The University Archives recently appointed Andrew Brandel as the first Archives Fellow.  The Archives Fellow program is designed to give a Hopkins student the opportunity to process an archival collection but also to conduct research in that collection. Andrew, a Ph.D. student in Anthropology here at Hopkins, has elected to process the papers of Professor Sidney W. Mintz (pictured above in the 1960s), a singular figure in the history of the university and the field of anthropology.  Below are some comments Andrew would like to share about this unique opportunity; we are equally honored to work with him!

The opportunity to work with the University Archives, and especially on a collection as special as Sidney W. Mintz’s papers, is as unique as it is valuable and rewarding. As a doctoral student in the Department of Anthropology, my research focuses on the movement of texts between archives, rare book dealers, reading groups, and literary publics. I am especially interested in how the life of books is a site through which we can understand imaginations of larger social organizations, like “nations” and “peoples.” How do we come to think about a particular text or edition as being marked by its “German-ness” or its “Romanticism” for example, and how does that reflect or refract larger scale processes?  My work with the Mintz Papers will allow me (I hope) to turn this methodological gesture on my own disciplinary practice.

Cultural anthropology, if anything at all can be said about its American brand as a unified body, is a field both preoccupied with and perennially anxious about its own history. As a field of inquiry relatively late to be established within the arrangement of disciplines of the academy, it has struggled for a long time to shake off its colonial heritage. Likewise, at least in its manifestation here at Johns Hopkins, it involves a training that on the one hand seeks to recuperate and engage with its predecessors, and on the other resists any kind of closure with regards to establishing a “canon.” The Sidney W. Mintz Papers are remarkable not just because the collection reveals in new light major contributions to the discipline, but also because it is a testament to a community of scholars and a plurality of voices.

Professor Mintz himself is a towering figure, humble to a fault, as charming as he is brilliant.  Returning from war, Mintz went to Columbia University to study anthropology at a time when the discipline was beginning to take shape in this country. Columbia had been home to the founder of American anthropology, the incredible Franz Boas, who by then had handed the reigns over to a next generation of pioneers that included Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and Julian Steward. Emerging from the swollen ranks of graduate students in the wake of the G.I. Bill, Mintz was part of a now famous group that included Marvin Harris, Stanley Diamond, Morton Fried, and Eric Wolf. Mintz and Wolf would go on to share a friendship that lasted the rest of lives (Wolf passed away in 1999) and have a profound impact on one another’s scholarship. Mintz’s research, drawing on several fieldwork excursions in the Caribbean (Puerto Rico, Jamaica and Haiti especially), is among the most influential in anthropology’s history, bridging the divide with history and bringing a Marxist historical materialist pedigree to bear on pressing issues, while weaving together cultural, economic, and social analyses. But his impact is greater still, influencing nearly all fields of contemporary social science in some way, in fields ranging from economics and history to food studies.

Mintz once told me, however, that he felt where he really excelled in his career was as a teacher. After a long stint at Yale (1951-1974), Mintz joined the faculty at Johns Hopkins, taking up one of the first two positions in the new Department of Anthropology, which had been established under an initiative by Dean George Owen and in conjunction with the Atlantic Program in History, Culture and Society. Over the years, he touched the lives and careers of an astonishing number of students, graduate and undergraduate alike, as well as those of his colleagues around the world. He has taught at MIT, Princeton, Berkeley, the Collège de France, and in Germany, New Zealand, Australia, and Hong Kong, and he is still Research Professor at Johns Hopkins University at nearly 90.

His collection speaks with arresting candor to this web of relations. His correspondence in particular reveals a richly intertwined academic community. Among the great figures that make an appearance are Claude Levi-Strauss (le grand Claude as one letter calls him), Sir Edmund Leach, Arjun Appadurai, Noam Chomsky, Marshall Sahlins, and Clifford Geertz. This collection has all the trappings of the anthropological archive as it is traditionally conceived –– fieldwork, lecture notes, manuscripts and reviews, grant proposals, and panel organizations. But what I hope this Fellowship –– dual vocation as it is, between archivist and historical anthropologist — will allow to me to do, is to turn the scholarly gaze onto itself, and to think of the discipline of anthropology as constituted not simply by detached ideas floating around haunted and hallowed halls, but as intertwined with the lives that produce them.

