Posts tagged with archives

Guest post by Brian Bocking, Heid Fellow, on his research in the Harry Alverson Franck Papers. Brian is Professor Emeritus of the Study of Religions at University College Cork (Cork, Ireland).

Join the Special Collections Research Center in Hatcher next Tuesday (10 January) at 4 pm for our first After Hours open house of the Winter term, exploring our extensive collection of letters, diaries, photographs, maps, books, and other material documenting early 20th century Philippine history!

The Labadie Collection’s Franklin and Penelope Rosemont Papers document their commitment to living out their surrealist ideals through notebooks, exhibition notes, photographs, unpublished manuscripts, and three extensive series of correspondence that include texts and original artwork from many individuals and groups.

We are very excited to announce that the Labadie Collection has acquired a new Emma Goldman archive. This is an important collection that had until recently been in private hands.

Fifty years ago, on March 16, 1968, in the Vietnamese village of My Lai in Quảng Ngãi Province, American soldiers, led by Lt. William Calley, summarily executed over 500 men, women, children, and babies at point blank range.

Among the author's papers housed in Special Collections are those of U-M alumnus and Ann Arbor native Nancy Willard (1936-2017). Nancy Willard (1936-2017) was born in Ann Arbor and is an alumnus of the University of Michigan and winner of major and minor Hopwood Awards (1955, 1956, 1957, 1958). Although best known as a children’s author and winner winner of the 1982 Newbery Medal for William Blake’s Inn, Willard in fact wrote for a range of audiences and genres.

One of the great pleasures of spending this summer in the archives as a Mellon Public Humanities Fellow has been stumbling into and out of people’s lives, or the echoes of them left behind in correspondence, records, doodles, drafts, and other materials. There are a lot of recognizable names in the Special Collections Library stacks, but for every person I’ve read or heard about there are so many more who are new to me...

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...