Tag Archives: uc history

Read UC Libraries Progress Report: Transforming Our Spaces

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progress report coverRead the 2015/16 Progress Report: Transforming Our Spaces. In addition to providing an update on the news, events and stats from the previous academic year, the report focuses on the transformation of library spaces – both current and future. Renovations and changes to library spaces that will enable us to be recognized as the intellectual hub for students, faculty, researchers and scholars by providing engaging digital and physical environments, as well as powerful new tools and services that spark inquiry, support analysis and ignite discovery and scholarship as well as prepare emerging generations for lives of ongoing discovery.

The Progress Report is available online at https://issuu.com/uclibraries/docs/uclannualreport15_16.

Questions? Request a print copy? Email melissa.norris@uc.edu

Donald and Marian Spencer: Lives of Love and Social Justice

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By:  Sam Whittaker, History Department Intern

Donald and Marian SpencerThe Archives and Rare Books Library recently received a new collection of papers from Marian and Donald Spencer.  For over fifty years, the Spencers fought for educational equity and equal rights with organizations such as the NAACP, the U.S. Commission on Human Rights Ohio Board, and the Cincinnati Board of Education. While processing the papers of Marian and Donald Spencer, I learned a vast amount about their groundbreaking electoral campaigns, keynote speeches, court cases, and community boards. However, I also came to know them as people. Donald and Marian Spencer met while they were both students at the University of Cincinnati, married in 1940, and raised two boys. They spent a great deal of their nearly 70 years of marriage in Cincinnati fighting for social justice and equality in the community. Continue reading →

Winkler Center Marks Halloween with Creepy Exhibit of Medical Artifacts

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winkler halloween

Do you want to attend a Halloween event that promises to give you hauntingly horrific, history nightmares…nightmares that include visions of amputee kits, maggot and leach therapies, pharmaceutical potions from the 1800s and much much more?

Then come visit the Henry R. Winkler Center for the History of the Health Professions on Monday, October 31, 2016 on the R- Level of the Health Sciences Library from 10am to 2pm.  On display will be historic documents, photos and artifacts from a variety of the health professions.

We guarantee you will leave the exhibit appreciating the advances made in modern medical treatments, therapies and technology available today.  All are welcome. Come if you dare!!!!!!!  Bwwaahhhahhhaaaaaa!!!

ARB’s “50 Minutes” Series Return Next Week

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By:  Kevin Grace

The Archives & Rare Books Library will usher in its 7th year of the “50 Minutes” lunchtime talks this August with “A Skeleton, Some Lions, Pigeons, and Gods! The Seldom-Noticed Art in UC Architecture.”

The talk is scheduled for Thursday, August 25, at 12 noon in 814 Blegen and as always, the “50 Minutes” presentations are very informal and conversational.  Bring your lunch, relax, ignore the clock on the wall which is invariably an hour behind (though we may climb on top of the piano beneath it and change the battery this year), and enjoy a look at the history and culture of the “hidden” campus.  Not advertised in the title, we will also be looking at semi-naked people in the architecture.

50 minute talk, August 2016

Continue reading →

UC’s First Thesis Comes Home to UC Libraries

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Dean Wang and Eaton Family

Dean Xuemao Wang accepts gift from the Eaton Family.

Eaton family gives historic documents, including letter from Thomas Jefferson, to UC Libraries

CINCINNATI – Thursday, July 21, 2016 – The University of Cincinnati Libraries today received the thesis of John Hough James, the first graduate of Cincinnati College, now the University of Cincinnati. In addition to the thesis, UC Libraries also received associated research materials, including an 1820 letter from Thomas Jefferson. The rare gift comes from siblings Russell Eaton III, James M. Eaton and Frances Eaton Millhouser, the great-great-grandchildren of John Hough James.

“My siblings and I are pleased to present to the University of Cincinnati our cherished family possessions of John Hough James (JHJ), our great, great, grandfather, the valedictorian of the university’s first class. These possessions include an 1820 letter from Thomas Jefferson to JHJ containing requested source material for his senior thesis, his hand written thesis booklet and his membership in a local volunteer fire company,” Russell said. Continue reading →

Libby Holman: Fresh Painting the Town Red

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By: Sydney Vollmer

Libby HolmanThe Fresh Painters Club was considered controversial due to the type of plays it put on—nothing was off-limits. Perhaps the nature of the club was influenced by the free spirits who participated. One such spirit was Libby Holman. Nineteen Twenty-three, the year the club was founded, she played the role of Violet Fields in “Fresh Paint.” Having dreams and talent too big for her hometown, she left for New York in 1924.

