Blog featuring news and updates about collections, discoveries, exhibitions, and public programs of the University of Oregon Special Collections & University Archives
And her spirit’s always loyal,
And we’ll have the world to know
That the bonds can ne’er be broken,
Formed in the dear old U.O.
—“There’s a Pretty Little Village,” circa 1910
University of Oregon Libraries is pleased to announce an exhibit titled Oregon Spirit: The Legacy of Track and Field, now on display from January 7th to March 22nd in the Special Collections and University Archives Paulson Reading Room. The exhibit is curated by archivist Lauren Goss.
The University of Oregon proudly celebrates over 100 years of track and field. Led by illustrious coaches, student-athletes defied the limits of human performance before an audience of devoted fans. Drawing upon 20 collections, these curated items reveal a palpable spirit that transcends generations. The legacy of track and field is built on enduring tradition and dynamic innovation.
Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go free… I must walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe. And that way the nation is moving, and I may say that mankind progress from east to west.
– Henry David Thoreau
University of Oregon Libraries is pleased to announce an exhibit titled Framing the West: Photography in the Age of Manifest Destiny, Past and Present, now on display during the Fall 2018 term in the Special Collection and University Archives Paulson Reading Room.
Shawn Records, Duane Ehmer and his gelding, Hellboy, pose for journalists before the daily press conference at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. January 8, 2016 [Shawn Records photographs of the Occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, PH365, Box 1; Special Collections and University Archives, University of Oregon Libraries, Eugene, Oregon]Continue reading →
Through a new traveling exhibition, discover an overlooked moment in U.S. history when people with disabilities occupied a government building to win their rights. The exhibit Patient No More: People with Disabilities Securing Civil Rights will be on display at University of Oregon Libraries’ Special Collections and University Archives from Monday, April 23rd, 2018 to Friday, June 15th, 2018. The exhibition uncovers the stories behind a turbulent April in 1977, when people with disabilities successfully launched protests across the nation to get Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 signed into law.
Please join us at the opening of this forthcoming exhibit on Monday, April 23rd, 2018, 4:00-5:00 pm in the Knight Library Browsing Room for a public lecture by guest speaker Professor Catherine Kudlick. Following the lecture there will be a reception and public viewing of the exhibition in the Paulson Reading Room. All events are free and open to the public.
Special Collections and University Archives (SCUA) has recently mounted an exhibit focusing on Black Deaf Americans to celebrate Black History Month.
Black Deaf people have one of the most unique cultures in the world. The Black Deaf Community is largely shaped by two cultures and communities: Deaf and African-American. Some Black Deaf individuals view themselves as members of both communities. Since both communities are viewed by the larger, predominately hearing and White society as comprising a minority community, Black Deaf persons often experience an even greater loss of recognition, racial discrimination and communication barriers coming from both communities.
Little has been written about the Black Deaf community. Even though segregated schools existed until the mid-1950s, no historical analysis of that experience, its people, or events has been written. Only a handful of memoirs by Black Deaf individuals have been published. Recent interest in Black Deaf sign language has produced a seminal work on the subject, The Hidden Treasure of Black ASL, but much more research needs to be pursued. This exhibit seeks to highlight the history, experiences, and accomplishments of Black Deaf Americans through six themes: segregated schools for Black Deaf students, memoirs by Black Deaf adults, incarceration of Black Deaf, Black Deaf sign language, Notable Black Deaf, and artwork of Black Deaf. Some of the archival material exhibited is extremely rare and difficult to find. Several publications on exhibit are considered rare books. Even some recent titles on exhibit are difficult to find.
Detail of Edna St. Vincent Millay quote in commonplace book of children’s book author and illustrator Elizabeth Orton Jones. Elizabeth Orton Jones papers. Coll 200. Box 7. Special Collections and University Archives, University of Oregon Libraries, Eugene, Oregon.
A new exhibit is now on view during the Winter 2018 term in the Paulson Reading Room in Special Collections and University Archives titled Creative Commonplacing: The Facets of Book Love.
Students of Professor Mai-Lin Cheng’s Fall 2017 course HC421, “Book Love: Or, Reading Commonplaces,” curated this exhibit of commonplace books, diaries, and scrapbooks. The exhibit also highlights other “book love” projects undertaken by the students during the course, including the results of a bookbinding workshop with Collections Conservator Marilyn Mohr and a handwriting workshop with Manuscripts Librarian Linda Long.
The public is invited to an opening reception in SCUA on 1/18/18, 4-5 p.m.
An introduction to the exhibit from the guidebook written by the student curatorial team follows:
Our class during Fall 2017 was the first of hopefully many future classes on the topic of Book Love, exploring the origins of book writing and what it means to love books and share what we understand of the world. Commonplaces are both a reflection of an author and their greater community, with the practice beginning in the seventeenth century as a type of note-sharing. In this class, we explored what it means to be an author as opposed to a compiler, as the lines are often blurred in commonplace books, as readers created their own personal anthologies, with passages, images, and other artifacts important to them to create a commonplace book.
The commonplace book is an artifact of active reading. In it, the reader becomes writer. The interchangeability of these two modes of relating to texts is, of course, familiar in our contemporary era of cutting-and-pasting, tweeting and retweeting, liking and linking. Exploring the origins of this information-sharing, however, reveals a more exclusive and exclusionary history in authorship and the sharing of information, and through exploring the history of book-making students deepened their awareness of an elitist history of information control. In this class, students experiment with individual methods of expressing “book love” in creating their own print or digital commonplace books, and through reading the same texts each student created their own unique commonplace work.
