Spring/Summer 2019 Issue 12
Confronting the 1919 Chicago Race Riots
A Newberry-led city-wide conversation series addresses the legacy of the most violent week in Chicago history.
Looking Outward from 60 West Walton
Across 132 years, the programmatic offerings of the Newberry have developed just as substantially as its collection.
We began with university extension courses before 1890 and added an exhibitions program from 1909. The fellowships program began in the later 1940s and was vastly expanded from the 1960s, under the leadership of President Lawrence W. Towner. Vice President for Academic Affairs Richard H. Brown, whose recent passing all Newberrians mourn, also was instrumental in helping to develop the research centers in the 1970s, as well as programs for teachers and a renewed and expanded emphasis on lifelong learning.
This issue of The Newberry Magazine features two innovative programming ventures, both of which look outward from 60 West Walton. In one of these, the Newberry can be found leading a partnership with 13 other Chicago cultural and educational organizations to explore a tragically important but largely ignored event, the Chicago Race Riots of 1919. Here only one of the project’s 11 programs is taking place at the Newberry, but our interest and expertise is galvanizing Chicagoans to take a fresh look at the events of a century ago and learn from them. This project builds on the knowledge gained from our exhibition in 2016, Civil War to Civil Rights
The other externally focused program is bringing old documents and Newberry staff to Chicago schools, in order to promote student interest in primary sources and advance their understanding of major historical events. It has roots in our teacher programs and especially the Digital Collections for the Classroom, which have made Newberry collection items and staff commentary available to teachers everywhere. The new program is an important reminder that the availability of digital materials across the Internet is complementary to hands-on learning with objects in the classroom.
This edition of The Newberry Magazine also offers three intriguing collection stories. One is the Helen Balfour Morrison and Sybil Shearer Papers, which mingle photographs, correspondence, and other items of two artistic collaborators. It will eventually total 130 linear feet of cultural material. A recently arrived postcard collection includes some 26,000 fascinating British postcards based on paintings. Printed in turn-of-the-century Britain, these “Oilettes” were collected by Leonard A. Lauder, and now they have been digitized, their metadata having been crowdsourced to a team of 56 off-site interns. The online availability of this collection will skyrocket postcard use in the years ahead. By contrast, another vast collection, consisting of medical books and periodicals, was assembled by the Newberry in the same period as the Oilettes were printed, used heavily, and then suddenly deaccessioned in 1906. Its arrival and departure sheds valuable light on our early collecting culture.
Writing this introduction affords me the opportunity to applaud the magazine’s principals, Alex Teller and Andrea Villaseñor, for their great work on this relatively young channel of communication. I hear frequently from readers about how much they enjoy The Newberry Magazine
Finally, as the Newberry prepares to welcome Daniel Greene to the presidency in August, allow me to say thank you to all of you for your enduring interest in and commitment to the Newberry. I could not have asked for a better job for the past 14 years, or for more ardent supporters of this wonderful place. As I head to retirement, I have many treasured memories —and you have my gratitude and best wishes.
MAGAZINE STAFF
EDITOR
Alex Teller
DESIGNER
Andrea Villasenor
PHOTOGRAPHY
Catherine Gass
The Newberry Magazine is published semiannually by the Newberry’s Office of Communications and Marketing. Articles in the magazine cover major archiving projects, digital initiatives, and exhibitions; the scholarship of fellows and Newberry staff; and the signature items and hidden gems of the collection. Every other issue contains the annual report for the most recently concluded fiscal year. A subscription to The Newberry Magazine is a benefit of membership in the Newberry Associates. To become a member, contact Luke Herman at hermanl@newberry.org or (312) 255-3616.
Unless otherwise credited, all images are derived from items in the Newberry collection or from events held at the Newberry, and have been provided by the Newberry’s Digital Imaging Services Office.
Cover image: During Chicago’s 1919 race riots, African American veterans defended their communities from attacks by whites, while the state militia eventually quelled the violence. Chicago Tribune Archives/TNS.
David Spadafora, President and Librarian
Alex Teller
In August, David Spadafora will retire as President and Librarian of the Newberry. Since arriving in 2005, Spadafora has upheld the Newberry’s founding principles while vaulting the library into the 21st century.
Confronting the Race Riots
Karen Christianson
Commemorating the 100th anniversary of the 1919 Chicago race riots, the Newberry is coordinating a year-long series of public conversations confronting the legacy of the most violent week in the history of Chicago.
Traveling
Kara Johnson
A new Newberry program brings primary sources into high school classrooms in Chicago, helping students develop skills for analyzing historical documents and engaging directly with the past. The Librarian Will See You Now
David Spadafora
Early in its history, before it began to focus its collecting efforts on the humanities, the Newberry had one of the preeminent medical collections in the country.
Let Us Paint You a Picture Postcard
Claire Dapkiewicz and Melissa Griffith
With support from Leonard A. Lauder, the Newberry developed an innovative approach to making a vast new collection of postcards digitally accessible. Now, thousands of early 20th-century “Oilettes” (postcards based on oil paintings) are freely available online.
Daniel Greene to Become Newberry President and Librarian
Effective August 19, Daniel Greene will become the Newberry’s ninth President and Librarian. Since 2014, Greene has served as Exhibitions Curator and Historian at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Prior to his arrival at USHMM, Greene spent six years on staff at the Newberry, serving as Director of the library’s Scholl Center for American History and Culture and then as Vice President for Research and Academic Programs.
“An accomplished scholar devoted to the public humanities, Danny will propel the Newberry forward with both innovative thinking and a commitment to the mission that has sustained us as an institution over the past 132 years,” said David Hilliard, Chair of the Newberry Board of Trustees.
“It is a privilege to return to the Newberry, a world-renowned institution whose ideals related to truth, access, and historical inquiry align so closely with my own,” said Greene. “I look forward to building upon the Newberry’s success while seeking to expand its role as a hub of learning and discovery for all.”
NFAN (Newberry Fellows Alumni Network) Launches
The Newberry is pleased to announce the launch of our Newberry Fellows Alumni Network (NFAN). Building on the success of our fellowship program, which provides outstanding scholars with the time, space, and community required to pursue innovative and ground-breaking scholarship, we look forward to advancing a scholarly network of former and current fellows. Each year, the Newberry hosts approximately 10 long-term and 50 short-term fellows for residential research fellowships, as well as another 40 fellows in multi-week summer institutes.
In all, the more than 1,500 former Newberry fellows make up a community of scholars that can foster connections long after those fellowships have ended.
The Newberry Fellows Alumni Network is first and foremost a scholarly network for alumni and current fellows. Alumni can learn about scholarly projects and programs happening at the Newberry, get updates on current and incoming fellows, and learn
A Newberry Fellows Seminar convenes in Towner Fellows Lounge in December 2018.
Daniel Greene
of publications and achievements by former fellows. This past January, in conjunction with the Modern Language Association and American Historical Association meetings in Chicago, we hosted a breakfast for former fellows and welcomed them to our newly renovated first floor. Former fellows had the opportunity to discuss their work, make new connections, and consult the Newberry’s collections. Each year, we plan to host an annual gathering at the Newberry to continue the conversation.
NFAN will act as a catalyst to develop and sustain lifelong connections between the Newberry and its fellows. Our fellows are at the heart of our scholarly community while they are here, and we welcome the opportunity to maintain and enhance that network beyond the doors of 60 West Walton.
For more information, contact Keelin R. Burke, Fellowships Manager, at burkek@newberry.org or (312) 255-3666.
The
Former Newberry fellows attest to the impact of their experiences at the Newberry:
“My year at the Newberry offered the most genuinely interdisciplinary learning experience of my entire career. We learned to talk about our specialized research cogently with non-specialists, and, more importantly, we learned to LISTEN to each other.”
“It was a wonderful experience looking at a treasure trove of material that I am still drawing on 15 years later.”
“ T he Newberry fellowship altered the trajectory of my career, for the better, in every way.”
“It was an invaluable experience that immersed me in my area of interest. Even more important has been my continued relationship with the Newberry in the 25 years since the fellowship.”
Newberry Names Rose Miron Director of the D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies
The Newberry is delighted to announce the appointment of Dr. Rose Miron as the Director of the D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies, beginning July 8. Miron comes to the Newberry from the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition in Minneapolis, where she worked closely with tribal leaders to develop programs aimed at further understanding, addressing, and raising awareness about the intergenerational trauma resulting from experiences at U.S. Indian boarding schools.
Miron’s scholarly work focuses on how Native peoples use tribal archives to claim authority over the creation, assembly, and use of their historical materials. Centering on the Mohican Nation of Wisconsin, she shows how Native activism through the creation of archives enables tribal members to craft their own historical narratives and to intervene in public representations of their history.
“With her blend of outreach and scholarship, Dr. Miron will bring a terrific set of experiences to the Newberry,” said Brad Hunt, Vice President for Research and Academic Programs at the Newberry.
NFAN Fellows Alumni Breakfast
Rose Miron
Source Material (Blog)
Walt and Garaphelia
What could a rare copy of Walt Whitman’s book of poetry Drum-Taps tell us about office culture in Civil War-era Washington, D.C.? Quite a lot, it turns out. In a new blog post, Director of Reader Services and Curator of Americana Will Hansen explains how the recent acquisition of a presentation copy of Drum-Taps —i.e., a copy inscribed by its author and presented as a gift—led him on a search for the identity of its recipient, Garaphelia Howard, a copyist in the U.S. Army Quartermaster General’s office and likely a poet herself. In seeking to uncover the relationship between Howard and Whitman, Hansen sheds light on a mid-19th-century government office where poetry was a part of everyday life.
Read more at www.newberry.org/ source-material Spring/Summer 2019
The Quest for Gutenberg Fragments
Copies of the Gutenberg Bible weren’t always prized collectors’ items. In the centuries following Gutenberg’s use of the printing press, his bibles collected dust or suffered an even worse fate: some were dis-bound and scattered to the winds, their pages used to bind other books or as wrappings for archival documents.
In a recent episode of our Shelf Life podcast, Eric White, Curator of Rare Books at the Princeton University Library, spoke with us about his quest to find these fragments, two of which are right here at the Newberry.
Listen at www.newberry.org/shelf-life
Shelf Life (Podcast)
The Spadafora Era
By Alex Teller
Whenasked about his 14-year run as president of the Newberry, David Spadafora is quick to deflect attention away from himself. He prefers to discuss the Newberry’s accomplishments during that time, including an expansion in programming for the public, the establishment—and subsequent growth—of a digital department dedicated to making our collections available online, and a $12.5 million renovation turning the library’s first floor into a more welcoming, engaging space for visitors.
“Personal pride and institutional pride are two different things,” David points out. “What has happened here has always been the work of many hands.”
While he urges the Newberry to take institutional pride in the public-facing outcomes cited above, David grants himself a little personal satisfaction in the behind-thescenes activities that allowed them to happen: the work of creating systems, workflows, and the administrative structures necessary for executing the Newberry’s mission over time.
