Posts tagged with archives in Blog Beyond the Reading Room

As I thumbed through letters between Danny Kaye and his sweetheart Holly Fine, I couldn’t help but imagine the ginger-haired actor twirling Vera-Ellen in his arms and singing “The Best Things Happen While You're Dancing.” We often think about film as a moving media––people and objects flickering across screens––but film archives, like those of the Special Collections Library, contain the material, tangible objects that accompany the making of films. These materials tell rich stories!

The Charles Ellet, Jr. Papers, part of our Transportation History Collection, document the career of a man who surveyed rivers, built innovative bridges, and served as Colonel of the U.S. Ram Fleet during the Civil War. Guest writer Lauren Lincoln-Chavez, who processed the collection, tells the story of an exceptional 19th century engineer.

There's a moment of suspense every time I remove the lid of an archival box. What will I find inside? Folders of nineteenth-century correspondences in French? A civil war diary with a bullet hole in its leather cover? A pile of pamphlets about applying makeup for transwomen? A random letter signed by J.R.R. Tolkien? (Yes, I really did find one!) After five weeks in the archives unit of the Special Collections Library, I have come to realize that I never really know what I will find...

As the only grandchild of Jo and Sophie Labadie, Carlotta Anderson was fascinated by her family's history. She wrote an authoritative biography of her grandfather, researched anarchism, labor unions and Detroit history before the auto industry, and preserved original family documents dating back to the nineteenth century. Anderson was a dear friend of the Labadie Collection and, shortly before her death she donated important papers that are now open for research.

The late-Soviet-period author's appearance on campus and in our archives are explored in this guest blog post by Caitlin Moriarty, Special Collections Reader Services Assistant.

"Utterly stunned, I walked down Broadway with a frie[n]d, repeating over and over to him, “Do you realize there are some things I will not be able to do simply because I am a woman? Do you realize…” I could not stop recounting the incident." In these words, anthropologist Eleanor Leacock recalls the moment in 1943 when she was denied an Assistantship solely because of her gender and she realized the full extent of discrimination that she would face as a female academic.

Arthur Miller, Marge Piercy, and...Grandma? They might all be shelved together amid these stately gray volumes.

Part of the Special Collections Library's Film, Theatre and Television Archives, the Robert Shaye-New Line Cinema Papers contains material on Robert Shaye’s career as a founder of New Line Cinema, producer, director, distributor and actor in Hollywood. New Line Cinema’s famous productions include the Nightmare on Elm Street series, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Austin Powers and the Lord of the Rings movies.

Many finding aids for our archives and manuscript materials are online, but some are not (yet). When a Special Collections catalog record says “Unpublished finding aid available in repository,” these are what we’re talking about.

We are elated to announce that the Tom Hayden Papers are now part of the Special Collections Library's Joseph A. Labadie Collection.