Author Archives: Rebekah Irwin and Kaitlin Buerge

About Rebekah Irwin and Kaitlin Buerge

Director of Collections & Archives at the Middlebury College Libraries.

Before and After Stonewall: Queer Stories Throughout American History

Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin (1956)

This fall in the Library Atrium, view Special Collections’ new exhibit commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, an event that sparked the movement for equal rights for members of the LGBTQ+ community.

Curated by Suria Vanrajah ’22, the exhibit presents a timeline illustrating the increased visibility and acceptance of queer literature in America.

On view through fall, with the companion exhibit:

Middlebury College Coming Out: A Foundation for Queer Activism
Depicting Middlebury College’s LGBTQ community in the decades following the Stonewall riots.

Curated by Joseph Watson, Reid Macfarlane, ’21 and Halle Shephard, ’22.
Located on the Library Lower Level.

Questions? Contact specialcollections@middlebury.edu

Vermont Life magazine is getting a second life online.

Vermont Life magazine is available online.

Visit http://go.middlebury.edu/vermontlife to browse and search the digital archive of Vermont’s iconic 72-year-old magazine.

Vermont Life was a quarterly magazine, published by the State of Vermont, covering Vermont’s “people, places and culture.” The state-owned magazine was founded in 1946 and ceased publication in the summer of 2018.

Summer 1947, painting by Norman Rockwell 

Summer 2012

The digitization of Vermont Life was undertaken to support the Middlebury College fall 2018 class: “Vermont Life’s Vermont,” taught by Professors Kathy Morse and Michael Newbury.

Vermont Life was digitized from originals held by Middlebury College Special Collections, the State of Vermont, and the Dorothy Alling Memorial Library with funding support from the following: the Davis Family Foundation, Middlebury College Friends of the Library, Middlebury College Departments of American Studies, Environmental History, and History, Middlebury College Digital Liberal Arts Initiative, the Center for Research on VermontSaint Michael’s College Library, the Vermont Historical Society, and the University of Vermont Special Collections.

Three female skiers from the Winter 1948 issue

 

Bhutanese festival-goers in Burlington’s Old North End, Autumn 2012 issue of Vermont Life

 

 

New Library staff member: Nellie Pierce

On August 29th, 2018 Nellie Pierce ’18, joined the Library as Postgraduate Fellow for Special Collections and Archives.

Nellie reads from the manuscript of her thesis, All Is To Be Dared, in a capstone event at the M Gallery, May 2018

Nellie is a Middlebury, Vermont native. She graduated Summa cum laude, with Highest Honors as an Independent Scholar with a Cognitive Science concentration. She was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa as a junior, attended the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and was named a College Scholar (Middlebury’s highest recognition for semesterly academic achievement) eight times.

Highlights of her time at Middlebury (in the past four years, but also those since birth) have included co-hosting a philosophy-and-“Buffy The Vampire Slayer”-themed radio show on WRMC, participating in exhibits and publishing ventures at the M Gallery, and designing, printing and organizing a public reading for her interdisciplinary senior thesis.

In her new role, Nellie will join the Special Collections staff as a crusader and evangelist, promoting our collections, lionizing the history (and future) of the book, and engaging in campus and community outreach, creative event planning, exhibitions, and imaginative uses of social media and technology.

 

 

Image credit: 

Honoring Mario Cooper, ’77, on World AIDS Day

To mark World AIDS Day we’re sharing this film clip from the 1976 promotional film Middlebury College, a Chance to Grow which profiled Political Science major and student activist Mario Cooper. After graduating in 1977, Cooper went on to earn a law degree and became a key figure in HIV/AIDS advocacy after becoming HIV positive and witnessing the disproportionate effects of the disease in the African American community.

Though it may have once seemed like an unassuming profile of a passionate student, the clip can now be appreciated as an early view into the work of a determined activist who would later become a prominent figure in civil rights and AIDS advocacy movements. The footage and narration also poignantly show Cooper enjoying college life and friendships in a time before the AIDS epidemic changed his life and that of those around him.