“In many ways, David is an unsung hero— an un-singable hero, you might say, because his heroics aren’t always visible to most people,” says Paul Gehl, who served for many years as curator of the Newberry’s Wing Collection on printing history before retiring in 2016. “Ever since his arrival, David has methodically addressed many structural challenges facing the Newberry. There’s something very courageous in that.”
“After guiding the library through the economic crisis of 2007-08, David refocused the institution,” says Vicki Herget, Chair of the Newberry Board of Trustees from 2010 to 2017. “He developed a robust, ambitious strategic plan, and instituted structures and actions designed to maintain and enhance the Newberry’s reputation as a preeminent independent research library.” One of these structures is the Collection Development Steering Committee. Consisting of Newberry curators and chaired by the Baskes Vice
President for Library and Collection Services, the group meets regularly to evaluate prospective acquisitions, ensuring the collection grows in a coordinated fashion across subjects and the curators’ areas of expertise. Instead of being isolated in their own separate fiefdoms, the core collections cohere into a unified whole, with individual items often proving useful to
David welcomes visitors during a special ceremony marking the Newberry’s 125th anniversary. (Sept. 2012)
“ David has had many successes, but it was his grace, perseverance, and steady decision-making that completed the brilliant restoration of our first floor—a masterpiece.”
David Hilliard, Chair of the Board of Trustees
multiple fields of study, from cartography and the history of printing to genealogy and Indigenous culture.
“It’s a real team effort now,” says David. “And while this approach isn’t necessarily unique to the Newberry, it is, comparatively speaking, unusual. It is certainly reflective of the collaborative ethos that we have here.”
“In planning, collecting, exhibitions, and other endeavors, David always sought wide staff participation,” says Martha Briggs, who retired last year from the Newberry as Lloyd Lewis Curator of Modern Manuscripts. “Smart, careful, ethical, and caring, David set the tone for the institution.”
David has created a “collaborative ethos” not just within the Newberry but across the wider cultural landscape of Chicago. In the mid- to late-aughts, David helped form and then launch the Chicago Collections Consortium, a group of
institutions with Chicago-related archival collections (such as the Chicago History Museum, Chicago Public Library, and the University of Illinois at Chicago) who wanted to strengthen their connections and collaborate more across institutional boundaries. In 2015, the consortium launched an online portal for browsing and searching materials in its members’ collections. Since then, the portal has only grown, serving as a hub for locating or accessing over 100,000 maps, photos, and letters from almost 30 different institutions, including the Newberry.
The precedent for collaboration among Chicago libraries goes back at least as far as 1896, when the Newberry, the Chicago Public Library, and the John Crerar Library (now part of the University of Chicago) agreed to divide up certain subject areas in order to minimize redundancy among each
Under David’s leadership, the Newberry implemented a $12.5 million renovation to transform its first floor into a more welcoming, engaging environment for visitors.
others’ collections. According to the agreement, the Newberry would focus on the humanities, the Crerar on the physical and natural sciences, and CPL on “all wholesomely entertaining and generally instructive books” (according to a Newberry report from the time).
At the Newberry, our history helps inform decisions we make every day. True to his roots as a historian, David is keenly aware of how the past echoes through time, and he frames the work that we do within an institutional arc reaching back 132 years—to 1887, the year the Newberry was founded. His knowledge of the library’s past is virtually unparalleled. He can tell you about the early 20th-century genesis of the Newberry’s continuing education seminars; about the design specifications of our original book vault, built in the 1920s and installed on the west end of the library’s first floor (it was removed last year as part of the Newberry’s first-floor renovation); or about the evolution of the Newberry organizational chart as we expanded our fellowships and scholarly programming in the 1940s, 50s, 60s, and 70s.
All institutional leaders rely on precedent (in addition to a foundational mandate or vision) to guide them as they embark on new initiatives. For the Newberry, the importance of precedent is rooted in the circumstances of its very founding.
Walter L. Newberry’s vision for the library that would eventually bear his name was rather general and open-ended. It had to be. One of Chicago’s earliest cultural leaders and philanthropists, Newberry included in his will a provision calling for the creation of a “free, public” library on the “north
branch” of the Chicago River. The provision would go into effect only if Newberry’s two daughters (Mary and Julia) died without heirs. Newberry could not be sure this scenario would ever come to pass; nor could he anticipate how the library might fit within Chicago’s cultural landscape by the time it did (Newberry wrote his will in 1866 and died in 1868—five years before the Chicago Public Library was established). And so he erred on the side of providing the executors of his will with a bare-bones framework rather than a fully fleshed-out idea. According to the late Richard H. Brown in his The Ideal Library of the Continent , “Newberry recognized that if the contingency clause were to matter, circumstances that he could not predict would determine how it should best be carried out.”
These unpredictable circumstances were instrumental in shaping the Newberry. So were its earliest leaders. Operating without a detailed roadmap for the institution, the Board of Trustees and the first Librarian, William Frederick Poole, charted a course, determining what they would collect and how they could best serve a city that had changed a lot in the 21 years since Walter L. Newberry drafted his will.
By 1887, the Chicago Public Library had been up and running for 14 years. Newberry staff and trustees had to distinguish their new venture from CPL even as they honored Mr. Newberry’s basic rubric of a “free, public” library. Poole and company threaded this needle by acquiring periodicals and other reading material of general interest to the public while purchasing rare primary sources for more specialized audiences. (For a time, a large medical collection at the
True to his roots as an historian, David is keenly aware of how the past echoes through time. He frames the work that we do within an institutional arc reaching back 132 years—to 1887, the year the Newberry was founded.
For David, being free and open to the public is a commitment that pervades the entire institution, from the programs and exhibitions to the collections and digital initiatives.
Newberry served a sizable readership of doctors. See pages 19-22 in this magazine.) Within a few years after opening, the Newberry also offered exhibitions and continuing education seminars as a way of expanding access to its collections. The template was set for an independent research library that was also free and open to the public.
Poole’s successors have built upon the foundation laid by the first generation of Newberry staff and trustees. At the same time, they’ve all incorporated the “free, public” strand of DNA into our institutional identity differently, engaging in the continual act of realizing Walter L. Newberry’s germ of an idea and reinventing it to accommodate the evolving needs and interests of our users. That each Newberry president has been empowered to do so is a reflection of the unique origins of the Newberry. David, one could argue, has interpreted Walter L. Newberry’s mandate broadly. For him, being free and open to the public is a commitment that pervades the entire institution, from the programs and exhibitions to the collections and digital initiatives.
“We are a rare combination,” he says, “a research collection completely accessible to the public with programs for advanced
scholars, teachers, undergraduates, and lifelong learners. Today’s Newberry would please Poole—and Walter.”
The latest expression of the Newberry’s capacity for welcoming different audiences is its renovated first floor, which reopened to the public in the fall of 2018. Consistent with David’s knack for triangulating between the past, present, and future, the renovation is at once a celebration of long-held institutional values and a cultural shift that is opening conduits to new audiences and new forms of engagement.
This duality lay at the heart of the project from the earliest stages of planning. On the one hand, the more open, inviting lobby was designed to bring the “front-of-house” into alignment with the friendly, intellectually stimulating environment users experience in the reading rooms on the upper floors; on the other hand, new and redesigned programming and exhibition spaces promised to change the ways in which visitors interacted with Newberry staff and collections.
“We thought that by using space more creatively, we would support our programming and outreach as well as increase our capacity for encouraging more people to join the Newberry community,” says David.
Early evidence suggests this is exactly what is happening. In the six months following the reopening of the first floor, reader registrations increased by 58%, exhibition attendance by 99%, and public program participation by 28%. “The Newberry keeps evolving but maintains its basic institutional principles. What a great tradition we have, and what an exciting future.”
David may resist talk of his legacy. But he can’t stop the Spadafora Era from being remembered as a time when the Newberry vaulted itself into the 21st century and found inventive ways to honor its past and look to the future.
David delivers remarks during the unveiling of the Newberry’s renovated first floor. (Sept. 2018)
Chicago 1919: Confronting the Race Riots
By Karen Christianson
Ona scorching Sunday in July 1919, 17-year-old Eugene Williams knew exactly how he was planning to cool off. Eugene worked six days a week in a grocery store, stocking shelves and keeping the place clean. Temperatures had been in the 90s all week—even higher inside the store—so on his day off Eugene and a group of friends headed from his parents’ house on Chicago’s South Side to a beach on the shores of Lake Michigan.
The boys retrieved a homemade wooden raft they had rigged up and pushed off into the deliciously cold waters of the lake. None were strong swimmers, but they could dive and play as long as they stayed close enough to hold onto the raft. They didn’t even notice when they drifted north, past an invisible line separating white and black beachgoers at the 29th Street Beach.
Eugene was born in Georgia. His family had moved to Chicago along with thousands of other African Americans fleeing the culture of Jim Crow and lynching in the South, and attracted by the prospect of decent jobs in Chicago’s growing industries. By 1915, most African Americans lived within a narrow strip on Chicago’s South Side known as the Black Belt.
The outbreak of World War I slowed immigration from Europe just as Chicago was expanding as an industrial center, and employers hired thousands of black southerners. As the Black Belt swelled across racial boundaries, whites formed neighborhood associations to pressure property owners not to rent or sell to black residents. Some whites also turned to violence, throwing homemade bombs at dozens of African American homes, while working-class gangs from predominantly Irish neighborhoods policed racial boundaries by chasing, beating, and even killing African Americans simply for setting foot on white turf.
Many African Americans, especially those who had just returned from fighting for their country in Europe, were no longer willing to acquiesce in being treated like second-class citizens. Tensions and skirmishes across racial lines had mounted throughout the spring and early summer of 1919. So when Eugene’s raft floated toward the de facto “whites only” beach at 29th Street, that part of the city was like a powder keg ready to explode.
George Stauber, a 24-year-old white man, started hurling stones at the boys from a breakwater extending into the lake. One hit Eugene in the head. Stunned, he slipped under the water and drowned. The first police officer at the scene, Daniel Callahan, refused to take Stauber into custody, and he even stopped
During the 1919 Chicago race riots, black Chicagoans defended their communities while the state militia was called in to quell the violence. Photo courtesy of Chicago History Museum, Jun Fujita collection.
a black officer from doing so. Police reinforcements arrived to confront a crowd of African Americans gathered near the beach. A black man fired a gun at the officers. Police returned fire and killed the gunman.
As word—and rumors—spread, the city erupted in racial violence. Whites loaded into automobiles and sped through black neighborhoods, firing indiscriminately at African Americans and their homes. As whites attacked, black people fought back in unprecedented numbers, a street-level expression of the growing race consciousness catching fire across the country. Days later, the National Guard was called in to quell the violence, but eventually a steady rain proved most effective in restoring peace.
