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Inside Spencer: The KSRL Blog

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Welcome to the Kenneth Spencer Research Library blog! As the special collections and archives library at the University of Kansas, Spencer is home to remarkable and diverse collections of rare and unique items. Explore the blog to learn about the work we do and the materials we collect.

Exhibiting Free Speech: The Wilcox Collection at 50

March 16th, 2015

This post is written to highlight the current exhibit at Spencer Library: Free Speech in America: The Wilcox Collection at 50. A reception will be held on March 25 at Spencer Library to celebrate the Wilcox Collection.

Fifty years ago Laird Wilcox was a student at the University of Kansas. He had started collecting political literature in his teen years, fueled in this interest by his diverse family leanings and volatile discussions over family meals. He wanted to understand what motivated people to believe the things they did and act on those beliefs.

In 1964 Laird entered and won the Elizabeth Taylor Book Collecting Contest sponsored by the KU Libraries. The Libraries purchased his collection in 1965 (then four filing cabinets of materials). Today the Wilcox Collection of Contemporary Political Movements is one of the largest assemblages of left and right wing U.S. political materials anywhere. There are thousands and thousands of pamphlets, books, newsletters, audio recordings, and political ephemera such as bumper stickers, posters, flyers, organizational membership mailings, and book catalogs, relating to some 10,000 organizations at the fringes of the political spectrum. There is also a growing component of manuscript collections as well, including Laird Wilcox’s personal papers.

1964 Contest Winners Laird Wilcox, Lawrence Morgan, and Jerry L. Ulrich, with Elizabeth M. Taylor.

The winners of the Taylor Book Collecting Contest, KU Libraries, 1964. Laird Wilcox, far left, and Elizabeth M. Taylor (sponsor of the contest), second from left. University Archives. Call Number: RG 32/40. Click image to enlarge.

Laird Wilcox in Wilcox Collection stacks, University of Kansas Libraries

Laird Wilcox standing in the Wilcox Collection stacks, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, KU, 1996. University Archives. Call number: RG P/LW. Click image to enlarge.

In 2015 an exhibit was mounted in Spencer Research Library to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Wilcox Collection. The exhibit includes examples of books, newsletters, and ephemera, and highlights some of the many books that have resulted from research in the collection. Materials from the collection include items from a scrapbook that Laird kept as chair of the Student Union Association Minority Opinions Forum, a FBI wanted poster with photos of Bernadine Dohrn and William Ayers from the ephemera file of the Weather Underground, and examples of Laird’s many publications.

Flyer from Wilcox Collection depicting American flag

Poster for a documentary film shown at KU in 1964 focusing on the Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). From the Laird Wilcox scrapbook. Kansas Collection. Call number: RH WL MS Q5. Click image to enlarge.

Wanted poster from Wilcox Collection, University of Kansas Libraries

FBI wanted poster from the ephemera file of the Weather Underground which operated as an underground urban guerilla force. Kansas Collection. Call number: RH WL EPH 2094. Click image to enlarge.

One of the strongest features of the Wilcox Collection is ephemeral materials, including bumper stickers, buttons, and flyers. Because of their “throw-away” nature ephemera are often overlooked as an information source, but can provide the original message of the creator in a way that is often concise and colorful.  On display are materials from the National Youth Alliance, Community Churches of America, the American Education Lobby, the Lesbian/Gay Labor Alliance, the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, T.R.A.I.N. (To Restore American Independence Now), Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum, Phoebe Courtney’s Tax Fax, and The Fact Finder published by Harry Everington. There are more than 200,000 pieces of ephemera in the Wilcox Collection.

Ephemeral materials from Wilcox Collection, Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas

Representative ephemera from the Wilcox Collection. Kansas Collection. Call number: RH WL EPH. Click image to enlarge.

The Wilcox Collection is a prime example of one of the world-class collections that reside within the Kenneth Spencer Research Library. Researchers from many parts of the globe have traveled to the KU campus to view this collection, an opportunity that is easily available to KU’s students and faculty.

Rebecca Schulte
University Archivist and Curator, Wilcox Collection

Sherry Williams
Curator of Collections and Curator, Kansas Collection

 

 

Throwback Thursday: Picnic Edition

March 12th, 2015

Each week we’ll be posting a photograph from University Archives that shows a scene from KU’s past. We’ve also scanned more than 3,600 images from KU’s University Archives and made them available online; be sure to check them out!

We’ve been enjoying some gorgeous, and unseasonably warm, spring weather on Mount Oread. It’s the perfect time to take a cue from these early KU students and enjoy a picnic!

