Spring/Summer 2020 Issue 14
Explore from a Distance
Newberry virtual programs and digital resources help us stay connected while being apart.
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he Newberry had many exciting plans for this spring, including a new season of public programming, an array of engaging adult education seminars, and a groundbreaking exhibition on Renaissance inventions and innovations. But as COVID-19 began to spread in the United States and public health experts escalated their calls for social distancing, we postponed programs, canceled adult education seminars, and closed our doors temporarily on March 14. In the days following, our staff quickly shifted as many library operations as possible online and began working from their homes, mastering Zoom, and interacting virtually with pets on their laps and children by their sides. Newberry staff rose to the occasion. The library’s many online resources—some that have existed for years, others created in response to the challenges posed by the pandemic—allow researchers, teachers, students, genealogists, and history enthusiasts to interact with our staff and collections. As I write this, my colleagues are fielding research inquiries via email, hosting book clubs on Zoom, providing teachers and parents with digital tools for remote learning, enabling crowdsource project participants to discover and transcribe handwritten sources from the archives, and going live from their homes to share favorite collection items on social media. (You can access some of this work by visiting #NLfromhome on Twitter.) This expanding universe of virtual connections is vitally important during such an uncertain time. To limit the severity of the global pandemic, we have all been asked to isolate ourselves for the common good. Flattening the curve of COVID-19 has thrust us into a new state of existence: being alone together. In response, people across the globe are searching for new ways to connect with one another and with institutions as they navigate seismic shifts in the balance between the individual and the collective. All of us at the Newberry remain committed to connecting people to our collections and our dedicated staff. Your support—both financial and moral—remains critical to sustaining the Newberry and allowing us to continue offering the high-quality service, programs, and expertise that have defined the institution for 133 years. Thank you for being a part of our community and for supporting us. I wish all of you the best of health, and I eagerly await the opportunity to welcome you back to the Newberry . . . soon. Sincerely,
Daniel Greene, President and Librarian
MAGAZINE STAFF EDITOR Alex Teller DESIGNER Andrea Villasenor PHOTOGRAPHY Catherine Gass The Newberry Magazine is published semiannually. Every other issue includes 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 Vince Firpo at (312) 255-3599 or firpov@newberry.org. Unless otherwise credited, all images are from the Newberry collection or from events held at the Newberry and have been provided by the Newberry’s Digital Imaging Services Office.
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Contents FEATURES The Newberry in the Time of COVID-19
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The Newberry’s community of learning transcends the walls of any physical space. It is blossoming online during these uncertain times.
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Teaching History through Poetry Kara Johnson
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How one English Language Arts teacher uses the Newberry’s Digital Collections for the Classroom to teach the 1919 Chicago race riots.
The Next Act Katie Dyson
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Playwright Todd Bauer retires after an illustrious career teaching in the Newberry’s Adult Education Seminars program.
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Drawing on the Past
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Artist Anya Davidson documented all 11 programs in the Newberry’s 2019 series Chicago 1919: Confronting the Race Riots. She describes her creative process.
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DONOR SPOTLIGHT 20 RETROSPECT: Recent Events
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TA K E N O T E The Newberry Receives Outstanding Public History Project Award On March 23, the Newberry accepted the 2020 Outstanding Public History Project Award for Chicago 1919: Confronting the Race Riots. Due to the risk of hosting large events during the COVID-19 outbreak, the National Council on Public History held the 2020 awards ceremony online. “We wanted to bring the city together to engage in public conversations about the 1919 Chicago race riots and to connect that past with the structural racism of the present,” said Brad Hunt, the Newberry’s Vice President for Research and Academic Programs, in an acceptance video shared via Twitter. “The events of 1919 were a critical moment. After the riots, whites moved to solidify and reinforce racial divides. This was a story that had to be told.” Throughout 2019, nearly 2,700 Chicagoans joined the Newberry and its project partners for 11 community conversations exploring the decisive role the riots played in cementing racial division and inequality in Chicago. Programs included film screenings, youth poetry slams, panel discussions, and even a bike tour visiting the key sites of violence and resistance during the riots. “This project is a model umbrella initiative that stretched across the city and brought people together to remember one dark event and its aftermath,” noted the NCPH award committee. “The most impressive aspect of the project is the way diverse organizations such as the Chicago Urban
Above: The Newberry and Blackstone Bicycle Works lead a bike tour of the key sites of violence during the 1919 Chicago race riots. June 29, 2019. Photo by Peter Pawinski Below: Scholars Eve Ewing and Kenneth Warren discuss literary responses to racial violence in Chicago. September 24, 2019. Photo by Anne Ryan
League, Chicago Architectural Club, Chicago History Museum, Chicago Public Library, and the Newberry Library worked together to make this project happen.” Chicago 1919: Confronting the Race Riots was made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and by additional support from Allstate Insurance Company and Edith Rasmussen Ahern and Patrick Ahern.
Chicagoans gather to discuss the interconnections between race, migration, and housing. May 4, 2019. Photo by Anne Ryan
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National Endowment for the Humanities Awards the Newberry a Grant to Continue Supporting Groundbreaking Humanities Scholarship The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded the Newberry $382,500 — plus an additional $180,000 in matching grants — to support the library’s longstanding fellowship program over the next three years. “For more than 60 years, the Newberry’s fellowship program has consistently resulted in ground-breaking research because it offers humanities scholars the time they need to work in a world-class collection, surrounded by a supportive community of other scholars and staff,” said Brad Hunt, Vice President for Research and Academic Programs at the Newberry. “With long-term funding from the NEH, Newberry fellows dig deep into the past to develop fresh interpretations of history that enrich our collective understanding of who we are as humans.”