In the end, 38 people were killed—23 black and 15 white—and 520 Chicagoans were injured. Two-thirds of them were African American, as were two-thirds of the 138 people eventually indicted for riot-related crimes by the state’s attorney’s office. Blacks had somehow made up most of the victims and most of the perpetrators during the race riots.
In the aftermath of the riots, the governor of Illinois called for an investigation of racial conditions in the city of Chicago. He appointed a Chicago Commission on Race Relations, made up of prominent white and black men—an extraordinary effort at cross-racial collaboration, research, and resolution. African American sociologist Charles S. Johnson directed the research and wrote the final report. The 600-plus-page report exhaustively chronicled the systemic racism that blacks in Chicago encountered on a daily basis, and it concluded that this racist treatment caused the 1919 riots. But its recommendations were weak, and few were adopted.
Critics accepted that racism had caused the riots, both in Chicago and in many other places across the nation that summer of 1919. But many prominent white Americans felt that the cure was segregation. Today, Chicago remains one of the most segregated metropolitan areas in the country.
Whyare Chicago’s race riots of 1919 so overlooked in the city’s collective memory? Ask Chicagoans today about the city’s history of race, and they might talk about the 1968 riots, restrictive covenants, redlining, housing projects, or the murder of Emmett Till. But you probably wouldn’t hear about the death of Eugene Williams and the most violent week in Chicago’s history.
In this centenary year of the riots, the Newberry is spearheading a multifaceted year-long initiative, Chicago 1919: Confronting the Race Riots. The project aims to heighten the 1919 Chicago race riots in the city’s collective memory, and to engage Chicagoans in a series of public conversations about their legacy.
Funded by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and with additional generous support from Allstate Insurance Company and Edith Rasmussen Ahern and Patrick T. Ahern, the project is being coordinated by the Newberry in partnership with 13 other Chicago cultural institutions.
The project’s website, www.chicago1919.org, provides a number of digital resources, including an overview history of the riots; a detailed timeline of important events before, during, and since the riots; and historical documents, photographs, and bibliographies for further reading and research, in addition to details about the project’s events.
At the heart of Chicago 1919 are 11 dynamic public programs to be held at locations across the city, designed to engage audiences and encourage them to examine the mechanisms through which segregation and inequality have been created, solidified, and reinforced over the past hundred years. Each program focuses on a specific expression of institutionalized racism, from policing and education to housing and the media. Chicago 1919 aims to help people address difficult history, come together in recognition and reconciliation, and imagine possible ways forward.
The 1919 Chicago race riots erupted when Eugene Williams, a 17-year-old, drifted across an invisible boundary dividing white and black sections of a beach. This cartoon appeared in the Chicago Tribune shortly after Williams’s death.
At the time of writing, three of these events have taken place.
About250 people gathered on February 23 at the DuSable Museum of African American History for the initiative’s opening event. The diverse crowd came from all over the region, from as far north as Lake Bluff, Illinois, south to Northwest Indiana, and from the north, west, and south sides of Chicago and the surrounding suburbs.
The day started with a multimedia presentation using words, music, photographs, and video to tell the story of the riots and their aftermath. The production was narrated and directed by Robin Robinson, the Chicago Police Department’s Special Advisor for Community Affairs and a former Chicago news anchor, and featured high school student Jabari Chiphe as Eugene Williams.
Audience members then had a choice of seven breakout sessions, where they could take part in hands-on, active conversations on a variety of topics. These sessions included the following:
• Housing and Color Lines, facilitated by Lee Bey;
• Policing and Violence, facilitated by Robin Robinson and Officer Michael Chuchro;
• Media and Race, facilitated by Christopher Benson;
• World War I and Chicago’s Black Soldiers, facilitated by Christopher Reed;
• A n Artifact and Archival Show-and-Tell based on the DuSable Exhibit, Two Colored Women in the US Expeditionary Forces: The Story of Kathryn Johnson , led by Armand Gonzalzles;
• Young Adult Book Reading and Discussion, facilitated by Claire Hatfield;
• Video Booth, where participants could record their own Great Migration or family migration story. Participants came back together at the end of the day to debrief on some of what they had learned and discussed. The event ended with a moving reading by Eve L. Ewing from her new book of poems about the race riots, called 1919.
Among the attendees was 107-year-old Juanita Mitchell, who used the video booth to record her vivid memories, as an 8-yearold, of the riots. She recalled hiding with her aunt behind a piano in their living room, her uncle standing at the window holding a gun, while a mob of armed white men and boys ran down their South Side street. Other participants expressed their appreciation for the event on comment cards, like one who wrote “The violence that went on in 1919—the mindset—still goes on today. We need to break the walls down and talk. Sharing, learning, opening ourselves up to others—moving past our fear—is the only way we can change our future.”
Jabari Chiphe portrays Eugene Williams during the Chicago 1919 opening event.
Robin Robinson narrates the story of the race riots.
Eve L. Ewing reads from her new book of poetry, 1919. All photos above by Bradley Murray.
City Bureau, a nonprofit civic journalism lab based on the South Side of Chicago, runs several programs aiming to make journalism more inclusive and democratic from the ground up. On April 4, it devoted its weekly Public Newsroom series to exploring issues of how race and journalism have intersected throughout Chicago’s history, from the 1919 race riots through today. About 130 people from throughout the city attended.
The evening opened with a conversation among Angela Ford, founder and executive director of The Obsidian Collection Archives, a national nonprofit focused on getting the images and articles of African American newspapers and small archives into the marketplace and online; Ethan Michaeli, author of The Defender: How the Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America ; and City Bureau co-founder Darryl Holliday.
The wide-ranging discussion encompassed media coverage at the time of the riots—which with a few exceptions largely got the story wrong; the role of Chicago’s black-owned newspapers, notably The Defender, in encouraging African American families from the South to move North, and in championing the incipient Civil Rights movement; and the role race continues to play in what becomes “news” and how it is reported.
Participants then broke into small groups, where they discussed such topics as race and newsroom hiring, the history of reporting on race, community engagement, and newsroom ethics.
Our next program, which drew nearly 150 participants, was held on May 4 in a soaring space on Chicago’s West Side, the Homan Square Power House Great Hall. Originally a coal plant that once fueled the nowdefunct 55-acre Sears, Roebucks mail order operations complex,
the enormous room with tall arched windows and original tile work was set up so those attending sat around tables. Lee Bey, the architectural critic, photographer, and writer, started the event with an instant phone poll that elicited the most common reasons audience members live where they do now: work, family, affordability, and diversity.
The Newberry’s Brad Hunt, a historian of Chicago housing and urban planning, then presented a brief history of migration, housing, and race in Chicago. He traced the explosion of Chicago’s population from about half a million people in 1880 to over 3 million by 1920, with continued growth to a peak of 3.6 million in the 1950s. The early increase was driven by immigrants from a variety of European countries, who lived together in neighborhoods of mixed ethnicity. But when, starting in 1916, they were joined by African Americans moving north to escape oppression and seek better opportunity, white Chicagoans sought to keep the newcomers segregated into separate neighborhoods, primarily the Black Belt on the South Side.
107-year-old Juanita Mitchell shared her memories of the race riots during the Chicago 1919 opening event.
On May 4, 150 Chicagoans gathered together to learn about how real estate practices and housing policies cemented segregation after the 1919 race riots. Sitting at small tables, they also shared their own stories about moving and migrating to and from Chicago. Photo by Anne Ryan.
Brad Hunt
This de facto segregation was often enforced by intimidation and violence, including a “dead line” blacks could not cross and bombings of black homes. After the 1919 race riots, whites codified segregation into restrictive real estate covenants, which only became illegal decades later. The federal government “redlined” African American sections of the city, making it prohibitively difficult to obtain home loans, and contract purchase schemes made it impossible for black residents to build equity in their homes and led to disinvestment and dilapidated conditions. These legal impediments to housing fairness ceased only in the late 20th century.
Small groups of participants then engaged in facilitated Story Circles, telling stories about their own experiences with migration, moving, and the idea of “home.” In comments, participants called this portion of the event “illuminating and
inspiring.” One wrote, “It was good to reflect on the human aspects of housing—the emotions you hold... and reflect on the reverberations that housing may have throughout your whole life.”
The event closed with a discussion between Lee Bey and Dr. Tanesha House, a West Side leader and activist, about grass roots work going on in the North Lawndale neighborhood to rebuild and attract new investment to the long-neglected area.
Ultimately, exploring the history of Chicago’s 1919 race riots, and the social and economic conditions they have led to, reminds us that there is nothing natural or inevitable about segregation. It was invented and has been maintained through a powerful blend of violence, intimidation, and law. One hundred years later, whether we remember the riots or not, we still live with this legacy.
Yet we can remember that conflict resolution is also in our history. We hold the potential to come together in recognition and reconciliation. We hope the Chicago 1919 events over the rest of this year will help Chicagoans to do just that.
Christianson is Director of Public Engagement at the Newberry.
Karen
Tanesha House, organizer and activist working in Chicago’s North Lawndale neighborhood, and architecture critic Lee Bey. Photo by Anne Ryan.
Chicagoans exchange stories about their experiences moving to and from Chicago. Photos by Anne Ryan.
Chicago 1919 Confronting the Race Riots
PROGRAM CALENDAR
Chicago 1919: Confronting the Race Riots , Opening Event
Saturday, February 23, 2:00 – 5:00 pm
Chris Benson, Lee Bey, Michael Chuchro, Armand Gonzalzles, Claire Hartfield, Christopher Reed, and Robin Robinson
DuSable Museum of African American History 740 East 56th Place
Reporting on Race: From The Chicago Defender and Carl Sandburg to Chicago Journalism Today
Thursday, April 4, 6:00 – 8:00 pm
Darryl Holiday, Ethan Michaeli, Angela Ford
This event is part of City Bureau’s Public Newsroom series at the Experimental Station, 6100 South Blackstone Avenue
Migration and Housing: A Century of Color Lines
Saturday, May 4, 1:00 – 3:00 pm
Lee Bey, Brad Hunt, Tanesha House
Homan Square Power House Great Hall 931 South Homan Avenue
Segregation and Education: Separate and Not Equal in 20th-Century Chicago
Saturday, June 1, 1:00 – 2:15 pm
Elizabeth Todd-Breland, Tara Stamps
Harold Washington Library Center
Cindy Pritzker Auditorium, 400 South State Street
’63 Boycott : Film Screening and Discussion
Saturday, June 1, 2:30 – 4:00 pm
Rachel Dickson, Tracye Matthews, Gordon Quinn
Harold Washington Library Center
Cindy Pritzker Auditorium, 400 South State Street
Bike Tour: Visualizing the 1919 Riots in Today’s Chicago
Saturday, June 29, 10:00 am – 1:00 pm
Facilitated by Blackstone Bicycle Works 31st Street Beach Parking Lot
Legacies of 1919: The Bughouse Square Debates
Saturday, July 27, 12:00 – 4:00 pm
Natalie Moore, Charles Whitaker
Washington Square Park 901 North Clark Street
Reflections of Youth: Spoken Word Performance and Conversation
Monday, August 12, 6:00 – 8:00 pm
Kevin Coval, Members of the 2019 Louder than a Bomb Squad
Harold Washington Library Center
Cindy Pritzker Auditorium, 400 South State Street
The Language of Bronzeville: Literature and Race in Chicago
Tuesday, September 24, 6:00 – 7:30 pm
Eve Ewing, Nate Marshall, Liesl Olson, Ken Warren
Newberry Library 60 West Walton Street
Policing Racial Violence: 1919 and Beyond
Tuesday, October 15, 7:00 – 8:30 pm
Simon Balto, Robin Robinson
Chicago History Museum 1601 North Clark Street
Red Summer/Winter Blues
Thursday, November 14, 6:00 – 8:00 pm
Screening and discussion of the rough cut of this new documentary
Barbara Allen, Cameron McWhirter, Jacqueline Stewart
DuSable Museum of African American History 740 East 56th Place
Traveling Collections
A new Newberry program brings primary sources into high school classrooms in Chicago, helping students develop skills for analyzing historical documents and engaging directly with the past.
