fruitful, though not long. As she had at Nonesuch, she embraced ambitious and adventurous music programming. She encouraged some of the on-air personalities to express themselves about the music, to “personalize” the air, to some degree. That was also happening in special programs launched shortly before she arrived as part of a New Music initiative, with John Schaefer and Tim Page presenting a range of music way beyond the standard classical fare. And because of Tracey’s deep history and contacts in the New York music business, she forged partnerships with music institutions and found ways to work live performances by individual musicians and chamber groups into the programming. She helped me carve out a segment on air for something we called Great Collaborations, a simple and very flexible idea of hers that spread out to every area of music and made a nice framework for some observations about musical style and history. She loved to talk (sometimes to a fault) and brainstorm about ways to enliven the idea of classical music on the radio, not something all that many people were thinking about, then. 

But management found her difficult, slow and entirely too perfectionistic. She found management difficult, slow and entirely too superficial. And after a short time, maybe a year, she packed up her sneakers —essential for navigating the unforgiving marble floors in that old place— and left the long, dusty hallways of the Municipal Building. 

After that, I occasionally visited Tracey’s house in Brooklyn for events which I can only refer to as “musicales.” Her residence was on the Upper West Side, but this family house was treated as a country place, she’d go on the weekends. She’d have people over, they’d play piano, and sing, and it might be William Bolcom and Joan Morris, or some other notables, spending a musical and social afternoon. Later, she and I produced a big, New York concert together for the 300th birthday of Domenico Scarlatti –which exact date fell on a Saturday in 1985. “Scarlatti Saturday,” we called it, with endless phone-calling, musician-wrangling and fundraising needed for months to get it off the ground.  The concert itself, much of which was also broadcast on WNYC, went on for many hours, with appearances by some of the finest pianists and harpsichordists in town and out, lines all up and down Broadway to get into Symphony Space.  Throughout, Tracey was her incorruptible self — and a brilliant organizer, writer, thinker, planner, and impossibly driven producing-partner. 

I should make clear, however, that for all her knowledge and perfectionistic, obsessive behavior, she was never the cliche of the driven, lonely careerist -or whatever other cliche you might want to choose. She was a warm, haimish person with friends all over the world, friends made mostly through music. A case in point: the “Scarlatti Saturday” event was produced by the two of us on a shoestring. And Tracey, being Tracey, she insisted that we provide full musical and performance information in printed programs, offered free to all audience members, and of course accurate to the last comma. How to assure this? She quite naturally charmed and befriended the printer — who wound up practically donating the costly programs to the event. By the time we were finished she was making him batches of her famous rum balls and he was giving us additional, corrected pages —at no extra charge. It was not a calculated maneuver -it was just how she did things. 

You just had to love and respect her for the life force, the intelligence, the excellence and even the temperament she displayed at every turn. Sometimes even now, after her death many years ago at 73 from ALS, I still feel Tracey Sterne’s high standards hanging over me —in the friendliest possible way.

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Sara Fishko hosts WNYC’s culture series, Fishko Files.

Today I want to recognize and thank the mission-essential staff of NARA’s National Personnel Records Center (NPRC). Like all NARA offices, the NPRC closed in late March to protect its workforce and patrons from the spread of the pandemic and comply with local government movement orders. While modern military records are available electronically and can be referenced remotely, the majority of NPRC’s holdings and reference activity involve paper records that can be accessed only by on-site staff. Furthermore, these records are often needed to support veterans and their families with urgent matters such as medical emergencies, homeless veterans seeking shelter, and funeral services for deceased veterans.

Concerned about the impact a disruption in service would have on veterans and their families, over 150 staff voluntarily set aside concerns for their personal welfare and regularly reported to the office throughout the period of closure to respond to these types of urgent requests. These exceptional staff were pioneers in the development of alternative work processes to incorporate social distancing and other protective measures to ensure a safe work environment while providing this critical service.

National Personnel Records Center (NPRC) building in St. Louis

The Center is now in Phase One of a gradual re-opening, allowing for additional on-site staff.  The same group that stepped up during the period of closure continues to report to the office and are now joined by additional staff volunteers, enabling them to also respond to requests supporting employment opportunities and home loan guaranty benefits. There are now over 200 staff supporting on-site reference services on a rotational basis. Together they have responded to over 32,000 requests since the facility closed in late March. More than half of these requests supported funeral honors for deceased veterans.

With each passing day we are a day closer to the pandemic being behind us. Though it may seem far off, there will come a time when Covid-19 is no longer the threat that it is today, and the Pandemic of 2020 will be discussed in the context of history. When that time comes, the mission essential staff of NPRC will be able to look back with pride and know that during this unprecedented crisis, when their country most needed them, they looked beyond their personal well-being to serve others in the best way they were able.

As Archivist of the United States, I applaud you for your commitment to the important work of the National Archives, and as a Navy veteran whose service records are held at NPRC, I thank you for your unwavering support to America’s veterans.

Students, faculty, and alumni! Heritage & University Archives is collecting stories and experiences from the FSU community during COVID-19.

University life during a pandemic will be studied by future scholars. During this pandemic, we have received requests surrounding the 1918 Flu Pandemic. Unfortunately, not many documents describing these experiences survive in the archive. 

To create a rich record of life in these unique times we are asking the FSU Community to contribute their thoughts, experiences, plans, and photographs to the archive.

How did COVID-19 affect your summer? Tell us about your plans for fall. How did COVID-19 change your plans for classes? Upload photographs of your dorm rooms or your work from home set ups.

If you’d like to see examples of what people have already contributed, please see the collection on Diginole.

You can add your story to the project here.

PPL is now accepting proposals for our 2021 Creative Fellowship! We’re looking for an artist working in illustration or two-dimensional artwork to create new work related to the theme of our 2021 exhibition, Tomboys.

View the full call for proposals, including application instructions, here. The application deadline is October 1, 2020 April 1, 2021*.

*This deadline has shifted since we originally posted this call for proposals! The 2021 Fellowship, and the Exhibition & Program Series, have both been shifted forward by six months due to the coronavirus. Updated deadlines and timeline in the call for proposals!

This week we are taking a look at some of the still life works of art in the permanent collection.

‘Still life’ (or ‘nature morte’ as it is also widely known) refers to the depiction of mostly inanimate subject matter. It has been a part of art from the very earliest days, from thousands of years ago in Ancient Egypt, found also on the walls in 1st century Pompeii, and featured in illuminated medieval manuscripts. During the Renaissance, when it began to gain recognition as a genre in its own right, it was adapted for religious purposes. Dutch golden age artists in particular, in the early 17th century, depicted objects which had a symbolic significance. The still life became a moralising meditation on the brevity of life. and the vanity of the acquisition of possessions. But, with urbanization and the rise of a middle class with money to spend, it also became fashionable simply as a celebration of those possessions – in paintings of rare flowers or sumptuous food-laden table tops with expensive silverware and the best china.

The still life has remained a popular feature through many modern art movements. Artists might use it as an exercise in technique (much cheaper than a live model), as a study in colour, form, or light and shade, or as a meditation in order to express a deeper mood. Or indeed all of these.

The works collected by the University of Stirling Art Collection over the past fifty years reflect its continuing popularity amongst artists and art connoisseurs alike.

In the modern era the still life featured in the post impressionist art of Van Gogh, Cezanne and Picasso. Henri Hayden trained in Warsaw, but moved to Paris in 1907 where Cezanne and Cubism were influences. From 1922 he rejected this aesthetic and developed a more figurative manner, but later in life there were signs of a return to a sub-cubist mannerism in his work, and as a result the landscapes and still lifes of his last 20 years became both more simplified and more definitely composed than the previous period, with an elegant calligraphy. They combine a new richness of colour with lyrical melancholy. Meditation and purity of vision mark the painter’s last years.

Anne Redpath is best known for her still lifes and interiors, often with added textural interest, and also with the slightly forward-tilted table top, of which this painting is a good example. Although this work is largely monochrome it retains the fascination the artist had in fabric and textiles – the depiction of the lace is enhanced by the restrained palette.

While Euan Heng’s work is contemporary in practice his imagery is not always contemporary in origin. He has long been influenced by Italian iconography, medieval paintings and frescoes.

In Ceri Richards’ work there is a constant recurrence of visual symbols and motifs always associated with the mythic cycles of nature and life. These symbols include rock formations, plant forms, sun, moon and seed-pods, leaf and flower. These themes refer to the cycle of human life and its transience within the landscape of earth.

This is a typical example of one of Elizabeth Blackadder’s ‘flattened’ still life paintings, with no perspective. Works such as this retain the form of the table, with the top raised to give the fullest view.

David Donaldson was well known for his still lifes and landscape paintings as well as literary, biblical and allegorical subjects.

William MacTaggart typically painted landscapes, seascapes and still lifes featuring vases of flowers. These flowers, for his wife, Fanny Aavatsmark, are unusual for not being poppies, his most commonly painted flower.

We end this blog post with one of the most popular still lifes in the collection. This depiction of Scottish classic the Tunnock’s teacake is a modern take on the still life. It is a firm favourite whenever it is on display.

With potential build sites in Miami and Cape Canaveral, the latter possessing the added benefit of proximity to NASA, the Florida Solar Energy Task Force, led by Robert Nabors and endorsed by Representative Pepper, felt confident. The state made it to the final rounds of the search before the final location of Golden, Colorado was settled upon, which would open in 1977. Around this same time however (1975), the Florida Solar Energy Center was established at the University of Central Florida. The Claude Pepper Papers contain a wealth of information on Florida’s efforts in the solar energy arena from the onset of the energy crisis, to the late 1980’s.

Earlier this year, “Tallahassee Solar II”, a new solar energy farm, began operating in Florida’s capitol city.  Located near the Tallahassee International Airport, it provides electricity for more than 9,500 homes in the Leon County area. With the steady gains that the State of Florida continues to make in the area of solar energy expansion, it gets closer to fully realizing its nickname, “the Sunshine State.”

Our next submission is from Rachel Duke, our Rare Books Librarian, who has been with Special collections for two years. This project was primarily geared towards full-time faculty and staff, so I chose to highlight her contribution to see what a full-time faculty’s experience would be like looking through the catalog.

The item she chose was Salome, originally written in French by Oscar Wilde, then translated into English, as her object. While this book does not explicitly identify as a “Queer Text,” Wilde has become canonized in queer historical literature. In the first edition of the book, there is even a dedication to his lover, Lord Alfred Bruce Douglas, who helped with the translation. While there are documented historical examples of what we would refer to today as “queerness,” (queer meaning non-straight) there is still no demarcation of his queerness anywhere in the catalog record. Although the author is not necessarily unpacking his own queer experiences in the text, “both [Salome’s] author and its legacy participate strongly in queer history” as Duke states in her submission. 

Even though Wilde was in a queer relationship with Lord Alfred Bruce Douglas, and has been accepted into the Queer canon, why doesn’t his catalog record reflect that history? Well, a few factors come into play. One of the main ones is an aversion to retroactively labeling historical figures. Since we cannot confirm which modern label would fit Wilde, we can’t necessarily outright label him as gay. How would a queer researcher like me go about finding authors and artists from the past who are connected with queer history?

It is important to acknowledge LGBTQ+ erasure when discussing this topic. Since the LGBTQ+ community has historically been marginalized, documentation of queerness is hard to come by because:

• People did not collect, and even actively erased, Queer and Trans Histories.
• LGBTQ+ history has been passed down primarily as an oral tradition. 
• Historically, we cannot confirm which labels people would have identified with.
• Language and social conventions change over time.

So while we view and know someone to be queer, since it is not in official documentation we have no “proof.” On the other hand, in some cultures, gay relations were socially acceptable. For example, in the Middle Ages, there was a legislatively approved form of same-sex marriage, known as affrèrement. This example is clearly labeled as *gay* in related library-based description because it was codified that way in the historical record. By contrast, Shakespeare’s sonnets, which (arguably) use queer motifs and themes, are not labeled as “queer” or “gay.” Does queer content mean we retroactively label the AUTHOR queer? Does the implication of queerness mean we should make the text discoverable under queer search terms?

Personally, I see both sides. As someone who is queer, I would not want a random person trying to retroactively label me as something I don’t identify with. On the other hand, as a queer researcher, I find it vital to have access to that information. Although they might not have been seen as queer in their time period, their experiences speak to queer history. Identities and people will change, which is completely normal, but as a group that has experienced erasure of their history, it is important to acknowledge all examples of historical queerness as a proof that LGBTQ+ individuals have existed throughout time. How do we responsibly and ethically go about making historical queerness discoverable in our finding aids and catalogs?

Click Here to see some more historical figures you might not have known were LGBTQ+.

Dickinson explained that the over-classification of space information leads to the duplication of space systems, the lack of integration of space capabilities and training, and a critical lack of knowledge about specific space threats across U.S. operational forces. Similar concerns about over-classification in space have been raised since December 2019 by current and former Department of Defense (DOD) officials, including Secretary of the U.S. Air Force Barbara Barrett, and former Commander of the U.S. Pacific Command and Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair, and former Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work.

USSPACECOM relies heavily on information collected and prepared by both the Intelligence Community (IC) and the combatant commands to support the mission of protecting and defending national security in space. Effective space defense relies on the collection, processing, and sharing of highly classified information that includes valuable sensor data, satellite communications, and navigation signals for a diverse set of end users. Over-classification of this information, which is strictly regulated by security controls, stymies the performance of Government engineers and contractors developing new technologies on a broad range of projects, and endangers warfighters.

Leaders across the DOD and the IC struggle with the existing classification system that protects, but also inhibits the proper sharing of sensitive information. Many from within the Government now call for a comprehensive review of the classification system to improve the timely dissemination for the operational support of warfighters. These demands echo recommendations the Public Interest Declassification Board has long advocated for the modernization of classification and declassification as a means of cutting costs, aligning the digital business practices of Federal agencies, and combatting over-classification to ensure a credible system for protecting national security information.

Outdated and excessively costly, the current method for classifying and declassifying national security information remains unsustainable in the digital information age. As all media become fully digital, analog technology and paper records become practically inaccessible and dysfunctional. The costs of the security classification system are staggering (reported to be an estimated $18.39 billion in FY 2017), yet resources for declassification remain woefully underfunded, while over-classification and the declassification backlog give rise to leaks and inadvertent disclosures that damage national security imperatives.

By continuing to unnecessarily classify information without timely declassification and a strategic transformation of the Government information system, the volume and diversity of records inaccessible to policymakers and the public will only continue to increase. Current practices diminish public confidence in the security classification system, impede appropriate information-sharing within the Government, and diminish the open discussion of our national history that is so fundamental to the democratic process. Yet, the Government still struggles to increase transparency and to demystify its classified activities.

In January this year, the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. John Hyten called for cleaning up the Pentagon’s classification process, noting that “we’re just so overclassified it’s ridiculous, just unbelievably ridiculous.” Crucial reforms to the system will need to include a tightening of definitions and greater specificity for categories requiring protection in the first place. Some measure of constraint on the system will be necessary to combat over-classification, a topic which requires broader study and more clearly defined outcomes to reverse the trend of excessive secrecy. Over-classification manifested in excessive secrecy remains and will likely continue to pose a serious challenge to appropriate information sharing and control. The benefits of sharing classified information with properly cleared users outweighs the perceived detriments of inappropriate distribution. Classification need no longer be the default selection to ensure national security interests are adequately protected.

Letter to WNYC director Morris S. Novik: 

Mill Lane

Bronx, N.Y.C. 

October 27, 1938 

Gentlemen:

The radio, as far as I am concerned, is WNYC. 

I work on the night shift, 4-12, in an ice plant.

At seven in the morning my alarm clock is rigged so that instead of a horrible ringing, the Sunrise Symphony switches on. (Want the patent fellow music lovers?)

So there I lie in bed, a working man enjoying a millionaire’s comfort. By eight I’m ready for breakfast and the morning paper. At nine, another hour of good music. And so I am well fortified for a new day!

Sincerely,

Jack Bruce Mercer

P.S. Please send me the Masterwork Booklet.  

