Month: February 2012

Categories
Artifacts Digital Archives Maps Photographs

Winter Blog Roundup

Blank 1940 United States Census form (Source: National Archives and Records Administration website)*

Genealogy Notes

Resources for getting a head start on your 1940 census research are available via the Columbus-Lowndes Public Library “Local History Announcements” blog. The 1940 census will be released on April 2, 2012 (the federal census remains closed for 72 years for privacy reasons).

Read some interesting facts about the 1940 census at NARAtions, the blog of the U.S. National Archives.

For researchers tracing families in North Carolina: the North Carolina State Archives recently digitized their WPA Cemetery Surveys. Read about it in this blog post and view the cemetery records here.

Martin Luther King Day

The Arts

The work of Mississippi artist Theora Hamblett is the subject of this blog post from the Mississippi Library Commission.

The Mississippi Museum of Art discusses its upcoming exhibition, Curious George Saves the Day: The Art of Margret and H. A. Rey, in this blog post.

Fans of the television series Downton Abbey will appreciate this exploration of that period’s popular music by the Library of Congress “In the Muse” blog.

Can a Stradivari violin be duplicated? Apparently so, using CT scans and advanced manufacturing equipment. Researchers used an instrument from the Library of Congress collection to make the replica.

Of Interest

This blog post describes an interesting function of the Library of Congress: selecting twenty-five films that merit permanent preservation for their “cultural, aesthetic, and historical value.” See this year’s list at http://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2011/12/the-registry-and-beyond/.

The United States Copyright Office is now blogging at http://blogs.loc.gov/copyrightdigitization. They discuss issues surrounding the digitization of nearly seventy million pre-1978 copyright records.

The Library of Congress just digitized the 30,000th map for its online collection. Read more at http://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2011/05/the-view-from-30000-maps/.

The National Archives wants you! …To help transcribe and tag documents in order to make them more accessible to the public. Check out the “Citizen Archivist” initiative at the NARAtions blog.

*Image from National Archives and Records Administration, “1940 Federal Population Census, Part 1: General Information, 1940 Census Forms,” http://www.archives.gov/research/census/1940/general-info.html#form (accessed February 17, 2012).

Categories
Photographs

Black History Month: Farm Security Administration Photos

African Americans at table in Clarksdale, 1939, by Marion Post Wolcott. Call Number: PI/1986.0026, item 132 (MDAH Collection)
African Americans at table in Clarksdale, 1939, by Marion Post Wolcott. Call Number: PI/1986.0026, item 132 (MDAH Collection)

The Farm Security Administration collection (PI/1986.0026) is unique in that it documents the everyday life of Mississippians, both black and white, during the Depression era. The photographs capture a microcosm of daily activities, including people at work and leisure. The Library of Congress holds the original negatives, but MDAH has copies of images pertaining to Mississippi.

Patti Carr Black assembled many of these photographs for her book, Documentary Portrait of Mississippi: The Thirties. She wrote, “These images, along with Eudora Welty’s One Time, One Place, help define for us the meaning of the Depression in Mississippi. They also may help others understand an observation that Walker Evans [an FSA photographer] made shortly before his death: ‘I can understand why Southerners are haunted by their own landscape and in love with it.'”1

Scene in Natchez, Mississippi, by Ben Shahn. Call Number: PI/1986.0026, item 77 (MDAH Collection)
Scene in Natchez, Mississippi, by Ben Shahn. Call Number: PI/1986.0026, item 77 (MDAH Collection)

This description from the Library of Congress gives a brief history of the collection:

The photographs of the Farm Security Administration – Office of War Information Photograph Collection form an extensive pictorial record of American life between 1935 and 1944…The project initially documented cash loans made to individual farmers by the Resettlement Administration and the construction of planned suburban communities. The second stage focused on the lives of sharecroppers in the South and migratory agricultural workers in the midwestern and western states. As the scope of the project expanded, the photographers turned to recording both rural and urban conditions throughout the United States as well as mobilization efforts for World War II.2

"Jitterbugging in a juke joint on a Saturday afternoon," by Marion Post Wolcott. Call Number: PI/1986.0026, item 159 (MDAH Collection)
"Jitterbugging in a juke joint on a Saturday afternoon," by Marion Post Wolcott. Call Number: PI/1986.0026, item 159 (MDAH Collection)3

View more of the FSA photographs at the “American Memory” page on the Library of Congress website.

