News & Announcements

University Archives has received 45 slides depicting an arctic expedition undertaken by Prof. James Van Allen to conduct research using “rockoons.” The slides were donated by Jim Kasper. His father, Joseph Kasper, was a graduate student in physics who accompanied Prof. Van Allen on one of his expeditions made in the 1950s to launch instrumentation on balloons. The 45 slides have been digitized in their entirety and can be viewed online:

 Arctic Rockoon Expedition

Recently added to the considerable culinary collections here in Special Collections are three alehouse licenses. They were all granted in the county of Kent, England, allowing their owners the right to “Keep a common alehouse or victualling-house.” Of course they also require the owners to “suffer no disorder to be committed, or unlawful games used,” something even modern-day alehouse patrons can relate to. These legal documents, like many at the time,  are printed on vellum (more durable than eighteenth century paper) and can be viewed at the links below:

Robert Allen at the Sign of the Bull, September 4, 1756

William Tupp at the Sign of the Wheatsheaf, September 3, 1763

John Mannering at the Sign of the Bell, September 3, 1763

They are also available to view or for classroom use in the Special Collections reading room.

Another donation to our growing science fiction collections has arrived in the form of dozens of programs and status reports from science fiction conventions, including several World Cons. The programs were collected by Ron Taylor, and focus primarily on conventions from the 1980s and 1990s. They add still more depth to the convention materials already present in the Horvat collection.

Special Collections has just received a nice collection of Star Trek fanzines, which complement the Star Trek materials already in the M. Horvat Science Fiction Fanzine collection. Included in this donation are copies of some of the more prominent Trek titles, such as Spockanalia, Masiform-D and T-Negative. There is good coverage of fan activities throughout much of Trek’s history, from the original series in the late 1960s through the revival of the concept in the late 1980s with Star Trek: The Next Generation.

This collection of Star Trek fanzines was originally assembled by an Australian fan, but we have another source to thank for their donation to the UI Libraries - the Save Farscape team. Farscape was a ground-breaking science fiction television series that ran for four seasons on the SciFi network before it was cancelled in 2003. Like the early Star Trek fans who mobilized to save the show, Farscape fans came together to lobby for the future of the series, often in creative ways. The effort was successful enough to convince network executives to finance a mini-series to wrap-up loose ends in the plot, and this past month it was announced that Farscape will return as a series of online “webisodes.” In addition to the Star Trek fanzines that came her way during the campaign, one of the organizers has also donated some material from the Save Farscape effort. The grassroots campaign organized a variety of fundraisers, including a cookbook with recipies contributed by fans entitled Foodscape. The cookbook mixes earth-bound cooking with recipies for delicacies referenced in the series, resulting in an intriguing document of fan culture and the creativity science fiction ideas can generate. Also included in the donation are promotional items and copies of scripts, most signed by one of the show’s producers and writers, Ricky Manning. Efforts to sustain or revive a series are increasingly one of the staples of media science fiction fandom, and the materials from the Save Farscape campaign provide a glimpse into how one such organization pursued its goal.

An audio recording of a speech given by the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., has been donated to the University Libraries, further documenting the civil rights leader’s 1959 visit to the UI campus.

The speech, entitled “The Future of Race Relations,” was presented by Dr. King at the Iowa Memorial Union on November 11, 1959. The 42-minute recording includes an introduction by Prof. Robert Michaelson of the UI School of Religion. King’s appearance was co-sponsored by the School and by the University Lectures Committee.

Charles Silliman, a Coralville resident, donated the recording to the University Archives earlier this year. Silliman had purchased it from the University’s audiovisual service, which recorded the speech, less than a week after the event. A circulating copy on CD will be available in Media Services, and a digital copy has also been preserved, with the original tape, in the University Archives.

The image at left of King on campus is taken from the 1960 Hawkeye yearbook.

An interesting new item in Special Collections, purchased in 2005, is a photograph album compiled by three men who took a vacation down the Iowa River to the Mississippi river at Burlington in a boat they built before undertaking their journey.

The album contains 40 photographs documenting their trip, from the construction of the boat in Oswald Veblen’s yard, to their various campsites, clouds, thunderstorms, and highlights of the scenery along the way. The result is a charming record of lazy summer days at the end of the nineteenth century.

Click on these thumbnails to view full-size selections from the album:

Special Collections has recently purchased a rare set of trade cards designed by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The set is known as the “Three Ages of Woman” and is complete with six cards. Trade cards were a common form of advertising in the nineteenth century - businesses would purchase cards printed with images and then letterpress their store information over the image, or on the back of the card. They would be distributed to potential customers and were often collected. Gilman’s set is distinctive for its unusual and highly symbolic imagery. The six card set is comprised of two three card themes - a religious series and a secular series. Each card depicts a different stage of a girl’s development (baby, young girl, and young woman) according to popular representations of religious and secular iconography. Each girl’s head is wrapped in a flower, and the series can be interpreted according to the “language of flowers,” a method popular in the Victorian era of describing attributes based on the designs of flowers. All six cards can be studied in detail at the links below. The top three cards are the religious series, the bottom three are the secular series.