New Acquisition: 1857 Plat Map of Lake Forest This winter, the City of Lake Forest transferred an important map to the Newberry: the oldest surviving copy of the 1857 plat map laying out the then-new Chicago suburb. A welcome addition to the Newberry’s cartographic holdings related to the history of Chicago’s metropolitan region, the rare map intersects with several topics that can be researched in the collection, including the complex relationship between mapping and city planning. “We’re grateful to the City of Lake Forest for preserving this piece of their history, and we are thrilled to be able to provide Newberry researchers with access to it,” said Jim Akerman, Curator of Maps at the Newberry.
The Newberry Earns Commendation from Sotheby’s for Upcoming Exhibition The Newberry was one of four institutions to earn a commendation as part of the 2019 Sotheby’s Prize, which celebrates curatorial excellence and champions the work of innovative institutions that strive to break new ground by exploring overlooked or underrepresented areas of art history. The award was made in recognition of the library’s fall exhibition, Renaissance Invention: Stradanus’s “Nova Reperta.” Opening in Fall 2020, the exhibition explores the conception of novelty and technology through a groundbreaking study of Nova Reperta, a late sixteenth-century print series that celebrated the marvels of the age, including the stirrup, the cure for syphilis, and the so-called discovery of America. “By mounting Renaissance Invention, we’re inviting visitors to explore universal themes that reverberate across time: change, disruption, and technological advancement,” said Lia Markey, co-curator of Renaissance Invention and Director of the Newberry Center for Renaissance Studies. “People living in the Renaissance expressed both excitement and anxiety about the innovations of their time—a mix of emotions we see ref lected in society today.”
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N O W O N N E W B E R R Y. O R G
We’re Live from . . . Home Right now, Newberry staff aren’t just working from home. They’re livestreaming from home. Each week, our curators, librarians, and educators share favorite collection items and digital learning tools live on Twitter. Even at a distance, we continue to provide access to the Newberry’s unique collection, foster community, and support our patrons’ research, teaching, and learning. We’re archiving these videos on the Newberry website so you can watch them whenever you like. Recent videos include a virtual tour of the Newberry’s Curt Teich Postcard Analú López, the Newberry’s Ayer Indigenous Studies Librarian, hosts a live video on Twitter. Archives, the largest public collection of postcards in the country; a demonstration of our online Man’s Greeting, an 1893 book by Potawatomi leader Simon teaching tools for K-12 teachers; a visual and historical Pokagon criticizing the celebration of Columbus and analysis of a 1542 map of Tenochtitlan (present-day Mexico settler colonialism at the World’s Columbian Exposition City) by Hernán Cortés; and a discussion of The Red in Chicago.
A Vestige of the Plague In January 1340, Pepo degli Albizzi started keeping track of his business dealings in a ledger book that is now part of the Newberry collection. The Albizzis were wool merchants in Florence, and Pepo used his book mostly to record the family’s transactions related to wool-cloth finishing and export. The last section of the book, however, includes more personal matters. Under the heading “all my other memoranda,” Pepo listed the ten members of his immediate family who died in June and July 1348—when the Black Death struck Florence as it swept across Europe.
A Beginner’s Guide to Transcribing Our Archives You can help bring our archives into the light by transcribing letters and diaries chronicling American life over the past 200 years. In the process, you’ll contribute to making these documents full-text searchable for researchers online, and you’ll discover stories of how Americans have lived, loved, and weathered difficult times. To help you get started, we’ve created a step-by-step guide to using our transcription website, Newberry Transcribe. Access a range of online resources and activities at newberry.org/explore-at-a-distance.
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The Newberry in the Time of COVID-19 The heart of the Newberry may be the collection, but the soul of the library is the community that coalesces around it. The Newberry’s community of learning transcends the walls of any physical space. It is blossoming online during these uncertain times.
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aunched in 2017, Newberry Transcribe enables users anywhere in the world to view and digitally transcribe more than 50,000 pages of letters and diaries from archival collections held at the library. The website makes accessible to anyone with an Internet connection a wealth of manuscript material, including Revolutionary War business records, diaries of nineteenthcentury settlers, letters written by Willa Cather, and much more. Anyone who chooses to can help make these materials more accessible by transcribing them, turning handwritten words into machine-readable data that researchers can find more easily using keyword searches. And they can do this work even while living under stay-at-home orders in this new world of being #alonetogether.
Newberry Transcribe has been popular from its start three years ago. Between 2017 and March 2020, users had transcribed almost 20,000 pages of the site’s nearly 50,000 total pages. During the last two weeks of March 2020, after the Newberry temporarily closed due to public health concerns over COVID-19, visitors transcribed an additional 5,100 pages, raising the total number of transcribed pages on the site to more than 25,600—a 25 percent increase in just two weeks! “Participatory resources are always popular,” says Jennifer Dalzin, Director of Digital Initiatives and Services at the Newberry. “But with so many people conf ined to their homes, we’ve seen an unprecedented surge in new volunteers and activity. Newberry Transcribe offers users
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Newberry Volunteer Transcribers In Their Own Words “ With libraries, museums, archives, and orchestra rehearsal spaces shuttered, I thought this would be an excellent way to relieve the boredom and make a contribution.” “ It’s quite a lot of fun, especially trying to resist the temptation to properly spell and punctuate a nineteenth-century author’s manuscript!” “ Being disabled, transcribing has helped me to feel like I’m contributing to society by doing this work. I love anything to do with history, how people lived in the past, or what they had to go through. I see what I’m doing as transcribing history for future learning.” “ Getting these sorts of materials into a state where they can be searched through is important to me. This felt like something important to at least try and help with in whatever limited way I could.”