Born Elizabeth Holzman, her last name was changed sometime after her uncle, Ross, embezzled $1 million dollars from the stockbrokerage he owned with Libby’s father. Mr. Holzman changed the family’s name not only because of the anti-German attitudes in America at the time, but because he most likely wanted to save his kin from being attached to such an outrageous scandal, and because he needed to detach himself from the Holzman name so he could find work. This was only the first of many scandals with which Libby would be associated. Continue reading →

Fresh Painters Club

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By:  Sydney Vollmer

Lilaine Program CoverI’m a little late on posting a few big Shakespeare things. I promise they’re coming. In the craziness that has been finals, Kevin decided maybe I would like a little break from the Bard. (He was right.) He suggested I try painting for a little—and by that he meant looking into the Fresh Painters Club that was once a major extra-curricular at the University of Cincinnati. Conveniently, there was a history of the club that was written several decades ago. Though I don’t know who wrote it or exactly when it was penned, he or she explained the organization far better than I can. The text is as follows:

ANALYSIS OF THE FRESH PAINTER ACTIVITY

OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI.

HISTORY.

Looking backward, the Fresh Painters has developed from an old Varsity tradition. Every year during the period between 1900 and 1921, students gave a revue called “Varsity Vanities”. These revues were disconnected sets depicting the frivolities of campus life, and demonstrated singing, dancing and acting talents of undergraduates. Every spring the varsity Vanities Committee was organized and the revue was produced. Continue reading →

Celebrating the History of Nursing at the 7th Annual Cecil Striker Society Lecture April 14

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cecil striker imageThe Henry R. Winkler Center for the History of the Health Professions and the Cecil Striker Society for the History of Medicine will host the seventh annual Cecil Striker Society Annual Lecture on Thursday, April 14, 4-6:30pm in Kresge Auditorium, Medical Sciences Building, 231 Albert Sabin Way. Julie Fairman, Nightingale Professor of Nursing and Chair of the Biobehavioral Health Sciences Department at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing, will present this year’s lecture, “Making History: From the University of Cincinnati to the Future of Nursing.”

Sponsored by UC Health, the evening will include the talk from 4 to 5 p.m. followed by Q&A and a reception at 5:30 p.m. The Cecil Striker Lecture is free and open to the public, but RSVP’s are requested to (513) 558-5120 or chhp@uc.edu.

Dr. Fairman’s presentation is supported by the UC College of Nursing. The Winkler Center gratefully recognizes the generosity and foresight of the following individuals and organizations who have provided significant support to establish the Cecil Striker Endowment fund: Presenting Sponsors: Dr. and Mrs. Carl Fisher and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center; Supporting Sponsors: Cecil L. Striker, PhD, Dr. and Mrs. Theodore W. Striker, UC Health; Additional Support provided by Dr. and Mrs. Michael K. Farrell.

For more on the history of the College of Nursing, specifically the 100th anniversary of the offering of a Bachelor of Nursing degree, read an article by Winkler Center student Nathan Hood on the Libraries blog.

National Women’s Month – UC’s Miriam Urban

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By:  Dawn Fuller

Miriam B. Urban

Miriam B. Urban

Miriam Urban was the only female professor in the history department during the 1920s and ‘30s. During this period of common discrimination against women in higher education, she fought to get tenure. Urban earned her bachelor’s degree from UC in 1915 and her master’s degree in 1917, earning a PhD from Columbia University before joining the UC faculty in 1920. Her field was European history and though she taught at the University of Cincinnati for 33 years Urban was not promoted to full professor until 1944.
Described as wearing shapeless tweed with white blouses, along with multiple glasses strung with black ribbons around her neck, students also commented that her hair was usually in “disarray.” Despite her “hot mess” eccentricities, Urban was a delight to her students, even though she was known to kick a dozing student in the shins or thump someone on the head with a pencil. She would signal the end of the class period by snapping her girdle.
Charlotte Shockley, a 1937 graduate in English from the Liberal Arts College, wrote, “Miss Urban’s dark eyes glittered as she likened Hitler to a ‘takeoff on Groucho Marx.’” Continue reading →

Presidential Love Notes

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Diaries reveal former UC President Raymond Walters’ love and admiration for his longtime Valentine

Raymond and Elsie Walters

Image of Raymond Walters and his wife, Elsie, created by Kathy Bohlen.

By:  Dawn Fuller

Raymond and Elsie Walters with News Record

President and Mrs. Raymond Walters hold a special souvenir edition of The News Record, presented to the couple at the president’s student-sponsored retirement dinner in 1955.

Her name was Elsie, but her husband, UC’s longest-running president, called her “BobOLink,” which is also the name of a songbird. Throughout their 46-year marriage, Raymond Walters remained charmed and fascinated by his wife, as passages reveal in his diaries, which were donated to UC’s Archives and Rare Books Library.

Walters served as president of UC for 23 years, from 1932-1955. The diaries hold daily activities and thoughts of President Walters over the decades, from 1925-1960, and as a result reveal decades of history, including the history of UC. But the diaries also lovingly reveal Valentine gifts, wedding anniversaries and tributes to his wife. Continue reading →