Alumni Weekend

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Alumni Weekend is September 15-17, 2017.  There are a number of planned activities for our beloved alumni, visitors, and current students that are listed online (view schedule), including reunions, panel discussions, social mixers, campus tours, excursions around Salem, celebratory meals, exciting entertainment and awards ceremonies.  Alumni Weekend truly has something for everyone.

More than 800 total guests and 500 Bearcats returned to campus this past September, making it one of the most successful and highest attended Alumni Weekend gatherings in school history.  Get a glimpse of the fun that was had by checking out the Alumni Weekend 2016 Recap and Photo Galley.  Also, a number of items owned by Willamette alumni will be on display this weekend on the 5th floor of Waller Hall for alumni weekend.  They will be on display into October for the Waller Hall birthday celebration.  These items include unique items from the Archives that usually are not loaned.

Below are a photos from last year’s Alumni Weekend (2016), including a leather bag with an early Willamette University bearcat emblem owned by Marian Pope (class of 1936), and a yellow stadium seat cushion with Barney the Beartcat that was used between 1952 through the 1970s.

(Info and photos courtesy of the Archives & Special Collections and the Alumni Weekend web page.)

Betty LaDuke Paintings

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As you enter the Hatfield Library or walk through the Mary Stuart Rogers Music Center or Goudy Commons, you may notice new paintings on display.  These paintings are part of the collaborative exhibition, Betty LaDuke: Social Justice Revisited, presented by the Willamette University Archives and Special Collections and the Hallie Ford Museum of Art.

“Oregon artist and writer Betty LaDuke has gained an international reputation for her murals, paintings, and sketches. Her work tends to express socialist progress and life’s continuity, from images of America’s civil rights struggles, such as Play Free (1968), to women’s struggles for survival in war-ridden, spoiled lands, such as Eritrea/Ethiopia: Where Have All the Fathers Gone (1998).” – The Oregon Encyclopedia

The paintings will be on display throughout the fall semester.  The Archives holds LaDuke’s papers as a collection within the Pacific Northwest Artists Archives. The exhibition is made possible through the generous support of the Willamette University’s Green Fund provided through the Office of Sustainability. The four paintings below are on display in the Hatfield Library throughout the fall semester.

Additional information about Betty LaDuke, including events, books, videos, and websites can be found at:
http://libguides.willamette.edu/betty_laduke

 

  Eritrea:
Dreaming Home
2002
Eritrea:
Refugees Waiting
2002
Kosovo:
War Widows
2006
Mozambique:
Vanishing Rainforests
2009

Eclipse-2017

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“The Great American Eclipse,” the first solar eclipse to touch the continental United States since 1979, occurred right here in Salem on the morning of August 21st (10:18 a.m.).  We have compiled events that happened on campus, as well as observation tips, safety, and other fun activities.

Additional info at: http://libguides.willamette.edu/solar-eclipse

Oregon Coast and Highway History

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The Oregon Coast is filled with unexpected history. Prior to World War I, most of the Oregon coast was inaccessible. As a response to World War I and perceived need for emergency preparedness, the concept of the Roosevelt Coast Military Highway was created and named in honor of President Theodore Roosevelt.

In 1919, Oregon voters approved the sale of $2.5 million in bonds for the project, but matching federal funds failed to materialize. But Oregonians still wanted access to the coasts, so the Oregon’s Highway Department began work on 400 miles worth of road, bridges, and tunnels in 1921 and continued through the 1920s & 30s. The road became U.S. 101 in 1926 and then renamed in 1931 as the Oregon Coast Highway.

This is also the 50th anniversary of Oregon’s Beach Bill which was signed into law on July 6, 1967 to safeguard beaches from development.  Our beloved coast could look much different had the bill failed and a few private developers won. Thankfully as Oregonians began to hear what they stood to lose, the trickle of public support turned into a tidal wave.  After months of  battle, the bill was signed into law.  And the rest is history.  Your experience of our wonderful Oregon Coast line and access to the miles of beach that people around the world come to visit is a direct result from this important legislative bill.  Know that our beautiful beach is for the public to treasure and protect.  Forever!

Below are just a few of the dozens of images from the Oregon Encyclopedia that describe the history of Highway 101, the Oregon Coast Highway (https://oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/highway_101_oregon_coast_highway_/#.WWOvVojyuUk).  The following link also goes to a page of activities and events connected to the Oregon’s Beach Bill (http://visittheoregoncoast.com/oregon-beach-bill-50th-anniversary-celebration).

   
 
   
   

New Art Acquisitions

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The three artworks shown above are on loan from the Hallie Ford Museum of Art at Willamette University.  Located at the corner of State Street and Cottage Street, the museum serves as a cultural and educational resource for the university, the city of Salem, and the entire Northwest region.