“ I’ve found that I start to feel close to the people whose diaries and letters I am transcribing. I’ve transcribed Julia Newberry’s diary. She wrote about attending a concert conducted by Strauss and she and her sister could hardly sit still—they wanted to get up and dance! Then she wrote about her house burning in the Great Chicago Fire and losing all the letters that her deceased father had written her. She was heartbroken.” 6
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Live Look: Simon Pokagon’s Red Man’s Greeting with Rose Miron
Live Virtual Tour: The Curt Teich Postcard Archives with Will Hansen
Live Look: Cortes’s Map of Tenochtitlan with Analú LÓpez
Live Look: Lady Mary Wroth’s Scandalous Unpublished Manuscript with Becky Fall
Live Demo: Digital Collections for the Classroom with Kara Johnson
On the library’s social media accounts, librarians, curators, and educators are taking turns going live from their homes, sharing their favorite collection items, digital learning tools, and, in some cases, even their pets with audiences around the world.
Live Demo: Exploring Early Modern History Online with Chris Fletcher The Newberry Magazine
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an opportunity for in-depth engagement with our collections right from their living rooms—and a number of folks are taking us up on that offer right now.” As one transcriber told us: “With libraries, museums, archives, and orchestra rehearsal spaces shuttered because of the COVID-19 virus, and with instructions from authorities to ‘stay home and practice social isolation,’ I thought this would be an excellent way to relieve the boredom and make a contribution.” “It’s quite a lot of fun,” wrote another participant in the transcription project, “especially trying to resist the temptation to Historian Ann Durkin Keating shares her latest research during a virtual conversation on April 14. properly spell and punctuate a nineteenthcentury author’s manuscript!” Many people who participate in Newberry Transcribe search for ways to engage students through video conferencing, appreciate opportunities for worthwhile diversion while social our Digital Collections for the Classroom site is there to serve their distancing. Other users have more personal reasons for joining needs. the transcription effort. In addition to promoting pre-existing digital resources, Gordon from Canada was initially drawn to our site library staff are finding new ways to advance the Newberry’s because he’s in the midst of transcribing and re-typing his mission remotely. On the library’s social media accounts, grandfather’s diaries. “Getting these sorts of materials into a librarians, curators, and educators are taking turns going live state where they can be searched through is important to me,” from their homes, sharing their favorite collection items, digital he says. “This felt like something important to at least try and learning tools, and, in some cases, even their pets with audiences help with in whatever limited way I could.” around the world. “Being disabled, transcribing has helped me to feel Thousands of people have viewed these videos already, and like I’m contributing to society by doing this work,” says the Newberry will continue to experiment with this form of Christian Mobley, another Newberry Transcribe contributor. engagement while the library remains closed to the public. “I love anything to do with history, how people lived in the Newberry programming is going virtual, too. On past, or what they had to go through. I see what I’m doing as April 14, for example, Newberry Vice President for Research transcribing history for future learning.” and Academic Programs Brad Hunt interviewed historian “As we try to make sense of life during a historic event, Ann Durkin Keating for an audience of viewers on Zoom. the act of transcription can provide both a distraction and Meanwhile, the library’s Center for Renaissance Studies a reminder that this too will pass,” said Digital Initiatives is hosting regular book discussions and writing workshops Manager Jen Wolfe. “We’re grateful to the public for making online for graduate students searching for ways to continue these first-hand accounts of surviving war, fire, f lood, and past their studies remotely. epidemics more accessible to the Newberry’s researchers.” No one knows for certain how long this pandemic will While Newberry Transcribe offers ways for members of the last or when social distancing guidelines will be relaxed. public to stay active in our community and continue making use No matter what, the Newberry will continue to fulfill its of our collections, other digital resources at the Newberry serve mission of providing access to its collection and building more specific audiences. communities around stories that bridge the past and Digital Collections for the Classroom, an online resource present—whether in person or (for the time being) from a designed for teachers, has been one of the most frequently safe, digitally mediated distance. consulted parts of the Newberry website for years. The platform features high-resolution images of primary sources from our collections, contextual essays written by scholars, and discussion questions for students. Now, as teachers (and parents, too!)
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Teaching History through Poetry How one English Language Arts teacher uses the Newberry’s Digital Collections for the Classroom to teach the 1919 Chicago race riots
used a c t a Wh riots e c a r the on o g a c i in Ch 1 9 1 9? , 7 2 July
By Kara Johnson “What caused the race riots in Chicago on July 27, 1919?” “What were the Chicago stockyards?” “Why does racism still occur?” These questions appear on Post-It notes on the walls of Valerie Person’s sophomore English Language Arts class at Currituck County High School in North Carolina. Person’s students are starting a new chapter in their class: a unit on the 1919 race riots in Chicago. And they’ve asked these questions to guide their work. These sophomores are looking to sources across the humanities, analyzing historical documents alongside works of fiction and poetry related to the race riots. Person knows that
Valerie Person teaches her class about the 1919 Chicago race riots. Photo by Sara Allman
What were the Chicago stockyards ?
