After months of planning and hours of rehearsal by our friends in the Heavenly Voices Gospel Choir, our Voices & Vinyl concert was held on Thursday, December 3rd in the Moody Memorial Library Allbritton foyer. It was, to be perfectly frank, a complete success from our point of view. A sizable crowd of students, faculty,…
Choose Your Own Civil War Letter Adventure!
We’re currently processing a couple of Civil War letters collections – to be unveiled soon! – and getting them ready for online access inspired this week’s blog post. After reading and/or transcribing dozens of examples of 1860s correspondence, certain patterns in their organization and content began to emerge. And for whatever reason, that reminded me…
All Hallows’ Eve in Poetry, Prose and Photos: Excerpts from the “Roundup” and the “Phoenix”
It’s the week of Halloween and there’s no better time to highlight some items from our University Archives collections, specifically the Baylor Roundup (our campus yearbook) and The Phoenix (a literary magazine sponsored by the English Department). First up, a poem called Halloween from the 1902 Roundup. From the 1950 Roundup A short story from…
This Is The Most 1990’s Video In Our Collections, And It Is Glorious
Oh, man. Let all that mid-90’s goodness settle in. It’s so perfect, it’s causing a Pavlovian response in my mind where everything tastes like Surge and smells like CK One and is swathed in flannel. The context on this piece is that, in celebration of Baylor’s sesquicentennial year (1995), a fundraising packet was sent to…
Political Maneuvering: Updates and Changes to the Digital Collections, Fall 2015
We’re taking the opportunity of this week’s blog post to highlight some changes to one of our partner institutions and – as it directly relates to us – their digital collections. Announcing the Baylor Collections of Political Materials Digital Collections! Our friends at the W.R. Poage Legislative Library recently announced a return to their longstanding…
Thrown Down, Fired Up and Glazed Over: Introducing the Harding Black Collection
How do we honor an innovator? Do we associate their name with their creation forever, like Eli Whitney and the cotton gin? Do we raise a statue in their honor? Do we put their name on a piece of currency? Around here, we make a digital collection out of their work, like we did with…
Farmers’ Wives, Insane Asylums and Dr. G.W. Truett’s Sermons of the 1940s
George W. Truett was an unrivaled master of the preacher’s art for telling an engaging story, for drawing parallels between the Bible’s cast of characters and his contemporary audience, and for recalling passages of Scripture at the drop of a mic. But even he wasn’t above falling prey to passing along misinformation, and in at…
Well Done, Sister Suffragette! Celebrating the 95th Anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment at Baylor
This week marked the 95th anniversary of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, the addition to the U.S. Constitution that prohibits denying the right to vote to any American citizen on the basis of sex. The amendment marked the culmination of years of activism and struggle on behalf of women across the country, and in…
Jax and EBB Sitting ‘Neath A Tree / R-H-Y-M-I-N-G: On Sesame Street’s “Sons of Poetry” and the Brownings
What do fictional Northern California biker gangs, a beloved television institution and two Victorian poets have in common? According to this video from Sesame Street’s amazing line of pop culture parody skits, they share a love of rhyming couplets, of course. In typical Sesame Street fashion, they’ve taken something decidedly adult – the hit FX…
The Spencer Collection Marches On With 400+ New Titles!
Unlike some of our never-ending projects (ahem, Black Gospel Music Restoration Project, ahem), there are some projects that we’re making slow, steady progress on every day. And that’s why we’re announcing a new batch of items in the Frances G. Spencer Collection of American Popular Sheet Music – 461 all told! The items span a…
A Not-So-Innocent Abroad: Presenting at the Keystone Digital Humanities Conference
When I use the phrase “digital humanities,” what comes to mind? Humans using machines to analyze what makes us human? Machines pretending to be humans? A T-800 model Terminator quoting Shakespeare? Turns out, it’s a trick question, because no one really agrees on what “digital humanities” means for sure. That’s a big takeaway I got…
Documenting 64 Years of Joyful Noise: The School of Music Performances Programs Collection is Complete!
They were written on typewriters, word processors and laptops. Some used italicized fonts, others used “high tech” typefaces and the most recent ones feature the Baylor University Judge Baylor/Pat Neff Hall wordmark. They could be one page, two pages or dozens. In short, while the School of Music Performances Programs collection may seem like a…