According to a news release issued a week-a-half later by the office of Mayor La Guardia, ​Morris Novik passed Mercer’s diagram (pictured above) on to ​WNYC’s Chief Engineer Isaac Brimberg who put the Rube Goldberg-like design to the test. It worked!

Sunrise Symphony was the station’s daily morning program of recorded classical music. The Masterwork Booklet, ​which Mercer requests in the postscript of his letter, was actually The Masterwork Bulletin, WNYC’s program guide.

Special thanks to the New York City Municipal Archives and to the La Guardia and Wagner Archives, La Guardia Community College/The City University of New York.

La’Naia Jones, acting Chief Information Officer for the Intelligence Community (ICCIO) in the ODNI, emphasized that the application of ODNI’s 2019 Cyber Implementation Plan, and lessons learned over seven years since the ODNI decided to invest in Cloud technologies, have reduced costs through the integration of IT services and process automation across the IC to “do more with less.” She acknowledged that manual processes put a drag on workflows, noting that this became especially obvious as the IC transitioned to performing as much telework as possible under the pandemic lockdown. Jones explained that the ODNI is uniquely positioned to leverage modernization through a common infrastructure and federated approach across the 17 IC agencies.  This allows for flexibility in adapting specific technologies to the needs of each IC agency for automation and processing unstructured data.

NGA’s Associate CIO Mark Chatelain explained that flexibility in implementing technological solutions for specific tasks have allowed the NGA to go from having only a few employees working remotely before March 15, to now having almost its entire workforce work remotely.  Less than 10 percent of NGA employees work on site. He emphasized the role of NGA’s agile business processes in rapidly adapting to support the NGA in deploying a remote topographic platform at the unclassified level within the first week of the pandemic lockdown.

As highlighted in these presentations, the IC’s rapid response to the COVID-19 pandemic was aided by their modernization plans.  They deployed advanced technologies for remote access and collaboration, shifting away from manual processes that were either inefficient or impossible to perform remotely.  IC adoption of automation, and the ability to efficiently and effectively process unstructured data, illustrate how the IC is cutting costs through digital transformation— a strategy that the Public Interest Declassification Board has long recommended for improving classification and declassification across the Federal Government. Modernization during the current pandemic further amplifies why the ODNI is uniquely positioned to serve as the Executive Agent for designing and implementing a transformed security classification system that leverages ODNI success in leading implementation of the Intelligence Community Information Technology Enterprise.

The response to COVID-19 provides an opportunity to accelerate the specific adaptation of new technologies for the digital transformation of classification and declassification. In the public interest, the Board will continue to study the implications of best practices and innovations in the IC driven by the ongoing public health emergency.

This week we are looking at the paintings of the McKenzie sisters in the Collection.

In 2015, the Art Collection received an unexpected letter from a solicitor in St Andrew’s stating that the late Sydney Aylwin Clark had bequeathed five pictures to the Collection. As it turned out, these paintings were by two sisters called McKenzie – Winifred (1905-2001) and Alison (1907-1982) – and Aylwin Clark (as she was known) had been their friend and biographer.
No explanation was given as to why these works were to come to Stirling, but apparently Ms Clark had decided that the Art Collection would be a worthy recipient.

In 1990 Sydney Aylwin Clark had written a biography about her friends entitled ‘The McKenzie Sisters: The Lives and Art of Winifred and Alison McKenzie’ with a foreword by David McClure, and this provides a fascinating account of their joint lives.

Winifred and Alison McKenzie were born in the first decade of the 20th Century in Bombay, where their father worked in the family sawmill business (though he had originally trained as an architect at Glasgow School of Art in the 1880s, where he was a contemporary and friend of Charles Rennie Mackintosh). The family moved back to Scotland when the girls were still young and in 1923 Winifred enrolled in Drawing & Painting classes at Glasgow School of Art, where the lecturer Chica MacNab introduced her to the art of woodcuts. Alison followed shortly after and became one of the leading students in Design & Textiles. They completed their art training together at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art in London. While living in the capital in the 1930s, Winifred was elected a member of the National Society of Painters, Sculptors, and Engravers, and she was also a member of the Society of Wood Engravers.

In 1940 the family moved back to Scotland, to live in St Andrews, where they joined the artist Annabel Kidston in running a series of art classes for the allied forces stationed in the town during the war. Run under the auspices of the Committee for Education for the Forces, the classes proved extremely popular, particularly with the Polish soldiers, whose work was exhibited in 1944 at the National Gallery in Edinburgh
Winifred joined the staff of Dundee College of Art in 1944, to teach wood engraving and composition. Alison joined her two years later on a job-share basis when their mother fell ill. They were popular and successful teachers, but their mother’s declining health forced them to resign from the College in 1957, to care for her full-time. The wood engraving course was taken over by Jozef Sekalski, another Polish artist who twice escaped from Nazi imprisonment during his attempts to reach Britain. 

“The two McKenzie sisters have lived close together throughout their lives, and as engravers each has a remarkable quality though in matters of individuality they are surprisingly different. The handling of light in Winifred’s engraving is the flood source, breaking through the arboreal colander. Her engraving technique is that of the painter. Alison’s handling of light is the beam source, illuminating a world of solids, a sculptural concept expressing solidity, security and order. Her engraving is remarkable for its economy and precision.”

– A History of British Wood Engraving by Albert Garrett 1978

The above painting is probably this one, referred to in Aylwin Clark’s biography:

‘From Ovronnaz [Rhone Valley, Switzerland] they walked up the valley as the sun came out, which provided Winifred with a dramatic image, made up of retreating storm clouds, grey glacier, varied light on the different planes of the mountain sides and in the foreground, green fields and a clump of trees, brilliantly illuminated. She worked it up later in their St Andrews studio – a perfect example of ’emotion recollected in tranquility’”

‘The McKenzie Sisters’ by Sydney Aylwin Clark, page 108

Aylwin Clark in her book describes how Winifred, in old age, enjoyed trips abroad, discovering France with the Friends of the RSA: ‘Looking from her cabin, she was thrilled with the light on Chateauneuf-du-Pape, with the brilliant blue of the bow wave in the foreground’.

Throughout his career, Pepper was uniquely devoted to the idea of comprehensive health care coverage. In 1937, during his first term as Senator, he co-authored legislation establishing the National Cancer Institute. Throughout the remainder of his career, he was instrumental in establishing an additional thirteen National Institutes of Health. Beginning in 1946, Pepper began efforts to muster support for the Wagner-Murray-Dingell Bill. A proposal to institute a national health care and hospital system intended to ease the hardship that America’s health care system imposed on those least able to afford it, the bill failed to gain traction or support.

For the next thirty years, the possibility of a National Health Care system continued to remain on the forefront of Pepper’s agenda. His last legislative efforts began in 1987. After the Bipartisan Commission, Pepper and his colleagues in the House began to craft what would become the Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act of 1988. The bill was designed to improve acute care benefits for the elderly and disabled, which was to be phased in from 1989 to 1993.The act was meant to expand Medicare benefits to include outpatient drugs and set a cap on out of pocket medical costs. It was the first bill to significantly expand Medicare benefits since the program’s inception. Although the bill passed easily with initial support, the House and Senate repealed it a year later in response to widespread criticism over projected government costs.

Senator Pepper died in May of 1989, not seeing his goal of a national health care system achieved. Today the work toward that goal continues, and if you are interested to learn more about the history and evolution of the path toward affordable and equitable health care coverage for all Americans, the Pepper Papers, and all of our political collections, are searchable online.

Claude Pepper speaking at the Aging Subcommittee on Health Maintenance and Long Term Care hearing. Claude Pepper Papers Photo B(1397)-01.

Special Collections & Archives is pleased to announce our new and improved page on the Florida History research guide. One of our major projects this summer in light of Covid-19 and the need for expanded online services has been to update our presence on FSU Library research guides to better connect patrons with our materials remotely.

The Florida History guide is overseen by Humanities librarian, Adam Beauchamp, who will be working on updating the rest of it in the future. Research guides can be accessed through the tile, “Research Guides,” on the library’s main page. To navigate to our updated page on the Florida History guide (pictured below), select the “Florida History in the FSU Libraries Special Collections & Archives” tab via the left-hand navigation bar in the research guide.

What were the improvements we have made to the page? We updated an introduction to Special Collections & Archives’ holdings and spaces, as well as information on our databases and how to search them. The main addition to this page is a break-down of our resources by topical subject areas within Florida History. The first section gives introductory information on how to use the resources listed as well as other places on the page to learn more about our searchable databases. Scroll down the page to explore different subjects represented in our collections. Alternatively, there are links that directly jump to each subject. The topics we have highlighted are Early Florida, Florida Industry & Agriculture, Tallahassee History, The Civil War in Florida, and Florida Politics. 

The sections explain how and where to find materials like the above photograph of the Saturn V Moon Rocket across different searchable databases like ArchivesSpace, the Library Catalog, and the Digital Library. We included links and examples of digital collections, finding aids, and Library of Congress Subject Headings as starting points for research. There are also suggestions for how to develop keyword searches at the bottom of the page. 

Be on the lookout for more blog posts as we continue to unveil updated pages and guides for the Fall semester. And, of course, make sure to check out our new page on the Florida History guide! While direct access to physical collections is unavailable at this time due to Covid-19, we hope to resume in-person research when it is safe to do so, and Special Collections & Archives is still available to assist you remotely with research and instruction. Please get in touch with us via email at: lib-specialcollections@fsu.edu. For a full list of our remote services, please visit our services page.

In 1968 the brand new University of Stirling was fortunate to be presented with a collection of 14 paintings by the eminent Scottish painter John Duncan Fergusson. The ‘J D Fergusson Memorial Collection’ was gifted by the artist’s widow Margaret Morris, as a mark of her friendship with Tom Cottrell, the University’s first Principal, and her excitement at the inauguration of a great new adventure in Scottish education.

J D Fergusson was a principal artist in the group now known as the Scottish Colourists, which combined French Impressionist techniques with Scottish themes to produce outstanding works in the early 20th Century. The collection of fourteen of Fergusson’s paintings at Stirling was chosen to represent all periods of his life from his very early Bazaar in Tangiers (c. 1897) to A Bridge on the Kelvin (1942). It contains some of his finest work and includes the seminal painting Rhythm (1911). This blog post focusses on just some of these works. They can be viewed in full here.

The first of four children, J D Fergusson was born in Leith in 1874. After the Royal High School, the idea of being a naval surgeon appealed briefly, but Fergusson soon realised that his vocation was to paint. Art studies in Edinburgh became too rigid for him however and, resolving to teach himself, he started to travel. Around 1897 he went to Southern Spain and Morocco. In his works of this time he acknowledged the influence of Arthur Melville who had made similar painting excursions ten years earlier. As can be seen above in ‘Bazaar in Tangiers’, his oil paintings of this time are loosely worked, with a restrained palette.

He started to spend time in France, meeting fellow artists and studying at the Louvre, deeply impressed by the Impressionist paintings in the Salle Caillebotte. During these years the strongest influence on Fergusson was his friend S J Peploe whom he had met in the late 1890s.

In 1907 Fergusson moved to Paris and began to fully embrace the new era. During the first years of the new century, the city was a ferment of ideas in art, literature, philosophy, music and dance. Here, he was a contemporary of Picasso and was influenced by such artists as Cezanne, Monet and Matisse and the intense colour of the Fauvists such as Derain. This painting deploys fauvist use of colour to delineate form, and gains energy from the unpainted areas of canvas and the set of the shoulder axis.

He also painted the many friends he made during this time. In this portrait of the American writer and critic Elizabeth Dryden, colour is used descriptively on form, whilst the background is a decorative surface of diminuished perspectival depth. This painting was exhibited in the Paris Salon d’Automne in 1909.

‘Rhythm’ was a key modernist concept, based on the philosophy of Henri Bergson, and this painting is perhaps Fergusson’s first modernist masterpiece. The young John Middleton Murry met Fergusson in 1910 and remembered ‘one word in all our strange discussions – the word ‘rhythm’. We never made any attempt to define it….for F. it was the essential quality in a painting or a sculpture; and since it was at that moment that the Russian Ballet first came to Western Europe….dancing was obviously linked, by rhythm, with the plastic arts’. Middleton Murry subsequently founded a literary magazine with Rhythm as the title, and Fergusson became art editor – a design based on this painting was used as the cover design. The painting itself shows a proud healthy Eve-like woman, complete with apple, though she seems more self-assertive than alluring or guilty. The figure is static but dynamic, poised to leap. Tension is introduced by the juxtaposition of verticals with more fluid lines, and movement through the shape and colour of her body and of the tree and drapes which surround her. Rhythm was first exhibited in Paris, at the Salon d’Automne, in 1911.

In 1914, with the outbreak of the First World War, Fergusson returned to live in London. This is one of a series of paintings which portray life in the naval dockyard at Portsmouth. The painting shows a dramatic viewpoint with strong verticals and a large destroyer’s bow. Energy not war creates the focal point. It was clearly influenced by the Vorticist movement. It has been claimed in the past that Fergusson was an official war artist, but apparently this was not the case. He was merely given permission by the Admiralty to visit the docks ‘to gather impressions for painting a picture’.

Painted after a tour of the Scottish Highlands in 1922, this picture illustrates a debt to Paul Cezanne and in its architectural approach to landscape heralds a new maturity in Fergusson’s art. It is a good example of a dialogue between colours and planes, created at a time when the artist was concerned with the problems of development of a shape within the many shapes of a composition. Many of the paintings from this trip were shown at his first major Scottish Exhibitions at the Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh and at Alexander Reid’s Gallery in Glasgow.

After the war ended, Fergusson began to visit France regularly again, settling with Margaret Morris in the south in the late Twenties. The colour and subject matter that he found there informed his painting and sculpture for the rest of his career.

In 1939 with the outbreak of the Second World War the couple returned to Britain, setting up home in Glasgow, and Fergusson became actively involved with the New Scottish Art Group. This picture was painted near their flat on Clouston Street. The refracted light and rich, sonorous colour is similar to a late Monet with a softer touch.

J D Fergusson is regarded as the most versatile and experimental of the quartet of
Scottish painters known as the Colourists (along with Samuel Peploe, Francis Cadell
and Leslie Hunter). The work of the group remains highly influential to this day.

‘Everyone in Scotland should refuse to have anything to do with black or dirty and dingy colours, and insist on clean colours in everything. I remember when I was young any colour was considered a sign of vulgarity. Greys and blacks were the only colours for people of taste and refinement. Good pictures had to be black, grey, brown or drab. Well! let’s forget it, and insist on things in Scotland being of colour that makes for and associates itself with light, hopefulness, health and happiness.’

J.D.Fergusson in Modern Scottish Painting (pub. William MacLellan, Glasgow 1943)

This is a short film about J D Fergusson which was made to coincide with a major Scottish Colourist exhibition in Edinburgh 2013/14.

The University Art Collection has recently re-published a catalogue of these works with added accompanying essays. ‘Colour, Light, Freedom: Fergusson at Stirling’ can be purchased in the Pathfoot Building Crush Hall for £5, or ordered online here.

All images copyright The Fergusson Gallery, Perth

Yardbird
Michael Tyzack (1933-2007)
(Emulsion on board, 1962)

Born in Sheffield, Michael Tyzack studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. In 1956 he won a French Government Scholarship that allowed him to travel to Paris and Menton, where his work began to show a tendency towards abstraction and the influence of Cezanne. In 1965 he won first prize in the prestigious John Moores’ Liverpool Exhibition and continued to exhibit at prominent galleries and museums in the UK and America during the 1960s and 1970s, while also working as a professional jazz trumpeter.

Two works by this artist were purchased for the brand new University Art Collection in 1967 from the Richard Demarco Gallery in Edinburgh. The works collected in that period for the new University were by contemporary artists, in keeping with its modernist architecture. They were displayed around the Pathfoot Building, making art and culture part of the everyday experience at the University.

In 1971 Tyzack took up a short teaching post in Iowa – originally planning to stay only one year. However, he and his family decided to remain in America after he was offered the post of Professor of Fine Arts at the College of Charleston, where he lived until his death in 2007.
He was one of the most distinguished British abstract painters to have settled in the United States in the last half-century. As a teacher he became a revered mentor for many young artists.

