WVU Libraries

Blog post by Stewart Plein, Rare Book Librarian.

Portrait Image Credit:  http://jrbenjamin.com/tag/thomas-jefferson-the-art-of-power/

The Rare Book Room in the West Virginia and Regional History Center owns many treasures from across the globe, from Austen to Diderot, and Linnaeus to Shakespeare.  The collection also includes many American gems; among these are books by Mark Twain and Isaac Asimov, as well as books associated with well-known individuals, such as the two volume legal dictionary once owned by the author of the Declaration of Independence, former President of the United States, and the founder of the University of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson. Read the rest of this entry »

Guest blog post by Dr. Brian Luskey, Associate Professor, WVU Department of History

In “Slavery’s Capitalism,” a history course I taught this semester, my students and I tried a bit of an experiment. Taking advantage of the small class size (10 undergraduate students hailing from a variety of majors across the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences), students learned how to do history by researching, writing, and revising sections of a collaborative research paper based upon archival sources in the West Virginia & Regional History Center.

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Guest blog post by Brandi Oswald, Graduate Student Assistant, WVRHC.

May 9, 2014 marks the 100th anniversary of President Woodrow Wilson’s proclamation designating Mother’s Day as an official holiday. Wilson issued his proclamation in response to a movement started by Anna Jarvis to honor and recognize mothers.  The holiday has its roots in Grafton, West Virginia. Read the rest of this entry »

Tradition and Innovation in Country Music

Unlike artists such as Hazel Dickens of West Virginia (1935-2011), who have sustained traditionally oriented musical styles of bluegrass and folk within their work, contemporary country-pop artists such as Taylor Swift and Lady Antebellum have submerged these rural styles to the vanishing point within the stylistic blend of their hybrid music.  This is of course the way music evolves, and the audience has moved with it.

There was an earlier time, however, after the “Big Bang” of modern country music in 1927, when commercially successful country artists more or less evoked the sounds of traditional rural music.  A collection of music memorabilia recently acquired by the West Virginia and Regional History Center documents two such country artists who are both connected to West Virginia, Cowboy Loye and Buddy Starcher. Read the rest of this entry »

April 23, 2014 will mark the 450th anniversary of the birth of William Shakespeare.  Born in 1564 and considered the greatest writer in the English language, Shakespeare is the author of such well known plays as Romeo & Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

The WVU Libraries, the West Virginia and Regional History Center, and the Department of English will celebrate William Shakespeare’s birthday on Wednesday, April 23, at 2:30 PM in the Robinson Reading Room located in the Downtown Campus Library.  The celebration includes a lecture by English Professor Dr. Sarah Neville titled, “‘Break[ing] into this woman’s mood’: The Lab Space of Shakespeare’s Henry IV”. The talk, according to Dr. Neville, will explore the ways that the current production of Henry IV onstage at WVU’s Creative Arts Center subverts the underlying patriarchal messages of Shakespeare’s play, and adapts it into a feminist tragedy for our modern age. Read the rest of this entry »

In honor of National Poetry Month, today’s post features three wonderful books of poetry in the WVU Libraries Rare Book Collection.  To create this list, I looked for the work of famous poets whom many of us learn about in school.  The Rare Book Collection also includes poetry of many other famous poets who did not make it onto this list (such as Walt Whitman and William Blake) as well as lesser known poets (such as Isaac Asimov, David Selby, and those featured in The Poets of Maine). Read the rest of this entry »

Amy Moore in the 1921 Monticola, the yearbook of West Virginia University

Scrapbooks are compelling snapshots of the past.  Their contents, consisting of the tangible ephemera of daily life such as photos, invitations, movie tickets, etc., can bring to life the experience of past times, even for those with only a modest interest in history.  The recently acquired scrapbook of Amy Moore, a WVU student in the period 1918-1921, affords just such a backward look, and the following highlights some of its contents. Read the rest of this entry »

Margaret Armstrong (1867-1944) made books beautiful.  Armstrong was a young woman when she began her career as a book binding designer.  As one of the first women to enter this new field, she would soon make a name for herself that would be recognized by publishers and the book buying public alike for her beautiful and intricate designs.  Years of innovation and technological advancements developed during the industrial era made the manufacturing of her designs possible. Read the rest of this entry »

Since its beginnings in the 1930s, the West Virginia and Regional History Center has continually sought to collect and preserve maps pertaining to our state and region.  While maps are found in many parts of the WVRHC, the largest gathering exists in the Center’s Map Collection.  Historically, every time a map was added to this collection, staff would type the map’s information on an index card to be placed in the WVRHC’s card catalog.  Patrons looking for maps could browse the cards to find what they needed.  Today, such information is entered into an electronic database, which makes searching the index much easier.

