New Digital Collection: Civil War Photographs

The Liljenquist Family Collection of Civil War Photographs
The Liljenquist family donated this collection of ambrotype and tintype photographs to the Library of Congress in 2010. Although there is an emphasis on enlisted men, the images below provide only a sample of the photographs retrieved using such search terms as mourning, families, women, and girls. 

[Unidentified girl in mourning dress holding framed photograph
 of her father as a cavalryman with sword and Hardee hat] 

[Unidentified woman wearing mourning brooch and
displaying framed image of unidentified soldier]

[Unidentified young women in dresses in front of American flag]]

[Unidentified African American soldier in Union
uniform with wife and two daughters]

Interview with Aviator Janet Harmon Bragg

Janet Harmon Bragg (1907-1993) was the first African American women to receive a commercial pilot's license.

Bragg described an earlier attempt to obtain a pilot's license in an interview that is featured on the Smithsonian blog The Bigger Picture. After being told that she did very well on her flight test, Bragg was denied the license because she was a black women.

Learn more about this pioneering aviator by reading Soaring Above Setbacks: The Autobiography of Janet Harmon Bragg, African American Aviator (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996). The book includes photographs of Bragg and group portraits of members of the Challenger Air Pilots Association.

Digital Collection: Betty Parsons Gallery Records and Personal Papers

The Archives of American Art blog is highlighting women who have contributed to the development and understanding of contemporary and modernist art in the United States. The first entry features Betty Parsons (1900-1982), who opened the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York City in 1946. A photograph of Parsons and a letter from Peggy Guggenheim provide just a hint of the 61,000 images that are available online in the Betty Parsons Gallery Records and Personal Papers. See More About the Collection for a biographical profile of Parsons. The Archives of American Art site also includes the transcript of an oral history interview with Parsons (1981). Access additional digital collections, oral history interviews, and collections by topic (e.g., Women) on the Research Collections page.

On This Day: Triangle Factory Fire

On March 25, 1911, a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City killed 146 people. Most of the victims were immigrant women. The tragedy paved the way for sweeping workplace safety laws.

The following web sites, articles, books and documentaries offer a wealth of information about the Triangle Fire.

The Triangle Factory Fire (Cornell) This recently redesigned site provides a variety of sources that document the fire and its aftermath: survivor interviews; photos and illustrations; newspaper and magazine articles; the transcript of the criminal trial; reports; audio of a lecture by Frances Perkins from 1964; and other sources.

Josephine Cammarata

The Cornell site also includes factual information about each of the victims. Josephine Cammarata, one of the final six victims identified, was only 17 and engaged to be married on Easter Sunday. Michael Hirsch's use of newspapers, census records, death and burial certificates, and marriage licenses to identify the six victims is chronicled in 100 Years Later, The Roll of the Dead in a Factory Fire is Complete (New York Times, February 20, 2011).

Chronicling America offers search strategies, key dates, and links to sample newspaper articles about the Triangle Factory Fire. The impact of the photographs in many of these articles is explored in Factory Fire: A Frontier in Photojournalism (New York Times, March 23, 2011).

Preview Dave Von Drehle's Triangle: The Fire That Changed America (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003). Von Drehle discussed the book on Booknotes (August 21, 2003; 58 min.). A number of children's books about the tragedy are also available.

Two documentaries offer additional opportunities for understanding the Triangle Fire from multiple perspectives. One can watch Triangle Fire (PBS) online, and HBO's Triangle: Remembering the Fire will air on CNN on March 26, 2011.

Celebrating Research

Celebrating Research (Association of Research Libraries, 2007) profiles rare and special collections at research libraries in North America. Many of these collections document women's history:

University of Alabama
David Walker Lupton African American Cookbook Collection

University of Arizona Library
The Fred Harvey Hotels Collection

Brigham Young University Library
19th Century Western and Mormon Collection 
Features an image of a journal page by Emmeline B. Wells

University of California - San Diego Libraries
Southworth Spanish Civil War Collection
Features a drawing by a girl and the photograph, "Spanish Refugees in France."

University of Connecticut Libraries
Alternative Press Collection
Features covers from Off Our Backs and other publications.

Cornell University Libraries
Human Sexuality Collection

Duke University Libraries
The Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture

Emory University Libraries
The Carter G. Woodson Library

University of Florida Libraries
Baldwin Library of Historical Children's Literature
Features "Paper doll with extra outfit included with The History of Little Fanny (1810).

Georgia Tech Library
The Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills Collection

Harvard University Library
Emily Dickinson Collection

University of Hawaii at Manoa Library
Hawaiian Sugar Planters' Association Plantation Archives

Howard University Libraries
Moorland-Spingarn Research Center
Features deed of sale from 1844: Caroline, a slave for life.

Louisiana State University Libraries
Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections
Features photo, "Mother and Child," 1890.