First of all, the challenges. One, a global pandemic but this one the DLC has navigated (cross all the fingers) really well so far. The DLC was closed from mid-March through early May. We returned to work on a rotation schedule which is working well. Another challenge was the retirement of a long time employee (we miss you Giesele!) which means the DLC is down a staff member. We’re also not actually *in* the DLC right now. Due to construction on the 2nd floor of Strozier Library, we’re in temporary digs until mid-September. This limits what equipment we have to do digitization right now. Bonus square on 2020 bingo? We’re also prepping for a platform migration for our digital library because why do one thing at a time when you can do ALL the things at the same time!

So, what are we doing to meet these challenges? The open position in the DLC is being reviewed currently and hopefully, we’ll be able to move forward with it before the end of the year. While we are limited in terms of our temporary space, we’re making it work and creating a “wait list” for projects to do once we’re back in the DLC. We’re proactively communicating with those on the wait list and so far, everyone is working with us on delayed delivery dates. We’re also working with our Special Collections & Archives Instruction Group on digitization needs and created guidelines to help instruction liaisons understand when the DLC might not be needed to meet their needs. We’re also planning and prepping for our upcoming migration and getting ourselves ready for if the digital library might need to be offline for a time during our move into the new and improved platform.

Even through all that, we’ve managed to get a lot of new materials up in the digital library since May. Some of this material was already digitized prior to our shutdown in March but was waiting on description for loading into the digital library. Thanks to the need for remote work, and the increased number of staff looking for it, we got a lot of waiting materials off the list and into the digital library. We’ve continued to add new materials online as we’ve digitized on campus and worked on description and loading remotely.

We added several university publications this spring and summer. Smoke Signals and Talaria (highlighted in a blog post earlier this year), Athanor, Black Insight, Black Voice (see the full issue highlighted at the side here), and Affirmative Action Quarterly were all added to the University Publications digital collection. We completed loading several more years’ worth of issues to the ongoing project to make the full run of Il Secolo available online. Continuing our partnership with community organizations, we also added new materials to both the Leon High School and First Baptist Church of Tallahassee collections.

Just this past month, we also added new video footage from an interview with Wright Family members to the Emmett Till Archives, shared our first submissions to the FSU COVID-19 Community Experience Project and loaded our first big batch of Instructional Support materials. The instructional materials are scattered through several collections in the digital library but include some of SCA’s “greatest hits” such as our chained book and our signed first edition of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species as well as many of our Book of Hours leaves.

As we head into the Fall, the DLC is trying to be prepared for whatever 2020 might throw our way next but we feel confident we’re moving in the right direction and continuing to support our faculty, staff and students!

For this blog post, I am choosing to write this from a more candid place, in hopes that people understand why change in library description is necessary. My last post talked about How to Transition on 63 Cents a Day, showing how there are outdated terms referencing Lee Krist’s identity in the catalog record. Those terms are still in the catalog record. My first post discussed how there are 0 results when you search “LGBT.” There are still zero results in Special Collections and Archives for that search. I started these posts as a way to facilitate the conversation about white supremacy in library settings, and to create some tangible ways to start addressing them. 

I was initially hired by Special Collections to update the artists’ book inventory, focusing on the labeling of printmaking techniques, themes, and identities to make them more accessible. One of the first books I ever worked on was How to Transition on 63 cents a Day. I remember updating the SCA spreadsheet of search terms with every term I could think of, the first one of them was LGBT. These terms have yet to make it into the catalog record. It feels frustrating to me because I have been doing this kind of work since my first day in Special Collections, but it seems progress moves at a glacier’s pace.

Tackling systemic issues within universities and other similar institutions sometimes feels impossible. Contacting the right people, organizing multiple meetings to discuss an action plan, finding the resources to do so, etc. etc. etc. and all while following “proper protocol.” Following bureaucratic etiquette, more times than not, perpetuates a mess of red tape that always ensnares progress for marginalized communities.

Meetings are important. I understand that! I just want tangible progress, and the ability to keep track of what’s been done in this effort. In a predominately white cisgender heterosexual career and institution, meetings can often feel performative rather than action-based. So much has been written about performative allyship in the workplace when it comes to racism, feminism, and anti-queer sentiment.  A recent Fortune article discusses performative allyship in workspaces, where organizations are “condemning racism through broad gestures but enabling its effects.” 

We all acknowledge that prejudice is bad. We all acknowledge that we want to “get better.” But you don’t “get better,” you DO BETTER. We haven’t uplifted the community that these problems have affected, so how can we say that we’re addressing them? One of the most important parts of creating change is recognizing that no person or institution is perfect. True allyship doesn’t lie in perfection (OR POLITENESS); it lies in the ability to accept critique and take accountability, which is what I hope we can do as a division and as a library. Next week is our first meeting about this initiative, and I want to make this about ACTION, to “light a proverbial fire.” 

I’m asking my division colleagues to do this “Privilege Check Game” prior to the meeting. We’d love for you to play along, and to think of one way that you can make your work more inclusive. This can be as big or as small as you want. 

Privilege Check Game: Start with 10 fingers!

Put down a finger if…

…you’ve ever been called a slur?

…you’ve ever had to see the same slur you were called in a catalog record?

…you’ve searched your identity (race, gender, sexuality, etc.) and no results came up?

…you’ve ever had someone (actively) not address you by your name or pronouns at work?

…you’ve ever had your identity “explained” to you by someone not of that identity? 

…you’ve ever had your identity affect how people behaved around/treated you?

…you’ve ever been anxious about your job status due to federal/state law?

…you’ve ever not spoken out in a situation for fear that you might get in trouble/people will think you’re overreacting?

…you’ve ever gotten frustrated when people use gendered language (guys, dude, sir/ma’am)?

…you’ve ever felt unwelcome in professional/academic spaces?

… you’ve ever had to switch the way you present yourself in different settings (appearance, clothes/style, language/speech, name/pronouns, etc.)

Inspiration for game:

The tradition of collecting art at the University of Stirling goes back to its founding in 1967. It was decided from the start that one per cent of the capital cost of new buildings should be made available for works of art, to improve the internal and external environment.

An Art Committee was formed and this made decisions about these early purchases, taking advice from art experts in Scotland at the time. Douglas Hall, first Keeper of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, was invited to join this committee and he encouraged the University to develop an art policy and to purchase and exhibit notable works. This was felt to be especially important as no other such major art collection existed locally. Click here to see a short film about the beginnings of the collection.

In these early days, site-specific works were commissioned and an excellent example of this is the wall-mounted steel sculptural panel by Mary Martin which was originally designed for the Pathfoot Dining Room, where it can be seen above during the 1971 graduation ceremony. It now hangs in the Crush Hall – you can read more about the piece here.‌

Major works were also borrowed, such as Barbara Hepworth‘s iconic sculpture ‘Figure (Archaean)’ (shown above) which came on permanent loan from the Scottish Arts Council, was subsequently gifted, and has remained in the same Pathfoot courtyard ever since.

Works were acquired chiefly from galleries such as the Waddington in London, the Compass Gallery in Glasgow and the Richard Demarco Gallery in Edinburgh. The fine works collected in that period were by contemporary artists, in keeping with the modernist architecture of the Pathfoot Building.  They included paintings by Patrick Heron, Sir Robin Philipson, Michael Tyzack and Jon Schueler and sculptures by Eduardo Paolozzi and Justin Knowles. Along with the major gift of 14 paintings by eminent Scottish Colourist J D Fergusson, these were displayed around the Pathfoot Building, making art and culture part of the everyday experience at the University. This was the stated aim of the first Prinicipal Tom Cottrell, who, although a scientist, was also a knowledgeable art connoisseur who believed that artworks should be accessible to all. These early acquisitions perfectly expressed the spirit of the age and Tom Cottrell’s confident hopes for the new University. As Douglas Hall recalled in 2011 ‘ Abstract art held the field. All right, the art we bought in those few years could shock.  But it was a visual shock, not a moral one.  People missed the old themes, and were dazzled by the bright colours and vivid shapes.  These were just what Principal Cottrell wanted.’

The commissioning and purchasing of artworks however was only part of the art story at Stirling. Students and staff in the late 1960s and early 1970s also had the opportunity to listen to an annual art lecture given by an expert art critic and accompanied by a major exhibition, and there was a constantly changing, rich and varied programme of temporary exhibitions, which were organised by Matilda Mitchell, the first art curator.

At first pictures were hung in Pathfoot around the spacious main concourse and A corridor, with the long-since disappeared ‘J Lounge’ upstairs being used for smaller exhibitions of local artists. Sometimes the works were for sale (the Collection also acquired works in this way), and there were also touring exhibitions from the Scottish Arts Council eg drawings by Albrecht Durer, and paintings by Joan Eardley. Exhibitions organised by Stirling also sometimes subsequently went on tour to other locations in the UK.

From 1971 onwards, there was a specially allocated gallery space (see photo above) in the newly built MacRobert Centre, and as Matilda Mitchell recalls, the many exhibitions were not restricted to that space but also ‘crept into the foyer, indeed into the small foyer on the way in to the little theatre, along the walls to the café and eventually outside into the grounds’. 

Several catalogues and price lists have survived from these early days. The Art Collection purchased the work below – ‘Plum Tree I’ – from this Duncan Shanks exhibition at the MacRobert Gallery in 1973.

Temporary exhibitions did not always consist of pictures. Matilda Mitchell recalls one more unusual show:

For some six months, large boxes of about 4ft x 3ft, filled with local earth, occupied two or three of the car parking spaces outside Garden Cottage.  This became one of the centre points of the Mark Boyle show. He always worked with his wife Joan Hills as collaborator but when his two children grew up they all worked together and the exhibitions became the Boyle Family exhibitions.  What grew in these boxes was just what was already in the soil and what the wind brought.  Wild flowers flourished and when we brought the boxes into the Gallery, they flourished better still and the spiders were able greatly to increase their webs.  As you would expect, going into an art gallery, we put in our ‘art viewing’ lenses and suddenly nature’s casual offerings became objects of great natural beauty and fascination.
They also replicated several large sections of London pavements in resin, complete with slabs, kerbs, gutters, cigarette butts, in one a discarded trainer, and assorted pleasing rubbish. With art gallery lenses firmly in place, these too became images of compelling interest.  But could we see clearly enough to purchase?  I am afraid not. They were expensive.  It was a wonderful show.

Matilda Mitchell speaking at The Principal’s Art Lecture in 2007
 

 As well as these temporary exhibitions, staff and students were also given the opportunity to purchase good quality fine art prints when London Graphic Arts set up shop in the J lounge. For two years running (1968 and 69), over £1000 worth of pictures were sold in three days. The Art Collection enjoyed a 10% commission on sales, which also helped to fill the walls of the staff offices and lectures rooms. The Victor Vasarely print below was purchased for the Collection at the first of these sales.

As the permanent collection grew, works were displayed in the new University buildings as they were completed. Below, a work entitled ‘Frosted Window’ by Barbara Balmer (purchased in 1973) is seen hanging in the staff room, in Cottrell.

Not all art initiatives were successful however. A scheme to offer framed prints on loan to students for their rooms was abandoned due to lack of interest.

Bystanders gather to look over a pile of merchandise scattered over the sidewalk in front of a pawnshop at 145th Street and Eighth Avenue, August 2, 1943, an aftermath of Harlem disorders.
(AP Photo)

False rumors that the soldier was killed by the officer spread rapidly and provoked an outburst of window smashing, fires, overturning of cars, and attacks on police. Property damage was estimated at as much as $5 million (1943 dollars). Five hundred people were arrested for rioting, looting, and assault. Five people were killed, and 400 were wounded. The rioting was noted, at the time, as the most violent disturbance in Harlem’s history. 

Mayor La Guardia with educator Dr. Max Yergan and union leader Ferdinand Smith near the scene of disorder, August 2, 1943.
(International News Photo/WNYC Archive Collections)

Mayor La Guardia imposed a curfew, and 8,000 National Guardsmen were ordered on standby. Leaders of the NAACP, National Urban League, and Councilman Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., praised the police response and said the disturbance was not a race riot but the result of “criminal hoodlum elements.” Powell, who would become the neighborhood’s  Congressman from 1945-1967, blamed the riot on poor economic conditions and “a blind smoldering and unorganized resentment against Jim Crow treatment of Negro men in the armed forces and the unusual high rents and cost of living forced upon the Negroes of Harlem.”[1] 

WNYC, the lead station of the city-owned Municipal Broadcasting System, an agency reporting directly to the Mayor, was enlisted in the effort to bring peace to Harlem. A leading goal was to make sure everyone knew the soldier was alive. They also sought to make the Mayor’s message, and that of community leaders urging residents to return to the safety of their homes, available to other stations and throughout the streets of Harlem. This was station director Morris Novik‘s official account.

WNYC News Release on Harlem emergency, page 4, August, 1943.
(Vertical files/NYC Municipal Archives)

Mayor F. H. La Guardia’s August 2, 1943 broadcast over WNYC.

The progressive and ad-free tabloid PM ran the following piece on August 3, 1943 on the incident that ignited the violence.

From the tabloid PM’s August 3, 1943 coverage of the disturbances in Harlem.
(WNYC Archive Collections)

While the newspaper highlighted Mayor La Guardia’s emphasis that the disturbance was not a “race riot,” in the sense of blacks fighting whites, “the incidence and underlying causes of the outbreak, however, were racial.” Indeed, white-owned businesses (particularly pawnshops and groceries) were targeted in the uprising as the residents of Harlem were all too aware of the contrast between the touted ideals of America and the reality of their daily lives. Their often dire social and economic conditions, especially the job and housing discrimination, revealed the nation’s thin veneer of ‘freedom and democracy.’ The author Ralph Ellison covered the riot for the New York Post[2] and described the rioting largely as revenge. 

In the distance there suddenly came the sound of a voice speaking over a loud speaker. Soon we saw a WNYC truck approaching. The speaker, speaking in the name of the Negro Neighborhood Victory Committee, asked the people to return to their homes. He assured them that the soldier had not been killed, and that Mayor La Guardia had promised that fair judgement would be done. The crowd applauded and cheered, then returned to its looting activities…In talking with the people along the sidewalks, I get the impression that they were giving way to resentment over the price of food and other necessities, police brutality, and the general indignities borne by Negro soldiers.[3]

Ellison would revisit the riot as fiction in the final chapter of his 1952 novel, Invisible Man.

‘I tell you they mad over what happen to that young fellow, what’s his name…’

We were passing a building now and I heard a voice calling frantically, ‘Colored store! Colored store!’ ‘Then put up a sign, motherfouler,’ a voice said. ‘You probably as rotten as the others.’ ‘Listen at the bastard. For one time in his life he’s glad to be colored,’ Scofield said. ‘Colored store,’ the voice went on automatically.[4]

The prejudice suffered by African-Americans at the hands of a nearly all-white police force made the struggle against systemic bigotry worse. And the imposed sacrifices of domestic wartime rationing to support America’s military –a military intent on keeping in step with Jim Crow segregation, was more salt in the wound. PM quoted NAACP executive secretary Walter White as saying, “The mistreatment of Negro soldiers is a terribly sore point with Negroes. This is the beginning of the trouble. Had it been a Negro civilian, however prominent, who was shot, there would have been no riot.”[5]

In 1943 Yale sociologist Harold Orlansky concluded the riot was protest against the property and authority used to oppress the people of Harlem.[6]
(WNYC Archive Collections)

The Harlem riot came at a vulnerable time, the mid-point of the United States’ involvement in World War II. The event in New York was also not an isolated incident but followed in the wake of the Los Angeles ‘Zoot Suit Riots’ and race-related disturbances in other American cities that summer. The upheavals threatened morale and cohesiveness on the home front when the country was bogged down in two different theaters of war. Mayor La Guardia and other leaders were keen to do whatever was necessary to ‘keep a lid’ on African-American dissatisfaction and complaints, in light of the critical role played by minority units in supporting white combat troops on the front lines of a strictly segregated military. 

