Beyond the Reading Room

Instruction is in full swing this fall semester! We gave 27 presentations in October alone for 527 participants. Here’s a small sampling of our instruction for the month!

Join us at 4pm on Sept. 20 in the Hatcher Gallery. Dr. Camille Bégin, author of Taste of the Nation: The New Deal Search for America’s Food, will shape a cultural and sensory history of New Deal-era eating, illustrating how nostalgia, prescriptive gender ideals, and racial stereotypes shaped how the FWP was able to frame regional food cultures as “American.”

In honor of the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen’s death, the Nineteenth Century Forum and the Special Collections Library at the University of Michigan invite interdisciplinary papers that explore movement, mapping, or the margins within the late-eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. Please email abstracts of no more than 300 words to austenmaps@gmail.com by October 1st 2017. Please also include a paper title, your name, and institutional/departmental affiliation.

Highlighting manuscripts and early printed books from the Special Collections Library, our new exhibit Reforming the Word: Martin Luther in Context commemorates the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation. Join us for an opening lecture by guest curator Professor Helmut Puff on Friday, September 15 at 4:30 P.M. in the Library Gallery.

Among the author's papers housed in Special Collections are those of U-M alumnus and Ann Arbor native Nancy Willard (1936-2017). Nancy Willard (1936-2017) was born in Ann Arbor and is an alumnus of the University of Michigan and winner of major and minor Hopwood Awards (1955, 1956, 1957, 1958). Although best known as a children’s author and winner winner of the 1982 Newbery Medal for William Blake’s Inn, Willard in fact wrote for a range of audiences and genres.

A quick peek at two cookbooks from the late 1960s, one for Summer of Love hippies and another for their more straight-laced counterparts at home.

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...

As I thumbed through letters between Danny Kaye and his sweetheart Holly Fine, I couldn’t help but imagine the ginger-haired actor twirling Vera-Ellen in his arms and singing “The Best Things Happen While You're Dancing.” We often think about film as a moving media––people and objects flickering across screens––but film archives, like those of the Special Collections Library, contain the material, tangible objects that accompany the making of films. These materials tell rich stories!

The Charles Ellet, Jr. Papers, part of our Transportation History Collection, document the career of a man who surveyed rivers, built innovative bridges, and served as Colonel of the U.S. Ram Fleet during the Civil War. Guest writer Lauren Lincoln-Chavez, who processed the collection, tells the story of an exceptional 19th century engineer.

The manuscript currently preserved in our library under the shelfmark Isl. Ms. 350 has a fascinating history that can be traced in internal owners’ marks and external documentary sources. Produced in Delhi, the manuscript was acquired by the library in 1924 along with several hundred other manuscripts from Istanbul that came to be known as the "Abdul Hamid Collection." How did these manuscripts reach Ann Arbor? Read the intriguing story in this second of two posts!