Watch our very own Alla Barabtarlo show off a few highlights of our collection on C-SPAN’s Book TV.
Special Collections and Archives
London and the Olympics
The 2012 Summer Olympic Games in London begin later this month on July 27th. For nineteen days, athletes from 205 countries will compete in 300 events for gold, silver, and bronze medals. Over one billion people watch the Summer Olympics, when it is held every four years. This month, the colonnade of Ellis Library is showcasing both the history of the Olympic Games and this year’s host city, London. As you are walking through the library, why don’t you stop by one of the displays and learn about some of the most memorable moments in Olympics history, or the history and culture of the only city in the world to host the Summer Olympics three times.
The Fourth of July Orations Collection: Independence Day 1812
July 4, 2012, will likely see many Americans partaking in backyard barbeques and enjoying fireworks displays. However, generations of earlier Americans celebrated Independence Day in a different way: with a sermon.
On this day two hundred years ago, the young United States was preparing itself to go to war yet again with a world superpower, Great Britain. In Washington, renowned orator Daniel Webster delivered an impassioned anti-war address on the subject. The war, he argued, would damage American business and place American liberty in peril:
Under these circumstances we believe that the War, “instead of elevating will depress the national character; instead of securing, it will endanger our rights; instead of improving, it will prejudice our best interests.”
Not only that, but the war would in effect ally the U.S. with Napoleonic France. What could be worse than that? Webster can’t think of much.
If there be any among us so infatuated, or so stupified [sic], as not to shudder at the prospect of a French Alliance, let them come and behold the nations that lie mangled and bleeding at the foot of the Tyrant’s throne, in a mixture of moral and political ruin.
Webster’s speech is one of the 450+ sermons and addresses that are now preserved in the Fourth of July Orations Collection in Special Collections. Spanning 1791 to 1925, the collection documents the issues and debates that mattered to the American people across a broad span of our history.
The collection is completely digitized. It is available online at the University of Missouri Digital Library, and also in traditional format in the Special Collections Reading Room.
Poems about Fathers
Happy Father's Day! Today we're offering a selection of poetry by, for, and about fathers. John MacKay Shaw, a father of two, was a businessman and bibliophile with a particular interest in the literature of childhood. He wrote this volume of poetry, entitled The Things I Want, at the request of his young children, Cathmar and Bruce, in the 1930s. Shaw's library is now housed at the Florida State University Libraries.
Wyatt Prunty is a professor of creative writing at the University of the South, and his poem "To My Father" deals with a son watching his father struggle with disease. This copy of the poem was produced as a broadside by the Palaemon Press. The edition was limited to 126 copies; the Libraries' copy is number 99 and was signed by Prunty.
Finally, from the library of John Gneisenau Neihardt comes Father: An Anthology of Verse, published in 1931. The anthology contains poetry both humorous and sentimental on the subject of fathers, fatherhood, children and families. Neihardt received this book as a review copy, and the book still has its original review slip.
Agnieszka Matkowska
Special Collections and Rare Books bids a fond farewell to Agnieszka Matkowska. Matkowska has been in residence during the past academic year to consult the Lord collection. The late Albert Bates Lord (1912-1991) was a professor of Slavic and comparative literature at Harvard University best known for his contribution to the understanding of the world’s oral traditions, especially those of the former Yugoslavia. His family donated his library to Mizzou in the Spring of 2011. It comprises a collection of almost 2000 books, articles, and even artifacts, many of which are in the closed stacks of Special Collections and Rare Books. The A.B. Lord Fellowship in Oral Tradition makes these volumes available to international scholars by allowing them to remain in residence at Mizzou for a semester or longer. Matkowska, PhD candidate from Poznan, Poland, was the award’s first recipient.
[Click on any of the images to enlarge.]
Matkowska studies the oral legends of the Buryat people, a group of 450,000 individuals spread across Siberia, Mongolia, and Inner Mongolia. The Buryat people have a rich heritage of oral tradition, though the current generation of performers might be the last. According to Matkowska, “When in 2011 I was doing my fieldwork in the Irkutsk Oblast’, a region bordering Lake Baikal, it was sometimes hard, so I became doubtful few times. In those moments Galina Vitalievna Afanasyeva-Medvedeva, a befriended professor and an expert in the field of Baikal folklore always raised my spirits emphasizing that what I do is of extreme importance as the folklore of that area is in decline and these processes are irreparable.”