Mario Cooper died in 2015 while in hospice care in Washington, D.C. His New York Times obituary can be read here, and a tribute to his work as an activist can be read on POZ, the social network for people living with or affected by HIV/AIDS.

 

Stacks & Tracks, on the radio. Tune in.

Stacks & Tracks.
The Special Collections & Archives radio show.

We’re back.


From the bowels of the library basement come wonders like you’ve never seen. (And still can’t, because it’s radio.)

Wednesdays, 12p-1p

91.9FM | iTunes radio | listen online | on your phone

s2pf-wrmc-1970-08

WRMC Radio Studio, 1970. From the College Archives Photographic File.

Visit us. Monday-Friday, 1-5p. You never need an appointment, or an excuse, to stop by.

One Giant Leap For Mankind, and for Special Collections (ArchivesSpace has landed.)

When astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took the first human steps on the moon on July 20, 1969, Armstrong famously uttered, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

Aldrin_Apollo_11_use

Astronaut Buzz Aldrin on the moon, courtesy of NASA.

47 years later, Special Collections & Archives launched ArchivesSpace (go/aspace), a search tool that organizes the diverse and unique archival and manuscript collections stored in the Davis Family Library on the Lower Level. (If you want to be fancy about it, these are called Finding Aids, or inventories made by archivists to help navigate a collection.)

Learn more about ArchivesSpace here.

Search ArchivesSpace now, contact special collections to learn more, or visit us for a personal tour of ArchivesSpace and of our collections.

WRMC’s Stacks & Tracks is back! With guest DJ, Prof. Christopher Star

We’re back. On the air, and live streaming, at a new time.

Wednesdays, 12p-1p

Tune-in during your lunch hour to the radio show that reveals the secrets of special collections.

This week we’ll be joined by guest DJ, Classics Professor Christopher Star for Episode #12, featuring music and talk inspired by the thought, art, and life of ancient Greece and Rome.

Mozart to Jimi Hendrix, Johnny Cash to The Doors. Be there. And be enlightened. With a soundtrack.

91.1FM | iTunes radio | listen online | on your phone

Stacks and Tracks

WRMC Studio, 1970. From the Middlebury College Archives.

A “first-rate beer” voucher, 2,000 years overdue (a new, very old acquisition for Special Collections)

In special collections, visitors often ask us, “What’s your most expensive item?” Or sometimes, “What’s the oldest thing you have?”

In late November, we acquired our newest, oldest thing: a baked clay tablet that originated in ancient Mesopotamia (current-day Iraq), from roughly 2,000 BCE. This small tablet (measuring just about 1 inch x 1 inch and pictured here) is incised with cuneiform script, considered to be one of the earliest forms of writing.


With the help of Middlebury alum Seth Richardson, Class of 1990, a historian of the ancient Near East at the University of Chicago, we’re learning more about our new acquisition. Likely in British and American hands since the early 20th century, our tablet is essentially a beer coupon. That’s right. Based only on preliminary examination, Dr. Richardson translated the first line: “3 liters of first-rate beer.”

And as it turns out, the Western tradition of beer brewing began in Mesopotamia between 3500 – 3100 BCE. How do we know? Largely from cuneiform tablets like ours, which contain detailed records around beer production, the delivery of raw materials (barley, yeast, bread, flour), and the trading of beer products. Like apple cider production in colonial New England, ancient Mesopotamians lacked clean water, but had an abundance of grains and the know-how needed to ferment them. And they had the earliest known written alphabet to boot.


References

Beer in the Ancient World.” Ancient History Encyclopedia. Accessed December 3, 2015.

Damerow, Peter. “Sumerian Beer: The Origins of Brewing Technology in Ancient Mesopotamia.” Cuneiform Digital Library Journal, no. 2 (2012).