The Very Personal Side of a World Famous UC Archaeologist

By:  Dawn Fuller
Photos Courtesy of UC Classics
Reposted from UC Magazine

Carl Blegen with UC Archaeologist Marion Rawson in the Land Rover at Pylos, July 1961

Carl Blegen with UC Archaeologist Marion Rawson in the Land Rover at Pylos, July 1961

Researchers mine through a ‘treasure trove’ of resources in Cincinnati and Greece to reveal the character, patriotism and unconventional lifestyle of famed American archaeologist Carl William Blegen.

From the 1930s to the 1960s, the discoveries of archaeologist Carl William Blegen made headlines around the world as well as here in the Queen City, where he was on the faculty at the University of Cincinnati. But the personal side of Blegen, publicly revealed for the first time, is the stuff that could be splashed across the celebrity tabloids.
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William and Me

By: Sydney Vollmer, ARB student assistant

shakespeare2

William Shakespeare

We all know who Shakespeare is. He lived in London, wrote some plays and poetry, died and became really famous.

In the ninth grade, my English teacher at Cincinnati’s Seton High School introduced my class to Shakespeare. We all knew who he was. He wrote plays and poetry sometime around 1600. Not really understanding anything about literature, plays, or poetry at the time, all I knew was that Shakespeare was brilliant and well respected, which meant that if I wanted to be smart and scholarly, I would like and respect him the way proper people do. Then I read Shakespeare. Continue reading

UC Librarian Suzanne Reller Receives Digital Archives Specialist Certificate

Suzanne Reller, reference/collections librarian in the Archives and Rare Books Library, was among 32 archivists who earned the Digital Archives Specialist (DAS) certificate from the Society of American Archivists (SAA) after completing required coursework and passing a comprehensive examination in February.

SAA’s DAS certificate program was developed by experts in the field of digital archives and provides archivists with the information and tools needed to manage the demands of born-digital records. Continue reading

Spring 2015 Issue of Records Quarterly Now Available

By:  Eira Tansey

Records QuarterlyThe current UC Records Management newsletter shares information on upcoming spring workshops, an announcement about Box@UC, program updates, and records in the news.

Click on the link to get the latest: http://www.libraries.uc.edu/
content/dam/libraries/arb/docs/records-management/rq-spring2015.pdf and if you have any questions about UC records, just contact me in the Archives & Rare Books Library at 556-1958 or at eira.tansey@uc.edu.

For more information on the Archives & Rare Books Library and its holdings, please contact us by phone at 513-556-1959, by email at archives@ucmail.uc.edu, or on the web at http://www.libraries.uc.edu/arb.html.

Final ARB "50 Minute" Talk of the Academic Year is Set

By:  Kevin Grace

Music Hall LadiesOur 2014-2015 “50 Minutes” series wraps up this month with a fascinating look at Cincinnati’s “Frail Sisterhood”: Nineteenth-Century Prostitutes of the Queen City

Throughout Cincinnati’s first 100 years, prostitution was common and leading prostitutes and madams were well known. Although labeled the “Frail Sisterhood,” these “Women of the Town” were anything but frail, carving out a transgressive community run by women, providing resources and services unavailable in the male-dominated society of the time.

Ladies of the TownAt noon on Thursday, April 16, Greg Hand will provide an overview of Cincinnati’s Victorian demimonde, highlighting some of the city’s most notorious brothels and introducing some of the colorful and infamous characters.  Hand retired in 2014 as associate vice president for public relations at the University of Cincinnati. He was a reporter and editor for several weekly newspapers in Cincinnati and has co-authored three books on UC history. He currently operates the “Cincinnati Curiosities” blog at handeaux.tumblr.com

Please join us for what promises to be a wonderfully unusual Cincinnati experience.  Bring your lunch, bring your friends!

 

Adventures in Tutus

By:  Sydney Vollmer, ARB Student Worker

I have never been to a ballet in my life. Why? Simply put: everyone in my family (excluding one aunt) has told me it’s boring and weird.  Indeed, I have let the opinions of others shape my own experiences (or lack thereof). I was perfectly happy never thinking to attend a ballet…until I started working at the Archives and Rare Books Library.

As the student worker here, part of my role includes sorting, inventorying, and processing collections so they can be properly stored in the archives for future research. The project I am currently working on is sorting everything that was recently given to us by Cincinnati Ballet Company (CBC).

