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This post was written by Prof. Alex McNair of Baylor University’s Division of Spanish and Portuguese in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures. An abbreviated version of this essay was presented at the Shakespeare First Folio faculty research showcase sponsored by Baylor Libraries on November 3, 2023.

In 2023 we commemorated the 400th anniversary of the publication of Shakespeare’s First Folio. A folio is a large format book, the largest size they could print (folding the folio, or sheet of paper, only once). In 1623, seven years after the bard’s death, a folio-sized volume was published in London with thirty-six of Shakespeare’s plays. The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C. has the largest collection of Shakespeare First Folios worldwide, and you can page through a digital edition online. To see a First Folio in person, you might venture down to the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in Austin, where they currently have three First Folios on display in an exhibit entitled “The Long Lives of Very Old Books” (August 19-December 30, 2023). The Baylor libraries do not have a Shakespeare First Folio, though the Armstrong Browning has many eighteenth-century editions. Initially on display to commemorate the quatercentenary of Shakespeare’s death in 2016, the ABL has reprised the exhibition in its treasure room this fall to celebrate the First Folio. The Texas Collection at Baylor also has fine examples of rare books from the early modern period. Last year, I had the opportunity to showcase the Collection’s rare books for students of Latin American Colonial Literature, and so I present here some observations on how these books can provide a different context for understanding the Shakespeare First Folio. 

In the front matter of Shakespeare’s First Folio there is a prologue “To the great Variety of Readers” by John Heminges and Henry Condell. They write: “. . . the fate of all books depends upon your [the readers’] capacities: and not of your heads alone, but of your purses. Well! It is now public, and you will stand for your privileges we know: to read and censure. Do so, but buy it first. That doth best commend a book, the stationer says.” This is not the typical pitch that comes out of advertising agencies today, but it is refreshingly forthright. The compilers, who belonged to the King’s Men, Shakespeare’s former company, reveal the anxiety they must have felt after working with the stationers (i.e., booksellers/publishers) to produce a work this size. It entailed a substantial investment of material and labor, and stationers would have been concerned about covering their costs. Stephen Greenblatt, in his introduction to The Norton Shakespeare, calls the First Folio an “expensive venture” (65). Most of the stationers involved in the project must have thought it a gamble to publish a collection of contemporary drama. Lavish quarto- and folio-sized books were reserved for literature with more prestige: the Latin Classics, the King James Bible, Theology, History. Heminges and Condell even seem to acknowledge the dubiousness of Shakespeare’s plays as literature when they refer to them as “these trifles” in their “Epistle dedicatory.” Most plays in the seventeenth century, if they were printed at all, came out singly in cheap quarto editions–quarto size is achieved by folding the folio sheet twice (giving eight pages per sheet, four on each side).

Shakespeare’s Spanish contemporary, Miguel de Cervantes, published eight of his own plays, along with eight interludes, in a single collection in 1615, only because he couldn’t find a theater company to buy them. He had the luxury of seeing them in print at least: the booksellers could capitalize on his name recognition ten years after the publication of Don Quixote; most plays of the period, whether they were successful in the theater or not, never made it into print. Cervantes claimed to have written twenty or thirty plays in the 1580s alone; only two from that period survive. The case of Antonio de Solís, who wrote for the stage in Madrid between 1627 and 1661, is also illustrative. He was a regular in the literary salons of Spain’s capital during the reign of Philip IV and wrote often for the public theater. Like Shakespeare in his last decade as a playwright, Solís was frequently engaged by the court and his plays enjoyed private performances before the king. Solís quit writing plays after he was named to the post of Chronicler of the Indies in 1661. I like to think his play on Amazon warriors, staged in the palace theater at Buen Retiro in 1655, recommended him to the court as official chronicler: accounts from the New World often reported rumors of islands inhabited exclusively by a race of war-like women. Hernan Cortés, for example, writes in his fourth letter (October 15, 1524) that a captain brought him “word from the lords of the province of Ciguatán, who affirm that there is an island inhabited only by women, without a single man, and that at certain times men go over from the mainland and have intercourse with them; the females born to those who conceive are kept, but the males are sent away” (298-300). The Texas Collection has two copies of the work Solís composed as official chronicler: his History of the Conquest of Mexico. Originally published as a folio-sized volume in 1684 in Spanish, it was soon translated into English. As a handsome large-format book, the History enjoyed multiple editions across the next two centuries in at least five different languages. The Texas Collection has a 1724 edition of the Thomas Townsend translation. It is a lavishly bound copy with the fold-out illustrations and maps still intact. But Solís’s plays did not have the same fortune. A biography of Solís included in The Texas Collection’s 1776 Spanish edition of the History only mentions four plays, though modern scholars have recovered and edited eleven (see Fernández Carrión for a more recent biography of Solís). Shakespeare’s first folio, by contrast, preserves thirty-six plays; eighteen of which were not previously printed.