Group portrait of the class of 1897 during a picnic

Group portrait of the KU Class of 1897 during a picnic at Blue Mound, Kansas.
University Archives Photos. Call Number: RG 71/34 1897 Prints: Student Activities: Class Pictures (Photos).
Click image to enlarge (redirect to Spencer’s digital collections).

Caitlin Donnelly
Head of Public Services

Melissa Kleinschmidt, Megan Sims, and Abbey Ulrich
Public Services Student Assistants

In Commemoration: Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965

March 9th, 2015

This weekend’s three-day commemoration of the 50th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday” recognized one of the pivotal events of the Modern Civil Rights Movement.  The occasion drew President Barack Obama, the First Lady and their daughters, former President George W. Bush and Mrs. Laura Bush, as well as a delegation of bipartisan Congressional representatives to Selma, Alabama.

On Sunday, March 7, 1965, about 600 civil rights activists marched in silence from Brown Chapel AME Church in Selma, Alabama for the Montgomery state capitol building to memorialize the shooting death of Jimmy Lee Jackson by a state trooper at a peaceful voting rights rally in Marion, Alabama and to protest against the intransigent opposition to African Americans registering to vote.  The opposition to voting rights was especially strong in Selma, Alabama, where half of the population was African American and had not been allowed to vote since the late nineteenth century. Immediately after crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the marchers were halted by heavily armed state troopers and local police who ordered them to turn back. When they refused, the troopers and police, in full view of news media and other photographers, mercilessly beat and tear-gassed the marchers. Today, this tragic event in our nation’s history is often referred to as “Bloody Sunday.” A week later, in a televised speech, President Lyndon B. Johnson asked for a voting rights bill, and on August 6, Congress passed the
1965 Voting Rights Act.

Spencer Research Library’s Kansas Collection includes sources that document the region’s support for Bloody Sunday’s civil rights workers and their efforts. We share a selection of these documents.

ITEMS FROM THE AFRICAN AMERICAN EXPERIENCE COLLECTIONS

The Wichita Chapter of the NAACP was an early leader in the Modern Civil Rights Movement’s strategy of breaking down the color line through non-violent, direct action.   The Chapter’s Youth Council organized the movement’s first lunch counter sit-in on July 19, 1958.  A month later, the Youth Council in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma conducted their sit-in.

On March 20, 1965, the Topeka Branch of the NAACP organized and led a Sympathy March for the civil rights activists in Selma, Alabama.

Samuel C. Jackson served as the president of the Topeka Chapter of the NAACP, which had been first established in 1913. Born in Kansas City, Kansas, Jackson earned his law degree from Washburn University Law School and was a WWII veteran. During the fall of 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed him to the first U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Four years later, he was appointed General Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development by President Richard M. Nixon.

 Portrait of Samuel C. Jackson

Photograph: Samuel C. Jackson portrait. Samuel C. Jackson Collection, Call Number: RH MS-P 557, Box 1, Folder 4.
Click image to enlarge.

The Topeka Branch of the NAACP distributed this flyer to mobilize community participation and support for the Sympathy March.

 Citizen’s Attention flyer

Citizen’s Attention flyer. Samuel C. Jackson Collection.
Call Number: RH MS 557, Box 1, Folder 11. Click image to enlarge.

On Saturday morning, March 20, 1965, about 150 marchers began their journey from Second Baptist Church on 424 N.W. Laurent Street in Topeka, Kansas and walked across the Topeka Avenue Bridge, wearing black armbands and carrying signs that read “Topeka NAACP Deplores Selma’s Brutality,” “Mourners March,” and “Police Brutality Must Go.”

Newspaper clipping of “Topeka Rights March.”

Newspaper clipping of “Topeka Rights March.” Samuel C. Jackson Collection.
Call Number: RH MS 557, Box 1, Folder 11. Click image to enlarge.

The Sympathy March continued through the streets of Topeka, Kansas.

Civil Rights Marchers.  Topeka, KS, 1965.

Civil Rights Marchers.  Topeka, KS, 1965. J. B. Anderson Collection.
Call Number: RH MS-P 1230 Box 1, Folder 31.  Click image to enlarge.

When the Sympathy March reached the downtown area of Topeka, about 100 more participants joined them as the demonstration moved toward South Kansas Avenue to the Topeka Post Office where they placed in the mail hundreds of letters and petitions to the Kansas Congressional Delegation, urging them to support upcoming civil rights legislation.

Sympathy March, Topeka, March 1965

Sympathy March, Topeka, March 1965.  J.B. Anderson Collection.
Call Number: RH MS-P 1230 Box 1, Folder 31.  Click image to enlarge.

