It’s almost July 4th! How will you celebrate? Andersen & Lenox libraries will be closed on Mon., July 5th. Then it’s back to normal summer session hours as of 8 a.m. on Tues., July 6th.
Whitewater’s festivities have the theme “Celebrating our Hometown Heroes,” starting on July 1st with amusement rides in Cravath Lakefront Park. You can see food vendors and all of the festival events online, featuring the Miss Whitewater Pageant on Friday night, July 2nd, a car show and fireworks on Saturday, July 3rd, and the Whippet City Mile run at 11:30 a.m. on Sunday, July 4th, followed by the parade at noon. Oh, and more fireworks on Sunday.
Check out events happening in nearby communities, too: Milton (events July 1-4 include parade on Sunday, July 4th), Elkhorn (music and fireworks on Friday, July 2nd), Jefferson County communities, Walworth County communities, and Janesville (events include a water ski show and fireworks). To find events in other communities, please search the Internet or ask a librarian (call 262.472.1032, come in, email or chat) for assistance.
Want to learn more? Read the history of Independence Day from History.com, the Library of Congress, or PBS. If you want to spend some time learning more about the Declaration of Independence, along with other founding documents, symbols, and anthems of the United States, check out The Citizen’s Almanac.
Andersen Library is a federal depository library with federal government documents on a variety of current and relevant issues available to you in various formats (print, DVD/CD-ROM, online). Check out your government at Andersen Library!
Pickings were slim at New Arrivals, so it seemed like a good opportunity to share a new online resource. PBS films are often useful teaching tools – plus, they’re entertaining.
The UW System used year-end funds to purchase this collection. Unlike other PBS content in Films on Demand or other services, these titles are owned so we won’t lose access to them. More than 1,400 films are included and I’ve already seen a few I might want to watch. For instance, 1421: The Year China Discovered America. This collection covers many subjects, ranging from art to science, diversity to business, history to social movements.
John Rocco’s lavishly-illustrated book tells the stories of missions to the moon from Sputnik to Apollo 11. His pictures and text explain complicated science and technology concepts in ways that kids (and adults) can understand. Even better than his engineering explanations, though, is his inclusion of all the different types of people (and animals!) that made these voyages possible. The book includes information on the women from many different countries involved at all stages of the projects and programs. This is a wonderful book to read from cover to cover or to dip into and learn about a small piece of the history of voyages to the moon.
How We Got to the Moon
Written & Illustrated by John Rocco
Curriculum Collection, Nonfiction, 2nd Floor 629.45 Roc
When I first moved to St. Paul, Minnesota from Raleigh, North Carolina in 1997, I worked at Hamline University in St. Paul. Across the street was Hancock-Hamline Collaborative Magnet School. The school had many Hmong students attending, and I was not aware of this nationality. The principal provided me a history lesson about how the Hmong people who lived in the mountains of Laos helped the Americans fight against the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War. The Viet Cong were members of the communist guerrilla movement in Vietnam that fought the South Vietnamese government forces 1954–75 with the support of the North Vietnamese army and opposed the South Vietnamese and US forces in the Vietnam War. The Hmong’s participation in the combat against the Viet Cong was called the Secret War. When the war was over, many Hmong were stranded in the mountains of Laos and were attacked by the Viet Cong without the assistance of the American forces.
The principal taught me this history lesson by referring to a large, colorful Hmong story cloth that was proudly displayed in her office. From that point on, I was fascinated with the Hmong culture, and I learned all I could by reading, researching, and attending cultural events like Hmong New Year, Hmong 4th of July Festival, Hmong and Southeast Asian restaurants, and participating in many community events. Eventually, I had the good fortune to travel to Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand and saw for myself the mighty Mekong River. This was the river that many Hmong people had to survive the crossing of to get from Laos to Thailand where there were many refugee camps.