Only a few months earlier, WNYC and other New York stations aired the series, Unity at Home, Victory Abroad, a program urging city residents to take tolerance and unity to heart because prejudice undermines America’s efforts to win the war. At the time, many African-Americans saw this cooperation with the war effort, both on the home front and in the military, as a proving ground for which their loyalty and willingness to carry on would bring rewards in the post-war period with greater freedoms and less discrimination. The war ended in victory for America and its allied forces in 1945 but, as history has shown, victory’s promised rewards for African-Americans were few. And seventy-five years after America helped vanquish injustice in Europe and Japan, its fight at home for civil, social, and economic rights rages on. 

__________________________________

[1] “Delany and Powell Find High Prices Incite Negroes,” The New York Sun, August 2, 1943, pg. 1. 

[2] During World War II the New York Post was a liberal newspaper owned by Dorothy Schiff. 

[3] Ellison, Ralph, “All of Harlem Was Awake,” New York Post, August 2, 1943, reprinted in Reporting Civil Rights, Part One: American Journalism 1941-1963, The Library of America, 2003, pgs. 50-51. 

[4] Ellison, Ralph, Invisible Man, Vintage Books edition 1972, pg. 529.

[5] Stewart, Kenneth, “Dewey Orders State Guard to Stand By; Riots Leave Harlem Stores in Shambles,” PM, August 3, 1943, pg. 3.

[6] Harold Orlansky’s 29-page 1943 study was published in New York by Social Analysis, “a group which seeks to apply the techniques of social anthropology to studies of the contemporary American scene.” It is an important piece of work that approaches the event from a holistic perspective. Among the aspects worth noting is his description of the national and local African-American press as “agreeing almost unanimously with the white press’s analysis” of the disturbance. Only the Amsterdam News and the People’s Voice, wrote Orlansky, “made an attempt to point out underlying causes.” (Page 4 of the study).

Special thanks to NYPR’s Senior Archivist Daniel Sbardella and to the New York City Municipal Archives vertical files for the WNYC News Release and audio. 

Excerpt from “Behind the Mike,” September/October 1943, WNYC Masterwork Bulletin,
(WNYC Archive Collections)

In addition to addressing the need to coordinate policies and the application of technology in managing the explosive volume of classified digital data, participants in the virtual public meeting discussed:

• designating the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) as the Executive Agent to coordinate the modernization of classification and declassification across the Federal Government;
• developing new metrics and measures for understanding how the government creates, uses, stores and works with all information in the digital space, including the actual line item costs of classification and declassification across agencies;
• applying Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning technologies already in use at agencies in mission-focused areas to support specific performance goals in classification and declassification;
• simplifying classification into a two-tiered system;
• prioritizing topics of public interest for potential declassification; and
• expanding the focus on individual instances to develop a broader consensus on questions of overclassification;

The PIDB looks forward to continuing discussions with the public and with stakeholders inside and outside of government. There is consensus that the current system is failing. The recommendations in this report aim to help Government modernize the classification and declassification system.

2 Stainless Steel Forms with White
Justin Knowles
(Steel, 1969)

The art object from the permanent collection that we are focusing on this week is this striking sculpture by Justin Knowles. Situated on the side of the small loch by the MacRobert Centre, on one side steel and the other painted white, it was commissioned for this location by the University Art Collection in 1970, enabled by the donation of £500 from the British Steel Corporation.

A University press release of the time states that ‘the sculpture was created utilising a technique normally applied to aircraft manufacture instead of welding: the stainless steel was resin-bonded to an alloy honeycomb frame. This method reduces the weight of the structure and eliminates the danger of surface distortion whilst ensuring that it can sustain structural stresses. Although resin-bonding has been extensively used in the aircraft industry, it is the first time that the technique has been adopted for sculpture.’

Born in Exeter, Justin Knowles was encouraged to take up art by school teachers but discouraged by his father. He tried a number of other careers before visiting New York in 1965 and deciding to take up art properly at the age of 30. Though he lacked formal training he enjoyed success immediately, and quickly established an impressive reputation as a boldly inventive painter. Using a limited range of acrylic colours straight from the pot, he produced shaped canvases and free-standing shapes.

‘These were not painted sculptures; they remained paintings, the paint working across the physical form rather than following it’.

Obituary, David Buckman, April 2004 The Independent

This sculpture was commissioned for the brand new University campus during that period. W J Strachan (1984) explained that white was added ‘to help the eye to separate the rising columns of his sculpture ‘Steel Forms’ at the University of Southampton, whereas here, it is added to harmonise with the white building and make an agreeable contrast with the green lawn.’
At the press conference held to mark the handing over of the sculpture, Dr Tom Cottrell, Principal and Vice-Chancellor of the University, said: “We feel we have a duty to staff and students to provide an environment in which the arts play a full part….we feel that it is important in our comparatively rural setting that we should provide some of the things which students take for granted in say Glasgow or London. And the artist said: “Stirling University is exceptional in its ready appreciation of the functions of arts as part of the environment.”

Tragically, a studio fire in 1973 destroyed most of Justin Knowles’ work, and he would not exhibit again until the 1990s. His final years were successful again, and Winchester and Exeter cathedrals commissioned sculptures.

A special series of four prints (originally published by the artist in 1968) was made by Justin Knowles in 1971, to commemorate the installation of his sculpture on campus. These were presented to four key persons involved in the beginnings of the new University which had been founded in 1967.

A. Black, C. Red and D. Yellow were given respectively to Douglas Hall, (first Keeper of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and member of the University art committee), Tom Cottrell (first Principal of the University), and John Richards (Architect of the Pathfoot Building). These three have subsequently been gifted to the Art Collection. The whereabouts of the fourth print (B. Black) is unknown.

As the home of the 19th Amendment, the National Archives invites you to join our virtual commemoration of the centennial of the Constitutional amendment that guaranteed that “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”

House Joint Resolution 1 proposing the 19th amendment to the states. National Archives Identifier 596314

This August, we will explore the complex story of the struggle for women’s suffrage, leading up to and beyond the certification of the 19th Amendment on August 26, 1920. The campaign for women’s suffrage was long, difficult, and often dramatic. The National Archives holds the records that help tell this story, including petitions, legislation, court cases, and more. 

Join us online as we highlight records from our holdings and examine the fight for women’s voting rights through virtual public programs for all ages.

Visit our 19th Amendment Centennial Events page to view and sign up for a full schedule of events, programs and activities. We will be adding more events and providing links as they become available.

Photograph of a Suffrage Parade in New York City. National Archives Identifier 593556

You can also visit the Women’s Rights page for a wide variety of women’s rights topics, stories from our exhibit, Rightfully Hers: American Women and the Vote, and a chance to participate in tagging and transcription missions on records related to women’s rights. 

Finally, from August 18 to 26, the National Archives Building in Washington, DC, and many Presidential Libraries across the country will light up in purple and gold, the colors of the suffrage movement, from sunset to dawn. This lighting is part of the nationwide Women’s Suffrage Centennial Commission (WSCC) Forward Into Light Campaign, named in honor of the historic suffrage slogan, “Forward through the Darkness, Into the Light.” I am proud to represent the National Archives on this Commission, which also offers a full month of commemorative activities. 

Employees across the National Archives have been planning this commemoration for more than a year. I’m thankful for their hard work and for their resourcefulness and creativity in developing an exciting observance of this landmark event as our own current public health events changed around us. 

We are honored to be the home of the 19th Amendment and to commemorate its 100th anniversary with the American people.

On May 4th of this year, one of the great geniuses of poetry and the arts passed away, and we wanted to take a moment here to commemorate his passing. Michael McClure helped launch the counterculture Beat generation alongside Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Philip Whalen, and Diane Di Prima, and is also associated with The San Francisco Renaissance school of poetry along with Kenneth Rexroth, Jack Spicer, Robin Blaser, Joanne Kyger, David Meltzer, and Robert Duncan, his mentor at San Francisco State. 

McClure’s groundbreaking work transformed our understanding of the relationship of the poet/artist to nature. He helped pioneer our thinking on ecology and illuminated the connection between human expression and the expression of all living things. While often remembered for his poetry, McClure was also a playwright, essayist, and his performance collaborations defined a new way of bringing the audience to poetry. McClure’s Meat Science Essays was a clarion call to liberation. His play, The Beard, rocked the comfortable sensibilities of the theater-going public, leading to censorship battles and boarded-up theaters. That play would go on to win an Obie for “Best Play” and “Best Director.” His performances with musicians Ray Manzarek from The Doors and the minimalist composer Terry Riley explored the bardic tradition and brought poetry to pop culture with relentless mastery. 

FSU Special Collections and Archives is fortunate to hold materials, both in our rare books and manuscript collections, that chronicle the life of Michael McClure through his close relationship with Michael Rothenberg, FSU Libraries Poet-in-Residence.

Rothenberg’s personal papers and book collection document the network of artists and thinkers that comprised the Beat Generation and San Francisco Renaissance movements. We are fortunate to have McClure’s official publications in our book collections, but also personal items from McClure from Rothenberg’s association with him through the years.

Michael Rothenberg first encountered a copy of McClure’s Meat Science Essays when he was seventeen in Miami Beach. He recalls, “McClure’s work was a gateway to a greater understanding of the poet in the natural world. He gave me permission to express myself in a language that was indigenous to me. He offered a kind of thinking and concern that became my path. He blew my mind.” Then, something like ten years later, Rothenberg was 

introduced to McClure at Rothenberg’s orchid and bromeliad nursery in Pacifica, California. They went hiking together, shared many lunches, and almost instantly became very close friends. “I felt that we were kindred spirits,” Rothenberg remembers, “Everything that McClure had set out in his work was what I was looking for as a poet and as a mammal.”

Click to view slideshow.

Eventually, Rothenberg and McClure would travel to Florida together to read at the Miami Book Fair. During that trip, Rothenberg took McClure out on a tour of the Everglades, “to show him the nature that I grew up with,” Rothenberg says. It was there that McClure signed the old, tattered copy of Meat Science Essays that Rothenberg read when he was seventeen, the book that opened Rothenberg’s eyes to ecology-based writing. 

Click to view slideshow.

McClure had a distinct writing style, and Rothenberg describes it like this: “McClure’s writing is cosmic. Open, romantic, haiku-ish, abstract, specific, concrete, and light-filled. You can hear the roar of lions, and the throbbing of a living cell in each word and breath he speaks.” 

“I will miss him dearly,” Rothenberg said, “but I know that his work will inform and enlighten generations to come.”

More reading on Michael McClure’s legacy: 

McClure Bibliography: https://www.emptymirrorbooks.com/mcclure/

“The Flame Is Ours”, Michael McClure correspondence with Stan Brakhage ,edited by Christopher Luna http://www.bigbridge.org/…/Luna_McClu…/THE_FLAME_IS_OURS.pdf ,

“Engraving of Snakes”, a chapbook by Michael McClure with illustrations by Nancy Victoria Davis, http://www.bigbridge.org/issue5/snakes.pdf

A special thank you to Michael Rothenberg for participating in writing this blog post, and for sharing his personal memories of Michael McClure. 

Prior to the University being established in 1967 the Airthey Estate where the University stands had been in various hands. The owner who had the single greatest impact on the present landscape was Robert Haldane, who between 1787 and 1798 created the loch, employed Thomas White (Senior) to assist with the designed landscape, and built Airthrey Castle.

During this time most of the estate were laid out as parkland, but to the north of the Castle there was a more intimate area, containing the practical supporting buildings upon which the smooth running of the household depended. These included an icehouse, stables and offices, Ivy cottage and Garden Cottage.

Garden Cottage was contained within a walled garden and would have been appreciated from the Estate East Drive. The character of the bricks in the surviving walls of the walled garden suggest a late 18th or early 19th century date. Originally it would have been fitted with glasshouses along the north wall.

Gardeners Magazine described the garden in 1842 as “perfect as regards culture and neatness and the abundance and fine quality of fruit”. The position of this cottage within the walled garden was carefully chosen, and its front elevation included an elegant porch. The building still contains some 18th century joinery and fireplaces

In 1965 when the new University was established Garden Cottage took on new importance and became the epicentre of the new University as home of the first University offices. Its use was short lived as by 1966 there were 27 members of staff which proved to be too much for it and adjacent Ivy Cottage.

However, during this brief period of use those who came to the University remember visiting these offices. The first Curator of the Art Collection Matilda Mitchell recalls that the original idea for an Art Collection began in Garden Cottage with a conversation with Principal Tom Cottrell.

When we first moved into Garden Cottage, my boss and hero said “Matilda, better fill up the place with pictures: try the Scottish Arts Council”.  After a very civilised lunch in Edinburgh with the director, I brought back paintings and prints (artists’ prints) for our walls. 

Public Lecture, Matilda Mitchell, 2007

The memories of those who worked in the University have been captured by the Stirling University Retired Staff Association and you can listen to former staff including Curator Matilda Mitchell recalling their experiences of life at the new University.

Garden Cottage is no longer in use. However, the Art Collection aspires to gain funding to restore the building to its former glory to be used as an artist and writers retreat.

Emmett Louis Till was born on July 25, 1941, at Cook County Hospital, Chicago, Illinois, to Mamie Till. He was named for his father Louis and his mother’s uncle, Emmett Carthan. Till was rarely called “Emmett” by family; he was frequently nicknamed “Bobo” or “Bo”. In 2018, Mamie’s cousin Thelma Wright Edwards reminisced with filmmaker Keith Beauchamp about Till’s birth, his nickname, and helping take care of young Emmett:

In 1947, relatives moved from Money, Mississippi to live next-door to Till and his mother in Argo, Illinois. Till’s second cousin Wheeler Parker Jr. was of a similar age and they became good friends. Parker and other family members shared their memories of young Emmett with Beauchamp for the 2005 documentary The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till (Parker’s interview is featured at about 1:42):

On December 27, 1954, a family friend took photos of Emmett and Mamie, with Emmett sporting new clothes he had received as Christmas presents that year. These are the last known images of Till before his lynching, and have played a key part in court proceedings and publications ever since.

We can only speculate as to what the next sixty-five years of Emmett Till’s life would have brought, had he come back from his trip to Mississippi in 1955, or never gone at all. Author Devery Anderson offered this passage about Till’s aspirations in his 2005 book Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement:

“Like most kids, Emmett thought about his future, and he talked about becoming a motorcycle cop or a professional baseball player. He had dreams of building his grandmother a new church and even talked of joining the air force after he heard that a boy could sign up at sixteen with a parent’s permission.”

In 2018, Mamie Till’s cousin Willie Wright told Beauchamp that, upon his joining the US Army in 1955, Till told him “I wish I was old enough, I’d go too.”

Which dream would have come true? All of them? None of them? No one can say, which is of course the deepest wound when children are taken from us – the loss of a life’s potential, sixty-five birthday wishes that were never made.

This weekend presents many opportunities for one to commemorate of Emmett Till. If you mark the occasion by attending events like this one, or reviewing American civil rights history, we invite you to remember Till the boy as well as Till the historical figure, and consider what might have been.

Sources and Further Reading

Wright Family Interview, Keith Beauchamp Audiovisual Recordings, MSS 2015-016, Special Collections & Archives, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida.
Interview Part I: http://purl.flvc.org/fsu/fd/FSU_MSS2015-016_BD_001
Interview Part II: http://purl.flvc.org/fsu/fd/FSU_MSS2015-016_BD_002

Devery Anderson. (2015). Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. https://fsu.catalog.fcla.edu/permalink.jsp?23FS037183478

Keith Beauchamp (director). (2005). The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till [motion picture]. USA: Velocity/Thinkfilm. https://youtu.be/bvijYSJtkQk

Florida State University Digital Library. Emmett Till Archives. https://fsu.digital.flvc.org/islandora/object/fsu%3Aemmetttillarchivesmain

Emmett Till Interpretive Center, Sumner, Mississippi. http://www.emmett-till.org/

Emmett Till Memory Project. https://tillapp.emmett-till.org/

New York Public Library Schomburg Center For Research In Black Culture. Emmett Till Project. http://www.emmetttillproject.com/

Florida State University Libraries. Emmett Till Archives [research guide]. https://guides.lib.fsu.edu/Till

Large Green, Swiss
John Hoyland
(Lithograph, 8/75, 1968)

John Hoyland‘s art used simple shapes, high-key colour and, later, texture and the movement of paint to evoke a world of emotion and imagination. He disliked the ‘abstract’ label and described himself as ‘a painter’.