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Just recently, January 13th to be exact, occurred the 150th anniversary of the death of Stephen Foster (1826-1864), who passed away in Bellevue Hospital, New York City.  Even after the passage of more than 150 years, many of his songs are still well-known, so well-known in fact that they are characterized as folk music, and are considered a central part of America’s cultural heritage.  They include such titles as “Oh Susanna” (1847), the unofficial theme song of the California Gold Rush, “Camptown Races” (1850), “Jeanie With The Light Brown Hair” (1854), and “Beautiful Dreamer” (1864). Read the rest of this entry »

In recognition of March as Women’s History Month, the WVRHC is pleased to highlight a recently inventoried collection focusing on the history of women at West Virginia University:  the Women’s Centenary Records collected by the WVU Women’s Studies Center, now the Center for Women’s & Gender Studies. Read the rest of this entry »

Born in 1868, Frank Holme grew up in the small West Virginia town of Keyser, Mineral County, in the 1870s.  From this inauspicious beginning he became one of the most successful newspaper artists of his era, achieving success as an illustrator just before the advent of newspaper photography. Read the rest of this entry »

In this week’s post, the WVRHC celebrates three African American West Virginians whose achievements in business and education contributed to the betterment of our society:  businessmen Charles H. James and John Hunt, and teacher and librarian Victorine Louistall Monroe. Read the rest of this entry »

The recent passing of folk singer Pete Seeger on January 27, 2014 is commanding the attention of media everywhere, including the New York Times (with a reminiscence by Neil Young), The Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, and countless other news outlets, big and small.  This is what we expect when a figure of iconic significance is no longer with us.  The folk musician Paul Metsa, who performed with Seeger at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as part of a Woody Guthrie tribute, said he should be the “fifth face on Mount Rushmore.” Read the rest of this entry »

On January 27, 1945, the largest Nazi death camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau, was liberated by Soviet troops.  In 2005, that date was declared to be International Holocaust Remembrance Day by the United Nations General Assembly, to memorialize the victims of Nazi-led genocide during World War II.  Other concentration camps were liberated before and after Auschwitz, as Allied troops advanced into Nazi-held territory.  The first major camp to be liberated, Majdanek or KL Lublin, was discovered by the advancing Soviets on July 23, 1944; Theresienstadt was not officially liberated until May 8, 1945.  The West Virginia and Regional History Center preserves pieces of Holocaust and post-war history.  (Please note, this post includes an image of the dead.) Read the rest of this entry »

The West Virginia and Regional History Center has acquired a major archive of photographs of the operatic singer Frances Yeend, who substantially contributed to the cultural life of America in the mid twentieth century.  In this collection of 300 photographs, we not only see Yeend costumed in the many operatic roles she rendered, but also her illustrious collaborators, including conductor Eugene Ormandy, tenor Richard Tucker, and composer Gian Carlo Menotti, among others. Read the rest of this entry »

Today we celebrate the life and work of Louise McNeill Pease, a noted twentieth century Appalachian poet and author, poet laureate of West Virginia from 1979 to 1993, and professor of history and English.  She was born on January 9, 1911 in Buckeye, Pocahontas County, West Virginia.  Her writings and personal papers are held in the West Virginia and Regional History Center in A&M collections 2215 and 3201. Read the rest of this entry »

A uniquely valuable resource for historical research is the picture postcard.  First introduced in the later 19th century as a novel method for convenient communication, the postcard soon became a collectible item in itself, apart from its function for conveying messages.  Millions of them were published at the height of the collecting “craze,” peaking in the period 1900-1920.  For present-day researchers, the sheer quantity of images produced during this period opens a wide window onto the material culture of the era, including the architecture, transportation, businesses, etc. of cities, towns, and even rural areas.

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For our pre-Christmas post, we bring you images of Christmas in West Virginia from the 1890s through the 1970s.  These photographs, available through the West Virginia History OnView database, capture scenes of family and community life, the state’s diversity, caring for the sick, providing for those in need, and celebrating the holiday with pageantry and food.

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The advent of the holiday season evokes in the mind sights and sounds, even smells, related to food, music, and winter landscapes.  Certainly one such holiday image would be sleigh riding, and the mountain landscape of West Virginia provides an ideal backdrop for such imagery, such as that found in Randolph County around the small town of Helvetia.  Settled by the Swiss in the 19th century, this isolated community sustained its cultural identity well into the 1900s.

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