In the Greater Kansas City area and in Independence, Missouri, local chapters of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the NAACP led silent marches throughout the day on Sunday, March 14, 1965. More than 1,200 people participated in these demonstrations.

Greater Kansas City Marches. March 14, 1965

Greater Kansas City Marches. March 14, 1965. Greater Kansas City Council on Religion and Race Collection.
Call Number: RH MS 786, Box 8, File 12.  Click image to enlarge.

At the Music Hall in Kansas City, Missouri, the Greater Kansas City Council on Religion and Race, an organization of clergy and lay members of all faiths dedicated to the advancement and attainment of interracial justice and charity, sponsored a community memorial service for the Reverend James J. Reeb, who was murdered by white vigilantes in Selma, Alabama on March 11, 1965. He had traveled to Selma a few days after “Bloody Sunday” to support the area’s civil rights workers. A Unitarian Universalist minister and a social worker, The Reverend Reeb was born in Wichita Kansas and resided in Russell, Kansas as a youth.

Second Reeb Memorial Program, March 14, 1965.

Reeb Memorial Program. Greater Kansas City Council on Religion and Race Collection.
Call Number: RH MS 786, Box 8, File 12. Click image to enlarge.

The KU Libraries is a co-sponsor of the African and African American Studies Department’s public program Selma: A Film Screening and Panel Discussion on March 25, 2015, at 5:30p.m. in Wescoe Hall, Room 3140.

Deborah Dandridge
Field Archivist and Curator
African American Experience Collections

King of the Wild Frontier

March 6th, 2015

Today marks the 179th anniversary of the Battle of the Alamo. Spencer Research Library is home to a small collection about the Alamo’s most famous defender: frontiersman and former Tennessee Congressman David Crockett (1786-1836).

Image of Fisher's Crockett Almanac, cover, 1843

The cover of Fisher’s Crockett Almanac, 1843.
Call Number: B10218. Click image to enlarge.

The items I find most interesting are the Crockett Almanacs. At least forty-five were published by various firms over a twenty-year period beginning in 1835, the year that Crockett lost his Congressional seat and famously told his constituents that “since you have chosen to elect a man with a timber toe to succeed me, you may all go to hell and I will go to Texas.” Shown here are selected pages from the 1843 edition of Fisher’s Crockett Almanac.

Image of Fisher's Crockett Almanac, March calendar, 1843

“Valuable Recipes” and the March calendar in
Fisher’s Crockett Almanac, 1843. This information might
come in handy if you have, say, mildewy linen or
tarnished gilt frames. Call Number: B10218. Click image to enlarge.

The Crockett almanacs contained some of the same information found in other early American almanacs, including calendars, sunrise and sunset times, astronomical data, and important dates, historical anniversaries, and holidays. Primarily, however, the almanacs focused on a comical, exaggerated version of Crockett, drawing and expanding upon popular books and plays that had already been written by and about him. As historian Paul Andrew Hutton explained in an article about the almanacs, they were filled with a cast of peculiar and outlandish characters; folk wisdom; tall hunting tales based on the “celebrated hunting skills of the real Crockett” (16); and stories of “daring escapes from wild beasts, descriptions of animals, and dialect humor” that the real Crockett was masterful at telling (15).

Image of Fisher's Crockett Almanac, preface, 1843

Fictional Ben Hardin was introduced to readers as an old sailor who
met Davy Crockett and “decided to devote himself to the continuation
of his friend’s almanacs” (Hutton 15). Beginning in 1841, the almanacs
were also based on the myth that Crockett had survived the
Battle of the Alamo and was a prisoner in Mexico forced to work
in the mines. Fisher’s Crockett Almanac, preface, 1843.
Call Number: B10218. Click image to enlarge.

Image of Fisher's Crockett Almanac, "Crockett Discovering the Pole," 1843 Image of Fisher's Crockett Almanac, "An Apology," 1843 Image of Fisher's Crockett Almanac, "Crockett and the Devil," 1843

Selected stories from Fisher’s Crockett Almanac, 1843.
Call Number: B10218. Click image to enlarge.

Taken together, writes Hutton, the almanacs created a fictional version of David Crockett in which he was “a tall-tale trickster with the strength of Hercules, the valor of Lancelot, the veracity of Baron Munchausen, and the wit of Brer Rabbit. This comic superman insured Crockett a rare immortality, enshrined the humor of the Old Southwest in print, provided an eventually triumphant rival to the romantic, class-conscious frontier hero of James Fenimore Cooper, and further defined the emerging American national character” (10).