By Kara Johnson
Ina letter to his father in May 1864, J. L. Conley, of the 7th Georgia Confederate Cavalry, combines the dull aspects of everyday Civil War life with what many people have since learned about in their high school textbooks: the violent fighting between the Union and Confederate Armies. He explains,
The [Regiment]…is full of body lice and some of the men have had to burn up some clothes to get rid of them…I tell them that they need not be so particular as they will have to face them when there is no chance to keep them off, that is one of the horrors of war. News came here yesterday of a fight in [Virginia]. I hope Lee will rout old Grant and I believe that it will be the decisive battle of the war. It is mighty dull in camp and hot till you cant [sic] rest.
While Conley’s sympathies towards Confederate General Robert E. Lee are quite evident—witnessed especially in his phrase “rout out old [Union General Ulysses] Grant”—the other elements of life during wartime that he alludes to in the remainder of his letter (long marches, terrible weather, and vermin) universally affected young soldiers in the Civil War, regardless of their military loyalties.
This evocative letter is one of several archival artifacts— revealing both the extraordinary and the mundane from our shared historical past—included in the Newberry’s Traveling Collections program, developed and implemented by the library’s Teacher and Student Programs department. With archival items accompanying grade-appropriate curricula for the American Civil War and World War II, the Traveling Collections program aims to better meet the material, logistical, and economic challenges facing many of Chicago’s public schools.
This innovative program is a complement to the on-site programs we offer at the Newberry, including professional development seminars for teachers, class field trips to the library’s Special Collections and current exhibitions, and custom programs for school districts across the city and surrounding suburbs.
Some might assume that a field trip, during which teachers bring their students to a cultural institution like the Newberry, is a “day off” for educators. In reality, field trips require a lot of preparation and logistical coordination, including scheduling buses, obtaining parents’ permission, and finding substitute instructors for their other class sessions. In addition, rigorous state testing schedules limit teachers’ scheduling options, and scarce funding prevents teachers from pursuing field trips, even those at sites just down the road from their schools.
However, with generous assistance from the Mazza Foundation, the Traveling Collections program at the Newberry brings archival objects directly to a school, so that classrooms can experience primary source materials firsthand. Acquired under the advisement of subject specialists, the objects are not accessioned into the Newberry’s collection but purchased specifically so they may leave the library. This program is aligned with Common Core requirements and the Advanced Placement U.S. History curriculum (including its key concepts and “Document Based Questions”) and is free for schools in CPS and for Big Shoulders-funded Catholic schools.
This spring, the Newberry has held three successful classroom visits at Hancock High School and Aspira Early College High School. On a typical day of a Traveling Collections visit, Teacher and Student Programs staff members arrive with a selection of historical artifacts to show the students. They come equipped with essential questions, discussion points, and class objectives to facilitate the lesson. Students are advised on how to handle the items and encouraged to take pictures for future reference and research.
Following a brief analysis and discussion of the items as a large group, the students branch out into a small-group analysis activity, which allows them to practice document analysis skills first-hand with a favorite object of their choice. The analysis activity focuses on answering questions that build in complexity, from identifying the object, analyzing its contextual details, and determining how it compares and contrasts with other items in the collection, to evaluating how the object sheds a new or different light on the historical period.
The American Civil War Collection contains 10 items, including objects such as newspapers, 19th-century currency, photographs, brochures, and handwritten letters. Its corresponding curriculum, developed by Dr. Kate Masur, Associate Professor of History at Northwestern University, aims to connect these ephemeral objects from real life to larger historical themes often studied in textbooks, like 19thcentury printing and photography technologies. Newspapers like the New-York Times, Harper’s Weekly, and The Liberator demonstrate—much like in today’s political climate—that no piece of journalism is completely neutral or an objective representation of current events.
The photograph of a white man and woman from the Civil War era pictured to the left shows how visual material can provide fruitful subjects for historical analysis and classroom discussion. Since photography was becoming increasingly widespread in this era, and was newly available to middle-class people, having a portrait taken—and at a photographer’s studio, no less—was a sign of one’s privileged social status. However, as the Newberry team has discussed so far with the high schoolers, having a single portrait taken in this time period was an ordeal—and certainly not as easy as snapping a selfie with an iPhone.
Even fairly prominent people might have only a few portraits taken during their lives. Cameras of that period had very slow shutter speeds, so people had to stand or sit still for a long time while their pictures were being taken. It is also enlightening for the students to know that aside from it being difficult to hold a smile long enough to accommodate the slow shutter speeds, it was unconventional at the time to smile in photos.
While nothing further is known about the identities of the people pictured, much can be gleaned about the class and gender of the unidentified Northern couple through their clothing, hairstyles, and postures. For instance, one student from Aspira Early College High School observed that the spatial dynamics of the couple’s pose, with the man seated and the woman standing with her hand on his shoulder, indicates the former’s potential attempt to demonstrate power and leisure in his pose, while the latter—presumably his spouse—performs a “supporting role” with a touch on her partner’s shoulder.
Photograph of a Northern couple, ca. 1860s. Part of the Civil War Collection that the Newberry’s Teacher Programs department is now bringing into high school classrooms in Chicago.
Like Dr. Masur’s Civil War curriculum and the anonymous photographed couple, the classroom materials for the World War II Collection, developed by Dr. Mark Pohlad, Associate Professor of Art History and Architecture at DePaul University, emphasize everyday stories and the various peoples, in particular soldiers and their families, affected by war. The collection, comprising approximately 20 items, contains a number of photographs taken by unidentified American soldiers, stationed in unidentified locales, “killing time” in their bunks or on the grounds of a nondescript military base.
All of the photos were small enough for the soldiers to mail to their families, friends, and loved ones, thus suggesting the important role of (infrequent) mail correspondence during World War II. (Another item from the collection, a letter from soldier E. W. Boulanger to his wife, shows lines of writing cut out of the page, redacted by censors.) In one recent Traveling Collections class session, students observed that despite the differences in the photographs, one significant similarity among them all is that there are no weapons pictured, suggesting that the men being photographed wanted to portray to their families the sense of relaxation, friendship, and down time experienced between any frontline action during wartime. Aside from trying to set their loved ones’ minds at ease, the lack of weapons suggests the long stretches of waiting between fighting.
An important contribution to the discussion of World War II is the role of African American soldiers—especially those who are not in the historical limelight, like the famous Tuskegee Airmen, the first group of African American fighter pilots. Like their white servicemen counterparts, they provide a document of how soldiers saw themselves, as well as when, where, and how they lived during their time in the war. Images included in the Traveling Collections illustrate the diversity of experiences during World War II. The camaraderie and togetherness shared among the men in the photographs are also quite evident. Furthermore, the World War II Collection shows a strong representation of women’s involvement in the war effort, through brochures for the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) and an advertisement for the U.S. Cadet Nurse Corps.
In an effort to model the skills of evaluating sources and analyzing their underlying messages, Newberry staff take care in the curriculum to demonstrate the various underlying messages of different representations of both the Civil War and World War II, whether propagandist, patriotic, sensationalist, or realist in purpose. For instance, students learn that, mistrustful of Japanese-American citizens and residents after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States government instituted a policy of internment where families were forced to relocate to guarded camps in remote areas of the western U.S. (Several CPS teachers have mentioned that the Japanese internment is barely addressed—if at all—in U.S. History curricula and textbooks.) This policy
The World War II Traveling Collection stresses the important role that African Americans played in the war effort.
The World War II Traveling Collection contains photos showing soldiers away from the battlefield.
coincided with government propaganda posters depicting both Germans and Japanese in a negative, caricatured light. Thus, several propaganda posters and issues of Life magazine show both visual and narrative examples of the language of exclusion, discrimination, and dehumanization, an underlying consequence of any war, whether it takes place solely on American soil or on the global stage.
Bringing primary source materials into the classroom helps students develop the critical skills of analyzing texts and images, contextualizing historically, and juggling multiple points-of-view on a historical subject. A tenth-grade English teacher from Aspira Early College High School shared that through experiencing the Civil War Traveling Collection, her students were able to “see real artifacts” and “draw useful connections” between the Civil War and their current unit, the Civil Rights Movement and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”: “They were able to identify how slavery was ‘normalized’ [in the 19th century], which helps bring importance to why MLK states in his letter that certain people in charge were continuing the status quo.”
Perhaps, most importantly, these Traveling Collections are fun for the students! One student shared, “My favorite part was interacting with the actual sources instead of looking at pictures of them or only being able to see them from afar.” Another reflected, “I loved how old the documents were. It was a first-hand experience.” Transported to another time period, someone said, “It felt like a time machine.”
Upcoming World War II Collection school visits are scheduled in the spring, and registration will extend through the 2019-20 school year, with the hope of expanding the reach to other schools and Chicago neighborhoods. There are also plans to build both collections with more archival materials—such as recently acquired Civil Warera paper currency—and to create a new collection based on photographs and other visual materials related to Native American and Indigenous experiences in the U.S.
Those interested in learning more about the Traveling Collections, and how to register for a class visit, can visit the Teacher and Student Programs webpage on the Newberry website: www.newberry.org/programs-students
Aside from skills-building and providing further academic support to curricular goals in the city of Chicago and beyond, the Newberry is invested in instilling the values of lifelong learning, curiosity, and deepening one’s personal experience through encountering first-hand primary source objects. Ultimately, everyone has a powerful role to play in telling their own stories, the stories of others, and the important historical moments that have shaped their lives. As we remind students, someday a historian will be searching for primary source artifacts from their lives to study!
Kara Johnson is Manager of Student and Teacher Programs at the Newberry.
Through primary sources, Newberry staff help students decipher the underlying messages of different representations of World War II.
