By Laura Laugle
It seems that smear campaigns fueled by fictitious rumors are nothing new to politics. Of course, most have known this to be true for quite some time. In fact, politicians in ancient Greece began pulling the proverbial wool about five minutes after the words demos and cratos were combined, but here we have one more piece of evidence to add to the already mountainous pile.
By Kevin Grace
Well, not really. One of the great things about working with archives is finding a jewel now and then that casts a light on an event or situation, or illuminates more fully the character of someone famous. The letter you see here provides one of those glimmering moments. In the Archives & Rare Books Library, we hold the records and documents of the Contemporary Arts Center, a great institution and a prime exhibitor of modern art in the United States. In fact, it was founded in 1939 as the Modern Art Society, and its exhibitions over the decades have featured groundbreaking and provocative art from Moholy-Nage and the Bauhaus movement to Jasper Johns and Jim Dine. The controversial showing of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs in 1990 still draws worldwide research and attention. Continue reading
By Laura Laugle
“Hey, look what I found!” I’ve been saying that an awful lot lately. I can’t help it; I keep coming across interesting and sometimes funny items of historical significance. In the past two weeks I’ve found photos of Berry with Martin Luther King, a letter with an authentic signature from W. E. B. DuBois, photographs of Donald Rumsfeld from 1969, and a frankly terrifying copy of Enquirer Magazine from 1972 which contains both an advertisement for a red shag bedspread and a photo of Burt Reynolds lying on a bearskin rug, clad only in a smile and a strategically placed hand. Luckily for me, not all 
discoveries are quite so… errr… revealing. Continue reading
By Kevin Grace
The next 50 Minutes-1 Book lunchtime talk in the Archives & Rare Books Library will be Thursday, February 24, in the Schott Seminar Room, 814 Blegen Library at 12:00 noon.
January’s gathering to talk about anthropodermic bindings was well-attended and a lot of fun. This month the topic is the Pennyroyal Caxton Bible, a masterpiece of book design and illustration by Barry Moser. Moser is recognized as one of the foremost bookwrights in the world and his Bible, completed in 1999, is arguably one of the most beautiful books ever printed. Here in ARB, Moser’s edition is often used by classes in book history, graphic design, art history, English literature, and religion. Continue reading
Written by Laura Laugle
Click image to see a larger version
Ever since finding the photo below I’ve been attempting to find its origin. As I stated in my previous blog post, Hmmm…, the photo was found in an envelope with other, non-related pictures from the collection. Not too long after posting the picture on the blog, I received a tip from the Berry family that the King photo and the JFK photo I posted along with it may have been taken while Berry was at the White House at the invitation of President Kennedy on June 21, 1963. Looking through Kennedy’s diaries for that time, I found that the meeting Berry attended was specifically for lawyers, so King probably wasn’t present. There was however another meeting listed in Kennedy’s diary for June 22 which Dr. King did attend. It is therefore very possible that Berry and King could have had overlapping visits to the White House and met in that context. Continue reading
Written by Lilia Walsh
Recently, my job as student assistant in the Archives and Rare Books Library has led me to begin an inventory of all of the UC student newspapers in the collection. While trying to find when the title of the newspaper changed names from University News to The Bearcat in the 1900s, I stumbled across a humorous and perplexing cartoon featuring one of the marble lions which now stand in front of the McMicken building: Mick and Mack.
The cartoon, from the October 22nd, 1919 issue, is titled “Freshmen, Profit by Experience.” It depicts two freshmen pledging “never again” and standing in front of Mick or Mack, which has stripes across its body and a brush and bottle of acid paint remover at its feet.
Written by Kevin Grace
See http://www.newsrecord.org/living/college-living/pre-grad-bucket-list-race-begins-1.2444785.
Beyond the unusual however (and that includes a ghost and the jawbone of an ass), we’re the go-to place for UC history and everything associated with it, along with primary source material in urban studies, local history, rare books, German-Americana, local government records and a wealth of other collections. Come to us for help in doing your course-assigned research or ideas on how to make that paper really stand out for the best grade. With our resources we can help students become critical thinkers. For more information, go to http://www.libraries.uc.edu/libraries/arb/index.html.
Written by Janice Schulz
The Archives and Rare Books Library has added nine boxes of speeches covering the years 2003-2009 to its collection of Nancy Zimpher papers. An inventory for the addition, accessioned as UA-11-01, can be found on the ARB website. An OhioLINK finding aid is forthcoming.
ARB holds three additional collections of Zimpher’s papers: UA-06-07 includes papers and correspondence for the year 2006; UA-09-24 includes calendars from 2003-2009; and UA-10-01 includes speeches covering 2004-2007 as well as publications. Inventories and OhioLINK finding aids for all three collections can be found on ARB’s University Archives Collection Records page.
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Written by Laura Laugle, Berry Project Archivist
I’d like to start out this post with a few words for a man with whom Theodore Berry worked closely during his tenure at the Office of Economic Opportunity, R. Sargent Shriver Jr. During the upheaval accompanying the creation of the program and amid controversy over lost memoranda, Shriver stood by his choice of Berry as director of the Community Action Program and continued to be a friend and supporter of Berry’s long after they had both left Washington when President Nixon took office. Shriver was not only the first director of the Office of Economic Opportunity, but was also the first director of the Peace Corps and helped his wife, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, develop and found the Special Olympics in 1968. Shriver died last Tuesday, January 18, 2011 in a Maryland hospital at the age of 95 and was remembered at his funeral on Friday, January 21 by his five children, his nineteen grandchildren and a horde of celebrities and dignitaries from all over the world as a loving family member and friend and a true statesman. Continue reading
City of Cincinnati birth and death records from 1865 to 1908 with surnames beginning with the letter “A” through the surname “Bach” are now available online. The remaining records are being loaded as quickly as possible. Please continue to check the Digital Collections and Archives and Rare Books Library websites for further updates.
The University of Cincinnati Libraries was awarded a Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) grant from the State Library of Ohio to digitize the records.
Read more about the project online.
– By Janice Schulz