In 2008, I had the honor of reading The Latehomecomer and learning more deeply about Hmong culture. I found it to be an inspiring memoir of the Hmong author’s flight from post-Vietnam terror in Laos and Thailand to the United States. Since the author was a former student of Hamline University, the University invited her to speak to our students about the book. Recently, I had the opportunity to read the book again as a part of the Whitewater Big Read initiative. It was exciting to revisit the language of the author that often flowed like poetry. As a culmination of the reading of the book, we had an opportunity to have a WebEx with Kao Kalia Yang, and her presentation was resplendent with story, recitation, reflection, and artistry. I was so glad that our paths had come full-circle.
Through my second reading of the book and listening to Kao Kalia Yang present her personal accounts of the Yang’s family escape across the Mekong River into Thailand, I was again captured by the lyrical nature of the memoir. The strongest part of Yang’s memoir is the account of her early years, most occurring before her birth in 1980 in a Thai refugee camp. Delivering her was her paternal grandmother, who emerges as a figure of towering importance to the author. The survival of the family was nearly miraculous; flood, disease, poverty, hunger, violence and despair all threatened them continually. In 1987 they finally arrived in Minnesota, where they faced new struggles. During the ensuing 20 years, the parents worked ferociously, the children succeeded academically, and the American Dream, in many tangible ways, was realized.
“Yang has performed an important service in bringing readers the stories of a people whose history has been shamefully neglected,” writes Kirkus. “Yang tells her family’s story with grace; she narrates their struggles, beautifully weaving in Hmong folklore and culture. By the end of this moving, unforgettable book, when Yang describes the death of her beloved grandmother, readers will delight at how intimately they have become part of this formerly … [unfamiliar] culture.”
A brief and impressionistic-feeling introduction to one of the early stars of movie entertainment. Without Charlie Chaplin, it’s been said movies today would not exist in their current form.
His early life in England — impoverished childhood with stints in the poorhouse, early and almost accidental moments on stage illustrating to him the thrill of making people laugh — are sketched out in multimedia and papercut collages, by Caldecott-winning artist Ed Young. (Amazon reviews told me to flip through the pages to animate the Little Tramp character in the bottom right corner, in a likely homage to the “flip books” that helped to create early animation!) The book ends relatively early in his career, when he’s gone to America, been “discovered” by Hollywood filmmaker Mack Sennett, and creates his famous Little Tramp character.
I found the Afterword more interesting for its further biographical details: I see parallels to today’s multitalented artists like Lin-Manuel Miranda who are known to “do it all” in the arts business: Charlie was “Actor, writer, director, composer, songwriter, editor, producer, and distributor” — wow! If you want to see a sample of his work, see this collage on YouTube, featuring his songwriting skills in “Smile” (though sung by Nat King Cole in this video), combined with clips from his movies.
Smile:
How young Charlie Chaplin taught the world to laugh (and cry)
by Gary Golio, illus. by Ed Young
New Arrivals, 2nd Floor 921 Cha
Saved Items Missing: Several users throughout the University of Wisconsin System have reported a loss of item records saved to their Research@UWW account. The problem coincides with the recent upgrade. We have notified our vendor about this issue and they responded that they “expect the fix to become effective during the first week of June.”
In the meantime, you may connect to the old Research@UWW site and login there to view your previously saved items. The old site will remain operational through June.
Saved Searches Will NOT Migrate: If you have Saved Searches in your old Research@UWW account, you will need to recreate them in the new Research@UWW environment. Libguides.uww.edu/primove has more information with screenshots to help you.
Wolves seem to elicit strong emotions in many parts of the world. People either love them or hate them. This year’s wolf hunt in Wisconsin got a little out of control. Your thoughts on the matter will likely depend on the emotions triggered by these furry beasts.
When we were children, my brother David was attacked by a half-wolf dog. My father stitched up his head wounds, but as the day worn on, David’s fever raged. Their island retreat in the Quetico Provincial Park was hours from any hospital. So my father canoed back to the mainland and drove through the night to get David back to the infirmary in Wisconsin where there was a supply of penicillin. David survived — as did Lobo — who had only attacked out of loyalty to our oldest brother. When Lobo bounded out of the cabin, there was his pack mate under “attack” by a scrappy kid who had just landed on the island and had his big brother in a headlock. So while I admire the beauty of the wolf and its place in a healthy ecosystem, I have no desire to get too cozy with them.