W h y does raci s m s t i l l o c c u r? her experimental, interdisciplinary class challenges expectations, and she relishes being able to respond to questions about her approach. She says with a laugh, “I learned early on in my career that it was a good thing when I was asked questions like, Why are we doing history in English class?” Person has been an active participant at the Newberry, including taking part in Reading Material Maps in the Digital Age, a 2018 National Endowment for the Humanities summer
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seminar for K-12 teachers held at the library. During that seminar, she explored the intersections between technology and traditional cartography, the decisions that go into creating and producing maps, and the role of “place” in making and reading literature. She learned techniques for teaching with maps, while also cultivating her interest in how geography affects one’s interpretation of literature— including poetry. Her passion for poetry in particular recently brought Person back to the Newberry— virtually, this time. After reading Eve Ewing’s acclaimed poetry collection, 1919 (published in 2019), Person followed a path of literary and historical discovery Published in 1922, The Negro in Chicago reported on the causes of the 1919 Chicago race riots. that eventually led her to the library’s suite of digital resources “Marriage and Family in Shakespeare’s England,” among many for teachers. others. These digital collections have been viewed more than Ewing’s poems ref lect on the violence that erupted in 300,000 times. In 2018, nearly 200,000 users from all over the Chicago in the summer of 1919, after an African American world visited the website. teenager named Eugene Williams was murdered at a segregated beach on Lake Michigan. As she explained at a Newberry public erson wholeheartedly subscribes to a philosophy and program this past autumn, Ewing—an assistant professor in the Twitter movement known as #TeachLivingPoets, which University of Chicago’s School of Social Service Administration encourages using the work of contemporary poets in the and acclaimed author, poet, and visual artist—was inspired to classroom to make poetry more accessible and relatable for write 1919 after reading The Negro in Chicago (1922), a lengthy young adults. She constantly questions which writers are being report by the Chicago Commission on Race Relations, a taught and asks why, in ways that she hopes will empower committee charged with investigating the cultural, social, and students to do the same. economic factors that led to the 1919 riots. In addition to diversifying her syllabus, Person teaches Person wanted to teach 1919 in her class. And she also literature through an interdisciplinary lens, especially by wanted to guide her students to learn more about Ewing’s incorporating historical documents into her poetry units. In the source material and other primary source documents about the process, Person often invites her students to “unlearn” deeply riots. To do so, she turned to the Newberry’s Digital Collections ingrained ideas about how humanities disciplines should be kept for the Classroom (DCC), an online resource featuring highseparate from one another. quality digital images of primary sources held at the Newberry, She explains, “A lot of times my students come to me content-based essays by subject experts, discussion questions, with a very defined idea of what an English class should look and supplemental K-12 classroom activities and lesson plans. like. My class does not look like that very often, and so they Supported by The Grainger Foundation, the Newberry’s question it. Some are resistant to combining history and DCC includes resources for teachers on nearly 100 different literature in the same class, because by the time they get to humanities subjects, and it is still growing. high school, they’ve been exposed so much to the idea that Topics include “World War II and American Visual these subjects should be distinct.” Culture,” “Flappers, G-Men, and Prohibition Legacies,” and
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A poem from 1919 about Emmett Till—a Chicago-born African American teenager who was lynched in 1955 while visiting relatives in Mississippi—demonstrated the value of learning historical context alongside poetry, while leaving an indelible impression on the students. Person says that prior to reading 1919, her students had never heard of Till. By the end of the unit, they were moved by the way that Till’s death illuminates an uglier side of America’s past—and present— that everyone should know. Her students encouraged her to continue to teach this tragic moment in American history to future classes. To contextualize Ewing’s poetic interpretations of the 1919 race riots, Person relied on the historical sources on the Newberry’s DCC platform. She consulted the Newberry’s “1919 Race Riots” digital collection, written by Dr. Megan Geigner, an Assistant Professor of Instruction in Theatre and Drama at Northwestern University. This particular DCC describes in detail the events and aftermath of the race riots, as well as the representations of the violence in multiple media, including newspapers, photography, cartoons, pamphlets, and maps. The sources in the collection perfectly complemented Person’s 1919 poetry unit. Person says the DCC helped her achieve two goals: filling gaps in historical knowledge and context and answering some of the questions that Ewing’s provocative text had generated among her students. The diverse range of digitized materials featured in the DCC provided powerful visual representations of the emotionally evocative scenes depicted in Ewing’s poems. One particular document, a page from the Chicago Tribune listing the dead and injured in the race riots, demonstrated the importance of humanizing the people affected by the riots. When placed alongside other items in the DCC, which include anonymous statistics of the injured or dead, this list encouraged students to look beyond statistics and consider human experience.
Eve Ewing’s latest book of poetry, 1919, inspired Person to teach the 1919 Chicago race riots through both literary and historical sources. Photo by Sara Allman
“It’s very easy to get caught up with the data, the numbers,” says Person. “But what we worked hard on is recognizing the individual names and the stories behind them.” Her students certainly responded to that idea. She describes overhearing students commenting to each other with remarks like, “Writing their names, that is humanizing them. These are human beings.” Person’s course design, Ewing’s poetry, and the DCC all center African American experiences. Consequently, they destabilize one persistent—and inaccurate—historical explanation of the race riots: that white immigrant workingclass Chicagoans felt threatened as a result of African Americans arriving in the North during the Great Migration. According to Geigner, this explanation too often functions as an apology for white supremacy, and fails to account for migrants’ individual experiences.
