Cool@Hoole

By: Amy Chen, CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow

Please join the Division of Special Collections and the Department of History for a curator’s talk next Tuesday, April 21, from 3:30-4:40 PM in the A.S. Williams III Americana Collection reading room on the third floor of the Gorgas Library.

This curator’s talk is in honor of two new exhibitions in the University Libraries. Making Confederates, by Lindsay Smith and Melissa Young, is located in the reading room of the Williams Collection. When This Cruel War is Over, by Katie Deale, is mounted in the lobby of the W.S. Hoole Special Collections Library on the second floor of Mary Harmon Bryant Hall.

Lindsay, Melissa, and Katie are PhD students in History who worked closely with Special Collections staff over the past semester to develop their shows; you can read more about their process in their interview series, “Curating the Confederacy” which ran in a five-part series this week. You can also see selected items from their exhibitions through Cool@Hoole’s social media presence on Twitter and Facebook.

Making Confederates and When This Cruel War is Over will be on display in Williams and Hoole respectively through Fall 2015.

We look forward to seeing you next Tuesday!

By: Lindsay Smith, Melissa Young, and Rachel K. Deale, History PhD students, and Amy Chen, CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow

This post is the final entry in a five-part series titled “Curating the Confederacy: An Interview with the curators of Making Confederates and When this Cruel War is Over.” If you haven’t yet, please read the first, second, third, and fourth installments of this series.

Display case from Making Confederates, currently on display in the A.S. Williams III Americana Collection

What would you say to future students who might have the opportunity to create exhibitions within the library with special collections holdings? Do you have any advice to share?

Rachel: I would definitely recommend that they take advantage of the opportunity. When you are getting started I think that it is important to make sure you choose a topic that is not too narrow or too broad. Try to focus your exhibit on a simple, but well focused topic or theme. I also think that it is very important to always keep your display cases and space in mind as you are researching the collection. Imagining how you plan to display the items as you go along is makes it easier to decide how you will organize and present your argument.

Lindsay: First, I would highly encourage them to take the opportunity. It’s a lot of fun and a nice change of pace from academia history. The process of putting together an exhibit is very hands on and inherently creative, I think. I would, however, recommend that you are interested in the exhibit’s topic because you will know a lot about it when you are done.

Melissa: The only advice I might share is to manage your time wisely and utilize the fabulous librarians because they are huge sources of knowledge. Lindsay and I started working on the project early, in December, so that we could become familiar with the holdings before we had additional responsibilities. This allowed us to generated an argument and narrow our focus quite early. We worked around one another’s schedules and personal deadlines and kept communication lines open—one of us would dedicate more time to the exhibition if the other had to study or work on a paper. We also spoke to Jennifer Cabanero and Nancy DuPree at length many times. They pointed out some really great items and offered new perspectives on some of the ones we had already chosen, especially after they knew the direction we wanted to follow. Jennifer and Nancy were also incredibly supportive and shared in some of the excitement of our own finds. To prevent being overwhelmed, students should stick to a schedule and look to each other and the librarians for assistance and guidance. That way it will be much easier to relax and enjoy the project as much as we did.

Case from When this Cruel War is Over, currently on display in the W.S. Hoole Library

What sort of role would you like to see yourself in following your graduation from the University of Alabama?

Rachel: I hope to teach at a liberal arts college or university.  I would also enjoy working as an editor for an academic journal or press.

Lindsay: I am still very much interested in pursuing a career in academic history. However, I see myself working at a smaller liberal arts college that allows me the flexibility to teach a lot of different courses, pursue my research interests, and also to work closely with the libraries and local historical museums. I enjoy public history too much to give it up completely.