Born in Sheffield, John Hoyland was one of Britain’s leading abstract painters. He studied at Sheffield School of Art and at the Royal Academy. From the early 1960s onwards he achieved international recognition for a body of work that eliminates literal depiction of the observed world.

Hoyland’s early works were identified by their date of completion. This painting was purchased for the new Art Collection from the Waddington Galleries in London.
Novelist William Boyd, a great admirer and collector of Hoyland’s work, calls such pieces ‘a pure visual delight’, and adds that his ‘large canvases of the 1960s prove that, as a colourist working in abstraction, Hoyland is unmatched. Between the early 1960s and the early 1970s, he produced work of tremendous ambition and audacity, with an impact that is almost palpable, and that should finally prompt a posthumous recognition that he is a modern British master – one of the great abstract painters of the 20th century.’ (William Boyd’s 2015 Guardian article can be read here)

After several works had been purchased from the Waddington Galleries by the new University of Stirling, Leslie Waddington made a generous donation of several prints, including those shown here, to the Art Collection. Matilda Mitchell, the first art curator, explained that ‘it was because we were keen to buy pictures, to show pictures and to build up a collection, that we were given these’.

‘If John Hoyland hadn’t existed, it would have been necessary to have invented him….’ Watch a 1977 BBC Arena film about the artist here…

We are saddened to hear of the passing of Katherine “Kitty” Blood Hoffman. Hoffman has had a relationship with Florida State University and its predecessor institutions since the 1930s. She was a student, a professor, and an administrator during her time with the University and continued to be active after her retirement.

Katherine Blood Hoffman began attending Florida State College for Women in the 1930s, and graduated in 1936 with a degree in bacteriology. During her time at FSCW, Hoffman became president of the College Government Association and became a member of several student organizations, including Phi Beta Kappa, Esteren, and Mortar Board.

Hoffman graduated from Columbia University in 1938 with a master’s degree. She began working as faculty at Florida State College for Women in 1940 and became a professor of chemistry in 1973. From 1967 to 1970 Hoffman served as the Dean of Women for Florida State University. She also served as the president of the Faculty Senate from 1980 to 1982. She retired from teaching in 1984 and the Katherine B. Hoffman Teaching Laboratory was dedicated in her honor. In 2007, she was presented with an Honorary Doctorate of Science.

After retiring Hoffman served as a board member for the FSU Alumni Association and trustee for the FSU Foundation. She also serves as chairwoman of the Emeritus Alumni Society and co-chairwoman of FSU’s Sesquicentennial Celebration.

Hoffman and her husband established a major scholarship in chemistry, the $100,000 Katherine Blood Hoffman Endowed Scholarship in Chemistry. Hoffman also created the Katherine Blood Hoffman Endowed Lectureship in Environmental Chemistry Fund, the Hank and Prescott Hoffman Fund for Biological Research Conducted Toward Preserving the Wakulla River, the Katherine Blood Hoffman Symposia in the Liberal Arts Fund, the Katherine Blood Hoffman Scholarship Fund in Chemistry, and an Alumni Center Fund.

Katherine Hoffman paved the way for women in the sciences and set up many lasting initiatives to better science and the FSU community. She will be greatly missed.

***Trigger Warning: trans slurs/derogatory terms***

Our first submission is from Kacee Reguera, a recently-graduated student worker, who has been with Special collections for 2 years. While this project was geared towards the full-time staff, I chose to highlight her contribution first because I’m happy to see this conversation being engaged with by everyone in the community. Getting students involved in this process ensures that the conversation continues in the next generation of professionals.

The object she found is How to Transition on 63 Cents a Day by Lee Krist, which is an unbound letterpress-printed artists’ book by a transgender man that describes the author’s transition and coming out story through postcards addressed to his mother and other ephemera. It is a very intimate story meant to bring us into his gender and family experience in a personal way. When students interact with it, they report feeling as though they’re digging through a collection of personal memories, like an act of voyeurism. This book was published in 2013, making it fairly recent.

Video Excerpt of How to Transition on 63 Cents a Day by Lee Krist, 2013

Though How to Transition on 63 Cents a Day is an amazing book that is well designed and a beautifully told story, and I’m excited for the opportunity to share the text here, it does not qualify for the challenge I initially raised. This project is geared towards highlighting queer and trans BIPOC voices, which are sorely lacking in FSU Special Collections and Archives. Kacee’s efforts to provide an example, though not exactly what I was looking for, both demonstrates this lack and creates an opportunity to explore problems in subject headings for these materials. 

Keeping in mind that this is a queer and trans-focused project, it is important that we also recognize history. Black and Latinx trans women were at the forefront of the fight for queer rights. Aside from throwing the first brick, which is still a point of contention, BIPOC trans individuals were at the apex of the queer rights movement and that is something that all institutions must acknowledge and recognize when collecting these histories. As FSU’s Pride Union was founded the same year as the start of the Stonewall Riots, I feel that this holds especially true for us. Out of the three titles that appear when you search the term “transgender,” none of them are by queer or trans people of color. Equitability and accessibility must be taken into consideration at all library levels, from acquisitions to cataloging.

Reina Gossett: Historical Erasure as Violence from BCRW Videos on Vimeo.

How to Transition on 63 Cents a Day is a great text and has been very useful in giving some insight into the trans experience. Many in our library commonly pick it when they want LGBTQ+ related materials. However, when I looked at the catalog record for it, I discovered outdated and now offensive terms are found in the “Subjects, general” section of the entry. I don’t have a libraries degree (yet), and I have only been working with Special Collections for a year, but it blew my mind that these derogatory terms made it into a catalog record for a book published this decade. After ranting to my roommate for 30 minutes on the impact of white supremacy in library settings, I wanted to know where these terms came from. 

In order to unpack these issues, a little background is needed, and I thought I’d share what I discovered in the process of my research. 

LOCSH (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS SUBJECT HEADINGS):

In an attempt to standardize the organization and classification of information, the Library of Congress developed a list of terms to be referenced and used when creating records for materials. This list is one of the banks that institutions may pull search terms from when intaking materials into their system. Terms were chosen based on what they thought the ‘average patron’ would search to find materials about a certain topic… 

Take a guess what the ‘average patron’ looked like to these information gatekeepers. Search headings for identity groups were, it seems, determined by what they thought a cisgender heterosexual affluent white christian male would search to find it. The record for How to Transition on 60 Cents a Day is evidence of this historical practice. The thing that’s particularly cruel about this is queer and trans people (or any marginalized person for that matter) has to comb through slurs and strife to even look at their own history.

Click here for the article I referenced for this section.

HOW DO LIBRARY OF CONGRESS SUBJECT HEADINGS GET INTO CATALOG RECORDS?:

Just because a subject heading exists does not mean institutions are required to adhere to them. Cataloging decisions and methodologies are governed by best practices, but the ultimate decision lies within the jurisdiction of the institution. In the next blog post in this series, I will be exploring current/best practices and the ways they perpetuate outdated/derogatory terminology. I especially want to take a look at copy cataloging as a practice, and how we can/will intervene when a copied record contains terminology that needs to be addressed.

Quick queer and trans history:

A quick overview of queer history:

A cursory overview of trans history:

No one who spends any time at Stirling does not stop every so often and appreciate the beautiful surroundings. The Art Collection are committed to finding new ways for visitors to engage with art and the natural environment at the University. This week’s blog looks at several projects which have drawn on the campus and collections as inspiration

During the course of the 50^th anniversary year in 2017 Suzy Angus and Janieann Macracken spent the year recording the sounds of Pathfoot building. The resulting sound installation reflected the architecture and fabric of the Pathfoot building as well as the people who work and study within.  

In the same year photographer Alan Dimmick was the Art Collection’s Photographer in Residence. His remit was to capture a ‘Portrait of the Campus’, exploring the unique natural, built and human environment of the University. Whilst the University archives and Art Collection held a collection of fine photographs from the early days of the University in the 1960s and ‘70s, relatively little had been done to document and explore the changing physical and human landscape of the campus in recent decades.  Alan’s residency contributed to redressing this balance.

Ally Wallace was artist in residence at the University in 2017. He spent two days a week at the Pathfoot Building for six months, making work that focused on the building – its Modernist architecture, art collection, relationship to surrounding picturesque parkland and its occupants. His exhibition Low-Rise High-Function at the University showcased work created during his residency. The Art Collection acquired two pieces Pathfoot Roof Ladders and Hanging Mobile from this time for our permanent collection.

The Pathfoot Building has been the location for the creation of other works including a series of still motion photo montages, which are part of the Red Shoes project (a Get Scotland Dancing activity run in conjunction with the Macrobert Arts centre). Three works including Pathfoot 2 below were added to the Art Collection in 2013. They are the work of Brian Hartley who studied illustration at Glasgow School of Art (1992-95) and is a Glasgow based artist whose multi-disciplinary work combines visual art and design, theatre and dance and extensive work in arts education.

The Art Collection is regularly used by staff and students as inspiration for the creation of creative writing, art and music. We annually host the Pathfoot Project working in conjunction with the M.Litt in Creative Writing at Stirling who create wriiten pieces inspired by our exhibitions. This work is performed at our annual open day which also showcases musical compositions by students at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.

During lockdown our campus and collections have continued to inspire. We have been working with University Museums in Scotland (UMIS) on a joint project Capturing Lives in Scotland’s Communities. This project is particularly targeted at those from more disadvantaged areas throughout Scotland, encouraging them to explore their local communities using different forms of art. The 110 participants come from regions across Scotland, from the Borders all the way to the Orkney Islands. Participants have used the collections as inspiration, learnt new art skills and are working towards an Arts Award Explore qualification.

Last week’ theme was Public Art and Archaean by Barbara Hepworth was one of the featured public art pieces used to start pupils thinking how to create their own pieces of public art.

Congressman John Lewis (1940-2020) was with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and other civil rights leaders for the landmark March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, August 28, 1963. Lewis was then chair of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) when he spoke these words at the Lincoln Memorial.

We march today for jobs and freedom, but we have nothing to be proud of. For hundreds and thousands of our brothers are not here. For they are receiving starvation wages, or no wages at all. While we stand here, there are sharecroppers in the Delta of Mississippi who are out in the fields working for less than three dollars a day. While we stand here there are students in jail on trumped-up charges. Our brother James Farmer, along with many others, is also in jail. We come here today with a great sense of misgiving.

It is true that we support the administration’s civil rights bill. We support it with great reservations, however.  Unless Title III is put in this bill, there is nothing to protect the young children and old women who must face police dogs and fire hoses in the South while they engage in peaceful demonstrations. In its present form, this bill will not protect the citizens of Danville, Virginia, who must live in constant fear of a police state. It will not protect the hundreds and thousands of people that have been arrested on trumped charges. What about the three young men, SNCC field secretaries in Americus, Georgia, who face the death penalty for engaging in peaceful protest?

As it stands now, the voting section of this bill will not help the thousands of black people who want to vote. It will not help the citizens of Mississippi, of Alabama and Georgia, who are qualified to vote, but lack a sixth-grade education.“One man, one vote” is the African cry. It is ours too. It must be ours!

We must have legislation that will protect the Mississippi sharecropper who is put off of his farm because he dares to register to vote. We need a bill that will provide for the homeless and starving people of this nation. We need a bill that will ensure the equality of a maid who earns five dollars a week in a home of a family whose total income is $100,000 a year. We must have a good FEPC bill.

My friends, let us not forget that we are involved in a serious social revolution. By and large, American politics is dominated by politicians who build their careers on immoral compromises and ally themselves with open forms of political, economic, and social exploitation. There are exceptions, of course.  We salute those. But what political leader can stand up and say, “My party is the party of principles”? For the party of Kennedy is also the party of Eastland. The party of Javits is also the party of Goldwater. Where is our party? Where is the political party that will make it unnecessary to march on Washington?

Where is the political party that will make it unnecessary to march in the streets of Birmingham? Where is the political party that will protect the citizens of Albany, Georgia? Do you know that in Albany, Georgia, nine of our leaders have been indicted, not by the Dixiecrats, but by the federal government for peaceful protest? But what did the federal government do when Albany’s deputy sheriff beat Attorney C.B. King and left him half-dead? What did the federal government do when local police officials kicked and assaulted the pregnant wife of Slater King, and she lost her baby?

To those who have said, “Be patient and wait,” we must say that we cannot be patient. We do not want our freedom gradually, but we want to be free now! We do not want to go to jail. But we will go to jail if this is the price we must pay for love, brotherhood, and true peace.

I appeal to all of you to get into this great revolution that is sweeping this nation. Get in and stay in the streets of every city, every village and hamlet of this nation until true freedom comes, until the revolution of 1776 is complete. We must get in this revolution and complete the revolution. For in the Delta in Mississippi, in southwest Georgia, in the Black Belt of Alabama, in Harlem, in Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, and all over this nation, the black masses are on the march for jobs and freedom.

They’re talking about slow down and stop. We will not stop. All of the forces of Eastland, Barnett, Wallace, and Thurmond will not stop this revolution. If we do not get meaningful legislation out of this Congress, the time will come when we will not confine our marching to Washington. We will march through the South; through the streets of Jackson, through the streets of Danville, through the streets of Cambridge, through the streets of Birmingham.  But we will march with the spirit of love and with the spirit of dignity that we have shown here today.

By the force of our demands, our determination, and our numbers, we shall splinter the segregated South into a thousand pieces and put them together in the image of God and democracy. We must say: “Wake up America! Wake up!” For we cannot stop, and we will not and cannot be patient.

______________________________

Note: The above transcript of the our audio sourced from the National Archives/Voice of America broadcast, however, does not include the reported last paragraph of Lewis’ speech as well as a small portion of material from the third to last paragraph when compared to the text provided by University of Maryland’s Voices of Democracy Project: The U.S. Oratory Project.

Venice Window
Elizabeth Blackadder DBE RA RSA
(Oil on canvas, mid 1960s)

Elizabeth Blackadder is famous as the first woman artist to be elected to both the Royal Academy and the Royal Scottish Academy, and she has long been a friend of the University of Stirling’s Art Collection. We have acquired her works over a period of nearly 40 years through generous bequests, purchases and as gifts from the artist herself. Today we look at three of her still lifes in the Collection.
Elizabeth Blackadder first visited Venice in 1954, on a Carnegie Travelling Scholarship. As well as Venice and Brindisi in Italy she also visited Yugoslavia, then Athens and Thessaloniki in Greece. It was not practical for her to paint in oils during these scholarship travels and she mainly used brush, pen and ink. The painting above is likely to have been inspired by her visit to Venice, but was executed later. As with many of Blackadder’s still life works, the table featured here to the left is tilted almost vertically towards the viewer. Perspective though is regained as ones gaze turns to the colourful riches of Venice, glimpsed through the window. In the following short film Blackadder talks about a more recent trip to Venice, which inspired some print making.

There are two further large still lifes in the Art Collection at Stirling.

This work is a typical example of one of Elizabeth Blackadder’s ‘flattened’ paintings. ‘The implied space of abstract painting, without conventional pictorial structure, allowed her, using an almost empty canvas or sheet of paper, to assemble a variety of objects in a free and seemingly random association. These representational elements provide a schema, but the painting is a poem built around them with its own internal logic’ (Duncan MacMillan in ‘Scottish Art 1460-1990’). Works such as this retain the form of the table, with the top raised to give the fullest view. Blackadder later dispensed with this method, using the surface of the canvas itself as the field on which objects appear. Here she is moving towards this, and only a suggestion of the table can be seen, with a definite tonal change on the left and right sides, indicating the edge of a table and a suggestion of a tablecloth edge at the bottom of the canvas. In fact the artist seems to have ensured that she has signed the work on the solid table, rather than on the draping fabric below. The objects here include a black coffee pot, which appears in a number of works of this period, a pair of clogs, a painted Easter egg and a coffee grinder. The objects featured in Blackadder’s still lifes of this time tend to reflect objects collected on travels – “an eclectic array of objects [which speak of her] fascination with the exotic” (Annabel Macmillan)

The title here only gives a hint, but as Elizabeth Blackadder reveals in the following film, after she and her husband John Houston visited an exhibition of Japanese art they developed a great interest in this country, which they visited several times. Blackadder gathered Japanese artefacts, including a kimono, which appear in her paintings.