The Betty and Edgar Sweren Student Book Collecting Contest has begun! This annual competition, endowed by longtime Friends of the Libraries Betty and Edgar Sweren, recognizes the love of books and the art of shaping a thoughtful and focused book collection. All students enrolled in a degree program at Johns Hopkins are invited to enter, and cash prizes will be awarded for the top three entries in separate undergraduate and graduate categories.

Entries will be judged according to the coherency of the items in the collection and the extent to which the collection reflects the student’s stated goals and interests. All topics are welcome; past entries have included collections focused on pilgrimages, monsters, feminism, and wartime as recorded by soldiers.

To enter, students must submit a 2-3 page essay detailing the purpose of the collection, how it was started, and how it has evolved over time. This description should also highlight the items of greatest interest within the collection, as well as plans for the future development of the collection. In addition, students must include a bibliography of the collection (between 20-50 items) and a “wish list” of up to 10 items that the student would like to add to the collection.

In both the undergraduate and graduate divisions of the contest, the first place winner will be awarded $1,000; the second place winner will receive $500; and the third place winner will receive $250.

Selections from the winning entries will be displayed on M-Level of the Eisenhower Library in late spring, and all winners will be eligible to enter the 2012 National Collegiate Book Collecting Contest. Maggie Murray, last year’s graduate category winner, was recently awarded second place in the the 2011 National Collegiate Book Collecting Contest.

So peruse your bookcase and enter your collection in the contest!

Submissions must be received by February 17, 2012. Visit the library website to enter, to see past submissions, and for additional information. Good luck!

From guest blogger Gabrielle Dean, Ph.D., curator in the Special Collections Department.

Veterans Day, as you may know, used to be called Armistice Day; November 11 was officially designated such by President Woodrow Wilson in 1919 to honor the cessation of hostilities on that day the previous year. The same day was set aside as Remembrance Day in Commonwealth countries by King George V. November 11 is also a national patriotic holiday in France and Belgium. Germans observe a national day of mourning, the Volkstrauertag, on the Sunday closest to 16 November—not to mark the official armistice but to commemorate all victims of war.

The name and nature of Armistice Day in the U.S. changed in 1954 to include veterans of later wars. But there continues to be an international “Great War” quality to Veterans Day; if you’ve ever been handed a tiny red paper poppy on November 11, you know what I mean. The poppy as a symbol for the war comes from the poem “In Flanders Fields” by the Canadian physician and officer John McCrae, who died of pneumonia in 1918 while commanding the Canadian military hospital in Boulogne. “Flanders,” the region that is part of present-day Belgium, France and the Netherlands, is closely associated with the battles of Ypres, Passchendaele and the Somme; the poem is often recited for November 11 commemorative ceremonies in Canada, the U.K. and the U.S. In its international origins and popularity, “In Flanders Fields” represents the global scale of the war.

“In Flanders Fields” may be the most widely known poem of the First World War, but it has a few rivals. One would certainly be “The Soldier” by Rupert Brooke, who died in 1915 from sepsis from an infected mosquito bite on his way to Gallipoli. Another contender: “Dulce et Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owen. For those who object to McCrae’s not-so-subtle call to arms and Brooke’s patriotic invocation of an “English heaven,” “Dulce et Decorum Est” presents war as painful, ugly and haunting. Owen’s soldiers limp through the mud, exhausted, wounded, drowning in the green glow of poison gas. “In Flanders Fields” is a roundeau and has been turned into a song; in contrast, the rhyme in “Dulce et Decorum Est” proceeds like a heavy footstep. Owen himself died one week before the armistice, shot in the head as he led an attack on enemy strongholds near Joncourt, France.

