Tag Archive for 'history'

Dillinger d. July 22, 1934

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Barbara
on July 22, 2009
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John Dillinger was killed as he left Chicago’s Biograph Theatre after attending the gangster film Manhattan Melodrama on this date (July 22nd) in 1934.

You may have seen the currently-playing film Public Enemies starring Johnny Depp (I did!), which was partially filmed in Wisconsin. It’s based on the book Public enemies: America’s greatest crime wave and the birth of the FBI, 1933–34. The book is available to UWW students and staff from other UW campus libraries by using the free Universal Borrowing service (requested materials arrive in 2-4 weekdays). Other titles, such as Dillinger: The untold story, are also available.

Madison newspaper image day after Dillinger's deathMore information is available from Library article databases and reference materials, such as full-text newspaper databases including NewspaperARCHIVE or ProQuest Historical Newspapers – The New York Times.

Other article databases provide access to articles such as Public enemies keystone cops (American History, Aug. 2009, vol. 44:no. 3, pp. 34-39).

You can also read a 20-page entry (with several photos) on Dillinger in the 2nd-floor Reference Collection title Bloodletters and badmen (Ref HV 6785 .N37).

FBI book coverAnd check out The FBI: A Centennial History, 1908-2008 which details Dillinger and other gangsters as well as other intriguing cases encountered by the FBI in its history. It’s in our 2nd-floor Federal Government Documents collection (call number J 1.14/2:C 33/3) and available online at http://fbi.gov/book.htm. Dillinger is on the cover. Can you spot him?

Please ask a librarian for assistance in finding materials.

Government Printing Office logo

The University Library is a federal depository with many federal, state, local, and international documents on a variety of current and relevant issues available to you in print, microfiche, CD-ROM, and electronically. Come check out your government at the University Library!

Presidential campaign TV commercials, 1952-2008

Published
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Ronna
on May 4, 2009
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I know, I know, after the recent presidential election, we’ve probably all had our fill of campaign commercials. But this web site is worth a few minutes of your time, I promise. The Museum of the Moving Image put together The Living Room Candidate: Presidential Campaign Commercials, 1952-2008. You can watch campaign commercials starting with the Dwight D. Eisenhower v Adlai Stevenson contest of 1952, all the way up to Barack Obama v John McCain in 2008.

The site is easy to browse. Just choose the year for the campaign you are interested in and at the bottom of the screen, thumbnails of the commercials appear, divided into Democrat and Republican. Click the one you want to view, and voila, you’re watching the commercial. You can even watch the “Peace Little Girl (Daisy)” commercial from Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1964 campaign, called by this web site: “the most celebrated and perhaps most notorious of all political commercials.” It aired only once, and was so controversial it even made the cover of Time.

Besides the pure entertainment value, what I really liked is the additional information provided by the site. The credits and a transcript for each commercial chosen are easily accessible, and tabs to the right of the commercial provide information on the campaign, each candidate, and the results of the election (including the number of popular votes, states, and electoral votes won by each candidate).

So take a moment and check out this site. It’s cool, it’s funny–and who knows what you might learn along the way?

World Digital Library: Cultural treasures, at your fingertips

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Ronna
on April 23, 2009
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On April 21, 2009, the World Digital Library debuted. Its mission: “[to make] available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world.”

Developed by the Library of Congress with the support of UNESCO (the United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organization), and many other partner institutions, the WDL contains books, journals, manuscripts, maps, motion pictures, prints and photographs, and sound recordings. At its launch, the site contained contributions from 25 institutions in 19 countries.

You can browse the site by place, time, topic, type of item, or by institution. The movable timeline at the bottom of the home page starts at 8000 BC, and runs up to the present time. Keyword searching is also available. Both browsing and searching can be done in seven different languages: Arabic, English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Chinese, and Russian. Many more languages are found in the actual materials, which are shown in their original languages.