The selections on display represent recent acquisitions to the museum’s Northwest collection.  The museum collection focuses on art from the region — including deep holdings of modern and contemporary art from Oregon and Washington as well as an extensive Native American basket collection.  In addition, the museum has built a broad study collection of art from Ancient Mediterranean, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Oceania.

The artists represented in the Hatfield Library exhibition include three Northwest painters Alden Mason (Seattle), Jackie Johnson (Portland), and Bonnie Schulte (Salem).

Below are photos from the exhibit:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Squirrel Kidnapped

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We currently have a mini-archives exhibit all about squirrels on display on the first floor of the library. There are tidbits of info about our infamous squirrels, including a petition that went to Governor McCall in the 1970s to declare the squirrels an endangered species near Willamette University and the Oregon State Capitol Building. Two separate Willamette Collegian articles are highlighted that accused Longview, Washington of stealing squirrels.  These two articles started the controversy surrounding the squirrel-napping.

Did you know that Willamette University’s squirrel population is made up of grey squirrels?  The grey squirrels were brought as a gift for the school in the 1880s.  Unfortunately, grey squirrels are an invasive species to the Pacific Northwest and displace red squirrels.  

Thank you Kate Kerns, intern in our Archives and Special Collections, for pulling this exhibit together with materials from our Archives and Special Collections. A special thank you to Sybil Westenhouse for investing in experiential learning through the Sybil Westenhouse Archives Excellence Fund.

 

 

Faculty Colloquium, Seth Cotlar

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Dear Colleagues,

Please join us this Friday, April 28th at 3 pm. in the Hatfield Room for our tenth and final Faculty Colloquium of this semester. Treats will be provided.

Seth Cotlar, Professor of History
 

Title:  What the Nostalgic Subject Knows: Nostalgia, the Nineteenth Century Archive, and the Melancholy History of Modernization in Antebellum America

This talk will be drawn from my ongoing book project entitled “When The Olden Days Were New: A Cultural History of Nostalgia in Modernizing America, 1776-1860.”   In the 1820s and 1830s there emerged a new category of people–self-described “antiquaries” and lovers of “the olden times.”  By the 1840s, just about every town or county had a small community of quirky amateur historians.  These librarians, bank clerks, widows, and lawyers collected old books and manuscripts, hoarded old tools and objects, donned “old fashioned” clothing, filled their houses with anachronistic furniture, drew sketches of old houses before they were about to be torn down, and regaled anyone who would listen with stories from “the olden days” that they had gleaned from their conversations with local octogenarians.  In an era when most of their contemporaries could have cared less about history (Independence Hall, for example, was almost torn down and replaced with a more modern building in the 1820s), this community of eccentrics produced hundreds of local histories (such as this gripping, 400+ page history of Newbury, Newburyport, and West Newbury) and founded dozens of historical societies.  This work matters, because the material they collected formed the foundation of the modern historical archive that we now use to reconstruct the history of early North America. In this talk, I will critically interrogate the nostalgic impulses that animated this work of recovery and preservation.  For the most part, these builders of the archive have been looked down upon, if not entirely ignored, by professional historians because of their unseemly, melancholy attachment to objects and documents from the “obsolete” past.  Their emotional investment in their work disqualified them as “serious” scholars for a profession eager to define itself as rigorously modern and empirical.  But I argue that the melancholy, nostalgic sensibility of these early nineteenth century historians is precisely what enabled them to see certain features of the American past that many of their more forward-looking contemporaries wished to forget.  Indeed, we are now able to tell more capacious and creative histories of early America today, in part, because of the radically inclusive work of preservation carried out by this first generation of nostalgic hoarders, and eccentric lovers of “the olden times.”

Students are welcome.

We look forward to seeing you there.

Doreen Simonsen and Daniel Rouslin
Faculty Colloquium Coordinators

Lecture by Gordon-Reed and Onuf

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The History Department invites you to attend a lecture by historians Annette Gordon-Reed, Professor at Harvard Law School and Pulitzer-Prize Winning author of The Hemingses of Monticello, and Peter Onuf, UVA emeritus, founder of the Backstory! Podcast, and author of numerous books on Thomas Jefferson.  The talk will take place on Monday April 24 at 7pm in the Hatfield Room.

Gordon-Reed and Onuf will give a talk based on their recently published and widely-acclaimed book “The Most Blessed of the Patriarchs: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination.”  We hope to see you there!

For questions about this lecture, please contact Seth Cotlar (scotlar@willamette.edu) from the History Department.

2017 Faculty Works Exhibit

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The Mark O. Hatfield Library has on display a number of select faculty works now through May 15th, 2017.  These displays are are located on the first floor, and consist of a number of faculty publications (books and articles), and works of art (photos and studio art).  For the first time, there is also a display which highlight video clips of a theater production. Below are a photos from this exhibit.