Melissa: Although I would love to teach at the post-secondary level, I would also like to pursue a career in a history museum or in an organization that promotes historical awareness. I have interned at small rural house museums and large urban institutions like the Birmingham Museum of Art. Both experiences were wonderful in very different ways, so I could see myself working in either type of institution. My own research is also very important to me. Hopefully I can continue to incorporate Civil War history, gender studies, and language in some of what I do, but if I go in another direction, I am okay with that. I love learning new things and gaining additional knowledge, so I am open to other historical genres, especially local ones. I may have the opportunity to work with the Birmingham Holocaust Education Center this summer, for example, which is really exciting. I have also recently started studying Latin American history and am going to Brazil in August. I hope to eventually be able to share some of my knowledge and experience with future students or museum guests.

Amy: Thank you for sharing your knowledge, experience, and insights with us today on Cool@Hoole. We encourage our readers to come see Making Confederates in Williams and When this Cruel War is Over in Hoole between April and September 2015.

Please don’t hesitate to tweet us about #makingconfederates and #thiscruelwar @coolathoole! Follow @coolathoole on Facebook and Twitter to get sneak peeks of items on display for the two weeks following the opening of these exhibitions (April 13-May 1).

Additionally, to continue our promotion of these shows, next week on Cool@Hoole we will share the curatorial essays from each exhibition. That way, if you are not able to come to campus, you can still get a taste of the content Rachel, Lindsay, and Melissa developed.

By: Lindsay Smith, Melissa Young, and Rachel K. Deale, History PhD students, and Amy Chen, CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow

This post is the fourth in a five-part series titled “Curating the Confederacy: An Interview with the curators of Making Confederates and When this Cruel War is Over.” If you haven’t yet, please read the first, second, and third installments of this series.

The topic of these shows, Confederate imprints, was selected before you all joined the project as curators. If you had the opportunity to create another show with the holdings in the Division of Special Collections at the University of Alabama, what topic would you want to portray and why?

Case from When This Cruel War is Over, currently on display in the W.S. Hoole Library lobby

Rachel: Gordon Wood once said that there are two types of historians:  hedgehogs and foxes. Hedgehogs focus on one big topic while foxes have diverse interests across multiple periods of history. I consider myself a hedgehog because I am most interested in the Civil War. Because Hoole has a large collection of Civil War sheet music published in the Confederacy, Border States, and North, I think I still would have focused my exhibit on music. But I definitely would have included music published in the Border States and the North.

Lindsay: I think it would be really fun to do a show on the University itself. It could use letters, photographs, old year books, and other material from the history of the University of Alabama to look at how student life has changed over the years. I really enjoy learning about the history of the places I know well. We are all acquainted with how campus looks now, but when you start thinking about the Gorgas house being the old cafeteria and the laundry facilities being located down at Mars Spring, it shifts your perspective of campus.

Melissa: I would absolutely love to do a show on some of the soldiers’ letters and manuscripts that are housed in the Williams Collection. I think they could be contextualized in particular contexts of the Civil War and be set apart by region and focus. I really enjoy examining the words of individual soldiers, and I feel the general public would be interested in the language the men used and what they discussed.

Another exciting exhibit would be one that featured the literature produced by various publishers, including S.H. Goetzel, a printer based in Mobile. This would allow us to focus upon both the literature and the publishing houses. We included several of Goetzel’s items in “Making Confederates,” which could be compared or contrasted with items printed by several other publishers across the South. We once spoke of creating a map featuring the locations of different southern printers, and I think that could be used as a main feature of such an exhibit. A similar thing could be done with Confederate authors. Both could demonstrate the widespread growth and influence of literature and publishing across the South.

Melissa Farah Young, curator of Making Confederates

What sort of collaborations would you like to imagine between the History department and the University Libraries in the future?

Rachel: I would like to see the History department and Library work more closely together. It is impossible for historians to do what we do without the help and expertise of librarians and archivists.  I hope that more history graduate students will have the same opportunity that I did to gain hands on experience with curating. I would love to see history graduate students taking classes on document preservation and archives.  But I would really like to see the History department and Library develop a program that would allow students to obtain both an MA in history and a MLIS degree at the same time. This would benefit both history and library students as many academic libraries require job candidates to have a second Master’s degree in addition to the MLIS degree.