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xploring the murder of Eugene Williams and the violence that erupted and spread across Chicago in 1919 enabled Person to teach her students about “the roles of perpetrator and bystander.” She asked students to think about the past on a personal level, inviting them to consider what they would have
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This map from The Negro in Chicago is featured on the Newberry’s Digital Collections for the Classroom platform.
done if they were placed in a certain situation. Many students were shocked by the bystanders who did not help Williams as he was drowning after being struck with a rock. According to Person, the students asked: “‘How could people witness what happened on that beach initially, and not stand up for what was right?’ It was shocking to them.” Successful teaching, Person recognizes, requires activating students to learn to their fullest potential. She explains that students in her Language Arts class are exceptional, because they all “come in every day hungry to learn and soak everything up like sponges.” This hunger for learning is fed by Person’s experience with digital learning and her creative, interdisciplinary approach to teaching literature. When teachers adopt an interdisciplinary, student-based model like Person’s, students become more active in making their own connections across topics and primary sources. For instance, the unit on the race riots prompted some students to bring their own family histories into the class. During a discussion of the Great Migration, one student mentioned that his great-grandmother had migrated from Mississippi to Chicago and was living in the city during the 1919 race riots. He learned about her experiences before she passed away, and still visits relatives in Chicago occasionally. That he was able to share that part of his life with the rest of the class “was particularly meaningful to him,” Person notes. As Person’s wonderful combination of teaching strategies, primary sources, and creative interpretations of historical events 12
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demonstrates, studying the humanities is so much more than memorizing names, places, and dates. “If I could give a student one quality, before they walk into the classroom, it’s intellectual curiosity—that hungry curiosity,” she says. “If they have that, it makes what we as teachers do not only delightful—it makes it a lot easier. You can teach the skills, but if they have the curiosity, that’s a win-win.” Person’s investment in her students, provocative teaching approaches, and welcoming and open classroom environment will allow her students to reap the rewards of that curiosity for years to come. Kara Johnson is Manager of Teacher and Student Programs at the Newberry.
The Newberry Library takes pride in supporting teachers and students across the country and the world. One critical way we extend our reach beyond the library’s walls is through digital resources like Digital Collections for the Classroom. For more information on Digital Collections for the Classroom, please visit dcc.newberry.org.
“ It’s very easy to get caught up with the data, the numbers. But what we worked hard on is recognizing the individual names and stories behind them.”
A table from The Negro in Chicago shows the actual number of deaths and injuries caused by the riots––as compared to the numbers reported during the riots. Available on Digital Collections for the Classroom.
Three days after the conf lict began, Chicago was still reeling from violence as depicted in these photographs from the Chicago Daily Tribune.
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The Next Act By Katie Dyson
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n many Thursday evenings over the past decades, students in Todd Bauer’s Newberry seminars have watched Mike Nussbaum deliver a David Mamet monologue from American Buffalo full of, as Todd puts it, “nothing but anger and four-letter words”; they’ve passed around Deanna Dunagan’s Tony Award for August: Osage County; interviewed Pulitzer Prize-winning playwrights like Martyna Majok; and learned about theater from a range of artists, actors, directors, and writers who make it happen. Todd believes that classroom learning, like theater, is an embodied experience. It’s a deeply collaborative and communal process. “The more you’re community-oriented, the more you’re nourished,” he says. Todd Bauer is a masterful teacher and an accomplished playwright, as well as an ensemble member of the New Yorkbased Apothetae Company. His plays have been performed as staged readings, workshops, and productions at venues including Chicago’s Raven Theatre and The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC. For many years, Todd questioned whether he could turn his passion for theater into a sustainable career. He’s been legally blind since the age of eight. After being diagnosed with a form of macular degeneration, Todd embarked on a career as an accountant, seeking the stability afforded by his business degree from Miami University. “I felt like it was prudent to pursue a very safe and secure path. In my heart, my passion was always writing and teaching.”
Deanna Dunagan, Tony Awardwinning actress of August: Osage County, with Todd Bauer.
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Todd Bauer poses on the front steps of the Newberry before teaching one of his Adult Education Seminars.
Initially drawn to Chicago for its accessible public transportation, Todd quickly threw himself into the life and culture of the city. “I was just picking up all kinds of pamphlets everywhere,” he says. In 1992, he made his way to the Newberry for an Adult Education Seminar on American theater with Terry McCabe, now the Artistic Director of City Lit Theater Company. The experience left a lasting impression because McCabe didn’t teach the iconic plays that Todd expected; instead, McCabe focused on the craft of playwriting. “Terry didn’t teach the classics like Death of a Salesman. These were plays that either Terry was going to do that season or plays that had just arrived in the mail. It was my first little instance of glimpsing behind the curtain, because up to that point my parents had always taken me to the theater but I knew nothing about how it was made.” Enrolling in multiple Newberry seminars gave Todd an escape from his day job as an accountant and allowed him to explore his passions for literature, theater, and writing.
“ The play doesn’t exist until it’s embodied by actors on stage with music and costumes and everything else in front of the audience. Tom Stoppard has a great line that says, ‘The text exists so that something more mysterious may transcend it.’” In 1995, Todd signed up for Bill Savage’s Newberry Adult Education Seminar on the Beat Generation. Bill readily admits that Todd, then a writer for Beat Scene magazine, knew more about the Beats than he did. Todd quickly became the seminar’s co-leader. He brought a rare intellectual energy and a genuine desire to connect with others in the seminar, even forming a book club that lasted years after the seminar ended. Recognizing Todd’s knack for teaching, Bill recommended that he become an instructor in the Newberry’s seminars program. Now, after more than twenty years of teaching at the Newberry, Todd is retiring this spring.
