In September of 1944 the front pages of the Daily Illini were covered with updates about the ongoing war. The newspaper readily chronicled major developments in the war as well as the deaths of young men who, just a few short years before, had once walked the university’s halls. Given the amount of bloodshed that was unfolding around the world, it is easy to miss the newspapers’ coverage of one particularly strange event, one that would come to be called the Mad Gasser of Mattoon.
Digitized Pittsburgh Newspapers
The Library now has permanent access to a collection of digitized Pittsburgh newspapers. Although the database is called ProQuest Historical Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the collection is actually a couple dozen different newspapers related to the Post-Gazette, which did not begin publication under that title until 1927. This collection boasts newspapers dating back to 1786.
New Digitized Newspaper Collection: Historical Communist Newspapers
The Library now has permanent access to ProQuest Historical Communist Newspapers, a collection of nine labor, socialist, and communist newspapers published in the United States. All nine newspapers are connected to the Daily Worker (either preceding or succeeding titles).
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2 New Digital Collections of Women’s Magazines
The Library now has permanent access to the second series in ProQuest’s Women’s Magazine Archive. Series 2 adds six more titles to the collection (for a total of twelve magazines), and like its predecessor the magazines are, wherever possible, digitized in full color. Series 2 is also notable for the addition of Essence magazine, a publication for African American women.
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A Brief History of Advice Columns
In March of 1912 a lovelorn young woman wrote into the Rock Island Argus with a problem. At 20 years old she found that her boyfriend of 2 years was starting to hint that he was interested in marriage. Overcome with doubt, she wrote a letter to Mrs. Elizabeth Thompson, the Rock Island Argus’ resident advice columnist. After explaining the situation, she ended her letter with one simple question: Am I too young? The answer she received was quick and straight to the point: “No”. This short and straight to the point style of answering questions seemed to be Mrs. Thompson’s specialty. Another woman in the same issue asked for advice on what to wear to an upcoming masquerade and was told curtly to dress as a French maid. Mrs. Thompson’s knowledge base was expansive and she seemed to be able to answer questions over a broad array of topics from skincare to food to fashion. She also dealt with much heavier topics, telling people, women in particular, how to survive and provide for their children when they had nowhere else to turn.
Something Interesting About Early American Newspapers Series 13
Series 13 of Early American Newspapers boasts over 2,300 titles from the trans-Mississippi west. If you browse the series, however, you might notice something peculiar: over a third of these titles are represented by only a single issue, with all these single issues coming from the year 1876. Why does the collection contain so many random issues from the year 1876?
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New Online Resource: Neues Deutschland Archive
We now have access to the Neues Deutschland Archive. Neues Deutschland began publication in 1946 as the official newspaper of the East German Communist Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands). Since the Wende, the newspaper has remained a socialist organ, even as its circulation has plummeted.
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Call for applications: 2019-2020 Research Travel Grant
Call for applications: 2019-2020 Research Travel Grant
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library and the Department of History are pleased to announce a Research Travel Grant to support scholars conducting research in any of the Library’s collections.
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Watch Your Language, Please: Researching Queer History
Evidence of queer history is often elusive, but it can be found throughout the historical record, in both expected and unexpected places. A challenge for the researcher, however, is that libraries and archives have not traditionally described these documents in ways that make them easily discoverable. Aside from its appearance in medical and penal records, queer experience might often not even have been recognizable to librarians, archivists, museum curators, and others charged with collecting and organizing historical documents.
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Morbidity, Macabre, Murder, and Memory: a look into our collections
There is no secret that humans are drawn to the macabre. Shows revolving around murder, such as CSI and Criminal Minds, carry on for years and spur a number of spin-offs which are often met with success. In the meantime, podcasts like UP and Vanished and My Favorite Murder continue to top the iTunes podcast charts.
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