Lindsay: I would love to see more projects like this. We have a wealth of graduate students with all sorts of interest who could contribute to exhibitions.  However, I also think that undergrads, particularly history majors, would appreciate having a little more interaction with the archives. Really, it’s not until you start interacting with special collections and the archivists who keep them that you really figure out what this history thing is all about.

Melissa: I think public history projects that collaborate with the University Libraries are incredibly useful to graduate and undergraduate students who wish to gain curating experience or explore new topics. I feel this experience has made me realize how valuable it is to work with others to present information. Projects that focus upon teamwork and team building present “win-win” situations for both the student and the library. The library benefits from the knowledge and excitement the students bring to new projects, and the students gain valuable experience and research opportunities.

I would like to see a greater connection between the libraries and our department in the future. Projects that created billboards, banners, or exhibitions that were generated from items in the archives could really be appealing to those who wish to pursue alt-ac or public history careers. I am not sure students know about these types of opportunities, though I believe many would be interested in participating. Exploring the archives and working with the librarians has been wonderful for me. It not only allowed me to discover materials I didn’t know the university held, it introduced me to sources that I desire to explore in the future and introduced me to some really great people.

By: Lindsay Smith, Melissa Young, and Rachel K. Deale, History PhD students, and Amy Chen, CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow

This post is the third in a five-part series titled “Curating the Confederacy: An Interview with the curators of Making Confederates and When this Cruel War is Over.” If you haven’t yet, please read the first and second installments of this series.

Detail from Uniform and Dress of the Army of the Confederate States

What was your favorite discovery while conducting research for these shows? “Discovery” can be a favorite item, a new piece of information, or even an insight into the era you represented in your exhibition.

Rachel: I really enjoyed learning about the Confederate publishers.  Before I began working on my exhibit I knew where most of the major Confederate publishers were located, but I did not know a lot about the individual publishing houses such as George Dunn & Company, Blackmar and Company, and John C. Schreiner & Son.  I was also fascinated in learning more about how songwriter Charles Carroll Sawyer became popular in both the North and South throughout the war.

Lindsay: Melissa and I found a letter written penciled onto the last page of a sermon. It was from a soldier to his mother, telling her that he’d heard the sermon given a few weeks prior and that he was now sending it home to her. He made sure to tell her that all was well and that he still had his health. There are things like that all over this material if you sit and look at it: an underlined verse the Bible, someone’s name scrawled onto the cover page of a favorite book, or pages that are folded down to a specific spot. Every time I came across something like that I was reminded that all these items belonged to someone, and even though I don’t know the individual owners or their story, these materials link us to them and their experiences in some way.

Melissa: We came across so many fabulous things, it is really difficult to chose just one! I really enjoyed looking at passages in the textbooks and the novels, which often drip so heavily with Confederate nationalism that the words are almost shocking. I also loved the colored plates in the Uniform and Dress of the Army of the Confederate States that librarian Jennifer Cabanero drew to our attention. Perhaps my favorite was the note we discovered in the back of J.J. Renfroe’s published sermon “The Battle is God’s,” which is featured in the “Soldier’s Life” case at the front of the show. The Confederate soldier appeared to have scratched a few quick lines to his mother in pencil, obviously desiring her to read a sermon he had heard and liked. It made the war and everything we were looking at eerily personal. Since it was one of the first things we came across that really made an impact, it set the tone for many of our other discoveries.

Melissa Young and Lindsay Smith work to create their exhibition, Making Confederates

What was the most difficult part of the process of creating your exhibition?

Rachel: The most difficult part of the process is choosing what to display in the exhibit. There were many pieces of sheet music that I could have displayed but did not have the space to do so.  

Lindsay: I think it would definitely be picking what made it into the exhibition and what was left out. There is just so much amazing stuff!

Melissa: For me, the most difficult part was meeting deadlines that coincided with much of the work I was doing on other papers and projects. It was definitely challenging to balance everything, but Lindsay was a great partner. We communicated well and were assisted and supported by the fabulous librarians at UA, including Jennifer Cabanero and Nancy DuPree.