University of Miami Libraries
Marjory Stoneman Douglas Collection 

National Library of Medicine
Public Health Films Collection

University of Nebraska, Lincoln Libraries
Willa Cather Collection

New York State Library
Van Rensselaer Manor Papers

Northwestern University Library
The Winterton Collection of East African Photographs

Ohio State University Libraries
The Curtiss Show Print Collection

Oklahoma State University Library
Angie Debo Papers

Rutgers University Libraries
Jazz Oral History Project Collection
Features photograph of Mary Lou Williams

University of Southern California Libraries
Shoah Foundation Institute Visual History Archive

Southern Illinois University Carbondale Library
Katherine M. Dunham Papers

University of Texas Libraries
The Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection
Features photograph, “Elisa García López,” and “Ordaz Mendoza and María Magiscatzin Genealogy.”

Virginia Tech Libraries
International Archive of Women in Architecture

University of Washington Libraries
Japanese American Evacuation and Internment Collections

Wayne State University Libraries
Digital Dress: 200 Years of Urban Style

Flickr and Other Digital Collections from the Center for Jewish History

Louise Waterman Wise and Justine Wise

The Center for Jewish History recently created a Flickr collection in honor of Women's History Month. Although this is a small collection, images of women appear in most of the Center's 25 Flickr sets. In addition, be sure to explore some of the 25,000 digital objects in the CJH Digital Collections; highlights include Emma Lazarus's Notebook, photos and films from the Hadassah Archives, scrapbooks and posters from the Molly Picon Papers, letters written by Abigail Franks in the 1700s, and oral histories from the Sephardic American Voices collection.

New Exhibit: Taxing Visions

Taxing Visions Exhibition Catalog

Taxing Visions: Financial Episodes in Late Nineteenth Century American Art
Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, January 29 - May 30, 2011

This exhibition features 34 works that reflect the economic hardships that women, African Americans, children and artists faced from Reconstruction to the end of the nineteenth century. Curators Jessica Todd Smith and Kevin Murphy discuss four of these works (e.g., "Tattered and Torn," at right) in the National Public Radio segment, Portraits of the Poor: Dignity in Times of Despair (6 min 28 sec).

Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky and the "Frankfurt Kitchen"

A new journal and a recent exhibition feature work by Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky (1897-2000), the Austrian architect who designed the "Frankfurt Kitchen" in 1926. 

West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, 
Design History, and Material Culture

This inaugural issue includes a translation of passages from Schütte-Lihotzky's Warum ich Architektin wurde (Why I Became an Architect). The extracts provide the rationale for the "work-only" design of the Frankfurt Kitchen, the eight basic elements of the kitchen (e.g., proper positioning of artificial lighting), and Schütte-Lihotzky's thoughts on design and the status of women.

The Frankfurt Kitchen is featured in the Museum of Modern Art's exhibition, Counter Space: Design and the Modern Kitchen (Sept. 15, 2010 - May 2, 2011). National Public Radio provides an overview of the exhibition in A Kitchen Revolution Aimed at Freeing Women (5 min 48 sec). 

Karen Melching covers conservation efforts at the Victoria and Albert Museum in the article, Frankfurt Kitchen: Patina Follows Function. For additional background information, see Susan Henderson's chapter, "A Revolution in the Woman's Sphere: Grete Lihotzky and the Frankfurt Kitchen," in Architecture and Feminism (Princeton Architectural Press, 1996).

Women Scientists on Flickr Commons

Libbie Henrietta Hyman

The Smithsonian Institution Archives has added additional photos of women scientists to Flickr Commons, and will be highlighting specific women on the Bigger Picture blog during Women's History Month. Additional information about some of these scientists is available online. For instance, zoologist Libbie Henrietta Hyman (pictured at left) is profiled in Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia,  a short autobiography appears in Biographical Memoirs (from the National Academy of Sciences), and an issue of American Museum Novitates includes papers presented at a symposium on Hyman's life and work.  

New Book: The Letters of Sylvia Beach

The Letters of Sylvia Beach. Edited by Keri Walsh and with a foreword by Noël Riley Fitch. Columbia University Press, 2010.

Sylvia Beach (1887-1962) was born in Baltimore, Maryland, settled in Paris in 1916, and opened the Shakespeare and Company bookshop and lending library in 1919. This collection documents Beach's day-to-day activities as a bookseller and publisher, her affair with Adrienne Monnier, and her efforts to prevent the piracy of James Joyce's Ulysses in the United States.

Columbia University Press offers a wealth of information about the book; the excerpts section includes Beach's letters to Ernest Hemingway, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and others.

For additional biographical information, see Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties (Norton, 1983) by Noël Riley Fitch.

Princeton University holds the Sylvia Beach Papers. See the Finding Aid for the collection, a small selection of images of Sylvia Beach, and the recent blog post from Rare Books Collection @ Princeton that covers The Dispersal of Sylvia Beach's Books.