In 2012 the University of Stirling Art Collection held an exhibition entitled ‘Journeys Together’ which celebrated the 80th birthday of Elizabeth Blackadder and her creative relationship with her late husband John Houston. This exhibition was held in conjunction with the exhibition ‘Journeys from Home’ which ran at The Park Gallery in Falkirk (Blackadder’s birthplace). You can obtain a catalogue from these exhibitions by clicking here.

During the virtual meeting, PIDB members addressed several questions from the public. However, time did not allow responses to all questions received.  The following are the remaining questions that were not answered during the meeting:

1. In advocating for a two-tier system (getting rid of confidential) to better align with how systems work, does the Board also advocate getting rid of SCI or SAP?

No, the Board does not advocate eliminating SCI or SAP when changing to a two-tiered classification system.  Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI) and special access programs (SAPs) are types of controlled access programs and not a classification level.  Information at any classification level may exist within an SCI control system or contain SAP information.

2. Why does the PIDB prefer a “cherry picked” topic-based approach to declassification as opposed to respecting records provenance and advocating for the prioritization for the review and declassification of specific “high interest” records series?

The Board sees the need to balance the declassification of “high interest” records series with topic-based prioritization which aims to target the records and information most sought-after by the public.  The Board also recognizes that while declassification of series of records is necessary for some classified textual records, declassification processes require modernization. The Board recognizes that traditional archival principles and practices for textual records no longer work in the electronic environment where metadata standards, Cloud storage, and access permissions/security are critical. Declassification processes must also modernize – moving from a textual-based analog system to one capable of dealing with large volumes of born digital classified records.

3. Is there any consideration given to enabling researcher submission of electronic MDR appeals directly to NARA on electronic media (USB drive, etc.)?

The Board sees no objection to a researcher being able to submit an MDR request or appeal electronically.  NARA and the ISCAP accepts MDR requests or appeals electronically via email. There are likely security issues for accepting requests via a USB drive.

4. Will the Public be able to learn what records are undergoing declassification reviews and the results?  Will there be changes in how the public accesses the declassified records?  The primary means of access are through the websites of agencies and presidential libraries or visiting the College Park National Archives or the presidential libraries.  Will these websites be greatly expanded?  With respect to College Park, massive numbers of permanent, classified records 25 years old and older are not even there although the retention periods have long expired.  For example, it holds very few records of the CIA, NSA, DIA, JCS, and FBI – a limited number are at the Washington National Records Center but the vast majority are at the agencies themselves.  Who will review these and how will the public access the declassified records?

The National Declassification Center at the National Archives is responsible for coordinating declassification reviews of records and currently lists record series prioritized for declassification on its website: www.archives.gov/declassification. The NDC is also responsible for reviewed classified Presidential records and materials for declassification. The National Archives is responsible for maintaining and updating its online catalog, including both series of records available for research as well as digital images for select records. The National Archives invites public comment on its blogs, including those related to public access. For records not yet in NARA’s legal custody, agencies are required to conduct declassification reviews.  In the new system we envision in our report, an Executive Committee led by the Director of National Intelligence and comprised of agencies, would offer implementation guidance for prioritizing declassification reviews that will allow improved access.

From The Passing Hour, we can tell that SDA had a full sporting calendar with cricket and bowling clubs which played all summer and football and the odd billiards tournament during the winter time. There’s even a passing mention of winter hockey in 1906 though it doesn’t crop up again. Did they abandon hockey? Or was The Passing Hour short of a hockey correspondent? For while we do dutifully receive a list of football fixtures and results every season there is rarely an additional comment on that sport; a billiards report might briefly dwell on handicaps and bowling tends to venture no further than an account of the annual opening of the green. But cricket. Cricket was the sport, cricket was the enthusiasm. That is, if the four page reports of the season, the team photographs and the occasional ‘cricket issue’ are anything to go by!

We can gather from the many reports and from the names of players which cannot be found in our admission registers that the teams were most often comprised of staff members. That patients were primarily spectators seems to be made clear in a report made by a patient in the April-May-June 1911 issue on the games day held in celebration of the coronation of King George V and Queen Mary:

Among the means for the amelioration of the mentally afflicted, rational, innocent amusement hold a prominent, if subordinate, place. The high pressure of modern life, its dangerous intricacies, the tendency to forget the calls of Nature in the pursuit of gold or even in one’s avocation, oft-times results in the breakdown both of bodily and mental health. To sit for a long time in a room is at least monotonous, and for the young to be compelled to sit long with only those of mature years becomes irksome. Sports, such as we enjoyed, take us for the time out of ourselves, and our very applause of successful performances affords a natural outlet for animal spirits.”

However, it would be incorrect to say that patients never took part at all. It seems from this report on batting averages from the September-October 1906 issue that patients made it onto the SDA Cricket Club team and for a most successful season.

Aside from team sports that played year in, year out, there were the occasional sports days where we know that both staff and patients took part in their droves. As mentioned above, one such day was in celebration of the 1911 coronation and another day which is recounted in The Passing Hour is put on in 1913 simply due to donations from ‘grateful friends of recovered patients’ making it financially possible. At both, the festivities centre around races divided into every category you could think of: Male Staff, Male Patients, Female Staff, Female Patients, Married vs Single Male Staff, Old Women Patients, Young Boys (under 10), you name it!

The variety of races is also prodigious, though our favourite has to be the Blind Wheelbarrow race from 1913 where the competitor is blindfolded and has a guide sitting in their wheelbarrow to direct their course of travel.

The fixtures lists always make for an interesting read, with SDA playing teams from other asylums (there is one fleeting mention of an inter-asylum championship) such as Royal Edinburgh, Dundee, Perth District, Woodilee and Gartloch, with whom SDA seemed to have a friendly rivalry and firmly established annual home and away games for both the cricket and the football, referred to as ‘the events of the football season’. Beyond this, it is also clear that SDA played a wide range of teams that were not comprised of asylum staff, many local names appear on the fixtures lists for both football and cricket with the SDA football team even playing the Edinburgh Civil Service and the Edinburgh University First XI in a particularly strong season in 1913 (the first and only year that the football team photo appears in The Passing Hour). Some team names suggest at being hospital teams – Stirling Victoria who play SDA at cricket was surely a team from Stirling’s Victoria Convalescent Home? Some are a little harder to place – is Haddington a local team or a team attached to Haddington District Lunatic Asylum? Or perhaps a bit of both as we do know the sometime captain of SDA’s cricket team Dr Anderson also played for Stirling County Cricket Club and even represented Scotland in International Matches against the West Indies in 1906. Undoubtedly, SDA played a broad range of opponents in both sports and all were welcome. A 1909 issue mentions a cricket match with the West of Scotland where Australian players were attempting to come over from Ireland to play.

Sadly the First World War not only eventually halts the printing of The Passing Hour in 1917 but it puts a stop to sports at SDA. Many of the fit and able male staff leave to fight for King and country while nurses and doctors leave to administer to the troops and The Passing Hour is, instead, filled with news of these men and women with letters both from the front and from staff home on leave. In 1915, it is reported that Dr Chisholm has managed to rustle up enough folk for just two teams to play each other at cricket and bowling on Saturdays but this is all that’s left in The Passing Hour of SDA’s previous enthusiasm for sports.

Nevertheless, we do have accounts of staff still playing regular matches against other hospitals in the 1980s and an oral history project conducted by Scotspeak in 1998 with patients and staff at SDA – then named Bellsdyke – shows that patients still ran in races and football and cricket were still played regularly – there’s even a mention of badminton!

But where does the fellow at wicket come in I should like to know, particularly with those fast erratic bowlers who send a ball in as if it were a shot from a gatling-gun. Take me for example. I want to play cricket, and my girl wants me to play. She says it’s such a nice, manly, athletic game. But, I give you my word, after these few weeks’ play, I am blue spots all over. As if I had been painted like one of my own early ancestors, and had only succeeded in washing it off in patches.

Vol. XIII, No. 2, April-May-June 1913

Botany was one of the first hard science majors offered at the Florida State College for Women. It was established in 1916 with Alban Stewart as the professor at the time. The classes were made up of only a few students, up to 10 a semester, due to a lack of interest in the subject.

In 1929, a club was established under the name: Primitive and Botanical Order of Ronales. Membership to this club was only available to botany majors. The club started off with only 8 members, the total of women involved in the major at that time. The Primitive and Botanical Order of Ronales was founded by Dr. Hurman Kurz who was known for his studies of traditional Native American ways of identifying and distinguishing flora and fauna.

Dr. Kurz organized a yearly field trip to the Apalachicola area. This field trip was exclusively for the senior members of the Primitive and Botanical Order of Ronales. On this trip Dr. Kurz would teach the members how to identify the flora and fauna using Native American traditions.

Under Dr. Kurz, the botany department was able to have a laboratory/greenhouse dedicated to botany. There, students were able to conduct experiments such as growing seedless tomatoes, research, and gardening. They were also able to examine fossils that were either found by students or donated to the department.

During World War 2, more job specific classes were added to the class registry, allowing for students to be more prepared to enter into the workforce after college. These classes were usually centered around jobs that were in high demand and relevant to the war effort. In 1942, more botany courses were added to the register due to the Pure Seed Law Enactment of 1939. This federal enactment required seeds to be correctly identified, pure in composition, and properly packaged. Since more classes were added, it allowed for the botany major to grow in size.

As of 2020, Botany is still a major offered in the biological sciences department. It is now referred to as “the field of Plant Sciences”. This major “broadly includes the study of photosynthetic organisms, especially plants and algae. It prepares students to make important contributions to the world in the areas of agriculture, food security, natural resource management, sustainability, policy, and many others.”

This article was written by Aya Saludo, a student worker in Heritage & University Archives.

Whether you are an advanced chef in the kitchen or a beginner just starting out, you can always use more inspiration and recipes. The Sunshine State Digital Network repository is an excellent place to go to find new inspiration. The recipes in the repository range from Spanish traditional food to stereotypical mid-century jello mold salads.

The Sunshine State Digital Network repository is an excellent resource for planning your next dinner party. Here are the recipes I would choose for hosting a multiple course dinner party.

To start the night off on the right foot, I found an excellent drink recipe. Here is a recipe for an Original Daiquiri created by Jennings Cox. The ingredients of this 6 serving recipe include 6 lemons, 6 teaspoons of sugar, 6 cups of Bacardi Rum, 2 cups of mineral water, and ice. This recipe was not provided in a cook book in the repository, but instead was alone. Make sure while you search the repository to not skip over the non-published recipes!

Now that the drinks have been served, it is time to move on to the first portion of the night. Most of the books within the repository do not break up into segments of the meal as modern day cook books do. Most books within the repository are broken up into ingredient type. That being said, I chose a soup out of the book “The American practical cookery-book, or, Housekeeping made easy, pleasant, and economical in all its departments.” The soup I chose was the lobster soup, but there are plenty of other soup options within that cook book.

The main course of any dinner party is important. The guests await it, most hosts spend much time preparing it, and it is the main dish. There are an abundance of options in the repository for a main dish, however the one I would serve if I hosted a dinner party comes from the book, “The frugal housekeeper’s kitchen companion: or, Guide to economical cookery : … dedicated to those American housewives who are not ashamed of economy.” I would choose to create a stewed beef and I believe the recipe down below is a very traditional and savory version of that.

The only way to end any dinner party is to finish off the night with a dessert. For my dessert at my fake dinner party, I would choose to make what the book“All about cookery: a collection of practical recipes arranged in alphabetical order” calls “common cake.” This book has many different cake and pudding recipes, but this is the most standard by modern standards.

Overall, there is an abundance of options you can choose from while planning a dinner party using only cook books from the repository. Most of the books I used were from the late 1800’s, however there are my more books from a more recent time period. I urge you to explore the books listed above to find more recipes than the few included in this article because you will find many more delicious recipes to serve yourself and others.

The University of Stirling was built on 330 acres of land within the grounds of Airthrey Estate, beneath the Ochil Hills two miles from Stirling itself and close to the Bridge of Allan. The campus was the first new university to be built in Scotland for almost 400 years. This followed the Robbins Report (1963), drawn up by Lord Robbins, who recommended an expansion of universities across the UK, and became the University’s first Chancellor in 1968.

Stirling was selected from a shortlist that included Falkirk and Perth, with the Pathfoot Building being built in the first phase of a thoroughly modern development. Constructed in 1967, it was the first building to be completed on the new campus and is now a listed building.  With its wide-open spaces giving a countrified feel, the landscape surrounding the University already provided a natural canvas. Though Lord Robbins recalled he had reservations when he visited the campus during the initial building stages.

I was overcome by the beauty of the setting… the most enchanting setting for a campus anywhere in the island. But the first piles of the Pathfoot Building were being dug. There was much mud about. It was very messy and as I looked around I could not repress the thought, Can it be that I have become Chancellor of a University which is going to ruin this marvellous landscape?

No reflection could have been more inappropriate. The Pathfoot Building has won world-wide commendations as an outstanding exhibition of what the best of modern architecture can do if it pays attention to the nature of the setting.

Lord Robbins speaking at the opening of the Pathfoot Building in 1967

In keeping with the liberal sensibilities of the era, the Art Collection was initiated from the start, with the University’s founding Principal Tom Cottrell insisting that art ‘should be part of everyday life on campus.’ With work displayed in the Pathfoot building’s iconic Crush Hall and the surrounding courtyards, the Art Collection has played a vital role in University life ever since.

As well as the Crush Hall, the building itself originally housed lecture theatres, offices and classrooms, while extensions in 1979 to house a tropical aquarium and in 1987 for a virology unit saw it widen its remit. The Pathfoot building itself is a work of art, with international conservation organisation DoCoMomo recognising it in 1993 as one of sixty key Scottish monuments of the post-war era. It was also voted as one of Prospect magazine’s 100 best modern Scottish buildings, and now has Category A listed status.  

Even though the Pathfoot Building has been altered and extended over the years, the spirit of the original design remains, and is appreciated by those who visit, study and work there. Alongside the offices and lecture theatres, Pathfoot is a public art space, displaying the University’s permanent art collection as well as a series of temporary exhibitions in its main concourse and corridors, the large Crush Hall and some of its seventeen courtyards.

You can also view Stirling student Pierre Engelhard’s interactive video of the Pathfoot building and its artworks.

In the 50th anniversary year Ally Wallace was the Art Collection’s Artist in residence. Ally created films about the Pathfoot building including this one by our curator Jane Cameron.

Details of Ally’s residency and more films can be found on his website https://www.allywallace.co.uk/About

Night Sky: Magda
Jon Schueler (1916-1992)
Oil on canvas, 1973

Jon Schueler painted a series of ‘women in the sky’ works, which related to significant women from the artist’s life. The ‘Magda’ in the title of this painting is Magda Salvesen whom Schueler had first met in Edinburgh in 1970. She was to become his partner for the rest of his life. Another work in this series, ‘Night Sky: Bunty’, also in the collection, is shown below. These two works are of a significant size, and are a permanent feature in the Pathfoot Building, hanging high up in the Crush Hall.

Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Jon Schueler came rather late to art, working first as a journalist, and after WWII as a teacher of literature. During the war he was with the US Airforce and the experience of extreme danger while navigating a B17 flying fortress, sitting in the clear plexiglas nose of the plane, surrounded by sky, was to have a powerful hold over Schueler for the rest of his life. Vivid descriptions of the Scottish Highlands too, related to him by Bunty Challis with whom he had an affair in wartime London (and whose name he used in the title of the painting above), similarly fired his imagination. After the war, he started part time art classes while working in San Francisco and he was influenced by Clyfford Still who was pivotal in Schueler’s decision to move to New York in 1951. Here he established himself as one of the ‘second generation’ of Abstract Expressionists (following on from Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock etc). In 1957-8 he fulfilled his long-held dream to visit Scotland, staying in Mallaig for the winter and from 1970 onwards he kept a permanent base there, at Romasaig, visiting regularly, and exhibiting successfully in Edinburgh and in the US.