Researchlibraries and their collections evolve. In the case of the Newberry, our evolution involved a narrowing and refining of focus: under the leadership of founding Librarian William Frederick Poole, we set out to collect everything, yet quite soon, we came to focus on the humanities alone, after the implementation of an 1896 specialization agreement with the Chicago Public Library and the John Crerar Library. Subsequently, in the early 20th century, the arrival of materials assembled by collectors Edward E. Ayer (American Indian and Indigenous history) and John M. Wing (the history of printing) strongly shaped our overall collection’s later development and perceived strengths.
The Librarian Will See You Now
Early in its history, before it began to focus its collecting efforts on the humanities, the Newberry had one of the preeminent medical collections in the country.
By David Spadafora
But behind these landmarks in the history of the Newberry and its collection lies terrain that remains almost unexplored. Even its broad contours are largely terra incognita. At any given time, who was making the key decisions about collectionbuilding? In what ways have gifts and purchases worked together? How did the definitions of the collection and its strengths change over time? How did the collection and the building housing and serving it interrelate? Good answers to such questions are still in short supply, and providing them will take much effort in institutional research.
A convenient point of entrée to these facets of Newberry history is offered by the forgotten story of a Newberry collection
This building directory guided Newberry visitors in the 1890s. At this time, “Room A” was dedicated to the library’s collection related to medicine.
that arrived to fanfare and then suddenly departed. This little tale shines unexpected light on the development of the library’s collection itself, our cultural norms related to collecting, and our institutional selfunderstanding.
After the Chicago Fire, the Chicago medical establishment sought to build a new and even larger collection of printed literature than had been available to support physicians’ work prior to 1871. By 1884, this collection was housed at the Chicago Public Library, then headed by William Frederick Poole. As of 1890, there were several thousand titles in the medical collection at CPL, and space had been set aside for their consultation by physicians.
But among the library’s board there were policy concerns about whether it was appropriate for a publicly supported institution to provide special opportunities for a particular profession. The Chicago Medical Society therefore began to look for a way to establish its own physical library for the collection. Nathan Smith Davis, M.D., co-founder and Dean of the Chicago Medical College (predecessor of the Northwestern University School of Medicine) and first editor
of the Journal of the American Medical Association , spearheaded these efforts through a short-lived organization called the Medical Library Association of Chicago, but it did not succeed in raising enough money to build its own facility.
In the years immediately after 1887, efforts began on two tracks to establish a medical collection at the Newberry. Poole himself, having moved from CPL to the Newberry, maneuvered to obtain a large collection of medical materials belonging to the American Medical Association, which had been placed in storage at the Smithsonian in Washington. He unsuccessfully asked Chicago doctors to prevail on the AMA for this purpose. Meanwhile, the Newberry’s Trustees met with Dr. Davis about the Medical Library Association’s project. Ultimately, the Trustees reached an agreement with him in four parts. The Association’s collection would be transferred to the Newberry; the Trustees would commit to spend at least $2,500 per year on additional acquisitions for at least five years; they would appoint a “committee of medical and scientific men” to advise the Newberry on this new collection; and they would all lobby CPL to give its medical collection to the Newberry. By taking these steps in 1890, the Newberry acquired 1,515 volumes and 1,909 unbound serials and pamphlets from the Association and 6,583 volumes and 4,550 unbound serials and pamphlets from CPL. It had very quickly developed a substantial medical collection. Of 34,852 books and pamphlets acquired by the library in 1890, half (17,203) were medical.
Medical vs. Other Acquisitions
Nathan Smith Davis
The Trustees took one further step not specified in the deal with Dr. Davis: it authorized Poole to hire “a proper man with a medical education” to oversee this new collection. Poole turned for this purpose to George Edwin Wire (18591936), an Evanstonian of whom he was already aware. Wire had graduated from the Chicago Medical College in 1883, worked in the libraries of Evanston and Northwestern, and then gotten a professional library degree in New York at the new Columbia University School of Library Science, which was run by Melvil Dewey of Dewey Decimal System fame.
During the next five years, Wire labored diligently to achieve goals that Poole laid out in remarks to the Illinois State Medical Society on May 7, 1890, when he said that he wished to establish “the most complete library of medical and surgical works in America,” important enough to “attract the attention of not only the authorities in the United States but in Europe as well,” while providing “absolutely free [access] to everybody for reference.” Wire’s own articulation of this goal emerged in a circular letter he wrote to the Chicago medical community, where he looked toward creating “a medical library second only to that of the Surgeon General’s Office in Washington.”
Two notable gifts soon helped the Newberry move closer to achieving these lofty goals. The first of these, from Dr. Nicholas Senn, was negotiated in late 1893 by both Poole and the Trustees. A Swiss-born surgeon who had trained in Chicago and become a professor of surgery at Rush Medical College, Senn travelled extensively, collecting early printed medical
books and contemporary medical journal literature as he went. He had acquired the large and impressive collection assembled by the great Göttingen surgeon Wilhelm Baum (17991883), and he made clear to Newberry officials his willingness to give it and other items subject to several conditions: his collection should be housed as a unit, identified with his name, and augmented by regular acquisition spending by the Newberry that would allow key medical periodicals to continue being collected on an ongoing basis. The Trustees’ Book Committee agreed to these conditions in December, and Senn’s surgery collection, including the Baum materials, arrived early in 1894. It was among Poole’s last actions before his death to write to Senn thanking him for becoming the “first large contributor to the resources of the Newberry Library.” Poole’s emphasis in this statement on contribution presumably allowed him in his own thinking to distinguish between Senn’s gift and the purchase in 1890 of the Henry Probasco Collection of rare books and manuscripts, which was so steeply negotiated as to have been almost a bargain sale.
Nicholas Senn
Within a year came the second medical books gift, the AMA collection at the Smithsonian for which Poole had been angling in 1888, and on which he continued to work in 1892 and 1893. To get it, the Newberry had to agree to bind and catalog the books as soon as possible. The 74 boxes that arrived in late 1894 were described as “rich in the possession of very many volumes of transactions of various foreign scientific societies, which are contained in few other collections.” A Journal of the American Medical Association article about the gift asserted that now “the Newberry Library Medical Department takes rank with the best medical libraries in the United States.”
The Newberry’s leadership, both staff and Trustee, fulfilled its explicit commitments to building the medical collection and making it accessible. Between 1890 and 1903, a total of 90,973 medical works came into the library, 25,002 of them from Senn, including a famous physiology collection
established by Dr. Emil Du Bois-Reymond of Berlin, which arrived in 1897. Apart from Senn’s personal benefactions, another 45,807 books and pamphlets were donated in those years, and 20,164 items purchased at a cost of $32,750.
Another $41,000 was spent on salaries and processing costs down to 1903. Catalog entries for medical works numbered about 28,000. In 1891, there were 383 medical journals; by 1905, the tally had risen to 473. Two-thirds of these journals were published abroad, and most of those in languages other than English.
A significant measure of the medical collection’s quality is how its collection compared to the one at the New York Academy of Medicine, a major East Coast institution. In 1897, the Newberry acquired some 41 percent more medical titles than did NYAM. In 1902, when NYAM out-acquired the Newberry by 65 percent, its collection numbered 61,180 titles versus the Newberry’s 65,793.
Readers consult the Newberry’s medical collection, 1894.
Meanwhile, the comparative importance of the medical collection internally is indicated by the fact that in 1900 the Newberry had 459 medical journals and 901 other journals in other fields. Clearly, medical material represented an enormous element of the Newberry collection during these years.
More than that, its users constituted a big portion of total Newberry readership. From the opening of the Cobb Building (which became the Newberry’s permanent home in late 1893), the Medical Department, as it became known, had a large room on the west side of the first floor. This room was crowded with collection materials and readers. To relieve congestion, in October 1896 an adjoining annex—called the “Senn Room”— was established. Poole’s successor as Librarian, John Vance Cheney, noted that this new space made “provision... for private consultation among the physicians and students desiring it for the better prosecution of their researches.”
With the availability of this new space, medical readership quickly doubled; indeed, from 1897 to 1905 between 12 and 14 percent of the Newberry’s total readership were medical readers. And they were active consumers of the collection: in the years around 1900, medical books and periodicals varied between 26 and 59 percent of all books and periodicals consulted by readers. Such high usage resulted in part from what we would today call marketing efforts. As early as 1892, a “Circular to Physicians” in Chicago, written by Dr. George Wire, touted the virtues of using the medical collection.
And yet, despite this remarkably successful effort by the Newberry to build a premier medical collection and stimulate its use, it all came to a sudden end—and it did so through Trustee decision-making and involvement with another institution.
The John Crerar Library, founded in 1894, defined its area of collecting and activity as the “sciences”—natural and social. The 1896 inter-library specialization deal led the next year to the transfer to the Crerar of most of the Newberry’s science books, some 7,800 items; the Newberry’s medical collection, however, was specifically excluded from these arrangements.
By 1905, the Trustees of the Crerar—who included E.W. Blatchford, the chairman or “president” of the Newberry’s Board of Trustees—were discussing the possible expansion of its mission to include medicine. They approached the Newberry about the availability of its medical collection, and Newberry Board discussion of the topic began in early October. Blatchford himself sought and obtained Dr. Senn’s acquiescence to the potential transfer of his collection to the Crerar. Blatchford went on to arrange a conference between the Newberry’s Book Committee and the Crerar’s peer body, and on February 1, 1906, the Crerar Board authorized its Book Committee to enter into a purchase-and-sale contract. Final arrangements were agreed to the very next
day, with a total price tag of $70,000—about $1.9 million today. This figure corresponded closely to the Newberry’s carefully calculated tally of what it had spent on the Medical Department’s books and labor since 1890.
The official transfer of ownership took place on February 7, but for about a year and a half, through July 31, 1907, the collection remained in the westernmost 4,500 square feet of the Newberry’s first floor, where it continued to be utilized by readers. In August and September 1907, the medical books were transferred to a new “Senn Room” at the Crerar, then located in the Marshall Field Building. Chicago press accounts described this medical collection as being “exceeded in completeness” only by the principal medical libraries of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia.
The medical collection continued to be used in the Marshall Field Building until 1921, when the Crerar opened a new building at Michigan and Randolph, and it migrated with the Crerar to its next location on the campus of IIT in 1962 and on to another new building on the campus of the University of Chicago in 1984.
Little Newberry documentation is known that specifically sheds light on the motivation for the dramatic deaccession of 1906. The Newberry’s finances were then solid, so there was no direct financial incentive, and in fact the Trustees continued right through early 1906 to invest substantially in the medical collection. Medical readership had not waned in the years leading up to the decision to deaccession; indeed, total Newberry readership actually dropped by 20 percent when the collection was relocated. The Crerar’s Annual Report for 1906 and contemporary press accounts suggest that the medical profession desired a more central location than Walton Street for the collection, which seems plausible. At the time, both the Northwestern Medical School, at 23rd Street, and the Rush Medical School, west of the Loop, were much closer to the Crerar in its Marshall Field Building location than to the Newberry.