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he Newberry’s Adult Education Seminars program occupies a unique space in Chicago’s cultural landscape. Todd values the fact that the program offers the purest form of teaching and learning. There are no prerequisites and no grades. All the seminar participants are eager to learn. “It’s not a means to an end in anything,” Todd says. “Learning is an end in itself.” Todd’s seminars always stand out. Like the plays he teaches, his classes set the stage for many voices and perspectives,
including his own as a working playwright. At the beginning of each seminar, Todd reminds participants, “The script is not the play. This is the text of the play.” What he means is that “the play doesn’t exist until it’s embodied by actors on stage with music and costumes and everything else in front of the audience.” Todd continues, “Tom Stoppard has a great line that says, ‘The text exists so that something more mysterious may transcend it.’” As the seminar develops, Todd invites students into the mystery of theater by pulling back the curtain and exploring the artistic choices made by playwrights, actors, musicians, artists, and directors. Each class focuses on a single play and features a guest speaker from the Chicago theater community, inviting discussions of both what’s on the page and what it takes to bring the script to life. This is the magic of Todd Bauer’s theater seminars: their ability to transcend the boundaries between audiences and artists, the classroom and the Chicago theater community. As Todd’s students enjoy the opportunity to learn about theater from the people who make it, guest speakers also
Todd values the fact that the Adult Education Seminars program offers the purest form of teaching and learning.
Literary scholar Bill Savage (right) shares his perspective with students during one of Todd’s classes.
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Todd’s classrooms are democratic spaces where everyone has something to offer and everyone learns something new. benefit from the questions students ask. Todd cites one of his mentors, playwright Lisa Dillman, in this regard. According to Dillman, “When you’re writing a play you need to see it with inside and outside eyes. When you’re writing it, you always see it with inside eyes because you know everything that’s going on with the characters. The tough skill to develop as a writer is to only view what’s on the page with outside eyes.” Todd’s students give visiting playwrights an audience of “outside eyes,” offering thoughtful feedback and fresh perspectives on both old favorites and works in progress. Todd’s classrooms are democratic spaces where everyone has something to offer and everyone learns something new. For Todd Bauer, though, theater is about more than art or community—it’s about living. “The play only exists for that moment you’re seeing it. You can go back the next night or the same day to the same production of the same play by the same company— it’s a different experience. You can see a video recording of the performance you attended—it’s a different experience. There’s a lot of power in knowing that this only exists for this moment. F. Scott Fitzgerald has a great line: ‘Beauty is only possible if poignancy exists.’ “We know that our life is finite and that this experience is ephemeral and that’s what makes it precious, that’s what makes it beautiful. Theater is an art form where the medium itself manifests our deepest experience on a metaphysical level. “A director of mine, Jonathan Wilson, once said, ‘The great plays are depthless,’ meaning that the minute you mine one level completely, a whole other level opens up. Experiencing a Bauer with Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Martyna Majok
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play like that makes you realize that you are depthless and that you can be opened up to an even larger experience of life. To me, it’s not about finding a meaning. It’s about finding an experience of being alive. And that’s what great theater and great art can do.” It’s also what great teaching can do. Todd Bauer has been an invaluable member of the Newberry’s community for more than two decades. In addition to teaching hundreds of adult learners, Todd collaborated with Martha Briggs, the Newberry’s former Lloyd Lewis Curator of Modern Manuscripts, to collect the papers of “all the storefront theaters and hustling playwrights” in Chicago’s vibrant theater scene. In addition to donating his own papers to the library, Todd helped the Newberry acquire the Chicago Reader’s theater photographs as well as archival material from theater producer Hope Abelson, actor Mike Nussbaum, director Bob Sickinger, and playwrights Lisa Dillman, Margaret Lewis, Tekki Lommicki, Mike Ervin, and David Scott Hay. Todd’s efforts to record and preserve Chicago’s theater history will live on in the Newberry’s archives for future generations of scholars, historians, artists, and students to discover. In a world-class city full of cultural institutions and artistic communities, the Newberry has played an outsized role in Todd’s life. In addition to being a home for his passion for teaching, Todd met and married his wife, Julia Anderson Bauer, in the library. This summer, they head west to Montana for a change of pace, a new adventure, and more time to write. Todd Bauer is a model of intellectual generosity and spirit. His decades of teaching have indelibly changed the Newberry, and his legacy will continue to shape the Newberry’s community of learning for decades to come. Unsurprisingly, Todd thinks philosophically—like a playwright—about life transitions. “One of the beauties of saying goodbye is that you fully feel what you’re saying goodbye to,” he says. Katie Dyson is Manager of Adult Education Seminars at the Newberry.
Drawing on the Past A
rtist Anya Davidson attended all 11 community conversations held as part of the Newberry’s Chicago 1919 series in 2019. Davidson distilled each event into a two-page cartoon, a form of documentation that some might not think to apply to something as solemn as the 100th anniversary of the 1919 Chicago race riots. But Davidson’s cartoons treat the moment with warmth, respect, and humanity; they live on as a succinct record of the Chicago 1919 project as well as an homage to the people who came together throughout the year to confront the long history of racial division in Chicago. Here, Davidson describes her artistic process and her experience documenting Chicago 1919: Confronting the Race Riots.
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raphic journalism is a genre G that goes back to the turn of the twentieth century. Recently it’s been getting a lot more attention, and it’s become a vital medium for documenting current events.