Without the first folio, we would not have plays such as Julius Caesar, Measure for Measure, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, or The Tempest. This is something of a miracle given the context of the book trade of the day, which prioritized the Ancients over the Moderns and, among the Moderns, preferred more international fare. As Greenblatt points out in his biography, Will in the World: How Shakespeare became Shakespeare, “Shakespeare’s reading, and indeed the entire Elizabethan book trade, was conspicuously international” (270). Many who could read, also read Latin. The grammar school that Shakespeare attended as a child in Stratford taught Latin, not English Literature (Greenblatt, Will in the World 26-27). This is borne out in The Texas Collection’s rare books from the early modern period. The oldest printed book we have in The Texas Collection, a Latin geography by Pomponius Mela, also contains the Collection’s oldest map. Printed in 1482, ten years before Columbus’s voyage, the Collection’s edition of Mela’s Geographia reflects the world as Europe had understood it for more than a thousand years (Pomponius Mela was a Roman geographer of the first century AD). The Texas Collection also holds sixteenth-century editions of another famous Geographia: Ptolemy’s. They demonstrate the period’s deference to the authority of the written word, especially that of the Ancients. Claudius Ptolemy had written his geography and cosmography in the second century AD in Greek. By the fifteenth century, the work had been translated into Latin and was first printed in 1477. A 1482 Italian translation of Ptolemy probably influenced Columbus’s calculations, but Ptolemy’s Geographia would have been hopelessly out of date after modern cartographers, like Vespucci, mapped the Western Hemisphere in the early 1500s. Nonetheless, the Renaissance was loath to overthrow the authority of classical learning, and Ptolemy continued to be reprinted. The Texas Collection’s three editions of Ptolemy, the Latin Geographia of1562 and Italian translations from 1561 and 1598, the latter a folio edition, leaned on the Ancient authority of the Alexandrian Greek’s name, but added maps and updated navigation charts that included the Western Hemisphere. They balanced respect for the old with fascination for the new.

The Tempest has pride of place in the First Folio as the volume’s first play, and it reflects Shakespeare’s engagement with a blossoming international book trade. Prospero, the deposed Duke of Milan, explains to his daughter Miranda that he “to [his] state grew stranger, being transported / And rapt in secret studies” (I.2.76-77). His “library / Was dukedom large enough” (I.2. 109-10), so his brother deposed him. Prospero and his infant daughter were sent into exile and shipwrecked on an island, but he was at least “furnished . . . with volumes that / [he] prize[d] above [his] dukedom” (I.2.166-68). Armed only with his books, Prospero enslaves the island’s inhabitants, the “monstrous” Caliban and spritely Ariel, along with local faeries and spirits. As critics, old and new, have pointed out, The Tempest evinces more than passing familiarity with the classical Liberal Arts, but also fascination with the recent accounts of voyages, discoveries, storms and shipwrecks (Smith 318; Graff and Phelan). The stationers knew there was a market for these. The 1578 Latin translation of Girolamo Benzoni’s Italian New Histories of the New World, is an example from The Texas Collection, as is the Collection’s copy of Richard Hakluyt’s Historie of the West-Indies, published around the same time in London. Among its rare books, The Collection also boasts a lavish folio edition of Hakluyt’s 1599 The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation. The Collection’s 1556 Italian translation of López de Gómara’s General History of the West Indies has what may be the first illustration in Europe of the American bison. The printing press with movable type had only been invented in the fifteenth century, so the sixteenth century witnessed the rapid expansion of the printed book at the same time that Europe was looking outward to the rest of the globe. Two years after the Shakespeare Folio, Samuel Purchas published a four-volume collection in folio, entitled Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas His Pilgrimes. The Texas Collection has a fine first edition set printed in 1625, along with a fourth edition of Purchas’ Pilgrimage from 1626. The title, in full, on the frontispiece of volume I continues: “Containing a History of the World, in Sea Voyages, & Land Travels, by Englishmen & Others, Wherein God’s Wonders in Nature & Providence, the Acts, Arts, Varieties & Vanities of Men, with a World of the World’s Rarities, are by a World of Eyewitness Authors, Related to the World.”