1 Patti Carr Black, Documentary Portrait of Mississippi: The Thirties (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1982), 7.

2 Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, “Background and Scope of Collection,” http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/fsa/background.html (accessed February 2, 2012).

3 Photograph caption from Black, Documentary Portrait of Mississippi, 83.

Categories
Digital Archives Paper Archives

Natchez Mardi Gras in 1900

Natchez Mardi Gras Association broadside, February 27, 1900. Call Number: OSXBroadsides/1900 (MDAH Collection)
Natchez Mardi Gras Association broadside, February 27, 1900. Call Number: OSXBroadsides/1900 (MDAH Collection)

This broadside (OSXBroadsides/1900) was discovered within a larger collection of materials from the attic of the Elms in Natchez. The two sided broadside was recently scanned and made available online through the catalog (click here to access both sides). Many of the other materials from the attic are now in Z/1879 The Elms Papers at MDAH.

Categories
Events Events: Eudora Welty House

Books and the Process of Creating Art

Tuesday, April 17, 5:30 p.m. at the Barber Auditorium, Belhaven University. Books and the Process of Creating Art. Jackson native and children’s book illustrator Scott Cook shares his book making process from beginning to end. Book lovers of all ages are welcome. At 4:00 pm, the public is invited to an Open House celebrating the launch of the new Shoe Bird exhibit at the Eudora Welty Education and Visitors Center. This event is made possible by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Mississippi Department of Archives and History in partnership with the Eudora Welty Foundation. For more information call 601-353-7762 or email Eudora Welty House.

Categories
Artifacts

Civil War Sesquicentennial: Today in 1862

The Mississippi Civil War Sesquicentennial continues and in the coming months we will be highlighting Museum Division collections related to 1862 and the Civil War. Special thanks to Nan Prince, Asst. Director of Collections, for writing this series.

Flag of Company A., Blount Guards, 23rd Regiment, Mississippi Infantry. Accession Number: 1968.61.1 (Museum Division Collection)
Flag of Company A, Blount Guards, 23rd Regiment, Mississippi Infantry. Accession Number: 1968.61.1 (Museum Division Collection)

The Surrender of Ft. Donelson

This First National pattern flag belonged to Company A, “Blount Guards,” 23rd Regiment, Mississippi Infantry. Captain C.G. Blount raised the Blount Guards in August 1861, in Iuka in Tippah County. Blount’s sister presented the company with this flag shortly before they left to join General Albert Sidney Johnston’s forces in Kentucky.

Known as the 3rd Mississippi in Kentucky, this regiment was stationed at Fort Donelson, a Confederate fort on the Cumberland River near Dover, Tennessee, when Flag Officer Andrew H. Foote’s and Brigadier General Ulysses S. Grant’s forces began their combined attack on February 13. Three days later on February 16, Fort Donelson surrendered unconditionally to Grant and this flag was captured. With the fall of Fort Donelson and its sister fort, Fort Henry, the North gained its first major victories of the war, and “Unconditional Surrender” Grant earned a nickname and became a hero.

The members of the 3rd Mississippi who did not escape from Fort Donelson became prisoners of war and were sent north to prison camps. The prisoners were exchanged in the fall of 1862, and the regiment was reorganized. This Blount Guards flag remained in the possession of its captors until it was returned to Mississippi in 1910.

Sources:

National Park Service, “Fort Donelson National Battlefield,” http://www.nps.gov/fodo/index.htm.

Mississippi Division Sons of Confederate Veterans, “23rd Mississippi Infantry,” http://www.mississippiscv.org/MS_Units/23rd_MS_INF.htm.