Owen’s work came to attention through the mediation of Siegfried Sassoon; the two men met at the Craiglockhart War Hospital, where both were being treated for shell shock. Sassoon started out in the glorifying vein, like Brooke and McCrae, but his war experiences soon led him to a more cynical view. The sonnet “Dreamers” and the almost-sonnet “Survivors,” for example, are dressed in proper rhyme and meter but pack a mean punch: a quick, gut-wrenching insight into the soldier’s broken psyche. One of the few “war poets” to survive the war, Sassoon lived long enough to write on other subjects—but still had nightmares in late life about the horrors of the trenches.

Other poets of the Great War include Edward Thomas, author of “In Memoriam [Easter 1915],” Alan Seeger, Isaac Rosenberg, Robert Graves and Vera Brittain. Selections from their works, plus biographies, images, oral histories, film clips and other documents from the war, have been collected in The First World War Poetry Digital Archive.

ShareThis

Thank you to all who attended the opening of Eureka! at the George Peabody Library on October 23. We hope you enjoy these images from the event.

If you missed the opening, not to worry: Eureka! runs through February 29, 2012, and admission is free. The George Peabody Gallery is open Monday through Friday 9 – 5, Saturdays 9 – 3, and Sundays 12 – 5.

From guest blogger Jim Stimpert, Archivist

In later September, along with two of my library colleagues, I participated in the Undergraduate History Seminar, comprised of two sections taught by Prof. Mary Ryan and Prof. Nathan Connolly.  We examined  a large “bird’s-eye” map of Baltimore and spoke about how the city looked in the 19^th century and also discussed the Great Exhibition of 1851, Western Depictions of Crime and Punishment in Late Imperial China and the Baltimore Riots of 1812. I talked about using Special Collections materials and described some of the highlights of our archival and manuscript collections.

We then engaged the students in an exercise to familiarize them with primary sources.  Presented with small portions of various collections, the students were asked to read and discuss the materials in small groups and answer these questions:  (1) Why was the item created?  (2) Can you identify (or guess) the bias of the creator?  (3) What types of historical questions might this item be used to answer?  (4) What other types of primary sources might you want to find to use with this document?

These questions are designed to get students to read sources critically and think about what is “between the lines” or left unwritten, and give them the opportunity to report their findings to the class. This exercise gave the students an opportunity to actively engage with the primary sources.

One of the examples we use is a government permit issued to a Hopkins professor in 1920 allowing him to purchase a barrel of whiskey for use in a psychological experiment.  I always ask the group studying this document, “Why did they have to apply for a permit to purchase whiskey?”  The answer, of course, is that Prohibition was in effect from 1919 until 1933.  Along with this document is correspondence between Professor John B. Watson and others, including Hopkins President Frank J. Goodnow.  While they allowed the experiment to proceed, there was some nervousness and the experiment does not appear to have been repeated in later years.

What was the experiment?  It involved measuring the effects of alcohol on one’s ability to throw darts accurately.  Interestingly, the dart-throwing accuracy of at least one group improved as they consumed whiskey.

Jewels from Victoria’s Crown: Three Decades of English Books and Bindings, 1845 — 1880.

The Friends of the Johns Hopkins Libraries invite you to this year’s Judge Robert I. H. Hammerman Lecture.

Join publisher David Godine for “Jewels from Victoria’s Crown,” a discussion of Britain’s Golden Age of book production and design. For the beauty of its illustration, binding, and reproductive processes, this was a period that was never surpassed, producing some of the best books of the century, many of which will be displayed and discussed.

Tuesday, November 1

Mason Hall, Homewood campus
6 pm reception; 7 pm lecture

Please Register Here or by calling 410.516.7943.

Since our acquisition last fall of the Dr. Elliott and Eileen Hinkes Collection of Rare Books in the History of Science, we’ve heard from students, faculty, and alumni, all of whom have been anxious to to get a closer look at this magnificent collection.

With the opening of Eureka! this Sunday, October 23, at the George Peabody Library, the wait is finally over.