One of the jewels of The Texas Collection is the 1524 Latin translation of Hernán Cortés’s “Second Letter of Relation.” The letter relates the story of Cortés’s conquest of the Aztec empire between 1519 and 1521 in Mexico, which he renamed “New Spain.” Modern readers may take for granted instantaneous access to news from around the globe, but the speed with which word of Cortés’s conquest spread is remarkable given the technology of his day: within a period of months his Spanish letter traveled from the Americas to Spain where it was published in 1522, then only months later translated and printed in Latin. The Nuremberg 1524 edition in The Texas Collection also has the first depiction (outside of Mexico) of the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlán, present day Mexico City. The temple portrayed at the center displays a grim scene with the Latin label “Templum ubi sacrificant” (the Temple where they sacrifice) and “capita sacrificatorii” to denote the victims’ decapitated heads. We now recognize many of these reports and narratives of conquest as attempts to dehumanize the indigenous Other, to justify the conquistador’s thirst for land and gold. But their greedy descriptions were greedily consumed by Europe’s expanding book market, which in turn spawned a machinery of representation. A 1770 history of the conquest based on the writings of Cortés, also among the Collection’s rare books, has an illustration on the frontispiece’s verso in which the conquistador presents a globe to the Spanish monarch. Cortés is followed by missionaries and soldiers, but also by indigenous peoples, some dressed in animal skins. One in the foreground, particularly dark-skinned, is prostrated with bow, arrow and quiver set aside. A banner with Latin writing over Cortés says “God is with you, Oh strongest of men.” Another banner cites the battle cry of the Israelites against the Midianites from the Latin Vulgate: “The sword of the Lord, and of Gideon!” in the King James (Judges 7: 20). A sun with a triangle (representing the Trinity) spreads its rays over the whole group, but one ray directed at the monarch cites another Latin verse from Judges 6, which in English would be “I brought you forth from their land.” The verse is incomplete but, if we read further into the biblical passage, we find that God is telling the Israelites “I delivered you out of the hands of the Egyptians, and out of the hand of all that oppressed you, and drove them out from before you and gave you their land” (KJV). As far as the Spaniards were concerned, God had delivered a new promised land to them. The 1770 edition was, in fact, annotated by the Archbishop of Mexico: it was meant to give local bishops and priests a primer in the indigenous customs they might encounter in their own parishes.

Cultivating cultural humility at Baylor, we must point out the assumption of cultural superiority in these texts. That should give us pause. Europeans in the Age of Exploration used religion to justify dispossessing a people they considered savage or even demonic. One hundred years after Cortés, and around the time of the First Folio, Samuel Purchas was echoing many of these justifications. Volumes three and four of Purchas His Pilgrimes are particularly interesting for students of Spanish Colonial literature, because they gather some of the earliest English translations of Iberian explorers and historians of Latin America, which in the early seventeenth century included most of the southern portion of what is now the United States. For example, the fourth volume includes an early English translation of Cabeza de Vaca’s Naufragios, or Shipwrecks, with his sojourn among the indigenous peoples of Florida, Texas, and Northern Mexico. Unlike Cortés, Cabeza de Vaca was abandoned to the North American wilderness, completely at the mercy of the tribes he encountered. Rolena Adorno remarks that “Naufragios reads like an efficiently condensed and straightforward report” (61), but in Purchas’s collection it becomes another tool for demonization of the American Other. Since the pages of the folio edition are so tightly packed with text, he uses running headers and marginal notes to summarize content on each page. But these are often used to moralize, pointing out “ungodly custome” (IV, p. 1512) as when he summarizes a page of Cabeza de Vaca’s account with the header “Indians cured by Christians, Dead Raised, Diabolical Superstition” (IV, p. 1516). At other times he juxtaposes ordinary customs like leatherworking with a casual reference to Satan worship: “Indians slaves to Satan, Leather Habit, Shaving of Skins, Good Food” (IV, p. 1517).