Matkowska, is writing a dissertation that investigates the factors contributing to variation that occurs across multiple tellings of Buryat oral legends. Before coming to Columbia, Missouri, she undertook fieldwork in southern Siberia along the shores of Lake Baikal. While there she recorded performances and interviewed performers. She was even invited to observe a shamanistic ceremony, a privilege seldom granted to an outsider. While in residence at University of Missouri, Matkowska has taken advantage of the many comparative and theoretical studies in the Lord collection, gaining insight into the different methodological approaches she could take: “There are many ways to bite the cake,” she says “I just have to figure out which way will make it taste the best.” Matkowska will defend her dissertation in February at Adam Mickiewicz University.
Skin white as snow, hair black as ebony
Snow White's been busy lately. This year alone she’s starring in two movies while also appearing in a television series.
First published by Jacob and Wilhem Grimm as part of their Children’s and Household Tales (Kinder-und Hausmӓrchen), the brief story introduces all the familiar faces: Snow White, her evil stepmother, the huntsman, and the dwarves. The elements and characters have been adapted in many ways over the years, from films and books to ballets and opera. Many of the narratives stick close to
that original tale, while others take a bit of creative license.
In Special Collections we see Snow White in very recognizable tales. A copy of Grimm’s Household Stories from 1896 and Grimm’s Fairy Tales from 1962 both contain the story as recorded by the Grimm brothers. The illustrations present a young girl with dark hair.
The comic series Fables catches up with Snow White in the present. The action takes place well after the adventures found in the Grimm's tale, with Snow White serving as deputy mayor for a community of relocated fairy tale characters. She is joined by other familiar faces, including Cinderella and the wolf who appears in many tales.
Click on any of the images below to see a few illustrations from some of the many works featuring these characters in our collection. You'll find both the well known versions of their stories and some with creative twists.
Gardens in Special Collections
June is prime time for gardeners in Missouri, and it’s also a great time to take a look at the rare and historic horticulture and gardening books in Special Collections. Since MU has a long history as an agriculture school, Special Collections has a great collection of these early texts on plants, gardening, and landscape design.
The Edible Garden
The last decade has seen a renewed interest in local and sustainable food, including vegetable gardening and heritage or heirloom varieties. The absence of pesticides, herbicides, chemical fertilizers and modern machinery in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries meant that kitchen and market gardeners had to be experts in the care of a wide variety of food crops. Advice for gardeners from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries contains information on historic plant varieties as well as natural solutions to problems with climate, soils, and pests.
The Flower Garden
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw the introduction of a number of new flowering plants as botanists and nurserymen identified foreign species and developed hybrids. Although color publications such as Curtis’s Botanical Magazine remained popular through the period, most gardeners learned about new flowers through descriptions or black and white plates. Botanical gardens such as the Royal Gardens at Kew became popular spots for the public to see exotic and colorful plants in person.
The Park
Garden design has changed dramatically from the formalized symmetry of Italian and French gardens to the informal plantings of today. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, English gardeners began to break away from the geometrical patterns of Renaissance knot gardens and Baroque parterres. Instead, the new garden style focused on creating picturesque, naturalistic views. Landscape architects during this period sought to shape the landscape without the outward appearance of control, creating “natural” scenery too perfect to exist in nature.
More Information
Search for Gardening, Fruit, Botany, or Landscape architecture in the MERLIN catalog. Limit your search to Special Collections to find more primary sources on historic gardens and gardening practices.
Celebrating Teaching
Today and yesterday, participants from across campus gathered for the annual Celebration of Teaching in recognition of faculty innovation and achievements. We’re celebrating another record-breaking year for classes and groups in Special Collections, and we count ourselves lucky to work with such dedicated and creative instructors. Here’s just a sampling of the classes we taught this past year:
- History of Modern Engineering
- Jane Austen and Her Contemporaries
- Theatre Scholarship
- Italian Civilization
- Letterpress and Book Arts
- Historiography of Medieval and Early Modern Convents
- The Inhuman Subject (English honors seminar)
- Information and Student Success
- History of Typography
- Introduction to Visual Culture
- Introduction to German Literature
- History of Western Dress
- Beginning Latin
- Color Theory
- Monstrous Births: Tales of Creation in 19th Century Literature
You can find out more about some of our student and faculty patrons in our Spotlight posts, and we look forward to adding even more profiles and interviews once the fall semester begins.
