Posts tagged with Labadie Collection in Blog Beyond the Reading Room

With the new semester comes a new slate of special collections meet and greets! These pop-up exhibits bring rare materials out of the library and into Weiser Hall, where we'll be sharing selections from the Joseph A. Labadie Collection. Visitors making their way through Weiser's busy halls will have an opportunity to take a look at books, pamphlets, ephemera, and even LPs while chatting with staff to learn more about our collections.

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document their commitment to living out their surrealist ideals through notebooks, exhibition notes, photographs, unpublished manuscripts, and three extensive series of correspondence that include texts and original artwork from many individuals and groups.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 the Thompson Family Papers, a collection that offers a window into the lives and political activities of Detroit’s black professionals from the mid 1920s to the late 1960s.

During the winter term we held five pop-up special collections meet and greets with our rare materials in Weiser Hall. Here's a sampling!

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.

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...

The University of Michgan has a long history of student activism on campus, particularly around antiwar movements. An especially significant event was the Feburary 1970 protest against General Electric recruiting engineers on campus. The Labadie Collection’s Subject Vertical Files has documentation of this event which helps us understand the contexts of student activism in the past and present.

Preserving the history of labor movements has been core to the Labadie Collection’s mission since its very beginnings more than a century ago. In 2016, two important collections on 20th century labor organizing have been arranged to better facilitate research. The Joyce Kornbluh Collection (3.25 linear ft.) and the Don Stewart IWW Collection (3 linear ft.) conserve evidence of the regular confrontations between workers, corporations, and government throughout the past hundred years.

An unforgettable figure of the anarchist and syndicalist communities, Federico Arcos (1920-2015) was known for his generosity and the unabating commitment with which he pursued his ideals. Friends of the Labadie Collection remember Arcos as a long-time benefactor and collector. Federico and his wife Pura curated in their home in Windsor, Canada, an important library of anarchist books, newspapers, and archives that never failed to impress their many guests. In addition to the many items he endowed the Labadie Collection with, Arcos bequeathed his personal papers, now inventoried.