The indigenous point of view, even when it is registered, is always filtered through a European lens: “You taught me language,” says Caliban to his captor, “and my profit on’t / Is I know how to curse” (I.2.366-67). But European representations of the imperial project were not monolithic and we should not assume that Shakespeare approved of the motives or the method of colonization, even as he reflects them in a work like The Tempest. An interesting example of a more nuanced view of European exploration and colonization may be found in the work of El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega. Garcilaso was born in Peru in 1539, the son of an Incan princess and a Spanish captain, and he died in Spain the same year as Shakespeare, 1616. Garcilaso is best known today for his Royal Commentaries of the Incas, originally published in 1609. Extracts were translated into English and published in Purchas His Pilgrimes (see vol IV, pp. 1454-85). The writer paints a more flattering picture of the Inca than previous Spanish chroniclers had, often correcting previous accounts with his superior knowledge of Quechua, his mother’s language. His view of the Spanish conquistadors, published posthumously in his General History of Peru (1617), is uncompromising in portraying their brutality. Garcilaso’s account of the Pizarro brothers’ conquest of the Inca and the civil wars that followed is replete with stories of greed, ambition, and betrayal; fans of Shakespeare’s history plays will find familiar themes there. Volume IV of Purchas His Pilgrimes also has an extract from Garcilaso’s General History of Peru (pp. 1485-89). For a taste of Garcilaso’s prose in the original Spanish, the reader can consult The Texas Collection’s rare second edition of La Florida published in Madrid in 1723. La Florida del Inca, as it is known today, was originally published in 1605 (between the debuts of Shakespeare’s King Lear and Macbeth) and it is a history of the Hernando de Soto expedition to the American southeast, 1539-1543 (Spanish Florida was not just the territory encompassed by the state of Florida today; after de Soto’s expedition it extended from Texas in the West all the way to the east coast, and as far north as Arkansas, Tennessee and the Carolinas). To stitch together his account of the ill-fated expedition, Garcilaso used written reports and oral histories (many of the expedition’s members were also veterans of Peru). But Garcilaso also gives voice to the native Americans, attributing long speeches to their chiefs and warriors. The title page of the 1723 edition references the “heroicos caballeros,” or heroic gentlemen, as being “españoles e indios,” that is, both Spanish and Indian. Nobility, for Garcilaso, was not exclusive to Europeans, it could be shared by the indigenous peoples of the Americas.

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FOR FURTHER READING

I’ve included all the books cited above in the REFERENCES, as well as some additional works for the interested reader. For more on the evolution of the book trade in the century and a half after the invention of the printing press, for example, see Lisa Jardine’s chapter “The Triumph of the Book” in her Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance. Spanish Colonial literature is well translated into English, not just in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. See modern translations, for example, of Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s Naufragios (Castaways), Hernán Cortes’s letters, along with excellent translations of El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega’s works by the Varners and Harold Livermore. Adorno’s short introduction to this literature is an excellent entry to the field. For a historian’s perspective on the Spanish in what is now US territory, see Weber. Greenblatt’s Marvelous Possessions is a new-historicist take on early-modern European representations of the “New” World. The Graff and Phelan edition of The Tempest reprints many articles on the critical controversy surrounding Shakespeare’s engagement with the colonial project in the Americas. Works cited below that are in the Rare Books room of The Texas Collection are followed by RBT.

REFERENCES

Adorno, Rolena. Colonial Latin American Literature: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford UP,

2011.

Benzoni, Girolamo. Historiae novi orbis novae. Geneva, 1578. RBT

Cervantes, Miguel de. Teatro completo. Edited by Florencio Sevilla Arroyo, Penguin

Clásicos, 2016.

Cortés, Hernán. Letters from Mexico. Translated by A.R. Pagden, Grossman Publications,

1971.

—. Praeclara Ferdinādi Cortesii de Nova maris Oceani Hyspania narratio. Nuremberg, 1524.

RBT

—. Historia de Nueva España. México: J.A. de Hogal, 1770. RBT

Fernández Carrión, Miguel Héctor. “Antonio de Solís.” In Diccionario Biográfico

electrónico, Real Academia de la Historia, 2023.

Folger Shakespeare Library. “Read A Shakespeare First Folio.” 2023.

https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeare-in-print/first-folio/bookreader-68/

Graff, Gerald and James Phelan, editors. William Shakespeare’s The Tempest: A Case Study

in Critical Controversy. Bedford / St. Martins, 2000.

Greenblatt, Stephen. Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. With a new

preface, U of Chicago P, 2017.

—. Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. W.W. Norton, 2004.

—, et al, editors. The Norton Shakespeare: Based on the Oxford Shakespeare. W.W. Norton,

1997.

Hakluyt, Richard. The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the

English Nation. London, 1599. RBT

—. The Historie of the West-Indies. London, n.d. [c1600]. RBT

Jardine, Lisa. Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance. Macmillan, 1996.

KJV = The Bible. King James Version with the Apocrypha. Edited by David Norton,

Cambridge UP / Penguin, 2006.

López de Gómara, Francisco. Historia generale delle Indie occidentali. Rome, 1556. RBT

Mela, Pomponius. Cosmographi geographia. Venice, 1482. RBT

Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Álvar. Castaways: The Narrative of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca.

Translated by Frances M. López-Morillas, edited by Enrique Pulpo-Walker, U of California P, 1993.

Ptolemy, Claudius. Geographia. Italian. Venice, 1561. RBT

—. Geographia. Latin. Venice, 1562. RBT

—. Geographia. Italian. Venice, 1598. RBT

Purchas, Samuel. Haklutus Posthumus, or Purchas His Pilgrimes. London, 1625. 4 vols. RBT

Shakespeare, William. Comedies, histories & tragedies, published according to the true

originall copies. London: Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount, L. Smithweeke, and W. Aspley, 1623. In “Facsimile Viewer: First Folio (New South Wales),” Internet Shakespeare Editions, University of Victoria, 2023. https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/facsimile/book/SLNSW_F1/index.html

Smith, Emma. This is Shakespeare. Pantheon Books, 2020.

Solís, Antonio de. Historia de la conquista de México. Madrid: Blas Roman, 1776. RBT

—. History of the Conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards. Translated by Thomas Townsend,

London, 1724. RBT

Vega, Garcilaso de la [El Inca]. La Florida del Inca. Madrid, 1723. RBT

—. The Florida of the Inca. Translated by John and Jeanette Varner, U of Texas P, 1996.

—. Royal Commentaries of the Incas and General History of Peru. 2 vols. Translated by Harold

V. Livermore, The U of Texas P, 1966.

Weber, David J. The Spanish Frontier in North America. Yale UP, 1992.

Since at least 2010 – and for more than 400 posts – this blog has documented the tales and treasures of The Texas Collection. From materials in our archival collections to stories about Baylor, Texas, and the world, we’ve documented the Lone Star State backward, forward, and every which way in between.

Now, after 13 years as a standalone blog, we are excited to announce that we will be joining our Baylor Libraries special collections colleagues at the Promoting Discovery blog. Starting with our next post, all of our stories will be posted exclusively to PD, which you can find at blogs.baylor.edu/baylorlibraries.

But don’t you fret! We’ll keep this space open as an outpost on the digital prairie, a virtual archive of our previous work that you can still peruse all the way back to its roots. (We’ll also be importing these posts into Promoting Discovery, giving it a very welcome injection of Texana.)

Some of you may ask why we’re making this move? It’s simple: when the Libraries maintain multiple blogs, the majority of folks who see those posts are only interested in that topic. But when we post a variety of stories, sources, and subjects in one place, we stand a much better chance of catching new audiences: people who may have come for Texana but stayed for Browningiana, or folks who want to learn about digital collections and became interested in American popular sheet music.

In short, we’re moving because it makes the most sense for a single, active, impactful blog to represent the libraries rather than several sporadically-updated, niche blogs. It’s a better way to serve our patrons, and we are happy to join the other Libraries accounts that have moved into Promoting Discovery already.

So don’t be sad that we’ve picked up stakes for new pastures – be happy we’ve ridden so many fine trails together. And remember: wherever a Texan chooses to put down their roots, a little piece of Texas is planted right there with them.

See y’all over at Promoting Discovery. And thanks for the memories, pardners.

This post was written by Shelly Salo, Outreach and Instruction Librarian at The Texas Collection

I started working as the Outreach and Instruction Librarian at the Texas Collection in July. From the start, one of the collections that I was most looking forward to working with is our cookbook collection. It consists of over 9,000 cookbooks from all corners of Texas, dating from the nineteenth century to today. Recently, I had the opportunity to explore our cookbooks from 1923 for a back-to-school event held on the Quadrangle outside Carroll Library, home of The Texas Collection.