In short, writes Hutton,

A celebrity in his own time, Crockett was elevated to near-mythical status by his heroic death at the Alamo in 1836. Rediscovered in the middle of the twentieth century, he again became a towering figure of American popular culture. He had courted fame while alive, and unlike Daniel Boone – whose mantle as America’s great frontier hero he inherited – he had taken an active role in the creation of his own overblown legend. His story, however, quickly became the property of others. They greatly embellished the core of truth he had projected to create the archetypical backwoodsman and Jacksonian self-made man who captured the imagination of the world. None were more important important in this heroic evolution than the imaginative creators of the wildly popular Crockett almanacs (10).

Image of Fisher's Crockett Almanac, "The Indian, Crockett and the Boa Constrictor," 1843

Fisher’s Crockett Almanac, back cover, 1843. Call Number: B10218. Click image to enlarge.

Want to know more about David/Davy Crockett? Check out these sources at Spencer and Watson libraries.

The Life and Adventures of Colonel David Crockett, of West Tennessee (1833): This anonymously-published work has been attributed to Matthew St. Clair Clarke and copyright holder James S. French. Hugely popular, it was republished under the title Sketches and Eccentricities of Col. David Crockett, of West Tennessee (1833).

An Account of Col. Crockett’s Tour to the North and Down East (1835): Increasingly displeased seeing others prosper from writing about – and in some cases caricaturing – him and seeking a way to pay off his debts, Crockett wrote his autobiography, published as A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett, of the State of Tennessee (1834). He promoted the work during the grand tour described in this book. It was written by friend and fellow Congressman William Clark based on newspaper accounts, other documents, and notes provided by Crockett.

The Life of Martin Van Buren, Heir-Apparent to the “Government,” and the Appointed Successor of General Andrew Jackson (sixteenth edition, 1837): This bitterly partisan work reflected Crockett’s virulent opposition to Jackson and Van Buren. He lent his name to the title page of this book, although it was written by Augustin Clayton. The publisher was so nervous about being sued for libel that the firm left its name off the title page of the first edition.

Col. Crockett’s Exploits and Adventures in Texas (1837): This is a work of mostly fiction by Richard Penn Smith masquerading as fact, allegedly based on Crockett’s own diary, a document that does not exist.

The Crockett Almanac (1839, 1840, 1841)

Ben Hardin’s Crockett Almanac (1842)

Three Roads to the Alamo: The Lives and Fortunes of David Crockett, James Bowie, and William Barret Travis by William C. Davis (1998)

Reference

Hutton, Paul Andrew. “‘Going to Congress and making allmynacks is my trade’: Davy Crockett, His Almanacs, and the Evolution of a Frontier Legend.” Journal of the West 37:2 (April 1998): 10-22.

Note

I previously wrote about the Crockett Almanacs for the blog of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas Library at the Alamo.

Caitlin Donnelly
Head of Public Services

Throwback Thursday: Severe Weather Edition

March 5th, 2015

Each week we’ll be posting a photograph from University Archives that shows a scene from KU’s past. We’ve also scanned more than 3,600 images from KU’s University Archives and made them available online; be sure to check them out!

It may still feel like winter on Mount Oread, but spring is just around the corner, and with it the potential for strong storms. We selected today’s images thinking about Kansas Severe Weather Awareness Week, which ends tomorrow, and today’s specific focus on thunderstorm and lightning safety.

Photograph of lightning flashing above the Campanile and Spencer Research Library, 1980

Lightning flashes above the Campanile, with Spencer Research Library
faintly visible behind it, 1980. University Archives Photos.
Call Number: RG 0/24/1 Storms 1980 Prints: Campus: Areas and Objects (Photos).
Click image to enlarge.

Photograph of firefighters battling a blaze at Hoch Auditorium, 1991

Firefighters battling a blaze at Hoch Auditorium, June 15, 1991. The building was struck
by lightning
during a violent thunderstorm that, according to the Kansas Alumni magazine,
“pelted the Lawrence area with heavy rain and pea-sized hail.” University Archives Photos.
Call Number: RG 0/22/33 1991 Slides: Campus: Buildings: Hoch Auditorium (Photos).
Click image to enlarge.

Photograph of a tree in front of Fraser Hall damaged by a storm, 1991

Tree in front of Watson Library (not shown) damaged by a storm, 1991. This may have been
the same June 15th storm that caused the fire at Hoch Auditorium. Fraser Hall is
in the background. University Archives Photos. Call Number: RG 0/24/1 Storms 1991 Negatives:
Campus: Areas and Objects (Photos). Click image to enlarge.

Caitlin Donnelly
Head of Public Services

Melissa Kleinschmidt, Megan Sims, and Abbey Ulrich
Public Services Student Assistants