But I have always been fascinated by these creatures and have read several wolfish books, including Farley Mowat’s, Never Cry Wolf. In Wolf Island the author traveled to Isle Royale in Lake Superior to study the wolf pack that had crossed the ice and been marooned there since the 1940s. He tracked and documented their relationship to the moose herds on the island to see how they interacted and the effects on both populations. This sort of study was only possible because the animals were pretty much in their natural state, without human intrusion or other outside influences.
What is the true impact of a wolf pack on a moose herd in the wild? Are wolves the ruthless marauders their detractors claim? Read on!
M July 5th (Observance of Independence Day): Closed
See all Andersen Library hours, as well as Lenox Library (Rock Campus) hours, online.
*Please remember that even when the physical Library is closed, or you are remote, you can:
Search the article databases (login when prompted with your campus Net-ID, same as for your campus email or Canvas) or Research@UWW (sign in to access all possible full text) and access online article text or submit ILLiad interlibrary loan requests for articles not available via UW-Whitewater’s libraries,
Ask a librarian for help using email, text, or chat (UW-Whitewater librarians respond to emails when the Library is open, but chat and text are often covered by non-local staff). You also can choose to make an appointment with a UW-Whitewater librarian, which can take place in person, over the phone, or online by Webex.
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The King/Chavez Scholars Program will be holding its annual research poster symposium in the Andersen Library at UW-Whitewater from 8-9:30 am on Thursday, May 6, 2021. The posters are up now and will be available through 12:30 pm on May 6.
This event will also be live-streamed for people who are unable to attend in person!
The K/C Scholars Program is designed to attract exceptional undergraduate students to UW-Whitewater. It was initiated at UWW in the fall of 1997 and has been going strong since then. Each academic year the K/C Scholars are introduced to the research process, participate in a research study, and create their own research proposal and poster. The end of the year Symposium is an opportunity for the rest of us to see what they’ve been up to. This is the first year it is being held in the Andersen Library, and we hope it will not be the last.
A short program will begin at 8 am followed by the opportunity to view the posters and ask researcher any questions you might have. Coffee will be provided.
The best historical children’s books blend the instructive facts and the imaginative story so well that the reader can scarcely tell where one ends and the other begins. This book fits the bill. I didn’t know much before reading this title about the overlapping lives of Walt Whitman and Abraham Lincoln, beyond that they were contemporaries. This book creates a factual story about their time in Washington, D.C. during 1861-1865, and while they never met in person, it is thought that their paths overlapped at times in the city and Whitman witnessed some of Lincoln’s public appearances.
After his brother was injured in a battle, Whitman visited a Union hospital and felt driven by what he saw there to continue to serve the ill and wounded soldiers, to ease their suffering in whatever small ways he could, and to bear witness to the deaths of so many of them by writing letters home to the families.
We don’t know for sure if the two men ever interacted directly, but from some of Whitman’s letters and his later poems “O Captain, my Captain” and “When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,” we can see how strongly he was influenced by Lincoln and his strong leadership through that time of trial. While some of the book is therefore speculation or narrative dramatization, the story still feels very true to life, and the extensive backmatter and notes make it easy for an interested historian to study the facts in more depth.
If you’d like a little poetry to brighten your day, here’s a dramatic reading of the title poem on YouTube.
O Captain, My Captain: Walt Whitman, Abraham Lincoln, and the Civil War
by Robert Burleigh, illus. by Sterling Hundley
New Arrivals, 2nd Floor 920 Bur
Whitewater’s festivities have the theme “Celebrating our Hometown Heroes,” starting on July 1st with amusement rides in Cravath Lakefront Park. You can see food vendors and all of the festival events online, featuring the Miss Whitewater Pageant on Friday night, July 2nd, a car show and fireworks on Saturday, July 3rd, and the Whippet City Mile run at 11:30 a.m. on Sunday, July 4th, followed by the parade at noon. Oh, and more fireworks on Sunday.