I selected two cookbooks for the occasion: “LaGrange Cook Book,” from the lady readers of the LaGrange Journal, and “Cook Book,” from the Ladies’ Aid of the First Christian Church of Lubbock, Texas. Many cookbooks from the twentieth century were written communally by women’s groups like these, and you will find more in our collection. This blog post from JSTOR Daily goes into detail about these types of cookbooks and links to other interesting resources on the topic.

Our special events coordinator Alexis sent my chosen recipes to local baking company Baked Bliss. They tested the original recipes and adjusted them for modern kitchens and palates. For instance, the 1923 recipes lack specific details on oven temperatures and baking times. Additionally, none of the original recipes call for salt. According to a 2017 Bon Appétit article, modern bakers can feel free to double the amount of salt in vintage dessert recipes to balance and enhance their flavor.

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The Centennial Cookies event was a great success, and we hope to hold similar events in the future. Stay on the lookout for more centennial celebrations with the Texas Collection!

Works Cited

Cook Book. Lubbock, Texas: [publisher not identified], 1923.

Harigel, B. F. LaGrange Cook Book. LaGrange, Texas: Mrs. B.F. Harigel, 1923.

Jackson, Ashawnta. “Community Cookbooks and the Women Who Wrote Them.” JSTOR, 2021, https://daily.jstor.org/community-cookbooks-and-the-women-who-wrote-them/ Accessed September 21, 2023.

Whitney, Alyse. “Why Every Dessert Needs Salt.” Bon Appétit, 2017, https://www.bonappetit.com/story/why-every-dessert-needs-salt Accessed September 21, 2023.

The collections we maintain take many forms: photographs, maps, books, coins, even bells from Spanish missions have found their way into our holdings! All these materials help us tell the stories of Texas in a way that focuses on documented facts.

When you combine that with oral memoirs and the power of creative fiction from works by authors like Dorothy Scarborough, you begin to see the rich tapestry that is the history of the Lone Star State.

Even our best efforts to collect and preserve stories can only go so far. There are gaps and blind spots in our holdings, and areas where we have an over-abundance of materials (that’s why we politely decline to take any more copies of Baylor’s Roundup yearbook). To enrich our collections and tell more diverse stories, it is important to reach out to ask for your help in locating and preserving resources that document Texas and Waco in more complete ways.

A Shifting Waco Landscape

The Waco neighborhood known colloquially as Calle Dos (for its location centered around Second Street) can be seen on some of the earliest maps of the city. Interrupted by Barron’s Branch creek as it flows into the Brazos River, the area sits on land originally deeded to R.W. Goode, M. Johnson, and R.W. Lusk, among others. In time, the area became home to the largest legal red light district in the United States, known as The Reservation.

When The Reservation was officially shut down as part of a deal for Waco to procure military installations upon America’s entry into World War I – Camp MacArthur and Rich Field, specifically – the area became home to a wave of immigrants from Mexico and Central and South America. These numbers swelled as people fled the chaos of the Mexican Revolution and found housing in Calle Dos to be more affordable than other options in the city.

Subsequent events in the Calle Dos story include destruction wrought by the 1953 Waco Tornado, clean-up efforts following the storm, and Urban Renewal from the 1950s-1970s. The end result is today’s largely open tracts of land and some remaining landmarks like St. Francis on the Brazos Catholic Church and Indian Springs Middle School.

Remembering a Vibrant Community

In recent years, there has been interest from community advocates to create a historic marker for Calle Dos, perhaps near the former community gathering place called La Pila. This artesian well-filled fountain served as a source for water and connection for the area’s residents before it was covered over with rubble created by the 1953 tornado. These efforts have been slow to gain traction, partly because the documentation of the lives that once were part of Calle Dos are not readily accessible, but scattered among family papers, small archives, and the memories of elder Wacoans.

The Texas Collection would like to take this opportunity to call on our friends in Waco’s Latino community to partner together to locate, document, and preserve the stories of Calle Dos. We are proud to offer our assistance with training, access to our current resources, and, if asked, provide a permanent home for documents, photos, and other materials related to this vibrant part of Waco’s history.

If you have materials related to Calle Dos and would like to discuss how The Texas Collection can help ensure that they are included in our archives on the history of Waco, please reach out to txcoll@baylor.edu or call us at (254) 710-1268.