Beyond the geographic consideration, however, other considerations must have been at work. Surely there were undocumented discussions about the “fit” of the collection for the Crerar versus for the Newberry. After all, the Crerar issued official language about the “natural relations of medicine to the scope” of its science collection. But no detailed Newberry sentiments about scope have as yet turned up, and the question of fit had certainly not impeded the Newberry from keeping the medical collection at the time of the inter-institutional treaty in 1896. It is worth noting in this regard that after the departure of Dr. George Wire, the collection no longer had a trained physician as its custodian who could be its professional proponent.
In February 1906, the Newberry and the John Crerar Library entered into a purchase-and-sale agreement that would transfer the Newberry’s medical collection to the Crerar.
In any event, what seems most plausible as a fundamental explanation for the transfer was the looming question of how to handle Edward E. Ayer and his collection of materials related to the native peoples of the Americas.
Ayer had already given the Newberry a few thousand items from this collection in 1895 and 1897. In 1905, the Newberry’s official description of itself asserted that “any book in Mr. Edward E. Ayer’s collection of Americana can be consulted at the Newberry” on 24 hours’ notice. As early as 1897, Ayer had signaled his intention to make a gift of the entire collection, although he did not formalize that plan until 1911. But thousands of Ayer items came to the Newberry in 1907 within months after the Medical Collection departed— Ayer’s vast set of works on American Indian languages.
This was no coincidence. By vote of the Newberry’s Trustees, the Senn Room and an adjoining space were simultaneously “set apart for the Ayer Collection,” designated henceforth as the “Ayer Room of Americana.” Work on re-equipping those spaces for the Ayer Collection began in February 1908. What had been for 13 years a space dedicated to medical works and their consultation by doctors and medical students now became the home for what would soon become arguably the world’s most important collection of printed and manuscript materials about the western hemisphere’s native peoples, matched by objects given to the Field Museum.
In Chicago, Ayer was to American—and especially Native American—history- and culture-collecting what Senn was to medical-collecting. At the Newberry, however, Ayer was an insider and Senn was not. Blatchford dutifully consulted Senn, as we have seen, but Ayer, who himself chaired the Newberry’s Book Committee, needed to be tended to on a deeper, ongoing basis. Blatchford obviously did so meticulously. He knew that Ayer had the capacity to give not only a collection but also substantial financial resources that were far beyond Senn’s capacity. Ultimately, Ayer did exactly that: between 1920 and 1925, he made three gifts totaling $250,000 (between $3.5 and $4 million in today’s dollars) for collection purchases, cataloging, and management, on the condition that the Ayer Collection was to be housed separately in a room or connecting rooms.
It seems safe to conclude that in the fall of 1905, when approached by the Crerar about a sale, using the channel of the Newberry’s own Board leader, the Newberry decided to make a big institutional bet—on Ayer and his collection rather than on Senn and the Medical
Department. With that bet, the transformation begun by the city’s library treaty in 1896 reached its culmination, as the Newberry completed its shift from being a research and reference library that tried to collect everything into one that concentrated on the humanities. And, notably, it was a wager made not by the Newberry’s collecting staff but by its governing Trustees.
Lest there be any doubt about the clout of Edward Ayer at the Newberry, it is worth noting that in late 1907, just as the Ayer Collection was replacing the Medical Department, the Trustees also agreed to set aside $4,000 for the purpose of establishing a collection of Tibetan literature. This action was stimulated by Ayer himself, who, as a longtime member of the Board of the Field Museum, reported to the Newberry that the Field’s Assistant Curator of Asiatic Ethnology, Dr. Berthold Laufer, was doing research on and purchasing a related collection of objects. With Blatchford’s enthusiastic support, the Board commissioned Laufer to purchase materials “representative... of East Asiatic works on subjects falling within the field” of the Newberry’s interests, namely, the humanities subjects of “religion, philosophy, history, belleslettres, philology, and art.” By 1910, the Newberry had acquired 13,483 Asian volumes.
The story of what happened to this Asian Collection, which kept growing for years and ultimately was deaccessioned by sale to the University of Chicago in 194344, is also interesting, as is the arrival and departure of a large collection of Russian materials (1944-66), finally sold to Hunter College in New York. The details of these other
Edward E. Ayer donated his vast collection of Indigenous history materials to the Newberry in 1911. His collection was stored in the spaces once occupied by the Newberry’s medical collection.
arrivals and departures cannot be related here, except to note that the role of the staff was crucial in the Russian purchase and in both deaccessions (as it was not with regard to the Medical Department). The Board’s leaders and its Book Committee did not lead in these instances, as they did in the 1890s and 1900s, but rather considered and approved what the staff recommended. The professionalization of acquiring and deaccessioning had by then begun in earnest, although much more was to come in subsequent decades.
After the Medical Department’s departure, however, one crucial thing had been settled in definitive terms—namely, the basic focus of the collection. It was said in the 1908 Newberry “descriptive leaflet” that the library was “closed only against extensive collections devoted to certain welldefined branches of learning grouped under the broad and elastic term, Science.” Put more positively, in the Outlines of a General Policy of Library Development of 1918, considering the collecting of other libraries in Chicago “there remains to
us the field of the humanities,” by which was meant especially “the two great subjects of history and literature.” To be sure, for purposes of “utility and wise economy,” duplication with what was or might come to be in the historical and literary collections of CPL and the University of Chicago and Northwestern University libraries was to be avoided by the Newberry. But otherwise, the Newberry’s collection was expected to continue to build on its strengths in American, British, and Continental history and literature, as well as the other explicitly cited fields of religion, philosophy and ethics, biography, language, the fine arts, and bibliography. The presumed readership for these various fields was not only “professional investigators” but also “serious readers.”
Not mentioned in the policy statement on collection development (or its nearly identical 1930 version) was the collection’s relationship to the allocation of space in the building. Space is just as significant to a research library as is buying books. In a strong implicit statement of institutional emphasis from 1893 to 1906, prime first-floor real estate was allocated to the Medical Department as soon as the Cobb Building was opened, and it was enlarged just three years later. A mere decade after that, the same real estate was turned over to the Ayer Collection, and within 20 years, at the very end of Ayer’s life, still more adjoining space was added. These changes included the construction of a two-story vault for the most precious Ayer materials, and they forced the move of the Newberry’s exhibition space out of the first floor and into a more marginal space on the second. By 1927, most of the western half of the first floor was devoted to the Ayer Collection, and the Newberry’s “museum,” which had been situated just west of the lobby, now moved to the extreme east end of the second floor. In terms of space, the Ayer and his books, manuscripts, and maps had triumphed over medicine and exhibitions.
The diverse evolutionary forces at work from 1887 to 1906—Trustees, staff, external experts, donors, other institutions—had together brought the development of the Newberry’s collection and its building to a point much different from what Poole had envisioned when he sought the AMA collection. Those same forces, arrayed in continuingly different ways, have effected still greater changes across the past century. Even so, the departure of the Medical Department assured one constant: the Newberry is a humanities institution.
David Spadafora is President and Librarian at the Newberry.
The space once occupied by the Newberry’s medical collection came to house Edward E. Ayer’s collection related to American Indian history and culture.
Let Us Paint You a Picture Postcard
With support from Leonard A. Lauder, the Newberry developed an innovative approach to making a vast new collection of postcards digitally accessible.
Now, thousands of early 20th-century “Oilettes” (postcards based on oil paintings) are freely available online.
By Claire Dapkiewicz and Melissa Griffith
Acrowdof the rich and leisured mill about in a lavish, highceilinged, pink-walled casino in Aix-les-Bains, France. Across the world, a woman in traditional dress twirls a brightlycolored parasol while posing next to a temple statue in Britishoccupied Burma. At the Danzig Stock Exchange, a vast meeting room extends into the shadows, and elsewhere a sprawling springtime landscape surrounds the ruins of Pevensey Castle, in England.
These are just a few of the scenes featured on the thousands of postcards comprising the Leonard A. Lauder Collection of Raphael Tuck & Sons Postcards, a comprehensive archive received by the Newberry in 2016. With cards displaying everything from political cartoons and turn-ofthe-century advertisements to images of faraway landscapes and famous landmarks, the Lauder Collection encompasses an abundance of intriguingly ephemeral material from early 20th-century Britain.
The postcards are a hugely valuable resource for scholars and researchers of all stripes. Not only do they provide glimpses into how publishers, painters, and members of the public viewed, depicted, and circulated their world during the first decades of the 20th century, but they also contain a disproportionately rich amount of information—including details about the daily lives of the Britons who sent and received them—for items of such a relatively small format.
Until recently, scholars and others interested in exploring the Lauder Collection could do so only in person. Now, however, researchers worldwide have direct access to a vast, virtual gallery of Lauder postcards through a newly launched digital resource, the Raphael Tuck & Sons Oilette Postcards, which gathers together thousands of “Oilettes,” as the unique picture postcards designed by the firm were called. The resource is the crowning achievement of a two-year effort—generously funded by Mr. Lauder—by the Newberry to digitize and make publicly accessible over 26,000 individual images and variants of many postcards in the Lauder Collection. And just as fascinating as the Oilettes themselves is the story of their provenance.
TheNewberry is the postcards’ final stop after a decadeslong journey from publisher to senders, from senders to collector, and from collector to library. In many ways, the journey began when Raphael and Ernestine Tuch emigrated
with their seven children from Prussia to England in 1865. Once in England, Raphael (whose last name was apparently Anglicized to “Tuck” in 1873) began dealing in furniture and picture-framing, at first from a hand-cart and then from a location near “Postcard Mile” in London. Over the course of the next four decades, his business—Raphael Tuck & Sons—would grow into one of the most prominent postcard publishing firms in the country, eventually occupying a building that included 10 distinct departments.
In addition to achieving great financial success, the firm also revolutionized the picture postcard industry in Great Britain. In 1880, Raphael Tuck & Sons organized the first Christmas card competition and exhibition ever held, likely in an effort to generate demand, and succeeded in popularizing the holiday picture card with consumers. Soon after, the firm embarked upon a years-long campaign credited with playing an essential role in convincing Great Britain’s Postmaster General to alter regulations governing postcards in the country and permit larger cards with images on one side and texts (including written messages as well as the address and stamp) on the other. The acceptance of the standard full-sized postcard in 1899 in turn kicked off a postcard boom, during which the firm ran several contests that underscored—and further stoked—the popularity of its cards.
Perhaps the most impressive demonstration of the firm’s impact on the postcard industry was the introduction in 1903 of its pioneering series of “Oilette” postcards, touted in a 1907 circular as “veritable miniature oil paintings” and “the Aristocrats of picture post-cards.” In fact, the images were miniaturized versions of oil paintings that had been specially commissioned by the firm and that depicted landscapes, seascapes, churches, and pastoral scenes, along with views of cities and life in other countries. Beautiful, compact, and inexpensive, Oilettes rapidly rose in popularity,
contributing to the subsequent development and growth of a picture postcard industry that created steady work for painters, chromolithographers, and printers alike. Soon, their popularity was transporting the minute masterpieces across towns, countrysides, and around the world, as well as into all manner of households, where collections of Oilettes and other picture postcards became a common sight.