Browsing by type of item, I found and listened to a beautiful rendition of Amazing Grace, played on bagpipes by a military band from Scotland in 1972 (contributed by the Library of Congress). Browsing by place, I looked at the pages of The Four Books in Chapter and Verse with Collected Commentaries (in Chinese), created in China in 1217 (contributed by the National Library of China). And finally, I browsed by time, and studied a 1775 Latin map of the world (contributed by the National Library of Brazil).

As you can see, there are lots of fascinating cultural treasures in this online library, and it will continue to grow. Take a look, and see what treasures you can find!

2009 Pulitzer Prizes

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Carol
on April 21, 2009
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The 2009 Pulitzer Prizes in journalism, letters, drama and music were announced on April 20 at Columbia University. The Library provides access to many of these newspapers through its databases. Any of the Prize winning books that are not available in our Library are available to UWW students, faculty and staff from other UW libraries via Universal Borrowing.

JOURNALISM:

LETTERS, DRAMA and MUSIC:

New Stuff Tuesday – April 21

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kyle
on April 21, 2009
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Motoring

Motoring:
The Highway Experience in America
By John Jakle & Keith Sculle
GV1021 .J33 2008
New Book Island, 2nd floor

With spring on the verge of breaking through, our minds instantly begin to think to summer. When you think of summer, what comes to mind? Personally, I think of road trips. In the last two and a half years, I’ve put over 50,000 miles on my car from driving to Virginia (twice), Colorado, Pennsylvania and countless trips over to the wrong side of the Wisconsin-Illinois border. With that in mind, I thought that Motoring would be a perfect title for New Stuff Tuesday.

Jakle, emeritus professor from the University of Illinois, and Sculle, head of research at the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency, primarily investigate recreational travel from 1900 to 1960, placing particular emphasis on the driver’s experience. The authors cover everything from dealerships and garages, filling stations and roadside attractions, all the way to the rise of the convenience store. The book tackles the subjects of not only American history, but urban planning, business history, technology, psychology and much more.

The authors have written several other books together – the Library has Fast Food: Roadside Restaurants in the Automobile Age (TX945 .J35 1999) and Gas Station in America (TL153 .J27 1994) available in the Main Collection on the third floor.

New Stuff Tuesday – April 7

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kyle
on April 7, 2009
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Milk

Milk:
The Surprising Story of Milk Through the Ages
By Anne Mendelson
SF251 .M46 2008
New Book Island, 2nd floor

In honor of Barb’s 200th blog post over the weekend, this week’s featured title made me think of her and her beloved animal. Oh yeah, and Wisconsin.

Mendelson, a seasoned food writer, takes an exploratory trip down way down memory lane at one of the first foods. In the first part of the book, she examines the origins of milk in the Old World, in which people used sheep’s and goats’ milk to make their yogurt. She then heads to the “Northwestern Cow Belt” (northern Europe and North America as defined by the author) and discusses the modern approaches and practices of the dairy ‘industry’. The second (and best) part of the book – or at least the part that will make you hungry – is a compilation of recipes that feature milk, cream, yogurt and other dairy products. Personally, I’ve always wanted to know what clotted cream was, other than delicious, and how to make it. Now I know!

Milk. Does a body good.

The Donner Party (a tragic April anniversary)

Published
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Barbara
on April 2, 2009
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In April 1846 the Donner and Reed families left Springfield IL for California. They split off from a larger wagon train to follow a so-called shortcut, but that and other difficulties cost them valuable time. When they finally reached the Sierra Nevada Mountains at the end of October they were trapped on the eastern side by heavy snows and food supplies were quickly depleted. A small group set out to get help, but along the way some died and were cannibalized. Seven of this group reached safety on the western side of the mountains in mid-January 1847. Californian relief parties sent to rescue the rest of the Donner Party found that some of the survivors had begun to eat their dead too. The last survivor of the Donner Party arrived at Sutter’s Fort on April 29, 1847. Of the original 87 pioneers, 39 died.