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Maps Cited

Map of Waco City and Vicinity (1869) – View full map

Official Map of the City of Waco and Suburbs (1891) – View full map

Map of Waco, Texas and Additions, 1930 – View full map

Map of City of Waco, Texas (1949) – View full map

This post was written by Horace Maxile, a student in the Museum Studies program. Horace recently completed a five-month independent study at The Texas Collection focused on archival work including processing, reparative description, preservation, arrangement, and description. He has written the following reflection, recalling how he became interested in archives as well as some of the lessons he learned in his studies.

My interests in the written traditions of black music, primarily classical pieces by black composers, date to my undergraduate years. As I enter my third decade in the academy, most of my scholarly work involves musical analysis and thinking through extramusical contexts, such as historical and cultural considerations, I rely heavily on musical scores. My analytical endeavors as a young scholar did not explore much beyond the engraved score and commercially available recordings, but an appointment at the Center for Black Music Research challenged me to reconsider my approaches to research and to consider the value and versatility of archival holdings.

Yes, the archival bug bit me during my tenure at the Center for Black Music Research and I am now taking some time to scratch that itch. To say that I am budding at this point in my life and career might be somewhat tongue in cheek, but I am excited to learn about archives and archiving through my studies at Baylor University.

As part of an independent study that was hosted by Baylor’s Texas Collection, I was assigned three projects, all of which piqued my interests in various ways. One project was reparative description for a finding aid. My initial rationale for doing this was to rewrite the description/scope with my connections in mind as well as deciphering what the first preparer may have deemed as the primary “finds” within the collection. This project took me longer than expected because I thought it would be wise to look for connections—or perhaps themes—between the materials. However, I was reminded by my supervising archivist that I was to provide some historical context in the description and allow the details that surface from within the collection do the work. The first lesson: reparative descriptions could move well past the description when necessary, involving edits/rewrites at the series level and, sometimes, relabeling folders. That lesson also challenged me to reassess the subject headings as well, editing and adding a few of my own. Around six weeks after I finished this project, I was informed that a researcher wanted to use the collection for which I provided the reparative work. I would like to think that some of my work guided the researcher to something useful.

The other two projects required me to fully process small collections (assessment, folders, preservation, finding aid, etc.). One of the processing projects was an herbarium. Yes, an herbarium. Compiled in the 1940s by Fannie Mae Hurst, the collection of floral specimens suffered no major deterioration. Other than being nearly 75 years old and dried out, the wildflowers were in pretty good condition. The collection was created by a professor who taught biology at Baylor. My research for the biographical profile yielded fascinating stories about her journey through graduate studies to the professorate as well as suggestive commentaries that peered into plights of women in higher education during the middle decades of the twentieth century. My inexperience was challenged by my supervisor, as all the cool stuff I learned about the creator and the deeper dives into gender and equity that I wanted to take had little to do with the actual collection of floral specimens. So, lesson number two surfaced: bibliographic citations may lead the researcher into deeper dives and aspects of biography and social contexts, but archival descriptions (at all levels) prioritize the contents of the collection. This was a valuable lesson, but so was the brief jaunt into the primary sources that offered insight on matters regarding this woman professor and her tenure at Baylor University.

The other processing project involved scrapbooks and other materials in a collection by Ethel Standefer, another woman with academic and professional ties to Baylor University. She was a pianist who served with the fine arts faculty in the early decades of the twentieth century, but the collection has little to do with her activities as a performer. Whereas the scrapbooks contain concert programs and postcards from her travels abroad and numerous clippings related to musicians and composers of note, most documents that bear her name are professional certificates and autographs for which she is the dedicatee. The research that went into the biographical note places Standefer among the central figures in social and artistic circles in Waco during the 1930s and 1940s but, like Hurst, those contextual pieces were relegated to bibliographic citations. My predilections for music and musical histories were interrogated in the third lesson: collections contain their own stories—it is my responsibility to organize and describe materials so that researchers can get the information they need for their interests, not mine. Indeed, the scrapbooks in Standefer’s collection also reveal an interest in current events and politics, arenas where women during her time were not as publicly observed. I am much more than a musician, so why should Standefer be any less?

Lessons learned. Of course, there is overlap between the lessons and the collections with which I’ve worked and there are, indeed, lessons that were not mentioned in this reflection. The biggest takeaway thus far, in this personal and professional pursuit, is that un-learning that which “works for me” while learning new rationales and best practices for organizing archival materials is both humbling and unbelievably invigorating.