Wondering if Special Collections can support your next course? Contact us at SpecialCollections@missouri.edu, or check out the Resources for Instructors section on our web site.
Ten Etchings on the Theme of Mothers
In honor of Mother’s Day, we’re highlighting a portfolio of prints and poetry by artist Michel Fingesten. This collection, 10 Radierungen über das Thema Mütter (10 Etchings on the Theme of Mothers) was released in 1920 in an edition of 100 copies. The Libraries’ copy is one of ten that also included an original pen and ink drawing by Fingesten, and each page is signed by the artist. The etchings depict the tenderness and sweetness of motherhood, but at the same time, Fingesten’s figures tend to be solid, monumental and immovable.
Although he is virtually unknown today, Fingesten was a prominent graphic artist and bookplate designer in Germany during the interwar period. He studied art briefly in Vienna and Munich, but was largely self-taught. Known for the Cubist and surrealist currents in his work, he was a member of the Berlin Secession, produced several well-received portfolios of prints, contributed to numerous art publications, and was himself the subject of a scholarly monograph.
During World War I, Fingesten explored the nature of violence and peace through his work, themes that would stay with him for the rest of his life. He was persecuted by the Nazis in the early 1930s, both for his Jewish ancestry and for practicing “degenerate” modern art. He died in an internment camp in Italy in 1943.
Teaching spotlight: Sean Franzel
Professor Sean Franzel from the German and Russian Studies department is our guest for the Teaching Spotlight this month. His research interests span the culture, philosophy, and history of eighteenth- to twentieth-century Germany and include the history of education and the university; media theory; German Idealism and Romanticism; and the history of the novel. Professor Franzel is a frequent visitor to the Special Collections and Rare Books department, and we were delighted to have a chance to ask him a few questions.
SC: How did you incorporate Special Collections into your teaching?
I have used SC repeatedly for two courses I teach. In a graduate seminar on the literature of the medieval and baroque periods in Germany, I usually take the students in for two separate visits. First we look at an introductory selection of Special Collections’ excellent medieval manuscripts and representative early printed books (incunabula). We then go in a second time to examine SC’s sixteenth century emblem books. This was a very popular pedagogical genre throughout Europe at the time that placed poetry and allegorical images side-by-side. For me it is important that my students get an initial sense that what literature is and does has changed so much since antiquity. It is also very important for students to think about how books operate on visual and textual levels; emblem books are great for discussing this, because they are all about the interaction between text and image.
In my undergraduate Introduction to German Literature course, we do a section on children’s literature, and we go in to SC to look at their excellent collection of children’s books. This is fun for students because they learn to appreciate how books for children have played such a wide range of functions throughout history, from basic ABC primers for reading the Bible to very imaginative fantasy books. I ask students to look at the books and think about differences in form, function, design, audience, etc. Basically, I think that taking students to special collections is a way to awaken their curiosity as well as their critical ability to differentiate between the various functions that books and other media have had over time.
SC: What outcomes resulted from your class visits? What were the effects on your students?
I think students respond really well to the visits; inspired papers and active discussions usually ensue in the class sessions following a visit. In an age when every assignment or paper can appear in uniform PDF-format on a laptop or e-reader, it is really important to hold actual books in our hands. Sometimes even just the realization that books used to be made on papyrus or animal skin is enough to change the way we think about how we process information today in the digital age. Personally I also love going into SC because I learn something new each visit. I get a lot out of trying to imagine the socio-historical contexts in which books were made and used— it is amazing how many new insights come from actually holding the books in your hands! In fact, my trips to SC have inspired me to get a more systematic introduction to book history, and I am going to take a course this summer at the UVA Rare Books School on the history of the book. I am very excited about this, and about incorporating more book history into my teaching.
SC: What advice would you give to faculty or instructors interested in using Special Collections in their courses?
There is so much interesting material in our library, chances are that it has something relevant for most courses, even if simply to shed light on the history of certain issues across the sciences and the humanities. And it is hard not to sign on to spending a class session looking at cool stuff! So even if instructors do not have a clear idea about what they want to do, they should contact the SC librarians for advice and guidance. Alla Barabtarlo and her team are all extremely helpful, knowledgeable, and eager to show students what the library has to offer!