Eureka! is open to the public from October 24, 2011 through February 29, 2012 at the George Peabody Library, 17 E. Mount Vernon Place, Baltimore, MD 21202.

The George Peabody Gallery is open Monday through Friday 9 – 5, Saturdays 9 – 3, and Sundays 12 – 5. Admission is free.

Mondays, October 10, 17, and 24

5 p.m. receptions at Homewood Museum
6 p.m. lectures at Gilman 50, Marjorie Fisher Hall

FREE; advance registration is requested. Register by email or by calling 410.516.5589. Walk-in registration based on availability. AIA/CES credits available.

Homewood Museum will host leading experts on historic garden structures and landscape design as part of 2011 Baltimore Architecture Month organized by AIABaltimore.

October 10
MICHAEL OLMERT, Professor of English, University of Maryland, College Park

Privies: Necessary & Sufficient
Learn about the architecture, patterns of use, folklore, and even literary presence of privies in the late 18th and early 19th century Tidewater region.

October 17
BARBARA PACA, Landscape Architect/ Historian

“Paradigms of Democracy: Gardening & Agricultural Pursuits of Maryland’s Founding Families”
Discover how our Founding Fathers fused orchards, gardens, vineyards, and other agricultural features with residential architecture to create private utopias.

October 24
OUTERBRIDGE HORSEY, Architect

“Architecture of Delight: The American Garden Folly”
Explore historic and historically-inspired follies and garden buildings in America, from the 18th century to the present.

This program is made possible with free admission by Aurelia G. Bolton,
with additional support from Lewis Contractors, and Adam and Fredye Gross.

Tuesday, October 18, 6 p.m.
Evergreen Museum & Library

Be among the first to see two new exhibitions at
Johns Hopkins’ Evergreen Museum & Library:

Nearly 70 works of astonishing intimacy and complexity comprise this retrospective of contemporary textile artist Louise Wheatley

The Johns Hopkins University’s collection of Zelda Fitzgerald drawings are highlighted in this student-curated focus show

BRIEF REMARKS BY
Louise Wheatley, celebrated artist
Laura Maria Somenzi, A&S ‘13, guest curator

CATALOGUE SIGNINGS

WINE RECEPTION & HORS D’OEUVRES

Free; reservations requested: by email or call 410.516.0341

Martin L. Millspaugh in front of Inner Harbor Construction, 1970

In April 2010, we announced the arrival of the corporate archives of the Roland Park Company, which played a crucial role in the history of neighborhood development from the late-19^th century to the 1950s.  To further strengthen our holdings in regional planning, Special Collections recently acquired the papers of Martin L. Millspaugh, the celebrated urban developer known for developing the Inner Harbor, the crown jewel of Baltimore’s tourism industry.

Millspaugh began his career as a reporter, covering urban affairs in the early 1960s.  Following a position working for the federal government’s Housing and Urban Development department as one of its first employees, the city of Baltimore attracted Millspaugh to serve as Chief Executive of Charles Center-Inner Harbor Management, Inc., an early example of a public-private partnership.  From the mid-1960s through the 1980s, Millspaugh oversaw the development of Charles Center and the Inner Harbor, a project involving 260 acres of downtown land and almost $7 billion of construction.  Weathering initial skepticism, the venture’s legacy endures as one of the most influential urban renewal projects ever accomplished.

After Inner Harbor development reached completion in the mid-1980s, Millspaugh joined famed developer James W. Rouse at Enterprise Development Corporation, a consulting firm that helped cities worldwide plan their own Inner Harbor-like projects.  The Martin L. Millspaugh Papers document this transition, including project files related to clients as far-flung as Sydney, Osaka, and Rotterdam.

The Martin L. Millspaugh Papers number over 50 linear feet of correspondence, writings, subject files, photographs, and books, spanning the mid-1950s to present.  The collection is currently being preserved and processed for researchers.

If the Roland Park Archives provide a window into an earlier era in the story of Baltimore, the Millspaugh Papers tell a more recent history, where once again Charm City played a significant role in land development both locally and beyond.