Like any company, Raphael Tuck & Sons sought to profit from its new product, but the firm also appears to have taken seriously its mission to make art—even ephemeral art—available to all. In the 1907 circular, for example, the company highlighted its efforts “to still further popularise and bring home to ALL the Beauty and Artistic merits of ‘TUCK’S POST-CARDS’.” In the end, Tuck & Sons’ success in popularizing its miniature paintings helped ensure the longevity of the Oilettes: when the Raphael House was destroyed in the London Blitz, the vast majority of the company’s records and original postcards—including the Oilettes—were lost. Yet thousands of the cards had been and would continue to be preserved elsewhere—in the households of senders, recipients, and, eventually, collectors.
Foremost among these collectors has been Leonard A. Lauder, who donated his collection of Oilettes to the Lake County Preserve District, where it formed part of the Curt Teich Postcard Archives Collection at the Discovery Museum before being transferred to the Newberry in 2016. Mr. Lauder, who has also donated parts of his extraordinary postcard collection to other cultural institutions, was drawn to
collecting postcards like the Oilettes for a number of reasons, including their use of color printing, their fantastical imagery, and their practical use. With respect to his donation to the Newberry, Mr. Lauder explains that the “Tuck Postcards have always fascinated me as a snapshot of everyday life in turn-ofthe-century Britain. They show how World War I changed our lives forever.”
The snapshots of British life provided by the Oilettes are not just visual, of course—they’re also textual. At the turn of the 20th century, postcards were a fast and cheap form of communication, enabling individuals to stay in touch efficiently and inexpensively through handwritten notes. Notes, however, were not the only messages the postcards carried. Propaganda, advertisements, and political cartoons were all frequently delivered along with a greeting. Hence, the Oilettes in the Lauder Collection embody a synthesis of information, both visual and textual, of potentially wide use to scholars.
Over the last few years, the Newberry has succeeded in digitizing the Tuck & Sons Oilettes and adding them to an evergrowing, publicly available online database. However, simply hosting the digitized cards online doesn’t make the collection readily accessible. Each card also requires the addition of metadata—descriptive information (titles, captions, production numbers, and so on) associated with a collection item—to be fully searchable. Yet creating metadata for each of the more than
26,000 digitized cards in a short period of time would have been an impossible undertaking for the Newberry alone. Thus, in order to create metadata for such a daunting number of items, we settled on an innovative solution: a remote crowdsourced transcription internship for library science students and professionals.
TheNewberry had already achieved great success through crowdsourced transcription projects. Transcribing Modern Manuscripts and Transcribing Faith —two earlier initiatives developed by and run through our Digital Initiatives and Services (DIS) department—demonstrated crowdsourcing to be both a high-impact and cost-efficient practice. Both projects involved using digital tools that enabled members of the public to interact with a selection of digitized manuscripts while simultaneously transcribing them, thereby making the manuscripts searchable by scholars working remotely. Together, the two projects have resulted in the transcription of many thousands of manuscript pages.
The ideal crowdsourcing project provides benefits to participants and institutions alike, and we adopted this standard in designing the new project, which we entitled Art in Miniature. Throughout the development process, Jen Wolfe—the project’s creator and the Newberry’s Digital Initiatives Manager—kept in mind the library’s mission statement, which conceives of the Newberry’s aim in part as “the advancement and dissemination of knowledge, especially in the humanities… fostering research, teaching, publication, and lifelong learning.”
In pursuit of this aim, Wolfe designed a six-week program that would allow interns to transcribe and classify postcards remotely but that also incorporated readings selected to familiarize participants with the project’s background and “introduce topics that library school might miss,” as one intern explained, including cultural heritage crowdsourcing, data wrangling, and digital public humanities. To provide a forum for readings and weekly assignments, we used Scalar, a web publishing platform that enabled us to build a digital hub where interns could learn more about the broader context of the project.
At the same time, we needed to create a digital portal through which interns could transcribe and classify the Oilettes. To do this, we searched for an open-source (or freely available) crowdsourcing platform that would be accessible to a community of users, and we found one in Zooniverse, a popular site for this type of work. Next, we uploaded digital images of the postcards to the platform, allowing for the fronts and backs of each postcard to be displayed sideby-side. Interns could then generate metadata by drawing a box around the relevant area of a card and transcribing text
Digitization technician Alexandra McGee photographs an Oilette postcard from the Lauder Collection.
from that area, whether a title, caption, production number, or painter’s name.
In order to recruit interns, we contacted MLS and MLIS programs around the country, asking them to advertise the internship. While the first group of three interns was small, we were ultimately able to scale up to a final cohort of 22. Over the course of the project, a total of 56 interns worked through every card, accurately recording printed content to create metadata before using cataloging standards to further classify each image according to its location and the subjects it depicted. When metadata records had been completed, we digitally overlaid each record onto its associated image, reviewed the final products carefully, and uploaded the newly enriched item to the publicly available digital collection.
Not only did the internships allow us to create metadata records for a vast collection of postcards, but they helped ensure that the records were reliable. In general, crowdsourcing as a practice requires consistent collaboration between participants and institutions in order to guarantee that records are trustworthy. The Art in Miniature project incorporated processes designed specifically to guarantee the reliability of records. By dividing workflows across a number of participants, for example, we were able to focus on improving and finalizing the content produced by the interns, confident in the fact that itemspecific concerns had been flagged as they arose.
We truly valued the opportunity to work closely with so many interns, many of whom submitted constructive feedback that allowed us to continuously improve the program while they honed their already keen metadata capabilities. Without these interns, Art in Miniature could never have achieved what it did: the creation of high-quality metadata records for thousands of postcards in the Newberry’s collection of Raphael Tuck & Sons Oilettes.
Thelaunch of the Raphael Tuck & Sons Oilette Postcards digital resource occurs almost a year after the Newberry announced a new Open Access Policy, making its collections available for any lawful purpose without licensing or permission fees to the library. To take advantage of the new policy, we chose also to publish the entire collection of Oilettes on Internet Archive, a free online library. Not only is Internet Archive’s flexible structure ideal for highlighting visually compelling collections, such as that of the Oilettes, but the site also boasts 6.1 million users around the world, meaning that the Lauder Collection is now immediately accessible to researchers the world over.
It is exciting to speculate how the postcards—with their juxtapositions of imagery and content—might be used by scholars. Already, some are exploring the potential applications
of the new digital collection. Tatiana Seijas, Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University and currently a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at the Newberry, has incorporated other parts of the Newberry’s digitized collections into assignments for her students. She sees the Newberry’s digital postcard collections as providing a publicly accessible way of showing students how to approach postcards not just as illustrations but as objects with specific historical profiles. Now that the Lauder Collection is available online, Seijas is considering how it too can be incorporated into larger projects designed with the aim of “presenting history to a public audience.”
The collection also promises to engage non-academic researchers and users. Jessica Rich, a volunteer at the Newberry, is interested in the Newberry’s postcard collections because they help us see how people once lived. Particularly interesting to Rich is the way the postcards show how people liked to spend their money—not just on postcard souvenirs, but on tourism itself. As she explains, postcards are cheap souvenirs of “something that someone went out to, experienced, and chose to show to others.” As such, postcards like the Oilettes give us insight into the places and objects that everyday people valued during past eras.
Reflecting on the collaborative nature of the crowdsourcing project, Mr. Lauder remarked, “The expertise and professionalism of all involved in the Tuck project—including the Newberry’s staff and interns throughout the country—have made these cards available to a wider public, opening a window onto that past age for all. I am very excited about this extraordinary achievement and am grateful to everyone involved.”
Like Mr. Lauder, the Newberry is excited to see how the items in the Lauder Collection will be used by scholars and members of the public. Yet while the original project of digitizing postcards for public use has been completed, the Newberry is not done with the collection. In the future, we plan to develop another crowdsourcing project to help transcribe the handwritten messages present on many of the Oilettes. The added layer of complexity promised by the transcription of these handwritten messages will open up even more opportunities for research and discussion.
Claire Dapkiewicz and Melissa Griffith are Digital Initiatives and Metadata Assistants in the Department of Digital Initiatives and Services at the Newberry.
Interested in exploring the collection yourself? You can access it here: publications.newberry.org/tuck
The Newberry Celebrates the Arrival of the Helen Balfour Morrison and Sybil Shearer Papers
If you’ve had the chance to visit the Newberry’s spring exhibition The Legacy of Chicago Dance, you are sure to have noticed one of the exhibition’s centerpieces—an extravagant costume from “Fables and Proverbs,” created and worn by modern dance pioneer Sybil Shearer. What you may not realize is that the Newberry is the new home of more than just this beautiful piece of Shearer’s legacy. Correspondence, photographs, and concert programs from Sybil Shearer’s archive, as well as the papers of Helen Balfour Morrison, noted photographer and Shearer’s long-time artistic collaborator, are now a part of the Newberry’s collections thanks to a major donation from the Morrison-Shearer Foundation.
Sybil Shearer (1912 – 2005) was a leading pioneer of modern dance and arguably one of the finest dancers of the 20th century. After a critically acclaimed solo debut at Carnegie Music Hall in 1941, Shearer moved to Chicago, where she taught at Roosevelt College and continued her independent choreography. Soon after arriving, she met photographer Helen Balfour Morrison (1901 – 1984), who became her lighting director, photographer, filmographer, and artistic collaborator for the next 40 years. Morrison is remembered for her “Great Americans” portraits of some 200 artists, authors, and other notables, as well as portraits of many Chicagoans taken over a span of four decades, with most from the 1930s through the 1950s. Also of great value are her 1930s documentary photographs of rural Kentucky AfricanAmerican communities.
Conversations about the donation of the archives began in 2012, when the Northbrook-based Morrison-Shearer Foundation (dedicated to perpetuating the legacy of both artists) reached out to the Newberry’s then-curator of Modern Manuscripts Martha Briggs. Initially, the idea was to donate to the Newberry only the Sybil Shearer materials, which would then join other archives in the Newberry’s Midwest Dance Collections. After surveying both the Shearer and the Morrison papers, Briggs proposed that all of the material should stay together in one repository, and after careful consideration, the Foundation acknowledged it was crucial to preserve the interconnectedness between the two women’s careers and lives.
“Both the Sybil Shearer and Helen Balfour Morrison papers are great additions to the Newberry’s holdings,” says Lloyd Lewis Curator of Modern Manuscripts Alison Hinderliter. “Obviously, Sybil Shearer’s correspondence and photographs dovetail nicely with our Midwest Dance Collections, but Helen Balfour Morrison’s photographs also complement many strengths of our American history and Chicago materials.”