Ordeal by Hunger coverWagons West coverInterested in this bit of history? Search the Library Catalog to find titles such as Ordeal by hunger; the story of the Donner Party (3rd-fl. Main Collection, F868 .N5S7x 1960), Unfortunate emigrants: narratives of the Donner Party (NetLibrary ebook), and Wagons west: the epic story of America’s overland trails (3rd-floor Main Collection, F593 .M475 2002).

Online resources include the brochure of the Donner Memorial State Park and a couple of digitized diaries of Donner Party members:

Knowing How We Got Here

Published
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Barbara
on April 1, 2009
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This week I read Leonard Pitts‘ column in the Janesville Gazette “You can’t understand world unless you know how it was,” in which he laments that many people do not know basic history, and thus cannot put our world today into proper context and fully understand where we are as a society.

The impetus for his column was the passing of historian Dr. John Hope Franklin, who wrote many books on the history of African Americans, including From slavery to freedom, which is “regarded as the seminal text in African-American studies.” The Library has copies of From slavery to freedom, including the original 1947 edition and the 6th (1988) edition (3rd-floor Main Collection, E185 .F825 1988).

Mirror to America coverPitts goes on to suggest additional reading, all of which are titles available in the Library’s 3rd-floor Main Collection:

New Stuff Tuesday – March 24

Published
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kyle
on March 24, 2009
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The Ascent of Money

The Ascent of Money:
A Financial History of the World
By Niall Ferguson
HG171 .F47 2008
New Book Island, 2nd floor

Money, money, money. You can’t live with it, can’t live without it. It makes the world go round and all that good stuff. It dominates the conversation in some form or another when it comes to the nightly news to the water cooler to the classroom. The question is how did it get to be so powerful? This week’s featured title seeks to answer that question.

Ferguson, highly-revered historian and scholar, tackles world history by examining the financial back stories of time. The author claims that evolution of credit and debt has had more of an impact on the rise of civilizations than any technological innovation and cites examples from the Italian Renaissance to the American Civil War. Perhaps by looking to the past can provide answers to today’s tumultuous financial environment.

Women’s History Month film festival

Published
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Ronna
on March 4, 2009
in campus connection
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In honor of Women’s History Month, the UW-Whitewater Women’s Issues Committee, Women’s Studies Department, and the Women’s Resource Center are sponsoring a free film festival of documentaries by and about women.

All films will be shown on Wednesdays at 7 p.m., in the Summers Auditorium of the James R. Connor University Center. The schedule is:

* March 4: “The Education of Shelby Knox” : A self-described “good Southern Baptist girl,” 15-year-old Shelby Knox of Lubbock, Texas has pledged abstinence until marriage. But she becomes an unlikely advocate for comprehensive sex education when she finds that Lubbock, where high schools teach abstinence as the only safe sex, has some of the highest rates of teen pregnancy and STDs in the state.
* March 11: “Desire” : In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, DESIRE offers a poignant perspective on the complicated dynamics of race and class in New Orleans. The film documents the lives of a group of young women from the city–-two teenagers from the Desire housing projects in the Ninth Ward, a working class single mother, and two girls from a prestigious private school–-by letting them film their own stories. Masterfully interwoven throughout the film, these vibrant and candid shorts record the intimate dramas of the girls’ changing lives, and stand in stark contrast to mass media images of hopeless Katrina victims.
* March 18: “Girl Inside” : Following 26-year-old Madison during a crucial three years of her transition from male to female, GIRL INSIDE is a beautiful film that tracks her emotional, intellectual and spiritual journey of self-discovery that is as important as the physical journey of hormones and surgery. Sharing the spotlight is Vivien, Madison’s glamorous 80-year-old grandmother, who has taken on the job of advising her on all things feminine. While Vivien’s attempts to school Madison in old-fashioned codes of fashion and behavior are often hilarious, the juxtaposition of two vastly different experiences of womanhood, from different generations, raises profound issues about the nature of gender, femininity and sexuality.

For more information, see this article from University Marketing & Media Relations.