We hold the collections of CBC that were acquired before I was hired, so the material I’m working on is a recent addition to the archive.  From what I hear, the last round was much more manageable. Below, you can see some pictures of the room where I am working. This is the collection AFTER a preliminary sorting. I’ve probably spent about 12 hours in there over the past few weeks and I’ve even had help and supervision. Even if it doesn’t look like it, this is progress!

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“In the Service of the Eye”: Georg Bartisch’s 16th Century Textbook On Ophthalmology

By:  Kevin Grace

bartisach reader-smallA new exhibit has been mounted in the 8th floor hallway of Blegen Library.  Reproduced from a volume in the Archives & Rare Book Library, this exhibit features fourteen woodcuts from a 16th century science book.   One of the seminal medical texts of the Renaissance, Georg Bartisch’s volume on the eye, Ophthalmodouleia Das ist Augendienst, was a remarkably detailed guide to surgical techniques on ocular diseases.  Published in 1583, this “service of the eye” would build the foundation for ophthalmology research for the next 300 years. Continue reading

Cincinnati’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade

By:  Kevin Grace

BagpiperOn Tuesday, March 17, the world will recognize St. Patrick’s Day for the Irish and Irish descendants with various celebrations and events, but this weekend will feature the many parades devoted to the day.  Dublin, New York, Savannah, Chicago, Sydney, Butte, New Orleans, and, Cincinnati all have community parades, and studying how these parades are historically manifested reveals a great deal about urban culture – the elements of religion, ethnicity, enfranchisement, inclusion, social mores, and political influence.  The day was first celebrated in America in Boston in 1737. Continue reading

An Irish Journalist in the Queen City: Lafcadio Hearn and the Cincinnati Demi-Monde

By Kevin Grace

From the Cincinnati winter of 1874, over 140 years ago:

 It is in all times a rugged road to the Place of Nameless Graves – a road running over rolling ground, where vehicles rock from side to side like ships in a gale and groan in all their timbers. “Rattle his bones over the stones, He’s only a pauper whom nobody owns.”  Hundreds of paupers’ bones are rattled over that road every year: the Undertaker always sending out three or four at a time in a covered wagon, with frightfully stiff springs.  And as the dismal vehicle rolls along the coffins rattle and bump one against the other fearfully from side to side, and bump horribly against the thinly-lined walls of those long and ghastly boxes.

Hearn

This article, “Golgotha, A Pilgrimage to Potter’s Field”, was written for the Cincinnati Enquirer on November 29 that year by an odd, bulging- eyed Irishman by the name of Lafcadio Hearn.  Hearn, who would chronicle the lowlifes, ghosts, and murderers of Cincinnati for several years before moving on to New Orleans, eventually settled in Japan where even today he is revered as a major literary figure.  He made his journalistic mark in Cincinnati because he explored the alleys and tenements and riverside settlements that housed the city’s worst and most colorful citizens.  He explored the lives of criminals and addicts, of mediums and flim-flam men, and of those who dealt with the underbelly of Cincinnati society.  And he did it by letting them tell their stories, by involving himself in his own reporting, by writing in the authentic dialect of the storytellers, and by thrilling his readers nearly every day with a world in which they seldom visited. Continue reading

Faustian Ghosts and Redemptive Masculinity in an American Baseball Story

By:  Kevin Grace

PitcherThere’s too much snow, too much cold, and too many gray skies, so we need to refresh ourselves a bit.  After all, the Reds are in spring training out in Arizona, and Opening Day is just a month away!  So let’s talk baseball and a little Cincinnati baseball story published 130 years ago.

In 1885, a quirky little tale was published in a Cincinnati humor tabloid called Sam the Scaramouch (SpecCol RB F499.C5 S16).  The anonymously-written story is entitled “O’Toole’s Ghost” and its plot centers around a young immigrant by the name of Mickey McGonigle who dreams of becoming the best baseball player ever seen.  Late one night, he is visited by the ghost of a deceased pitcher by the name of Barney O’Toole, who offers to fulfill this dream on one small condition: never argue with the umpire.  McGonigle accepts the offer, and for a brief time he is indeed the greatest player in the land.  But during one game, he forgets that agreed upon condition with the ghost, violates it, and sees his prowess quickly and publically stripped away.  He spends the rest of his days consumed with regret and humiliation. Continue reading