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At each event, I’d record the audio from the program while making sketches in a notebook. Listening back to my audio recordings, I can hear my pencil working furiously in the moment. I was basically in a fugue state, just trying to capture as much information as possible.
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I wouldn’t consciously outline the comics during the programs. It was only in retrospect, after a program had ended, that I’d return to my notes and realize that I’d f lagged an important moment—something that let me know: Maybe this is one of the kernels I want to pull out of the event for the comic.
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I got into graphic journalism a few years ago while covering the Women’s March for the Chicago Reader. One of the aspects of the assignment that interested me was talking to people and understanding why they were there. Having a notebook gave me some legitimacy and some extra courage to approach people. I was struck by how open so many people were to talking to me.
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In addition to documenting the programs in the 1919 series, I wanted to represent who was attending the programs—and why. I thought that would add to the narrative and to the broader picture.
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I honestly enjoyed documenting all the programs in the 1919 series. But one of the highlights for me personally was “The Language of Bronzeville” [with poet/sociologist Eve Ewing and literary scholar Ken Warren]. As an artist, I relate to history via art and literature. Hearing about the creative responses to the 1919 race riots enabled me to feel that unbroken thread of artists and intellectuals through time.
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Access Anya’s comics at chicago1919.org
Anya Davidson works in her home studio. The Newberry Magazine
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DONOR SPOTLIGHT
Creating the Library of the Future Sue Furman visits the Newberry’s IT Department earlier this year.
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“ I’m proud to be a librarian because it’s about serving people and giving them access to the information that they need. Digital tools help us do that.”
hen asked about her successful library career, Sue Furman half-jokingly attributes it to “the quirk of having been a girl able to understand machines.” Sue is a vibrant personality, a self-described perfectionist, a dedicated librarian, and a member of the Blatchford Society, the Newberry’s planned giving society. She’s also one of the tech whizzes who helped launch the Newberry into the Internet Age in the 1990s. In addition to repairing malfunctioning equipment, Sue began Sue has always been dedicated to serving the public. After helping libraries computerize their card catalogs, an important step earning her Master’s in Library Science in 1980, she joined a team toward making information more accessible. “I’m proud to be a of librarians tasked with building a public library from scratch in librarian because it’s about serving people and giving them access Darien, Illinois. “We literally had to go to a bookstore and buy to the information that they need. Digital tools help us do that.” a library,” Sue says with a laugh. “That’s not something you get When Sue interviewed for a position at the Newberry in 1990, to do every day.” In just six months, the team built the Darien Associate Librarian Mary Wyly knew that the library needed to Demonstration Library and convinced the public that it was computerize its catalog—and that Sue was the woman for the job. worth their time and tax money. “Our biggest selling point was Sue served as the Newberry’s Director of Computing that we could get our users information from anywhere in the Services from 1990 to 1999. During that time, she was also part country using Interlibrary Loan.” (Interlibrary Loan is a service of an informal interdepartmental alliance of female librarians led that allows readers to request materials from other libraries— by Mary Wyly and including Sue in computing services, Hjordis including the Library of Congress.) “That was a big deal for our readers. It gave them access to information like never before,” Sue explains. After leaving Darien’s new, fully functioning public library district, Sue continued to work as a librarian in the Chicago area. No matter where she went, though, one thing remained constant: “When machines stopped working, they came looking for me.” Sue had a knack for technology from a young age, due in part to the inf luence of her father. “My father didn’t particularly want a child, but if he was going to have one, he was going to have a boy. Instead, he got me.” But the things that were supposedly “for boys,” like machines and engineering, interested her, too. And she was good with them. “Machines just made sense to me.” The Newberry’s IT department in 1990
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“ Never in my wildest dreams did I think I’d be able to contribute.... But I’m in a place now that I can.”
Sue enjoys a moment while installing new equipment at the Newberry.
ably one of the best jobs I ever had.” When people come to the Newberry, they aren’t just looking up old information—they’re generating new knowledge. “I remember watching students enter the building and, after a moment or two of uncertainty, realizing just how much they could do here.” That unique type of engagement combined with the library’s dedication to service led Sue to include the Newberry in her estate plans. “Never in my wildest dreams did I think I’d be able to contribute. I’m a librarian and my husband’s a high school teacher! But I’m in a place now that I can.” Sue and her husband Vince are now members of the Blatchford Society and are building upon the legacy of service Sue began at the Newberry in 1990. “The reasons I became a librarian play out here at the Newberry every day,” Sue explains. “I’m a librarian. I connect people with the information they need, and I want to help keep doing that.” During a recent visit to the Newberry, Sue stood in the Herget Welcome Center. More than twenty years after finishing her time as Director of Computing Services, she took in staff, volunteers, and readers using computers to explore the collection just steps from the front doors—a reality she helped create. “I think I’m going to cry. The science fiction we wrote in the ‘90s is real now. We created the library of the future.”