An extremely prolific artist, who also continued to write throughout his life, Schueler’s main passions, reflected in his work, were for women and nature:
‘When I speak of nature, I’m speaking of the sky…and when I think of the sky, I think of the Scottish sky over Mallaig’.

The following one-hour film conversation unfortunately has poor sound quality, but it is worth trying, as the discussion about the life and creative process of this important artist is an interesting one.

This was filmed during the 2016 Jon Schueler centenary celebrations in Scotland, in which the University of Stirling Art Collection took part, hosting a major exhibition entitled ‘Speaking of the Sky’.

All images © Jon Schueler Estate

5. Dancers! Protest! (undated)

The 1930s were a challenging time for members of the MU. The arrival of the ‘talkies’ had removed cinema orchestras as a dependable source of employment almost overnight. Many of the union’s orchestral members were forced instead to adapt to playing music for dancing in the growing ‘dance band’ scene which provided entertainment in cafes, restaurants and ballrooms. However they found themselves facing competition from both foreign musicians and non-union bands. The union mobilised its members on many occasions to protest against non-union entertainment on offer in venues across the country. The impact of leaflets such as this example on the dancing public is not recorded.

4. The MU can help you break out of your bedroom (1992)

The MU has often had a troubled relationship with technology and its impact of the livelihood of musicians. From gramophone records in the 1920s to increasingly sophisticated synthesisers in the 1970s new ways of producing and playing music were generally perceived as threats. By the start of the 1990s however the union was embracing the musical potential of technology. Dance music and DJ culture had become a firmly established element of the music industry and the MU was keen to support emerging talent as it had done in the 1960s when it shifted its focus to supporting rock & roll bands. This leaflet brings together an impressive line-up of artists to promote the union to a whole new audience of potential members.

3. Join the Musicians’ Union (1930)

The 1920s were a period of crisis for the union which had to deal with a variety of threats to its members livelihoods including technological change, the decline of silent cinema which required live musical accompaniment, and increasing competition from military bands and foreign musicians. The 1930s saw a renewed membership drive focusing in particular on the dance bands which were providing a lucrative new opportunity for musicians. This four page leaflet strikes an optimistic tone, noting that opportunities of employment are increasing and pointing out that ‘those who argued that the Modern Dance Combination was just a passing phase have lived to see it rise to financial heights undreamt of in the old days.’

2. Dr Feelgood says… (1976)

Over the years a range of popular musicians have lent their support to the MU’s promotional campaigns. From the 1960s onwards leaflets have featured an eclectic selection of performers including Spencer Davis, The Hollies, Sting, Nik Kershaw, Stereo MCs and The Shamen. In 1976 the union’s poster boys were Canvey Island’s own R&B rockers Dr Feelgood. The striking leaflet provides a statement of the union’s strength: ‘There are 40,000 musicians in over 120 branches nationwide who are members of the Musicians’ Union. Why aren’t you?’ with Dr Feelgood warning ‘there are so many people out there waiting to rip you off in rock music.’

1. Keep Music Live (1966)

With its striking badges, bumper stickers and banners the Keep Music Live campaign has been a core part of its union’s activities for over 50 years. A slogan which encapsulates the union’s support for the live music sector, it initially appeared on the cover of its members diary for 1959. By the mid 1960s the campaign was fully developed, this leaflet providing a key element of the promotional activity. The four page leaflet features the BBC Symphony Orchestra, The Hollies and Ronnie Scott highlighting the range of live music the union was supporting across orchestras, pop and jazz. An article in the January 1966 provides full details of the launch of the Keep Music Live campaign – a digitised copy is available to view on our new website.

The ephemeral nature of leaflets means we have many gaps in our collection. There are tantalising mentions in the archive to other leaflets such as those handed out to cinema goers in the late 1920s opposing the introduction of the ‘talkies’ – we would love to add some examples of these items to the collection.

As authorized by Congress, the Board consists of nine members, five appointed by the President, and one each by the Speaker and Minority Leader of the House, and by the Majority and Minority Leaders of the Senate. Mr. Tierney’s appointment by the Speaker now opens a vacancy appointment for House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy to fill.

Prior to joining the Board, Mr. Tierney served nine terms in the U.S. House of Representatives from the State of Massachusetts, where he served on the House Intelligence Committee and chaired the National Security and Foreign Affairs Subcommittee of the Government Oversight and Reform Committee. In Congress, he participated in oversight of the Government Accountability Office’s annual assessment of the Department of Defense Weapons Selection Programs and reform of overall Defense spending. He currently serves as the Executive Director at the Center for Arms Control & Non-Proliferation, and The Council for a Livable World.

I am a queer non-binary artist, researcher, and the Rare Books Assistant in Special Collections and Archives. My research deals with queerness, highlighting the erasure of queer history, primarily focusing on people of color. As an undergrad, trying to do research in this topic with no formal training in research proved to be next to impossible. I leaned on my professors for resources, but these results were not so fruitful. Later that year, we went to Special Collections and Archives to look at artists’ books and before the class started, a librarian helped us look through the catalog and find topics we were interested in. I shouted out “LGBTQ+ History!”: no results. We tried just “LGBT”: no results! We tried dozens of configurations until we found results, but even then, it wasn’t guaranteed that they would actually be of use to my research. 

As a student, it was comforting to know that it wasn’t just me, that the institution was also struggling to find these histories. But as a researcher, I was frustrated beyond reason. I wondered why it’s so hard to find these histories. Now I work in Special Collections and Archives, and I wonder what my fellow coworkers and I can do to fix this? I began asking these questions to my colleagues and decided to make it into a project.

We often think that libraries are neutral, that they are solely a source of information for people to come and formulate their own opinions on the matter. Librarians are human; personal biases always creep into the work, often to the detriment of marginalized populations. Libraries are sites of power, organizing, labeling, and delivering information in ways that affect cultural beliefs and understanding on institutional, national, and even global scales. It is important that we take the time to acknowledge that power and privilege, and that the discipline evolves out of (perhaps comfortable) old practices that contribute to systems of bigotry, oppression, and white supremacy. 

Librarians are tasked with the role of making information discoverable and available. They have the ability to place subject headings and search terms on materials, are involved in the acquisition of materials, and even contribute to what is taught in the classroom. These factors, among many others, put libraries in a unique position of power, as gatekeepers of information. 

The project – asking my colleagues to engage with queer histories in archives

For Pride month, I tasked my fellow coworkers with taking a moment to reflect on our role in the distribution and accessibility of information relating to LGBTQ+ history. I asked them to look into our catalogs in order to find materials, to experience what it’s like to be a queer researcher in our institution. The rules for the search were to prioritize the following: 

• LGBTQ+ people of color
• Materials outside of the Pride Student Union collection (These institutional records don’t represent intentional acquisition, and while valuable records of queer life on campus, don’t tell the story of underrepresentation on a larger scale.)
• Stories that do not relate to LGBTQ+ struggles/hardships (Look for stories that highlight queer joy/culture!)

I asked my colleagues to submit a write up of their findings, describing why they chose that object, and what their experience was like in the shoes of a queer researcher. I will curate these submissions and blog about them on a biweekly basis, in hopes that this conversation will continue past Pride month and help create sustainable change.

I’m happy that this Pride Month work is turning into a blog series! In addition to sharing my colleagues’ findings, I hope to interview librarians and scholars who study representation in the archives. Be sure to check out the next post (hoping for a biweekly schedule), where I plan to include some of the discovered materials and describe the challenges my colleagues reported in their search process. 

In addition to this prompt, I also sent my colleagues some LGBTQ+ resources that I would like to share here as well:

• https://www.glitsinc.org/
• https://time.com/4327915/gender-neutral-pronouns/
• https://www.glaad.org/transgender/allies
• https://www.glaad.org/resources/ally/2
• https://www.glaad.org/
• https://marshap.org/about-mpji/
• https://www.hrc.org/resources/glossary-of-term

Other institutions have been researching and working towards a solution for this issue as well. UNC has created a conscious editing initiative to repair and fix any harmful/outdated language in their catalog. 

Whether we follow the lead of other institutions or create a new program entirely just for FSU, it is important to take the time to acknowledge the power information holds and to make sure that we are doing our part to make it accurate, available, and equitable.

The new University of Stirling began to commission portraits right from the start. Eminent Scottish artist Alberto Morrocco was chosen to paint first Vice Chancellor and Principal Tom Cottrell in 1968, and we know from archive notes that this picture was originally hung in the first University Court Room, which was situated in the modernist Pathfoot Building. The mood of the portrait – relaxed and informal – is very much in keeping with the spirit of the age, as this new university embraced the egalitarian approach of the late ’60s.

The immediate massive expansion of the modern university system in Britain in the 1960s had been advocated by eminent British economist Lord Robbins in the ‘Robbins Report’ (1964), which led directly to Stirling’s founding in 1967. As a result, Lord Robbins was invited to become first Chancellor of the University. Here he is portrayed in a plain suit on a simple wooden chair, with no gown in sight, and this certainly seems to have been the conscious style of choice for portraits throughout the 1970s, with a relaxed Lord Wheatley sitting comfortably against a striking Holbein-esque turquoise backdrop, shown below.

By the eighties however, the portrait style had clearly gained a new formality. Alberto Morrocco, who had painted Tom Cottrell in the late 60s, went on to paint the next three Principals during the 1980s and 90s, and these are notably all much more traditional than the three above. Now, the subjects are wearing their robes of office, and sit on much grander chairs.

In this last one, painted in 1994, Professor Forty sits on a carved throne, wearing one gown, and leaning on another. It is also the first portrait to feature some background detail – the beautiful expanse of campus, loch and snowy Ochils.

Professor Forty’s successor, Professor Andrew Miller, is similarly portrayed with a scenic background. This portrait was painted by Juliet Wood who at around the same time was commissioned also to paint Lord Balfour of Burleigh. At the turn of the millennium there seems to have been a move away again from the gowned portrait towards a more informal feel, with the subjects in relaxed poses, and with more interest created in the foreground by hints at the subject’s area of research.

The artist says:’ I painted Robert Balfour in his engineer’s overall, with working tools at hand. This was more expressive of his lively and individual character than the wearing of a gown’. The gown is shown hanging in the background.

A particularly relaxed portrait, also by Juliet Wood (Oil on canvas, 2007), is this one of Dr Littlejohn CBE who was Chairman of the University Court, and was the first female chair in the UK of the Industrial Tribunal (Scotland). “Painted [at her] home in Bridge of Allan in the unusually sunny autumn of 2007” (Juliet Wood)

These two photographic portraits were taken at the request of the two individuals.  Colin Bell (above) was adamant that he did not want a painted portrait of himself and preferred a photographic medium, but he tragically died in post before one could be commissioned. Tricia Malley and Ross Gillespie, known together as ‘broad daylight’, had earlier been commissioned by the University of Edinburgh however to take official portraits of their staff, so we were able to select this one of Colin as our official portrait.  He’s looking a little serious for a man who laughed a lot and loved jazz, music and art. Christine Hallett (shown below) similarly preferred the option of a photographic portrait and Tricia and Ross were commissioned.  This portrait was taken in the University library.

The University recently benefitted from a generous gift from an anonymous donor, which enabled the painting of the portrait of James Naughtie, shown below.
The artist (Guy Kinder) gives an interesting insight into the creation of this painting:
‘During my preliminary meeting with James Naughtie, I established that he was keen for me to reveal in the portrait his passion for books, politics, music and Scotland. Much of this has been conveyed through the titles depicted in the bookcase. His years as Chancellor of Stirling University are represented by the carefully placed mortar board and the gown draped over his piano. Also during our conversation, James talked about his piano lessons as a boy, and of a statuette of Mozart belonging to his teacher, which he had always admired. The statuette was bequeathed to James when his teacher died. I decided that the inclusion of the statuette was a personal touch that would also lend an intermediate interest between the figure and gown in the foreground and the backdrop of the bookcase’.

The double portrait featured at the top is:
Portrait of Dr. R. G. Bomont and Dr. Angus Mitchell
by Anne H Mackintosh
(OIl, 1995)
Bob Bomont was University Secretary for 22 years, retiring in 1995. His book “The University of Stirling: Beginnings and Today” is in the foreground. Dr Angus Mitchell was Chairman of the University Court. He is painted with Penguin books at his elbow as he collected a complete set of Penguins which he later donated to the University Archive. The campus can be seen from the window in the background.

Floating Stones
Lotte Glob
(Ceramic, 2008)

Originally from Denmark, Lotte Glob arrived in Scotland during the 1960s. Living and working as she does in the remote far north of Scotland, her ceramics are imbued with the beauty of the natural landscape. These floating stones were part of a project which involved releasing three ceramic stones into 111 lochans in the Scottish Highlands. In the following film, Lotte talks about the development of this idea.

The Art Collection is fortunate to have some other objects created by this artist.

‘Fragment of the Land’, seen above, is described by the artist as ‘an important piece in my ceramic and installation work’. And the work shown below is ‘Birdbath’ which was also featured in our blog piece a few weeks ago about the Oystercatcher courtyard where it is situated.

Here is another short film in which Lotte talks in 2018 about her recent work.

While John Adams originally recognized July 2, 1776 as “the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America,” he envisioned future celebrations of the event. In a letter to his wife, Abigail Adams, he wrote:  “It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward for ever more.”

The National Archives celebrates Independence Day with musical performances, a dramatic reading of the Declaration of Independence, and history-related family activities on July 4th, 2019 in Washington, DC. NARA Photo by Ted Chaffman.

As the trustee of our nation’s founding documents—the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights—the National Archives and Records Administration has a long tradition of celebrating this national holiday in a special way. This year, with museums in Washington, DC, and at the Presidential Libraries closed, the National Archives celebrates the 244th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence in a new way—online.

Join us as we host a virtual Independence Day celebration on July 4, 2020, in partnership with the National Archives Foundation. The event will take place at 4 p.m. on @USNatArchives Facebook page and YouTube channel.  Several hours of additional educational programming will be offered throughout the day.

The virtual July 4th Schedule will be as follows: 

• 11:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m. EST July 4th family programming including welcome remarks from Archivist of the United States David S. Ferriero, a discussion with Thomas Jefferson and other historical reenactors, including Abigail Adams, John Dunlap, and Dorothy Hancock. author Brad Meltzer and illustrator Chris Eliopoulos will talk about their Ordinary People Change the World book series. Register here . 
• 4:00 p.m. EST July 4th ceremony airs on @USNatArchives Facebook page and YouTube page. Tune in for the traditional reading ceremony, hosted and narrated by journalist Soledad O’Brien.

All July 4th activities are free and open to the public, but registration is required. See the July 4th schedule to register for a program and download activities and resources.

Wherever you are on July 4th, share your celebrations on social media using the hashtag #ArchivesJuly4. See more on National Archives News.

Engrossed Declaration of Independence. National Archives Identifier 1419123 

Two hundred forty-four years ago, our founding fathers declared our independence and mutually pledged their lives, fortunes and sacred honor.  Today, as in 1776, we face fear, uncertainty, and challenges to our lives, economy, and general welfare. Throughout our history, as a nation united, we have confronted and overcome such threats. Let us continue to stay united as we strive for a more perfect – and more healthy – union.

We can often take for granted our founding documents. I encourage all of us to take time during our Independence Day celebrations to read these documents and to pause and remember the difficult choices our nation’s Founders made and the meaning of these documents today.

• Engrossed Declaration of Independence
• Constitution of the United States
• Bill of Rights
• Film of the transfer of the Charters of Freedom from the Library of Congress to NARA
• Public Resolution directing the distribution of certain copies of the Declaration of Independence
• Papers of the Continental Congress

I wish you all a safe and happy Independence Day!

This complex lattice of gendered and racial hierarchies undergirded the formation and development of FSCW, its student population, and the kinds of scholarship its students undertook. The historical records associated with FSCW, in particular the scholarly publications produced by its students, offer us a window into this world where certain classes of White women were given limited agency to pursue academic and professional development within a deeply segregated, patriarchal society.