In fact, it was the Morrison papers that were first to arrive at the Newberry, starting with the photographs of Kentucky AfricanAmerican communities that were featured in the 2017 exhibition Photographing Freetowns. To date, the Foundation has donated over 70 linear feet of Morrison’s materials, including the 2018 delivery of the “Great Americans” series, featuring photographs of Robert Frost, Helen Hayes, Nelson Algren, Frank Lloyd
Helen Balfour Morrison
DONOR SPOTLIGHT
Wright, Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein, Mies van der Rohe, Ed Paschke, Amelia Earhart, and Jane Addams.
The dance photographs of Sybil Shearer began arriving at the Newberry in 2019, and the remaining papers and photographs will continue to be received in the coming months. When the Morrison-Shearer Foundation’s donation is complete, the Newberry will have received an additional 60 linear feet of materials to the collection. The complete Morrison-Shearer Foundation’s donation will total 130 linear feet of archives, including nearly 1,000 photographic prints.
“The Morrison-Shearer Foundation is delighted that these materials have found a home where they will be cared for and studied,” says Carol Doty, Board Chair of the MorrisonShearer Foundation. “Our mission is to promote a broader understanding of the artistic legacies of these two great artists,
and we know that at the Newberry, these materials will be publicly available to the widest possible audience.”
To promote the use of the Morrison and Shearer materials, the Foundation has also made efforts to fund public programming at the Newberry (including a recent program as part of The Legacy of Chicago Dance exhibition) and fellowships that encourage research projects related to each artist’s work.
“The Morrison-Shearer Foundation is a wonderful example of how to approach a donation holistically,” commented Meredith Petrov, Director of Development. “The contribution of such rich materials would be enormously valuable to the Newberry in its own right, but the addition of funding for programming and research around the collection shows incredible foresight and generosity. We’re truly grateful to have such a partner.”
Sybil Shearer performs in “Fables and Proverbs” during the 1960s.
Sybil Shearer was one of the pioneers of modern dance.
Forbidden Newberry
On December 11, Next Chapter, the Newberry’s young professionals group, drew back the veil on some of the library’s most secret, spooky, and scandalous treasures at Forbidden Newberry: Volume 2. This special program, designed for the next generation of Newberry supporters, challenged preconceptions about the kinds of items housed at a prestigious research library while exploring historic parallels to current conversations on politics, religion, art, sex, and scams. Attendees were treated to presentations by Newberry staff members Suzanne Karr Schmidt and Will Hansen that highlighted salacious secrets, séances, and spiritualism, respectively.
“Forbidden Newberry offers an intimate, irreverent, and irresistible gateway to the collection,” says Karr Schmidt. “Many Next Chapter members and their guests have never
been Newberry readers. Yet they immediately understand the importance of primary sources once they see the collection encompasses something for just about everyone, from propaganda to erotica, art to kitsch, and fiction to history.”
Since its inception in March 2017, Next Chapter has presented eight educational and mischievous programs on topics ranging from the Popol Vuh to the Newberry’s protest archive to chocolate to calligraphy, all driven by the amazing diversity of materials in the Newberry’s collections.
Next Chapter membership is open to those aged 21 to 45 who make a donation of $50 or more to the Annual Fund.
Benefits include free and discounted tickets to Next Chapter events, invitation for two to Book Fair Preview Night, and more. To join or learn more, contact Luke Herman at (312) 255-3616 or hermanl@newberry.org.
“Forbidden Newberry offers an intimate, irreverent, and irresistible gateway to the collection,” says Karr Schmidt.
Suzanne Karr Schmidt, Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts, presents materials during a “Forbidden Newberry” event.
Will Hansen, Curator of Americana, leads a presentation during a “Forbidden Newberry” event.
VOLUNTEER SPOTLIGHT
Volunteer Impact on Display
While many of the Newberry’s volunteers are highly visible, serving as greeters in the lobby, in the Herget Welcome Center, or at public programs, they also play an equally important role behind the scenes. Elizabeth Seeley started volunteering in the exhibitions department in November 2018, working with Diane Dillon, Exhibition Curator, and Emilie Puttrich, then-Assistant Registrar and Exhibition Specialist. “The Newberry has long been my favorite institution in Chicago, and I was thrilled to have the chance to volunteer here,” says Elizabeth.
As a volunteer, Elizabeth worked on a range of different projects, from cleaning the galleries to exhibition design and installation. She had the opportunity to assist with several exhibitions, including three rotations of the From the Stacks exhibition, deinstallation of Pictures from an Exposition: Visualizing the 1893 World’s Fair, and installation of both Melville: Finding America at Sea and The Legacy of Chicago Dance (which is currently open). Given the short time frames for turning over exhibition space, Elizabeth’s assistance was incredibly valuable to Newberry staff.
Elizabeth cherishes the insider knowledge she has gained through volunteering. “Over the past several months, I’ve learned about how each exhibition item is cared for and tracked as it goes through the process of being selected for display, being prepared, and being installed. I’ve also learned
“I’ve gained a greater appreciation of what libraries like the Newberry can accomplish and the role they play in the community.”
about light meters and the importance of ensuring that items are not exposed to dangerous light levels while they are on display. After exhibitions have been installed, I have found it incredibly interesting to track people’s experiences in the galleries and gather other feedback on the accessibility and usage of the spaces.”
Elizabeth’s favorite aspect of volunteering was the time she got to spend looking over collection material for upcoming exhibitions. The material for The Legacy of Chicago Dance has been especially exciting, and she has relished working with the unique costumes in the exhibition.
Elizabeth has since transitioned into a new role on staff at the Newberry as Exhibition Program Assistant. This fall, she will begin a Masters program in Library Science with a focus on archival work. Volunteering at the Newberry has confirmed that this is the type of work she wants to pursue. “I’ve gained a greater appreciation of what libraries like the Newberry can accomplish and the role they play in the community.”
Elizabeth Seeley installs items in the Newberry’s From the Stacks exhibition.
The Legacy of Chicago Dance.
Recent Events RETROSPECT
AWARD DINNER
The Newberry celebrated acclaimed novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson at its annual Award Dinner on May 6, 2019. Sponsored by Kirkland & Ellis LLP and chaired by Newberry Trustees Richard Godfrey, Andrew McGaan, and Nancy and Richard Spain, the event welcomed a crowd of 250 and raised more than $300,000 to support the Newberry.
Perhaps best known as the author of the critically acclaimed novels Gilead, Home, and Lila , Robinson offered remarks to a rapt audience on the importance of the humanities to American public life.
“Robinson has provided consistently insightful and toughminded commentary on the challenging conditions of our time,” commented President David Spadafora. “Her writing and her teaching illustrate in profound ways the value of the humanities in promoting critical reflection and compassionate understanding —values that also guide our work at the Newberry. We are proud to honor her with the 2019 Newberry Library Award.”
During dinner, Board Chair David C. Hilliard led a tribute to David Spadafora upon the occasion of his retirement, thanking him on behalf of the Board of Trustees for his 14 years of service to the library.
“Under David’s leadership, the Newberry has entered a new age of financial stability and public outreach,” said Hilliard. “We are most grateful for his dedication to the Newberry, and wish him and Carolyn the best in the next chapter of their lives.”
Pictured from left to right: David Hilliard [Chair of the Board], Richard Spain, Celia Hilliard, Nancy Spain [Newberry Trustee], Marilynne Robinson, Andrew McGaan [Newberry Trustee], Richard Godfrey [Newberry Trustee], and David Spadafora [Newberry President]
Marilynne Robinson accepts the 2019 Newberry Library Award from Board Chair David Hilliard.
Carolyn and David Spadafora
Upcoming Events
Since the Newberry’s founding in 1887, the library has provided programs in the humanities for people throughout the Chicago area and beyond. Today, you can explore history, literature, music, and the arts through public lectures, meetthe-author events, exhibitions, seminars, and other programs. Register to attend these free programs online at www.newberry.org/public-programs.
EXHIBITION
The Legacy of Chicago Dance
April 27 – July 6
EXHIBITION PROGRAMS
Symposium on Dance in the Midwest
Saturday, May 18, 9:30 – 3 pm
Patricia Ward Kelly, Spotlight on Gene Kelly: The Chicago Years
Thursday, June 6, 6 – 7 pm
Choreography and the Archives
Thursday, June 13, 6 – 7:30 pm
PUBLIC PROGRAMS
Make Music Chicago 2019
Friday, June 21, 1 – 4 pm
Washington Square Park: 901 North Clark Street, across from the Newberry; in case of rain, Rettinger Hall, inside the Newberry
No registration or tickets required
The 35th Annual Newberry Book Fair
Thursday, July 25 – Sunday, July 28
Thursday and Friday, Noon – 8 pm
Saturday and Sunday, 10 am – 6 pm
No registration or tickets required
The 2019 Bughouse Square Debates: Legacies of 1919
Saturday, July 27, Noon – 4 pm
Washington Square Park: 901 North Clark Street, across from the Newberry
No registration or tickets required
GENEALOGY AND LOCAL HISTORY
ORIENTATION
Usually held the first Saturday of the month at 9 am: June 1, July 6, August 3, September 7, October 5
No registration or tickets required
CHICAGO 1919: CONFRONTING THE RACE RIOTS
An NEH sponsored year-long initiative to heighten the 1919 Chicago race riots in the city’s collective memory. In partnership with DuSable Museum, Chicago Urban League, and others. Visit www.chicago1919.org for more information and registration.
Segregation and Public Education, ‘63 Boycott
Saturday, June 1, 1 – 4 pm
Film screening and discussion
Harold Washington Library, 400 South State Street
Bike Tour: Visualizing the 1919 Riots in Today’s Chicago
In partnership with Blackstone Bicycle Works
Saturday, June 29, 9 – 1 pm
Meet at 31st Street Beach Parking Lot
Reflections of Youth: Spoken Word Performance and Conversation
In partnership with Young Chicago Authors and Kevin Coval
Monday, August 12, 6 – 8 pm
Harold Washington Library, 400 South State Street
The Language of Bronzeville: Literature and Race in Chicago
Tuesday, September 24, 6 – 7:30 pm
Eve Ewing, Nate Marshall, Liesl Olson, Ken Warren Newberry Library, 60 West Walton Street
Policing Racial Violence: 1919 and Beyond
Tuesday, October 15, 7:00 – 8:30 pm
Simon Balto, Robin Robinson
Chicago History Museum, 1601 North Clark Street
Red Summer/Winter Blues
Thursday, November 14, 6:00 – 8:00 pm
Screening and discussion of the rough cut of this new documentary
Barbara Allen, Cameron McWhirter, Jacqueline Stewart DuSable Museum of African American History 740 East 56th Place
April 27 – July 6
A free exhibition drawn from the Newberry’s extensive dance archives
Thursday, July 25 & Friday, July 26 Noon – 8 pm Saturday, July 27 & Sunday, July 28 10 am – 6 pm