Halvorson in reader services, and Margaret “Kitty” Brenneman in cataloging. Together, these four women worked to bring the latest technologies to the Newberry and implement them to best serve readers. They met every week to discuss, plan, and advocate. “People must have thought we were brewing witches’ potions in there because we’d disappear for hours,” Sue jokes. The result of their efforts? In 1990, the technology available to the public at the Newberry consisted of four terminals on the third f loor with ten to fifteen percent of the catalog loaded To learn more about the Blatchford Society, please onto them. But by the time Sue left in 1999, the Newberry was contact Natalie Edwards at (312) 255-3544 or connected to the Internet, had computers available for public edwardsn@newberry.org. use, had installed its first firewall, updated its telephone system to eliminate a literal switchboard, built its first institutional webpage, and established personal email addresses for all employees. “When you put the dates together, you realize that the Newberry was right at the forefront of technology thanks to us four caballeros,” Sue says, using her nickname for the four-woman team. “What we held on to was that the Newberry was free and open to the public—not just to specialized academics and researchers. That statement drove the nineties. It drove us.” Sue, Mary, Hjordis, and Kitty helped staff and technology at the Newberry work together to introduce readers to the rich world of its collections. “Looking back, I have so many fond memories of the Newberry,” Sue ref lects. “It was probThe modernized IT department, 1999
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RETROSPECT
Recent Events JUN FUJITA: AMERICAN VISIONARY CURATOR TALK WITH GRAHAM LEE, KATHERINE LITWIN, AND FRED SASAKI To commemorate the opening of Jun Fujita: American Visionary, an exhibition jointly presented by the Newberry and the Poetry Foundation, curators Katherine Litwin and Fred Sasaki of the Poetry Foundation sat down with Jun Fujita’s great-nephew Graham Lee on February 4. The speakers provided a behind-the-scenes look at the development of the exhibition, how it expanded upon the Poetry Foundation’s earlier version staged in 2017, and how they worked with Newberry staff to bring it to the library. Lee shared illuminating biographical details about the man who captured images of many of the most infamous moments in Chicago history, including the Eastland Disaster, the 1919 race riots, and the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. The exhibition and this program were co-sponsored by the Poetry Foundation. Fred Sasaki discusses the bookplate designed for Jun Fujita’s book Tanka: Poems in Exile.
Graham Lee ( Jun Fujita’s great-nephew), Katherine Litwin, and Fred Sasaki discuss Fujita’s life and photography at the opening event for the exhibition Jun Fujita: American Visionary. Photos by Anne Ryan
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FLOE: DANCE AND DIALOGUE ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE On February 25, the Chicago dance company The Seldoms presented excerpts of FLOE, a new dance theater work about climate instability. Through dance, FLOE represents the way anti-science conspiracy theories undermine global efforts to fight climate change. The choreography expresses the urgency of confronting and mitigating the effects of global warming: vanishing polar ice, rising sea levels, extreme weather, and forced migration. Following the performance, Daniel J. Vimont, Professor of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Director of the Nelson Institute Center for Climatic Research, spoke about the effects of climate change on our midwestern region. In the third part of the program, Carrie Hanson, Founding Artistic Director of The Seldoms; Director Seth Bockley; and members of the dance company spoke to the audience about performing FLOE and translating science into choreography. As part of the Newberry’s What Is the Midwest? project, the program was made possible by a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Daniel J. Vimont, Professor of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, discusses the effects of climate change in the Midwest.
Members of the Chicago dance company The Seldoms perform a new work ref lecting on the consequences of climate change. Photos by Anne Ryan
Listen to recordings of these programs at soundcloud.com/newberrylibrary.
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RETROSPECT
Recent Events IMAGINING THE END: WE SHALL NOT BE MISSED! On February 18, Jonathan Lear, the John U. Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought and the Department of Philosophy at the University of Chicago, inaugurated the Newberry’s David L. Wagner Distinguished Lectureship for Humanistic Inquiry. Lear’s lecture was the first in a three-part series exploring how our fears of catastrophe (from climate crisis to political collapse) shape the ways we imagine the ends and purposes of human life. During his lecture—titled “We Shall Not Be Missed!”—Lear meditated on the psychological and imaginative challenges of living in our times. Drawing upon both philosophy and pop culture— from Aristotle to The Simpsons—Lear questioned whether focusing on the possible extinction of human life inspires us to meet today’s challenges or instead cripples us with fear, anger, and despair. Throughout his lecture, Lear paid special attention to the activity of mourning in the broadest sense: how do
Jonathan Lear
humans relate to the past as a way of making room for the present and future? The David L. Wagner Distinguished Lectureship for Humanistic Inquiry Series is funded by David L. Wagner and Renie B. Adams.
JULIETTE KINZIE AND CHICAGO BEFORE THE FIRE: A VIRTUAL CONVERSATION In a well-attended virtual talk held on Zoom on April 14, historian Ann Durkin Keating spoke with the Newberry’s Brad Hunt about nineteenth-century writer and historian Juliette Kinzie, one of Chicago’s forgotten female founders. Drawing
on her book The World of Juliette Kinzie, Keating—a professor of history at North Central College—traced her subject’s biography, recounting how Kinzie defied gender norms to become one of the few nineteenth-century American female historians and an inf luential player in the civic development of Chicago. Illustrating her virtual talk with fascinating photographs and maps, Keating discussed how the New England-born Kinzie married a US government official and moved with him to Wisconsin, where she researched and wrote a detailed account of the region and its Indigenous groups. The Kinzies profited off the eventual appropriation of HoChunk and Potawatomi lands, and, moving to Chicago in the mid-1830s, used their newfound wealth to fund churches, hospitals, and train stations. Meanwhile, Juliette transformed their home in River North into a salon from which she fostered the city’s bourgeoning civic culture.
During a live virtual event, Ann Durkin Keating shared her new research on early Chicago historian Juliette Kinzie.
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Renaissance Invention
Stradanus’s Nova Reperta Exhibition Opens Fall 2020
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