In an effort to make this rich history more accessible to researchers, instructors, and students, FSU Libraries has begun the process of digitizing and electronically publishing theses and other academic writing produced by FSCW students. These fragile, original documents are currently held by Heritage & University Archives, and this effort is the first comprehensive, cross-departmental initiative to provide unprecedented digital access to these materials via FSU’s institutional repository, Diginole.

While progress on this project (and many others across the University) has been hampered by the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, FSU Libraries has completed the first batch of 55 theses produced by FSCW students, written between 1908 to 1935. You can access these materials directly here and can sort by date to see this particular set of theses. These represent a broad array of subjects and research areas, some which do suggest deviations from the restrictive academic environment described by Birnbaum. Topics explored range from analyses of Renaissance poets to studies in entomology to sociological investigations of racial relations in early 20th century Florida. Through these works, we are offered a tremendous amount of insight into both the history of FSU as an educational institution and the greater cultural and societal roles of women in the American South. Below are a few highlights and excerpts from this initial batch of theses. We invite you to explore this fascinating collection and look forward to making more of these historic records available to all.

In 1683 or 1684 Archbishop Robert Leighton drew up a list of the books he intended to bequeath to Dunblane Cathedral. After his death, his nephew, Edward Lightmaker, added to the list. The original document is in the National Library of Scotland, but we now have a transcription on our website.

Another catalogue was created in 1691 by Bishop Robert Douglas, once the books were installed in the library building. The original catalogue is a manuscript in the Leighton collection, but we now have a transcription available from our website.

Bishop Douglas also listed pamphlet publications, or “sticht Peeces, viz single sermons, Litle treatisis and other Pamphlets”. We now also have a transcription of this list on our website.

These three catalogues are particularly useful for identifying Robert Leighton’s own books.

After the Leighton Library opened in 1688, the collection was augmented substantially. Later catalogues are also available. William Smellie’s 1793 catalogue is available online as a Google Book. The 1843 catalogue is a book in the Leighton Library, while the 1940 catalogue of Cameron Dinwoodie is available in Stirling University Library.

We are grateful to Gordon Willis for transcribing the three early catalogues.

See all the catalogues on our website .

Helen Beardsley

The Garden of Time is a beautiful haven where all are welcome to enjoy a peaceful moment surrounded by nature, history and art.

As part of the University of Stirling’s 50th anniversary celebrations in 2017, the University redeveloped an existing garden to create a new concept: a Garden of Time. Located to the east of the campus, the Garden enjoys spectacular views of Airthrey Castle, the Wallace Monument, the Ochil Hills and the prominent peak of Dumyat.

Reflecting the youthful vibrancy of the University, the Garden of Time is a place where nature meets art, whilst exploring time and memory. It’s a tranquil and inspirational place, which like the four seasons, will continually change and remain a place where everyone can visit, relax, imagine and dream new possibilities.

Landscape architects, designers and university curators have created a place of natural beauty within the campus’ historic parkland setting. The Garden features floral meadows, specimen trees, mowed lawn walkways, a walking labyrinth and unique sculptures.

Leave a memory

For anyone who has loved the University of Stirling and its beautiful setting there are opportunities to remember an event, a friend or a loved one, whilst also supporting student projects and the further development of the Garden of Time:

• engraving a Caithness path stone
• adopting a specimen tree
• supporting the purchase of original sculptural artworks

Find out more about recognition opportunities and how to make a donation.

Kathleen Jamie, award winning poet and Professor of Poetry at the University of Stirling, was commissioned to write a poem which captures the spirit of the Garden of Time and the surrounding ancient landscape. The poem’s title is Sun to the stone

How to find the Garden of Time

Follow Hermitage Road and you’ll find the Garden of Time next to Alexander Court and opposite the Airthrey Golf Course club house. Find out more on getting around campus.

As mentioned in our previous library history post, the School of Library Training and Service was restructured in 1947 and began offering a master’s degree. In 1967 and 1968 respectively, the school began offering doctor of philosophy degrees and advanced master’s degrees.

In 1981, the new library school building, the Louis Shores Building, was opened and the name of the program was once again changed to the School of Information. The school’s name was changed once more in 2004 to the College of Information. In 2009, the College of Information merged with the College of Communication to become the College of Communication & Information. The college now consists of three schools, the School of Information, the School of Communication, and the School of Communication Science & Disorders, offering both undergraduate and graduate courses on campus and online. The School of Information is an international leader in the iSchool movement and is the only iSchool in the state of Florida. The school offers graduate and specialist degree programs entirely online.

The department of Special Collections grew rapidly after 1953 with Louise Richardson as the head of the department, a role she would hold until her retirement in 1960. As early as 1962 Special Collections was curating and hosting exhibits using their holdings. By 1964, Special Collections holdings included the McGregor Collection of Early Americana, the Crown Collection of documents, pictures, and manuscripts, an archival collection of photographs of Florida and Floridians, an extensive rare book collection, and the Shaw “Childhood in Poetry” Collection. By this time the library was also a depository for federal documents (Report to the Director of the Libraries, 1960; Florida State University Bulletin, 1964).

By 1973, Strozier library contained 1,150,000 volumes, 500,000 government documents, 93,000 maps, and a collection of micromaterials exceeding 700,000. In 1985, the Claude Pepper library was established as the official repository for the Claude Pepper Papers.

Between 1995 and 1996, Special Collections was relocated to its current location on the first floor of Strozier library. The Heritage Protocol program, now known as Heritage & University Archives, was established in 2001 to gather university history related documents and memorabilia.

According to the Special Collections Annual Report for 2003, Special Collections, along with the Digital Initiatives? Center, was already providing digital access to rare Florida materials. The extensive Photographic Archives collection was being used by departments all across campus. 

The last installment of Library History with HUA will be focused on the satellite libraries of Florida State University: the Dirac Science Library, the Maguire Medical Library, the College of Engineering Library, the Law Research Center, the Library and Learning Center at the FSU Panama City Campus, and the Allen Music Library.

This article was written by Kacee Reguera, a student worker in Heritage & University Archives.

Farnell
James Morrison RSA RSW
(Oil, 1972)

The first curator of the Art Collection, Matilda Mitchell, tells the story that in May 1973, Tom Cottrell, first Principal of the University of Stirling,
‘came back from a visit to the RSA [Open Exhibition], all excited about this picture and died a week later so we just went and got it.’*
It was the first of four by this artist to be acquired by the Art Collection.

James Morrison‘s main working areas are the lush farmland around his home in Angus (as above) and the rugged wildness of the west coast (below). His restrained palette and distinctive huge skies, usually filled with majestically shaped broad brush clouds, convey the wide spaciousness of the Scottish landscape in a particularly unmistakable style.

This painting, entitled ‘An Teallach between Ristol and Mullagragh’ (Oil on board, 1997), was donated to the Collection by the artist to mark the reconvening of the Parliament of Scotland in May 1999. An Teallach is the name of a Scottish mountain. It comes from the Gaelic “the forge”, thought to refer to the colour of the mountain, which is mainly Torridonian sandstone. Watch a short film about Morrison in the Art Collection (made as part of ‘Corridor of Dreams‘ in 2013) here.

‘Rhum and Eigg’ (Oil on board, 1983) was also generously donated to the Art Collection by the artist, and according to the date accompanying the signature – 24/vi/83 – was painted thirty seven years ago this week. It evokes very clearly the mood of a quiet, mild, cloudy June day on Scotland’s west coast.

The fourth work by James Morrison in the Collection is actually his earliest, painted not long after he finished his studies at Glasgow School of Art (1950-54) and when he was still resident in that city. ‘Winter Trees, Glasgow’ (Oil on canvas, 1956) is quite different from the three shown above. Morrison did not move over to the East coast until the 1960s, and this early work has the feel of the city with its geometric trees, undergrowth, and the suggestion of a built environment, with only a sliver of pale sky. The work came to the Collection in 1998 by way of the Scottish Arts Council bequest.

* This story was retold in the Times Ed Supplement ‘ Scottish Diary’ Friday 21st June 1974.

Although in-person meetings are preferred, the virtual format was the best way at this time to continue the Board’s work with public participation and transparency while keeping everyone safe. In order to better plan for future engagements, the Board has approved an online survey for participants to let us know what worked best on June 5, and what we can do to improve the next events that may become necessary to hold as teleconferences open to the public.

Please take this short online survey, https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/PIDBvpms, to provide your feedback on the meeting. Survey responses are anonymous and should take between 5 and 7 minutes to complete.  You may respond to this survey any time through July 5^th.  We thank you for your participation and look forward to incorporating your valuable feedback into future events.

At the time of King’s speech, the Vietnam War was in its twelfth year. President Lyndon Johnson was committed to winning it through a series of escalations of the United States’ ground war and bombing missions. But rather than bringing the conflict to an end, Johnson’s combat surges between 1963 and 1967 sunk the United States deeper into the quagmire of the war. Civilian and military casualty rates rose exponentially, and news outlets around the world broadcast horrific images of the chaos and tragedy of the war.

King, who had until 1967 been restrained in his public criticism of the war, now called openly from the sanctuary of Riverside Church for an immediate end to the conflict. He asserted that the “madness” of America’s role in Vietnam was morally indefensible and unambiguously linked to what he called “the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism.” The time had arrived, he told his audience, for him and his fellow clergy to break their silence and to “move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history.” 

Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read: Vietnam.

He went on to say:

This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

King’s speech was denounced quickly, and not only by his usual critics. Many prominent voices in the civil rights movement and in the liberal political establishment criticized and distanced themselves from King and his assessment of the war.  The New York Times ran a castigating editorial entitled, Dr. King’s Error, calling the ideas presented in his Riverside Church lecture “both wasteful and self-defeating.”²  Dr. Ralph Bunche, the United Nations Under Secretary for Political Affairs and a Director of the NAACP, said of Dr. King and the speech, “Like us all, of course, he makes mistakes.  Right now, I am convinced, he is making a very serious tactical error.”³

A few weeks after his speech at Riverside Church, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a guest on the Casper Citron Show, a nationally syndicated radio program which aired in New York on WQXR, WOR and WRFM.  The exact date of Dr. King’s appearance on the program is not clear, though it likely took place during the week of June 19th, 1967. Mr. Citron began the interview by asking King to respond to the criticisms being leveled at him in the wake of his Riverside Church speech, and specifically to the charge that King should focus on civil rights and not involve himself in matters of war and foreign affairs.  Dr. King remained steadfast in his convictions, telling Citron:

Before I became a civil rights leader I was a clergyman, and I still am.  And it’s always the responsibility of a clergyman to bring to bear the great insights of our Judeo-Christian heritage on the social evils of our day, and I happen to think war is a great social evil. 

The other thing is that I cannot, for the world of me, segregate my moral concern. These issues, in the final analysis, are tied together.  There can be no peace ultimately without justice, and there can be no justice without peace. Therefore I must carry my moral concern to the problem of war in general and the war in Vietnam in particular.   

And the other thing is that in 1964 I received the Nobel Peace Prize. And this was a commission, so to speak, for me to do more than I had ever done to try to bring the issue of peace before the conscience and before mankind in general. 

So for all of these reasons  I don’t feel that I’m moving out of my area but that I’m in the very area where I must be because of a deep moral concern and a deep feeling that racism and militarism and economic exploitation are all tied together.     

Audio of this excerpt of Martin Luther King, Jr. speaking with Casper Citron in 1967 is available in the media player at the top of this page; the complete interview is available here.  Note: The audio quality of the original recording is often distorted.

                                                     *       *       *

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered in Memphis, Tennessee by a white supremacist on April 4, 1968, one year to the day from his speech at Riverside Church in New York.   America’s war in Vietnam continued to escalate and expand through the administrations of both Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon.  On April 29th of 1975, President Gerald Ford withdrew the last American forces from Vietnam in a dramatic two-day evacuation called Operation Frequent Wind. On April 30th, 1975, North Vietnamese troops captured the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon, ending the twenty year conflict with the United States. In 2008, an article in The British Medical Journal estimated that there were 3,091,000 combat and civilian casualties in Vietnam between President Harry Truman’s deployment of the US Military Assistance Advisory Group in 1955 and the fall of Saigon in 1975.

¹Peniel, Joseph, “This speech made Martin Luther King Jr. revolutionary”, CNN, 3 April 2017
²Editorial Board, “Dr. King’s Error”, New York Times, 7 April 1967
³Sibley, John, “Bunche Disputes Dr. King on Peace”, New York Times, 13 April 1967

This recording of Martin Luther King Jr. on the Casper Citron Show is a recent acquisition of the New York Public Radio Archive.  It was made possible through the generosity of Christiane Citron, the host’s daughter.

There are three works by sculptor and environmental artist Diane Maclean on campus, and their siting and scale means that they are a familiar sight. The first of the three distinctive works to be installed at the University was Shoe. It was purchased by the Art Collection in 2002 (having already been on loan since 1995). Plume and Wing arrived in 2015, on long term loan from the artist.

Wing (Steel, 2011) is based on the skeletal structure of a bird’s wing. Although made of industrial materials, it has a look of lightness that belies its strength. Using tough industrial materials to make something as delicate as a bird’s wing may seem perverse, but the scale and durability required to stand up to being in the open in a busy public area with high winds and changeable weather led Maclean to experiment with mild steel tube and the idea of a wing just touching the ground. The sculpture is galvanised and etched.
The artist adds: ‘It was exhibited in my solo exhibition ‘Bird’ at the Lead Mining Museum in the Pennines in 2011. I made 4 sculptures relating to parts of a bird and also showed large scale photos of birds in exotic habitats from my travels in Africa and South America’.

Plume (Stainless steel, 2011) is a feather, a quill, a hackle. Using coloured stainless steel means the sculpture has many variations of colour depending on the viewpoint, the weather and the time of day or season. The red coloured stainless steel from which Plume is composed is an oxide layer on the surface of the polished material. The polished sheet is dipped into a tank of clear oxide. Light entering the infinitesimally thin layer at different angles creates colour which changes when seen from different viewpoints, through red, blue, purple and gold.

Plume was also created for Diane Maclean’s ‘Bird exhibition.

Shoe (Steel and wood, 1995) was made for the Scottish Sculpture Open exhibition in 1995 which started at Kildrummy Castle, Strathdon, Aberdeenshire, (near the Scottish Sculpture Workshop which organised the exhibition), and then moved to the University of Stirling. The sculptor says that ‘ideas for the sculpture came from visiting the 13th Century ruined castle and thinking about life at that time. Fortified with round towers and a moat, the castle had been the scene of many sieges. I was conscious of my feet, walking around the ruins in sandals ‐ only bishops, princes and people of high rank would have worn stylish footwear like a sandal in those days. Somehow the two ideas came together. In the process of making a model of the sculpture, the giant sandal emerged as a tower and a bridge or ramp. I think it spans the distance in time. In fabricating Shoe I worked with a blacksmith at Tomatin near Inverness. We curved the steel sheet by feeding it through a hand‐operated machine like a mangle, then welded 15 mm tube along the edges before galvanising and etching. Galvanising gives a very durable surface and the etching gives a varied, silvery surface to the galvanised metal. The pine logs are individually bolted on.’ (Diane Maclean, 2012)

Setting Sun II
Alberto Morrocco
(Oil on canvas, 1962)

Although he lived in Dundee, Alberto Morrocco‘s Italian heritage meant that Italy was the destination for many holidays and study trips. He drew prolifically on these outings, and many of his paintings evoke scenes of the heat and vitality of a southern Mediterranean summer. Morrocco was interested in exploring colour in relation to shape and form. He was influenced early in his career by Picasso and Braque, whose work he had encountered on his travels. This looser landscape perhaps retains some of this influence. The work was donated to the Art Collection as part of the Scottish Art Council Bequest in 1998.

Morrocco was especially prolific after retiring as Head of Painting at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee, in 1982, where he had worked for thirty years.
The short film above shows a small sample of the variety of his oeuvre – landscapes, figures, still lifes and interiors.

In addition to all of this work, he was also described in an obituary as ‘by far the finest portrait painter of his time in Scotland’, and this dual career led Morrocco to depict a wide variety of sitters from HM The Queen Mother to the President of Iceland, and also four Principals of the University of Stirling, which awarded him an Honorary Doctorate in 1987.