Expansive, rich, divisive, unifying: the history of Texas is, arguably, the most unique of any state in the Union. From the domain of Native tribes to the holding of distant European empires, a place of hope and struggle, triumph and loss, Texas has forged an identity as big as its territorial borders and as intense as its environmental extremes. And for one hundred years, The Texas Collection at Baylor University has collected, documented, displayed, and provided insight into the cultures and stories of generations of Texans.

Established with a major gift from the collection of Kenneth Hazen Aynesworth, The Texas Collection was officially introduced to the Baylor campus at the Alumni Business Meeting on June 12, 1923 as a “Texas History Library.” Over the decades since, we’ve become one of the state’s premier locations for archival holdings of Texana over a broad range of categories including religious life, the American Civil War, cartography, photography, and much more.

The Spirit of ’23

After his initial donation, Aynesworth continued to support the collection financially as well as with regular materials donations. He even provided a stipend for a Professor of Texas History and Curator of the Texas History Library. Aleph Tanner was hired, and her course was the first Texas History class taught at the university level in the state. Her class became quite popular and was at capacity each time she taught. Although her tenure was short (1924-1928), Tanner was the first curator to care for, grow, and actively use the collection to teach Baylor students.

Each successive director has added their mark to the collection. Under the leadership of Guy B. Harrison (1928-1969), Dayton Kelley (1969-1973), Kent Keeth (1973-2003), Thomas Charlton (2003-2010), John Wilson (2010-2020), and interim, Amie Oliver (2020-2022), the collection has grown to include thousands of print items, maps, archival collections, digitized materials, and become the official home to the University Archives. We look forward to our newest Director, Jeff Pirtle (2022-present), continuing the legacy.     

Growth from the Ashes: Our Centennial Exhibit

On February 22, 1922, a fire of unknown origin ripped through Carroll Library and Chapel, destroying roughly half of the library materials and the interior of the building. From that fire, an outpouring of support came through students, alumni, friends of Baylor, and many others. Kenneth Aynesworth’s support encouraged the growth of The Texas Collection.

To commemorate our anniversary, we have put together a two-part exhibit with over 50 items on display at our home in Carroll Library and Moody Memorial Library. We do not often get to share these many treasures at the same time. Items such as the Mission San Francisco de los Tejas Bell, “Texas, Our Texas” sheet music, and a Republic of Texas currency printing plate sit alongside student literary society pins, modern postcards, and the Pomponij Mellae Cosmographi Geographia, printed in 1482.

Telling the stories behind these items is just as important as displaying them. As you visit the displays, you will learn so much more about our history and these items.

Making Our Mark: The Centennial Celebration Mark & Design Inspiration

The Texas Collection Centennial Mark was created to celebrate 100 years of The Texas Collection and remembrance of Texas History using photography of iconic moments and people in Texas, using colors that are representative of Baylor but not exclusive to Baylor, and using elements of design that are iconic symbols of Texas. When choosing typography, we intentionally chose a typeface that resembled old Western typefaces while remaining clean and modern. We carefully selected photos for our poster series that highlighted twelve pillars of Texas history. By using a more muted green rather than the classic Baylor green, we allowed this campaign visually to branch out beyond the Baylor Community and into the community of Texas as a whole. The stars in our celebration mark tie back to the stars of the Texas flag.

Keep the Celebration Going: Online Resources

For a celebration as big as Texas, we want to make sure everyone from Amarillo to Brownsville, El Paso to Tyler and all points in between can share in the fun. Be sure to check out these sites for more great Texana content!

The Texas Collection Centennial Homepage

The Texas Collection’s Digital Collections

The Texas Collection on Facebook

The Texas Collection on Flickr

Here’s to the Next Hundred Years

A story as epic as Texas’ requires dedicated professionals with the skills and drive to preserve its archival treasures. The Texas Collection is committed to collecting artifacts of the past, culturally significant objects of the present, and the offerings of the future as they come to us. We also ask that anyone with materials you believe may be of interest to our collections professionals reach out to us via email and we will gladly discuss the possibility of including your items in our holdings.

We are particularly interested in stories and materials from the wide range of ethnic and cultural minority groups in Texas: African American, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, and religious minorities’ materials are of particular interest as we chart the next century of our collections.

Pro Texana,

The Staff and Faculty of The Texas Collection

This post was written by Payton Perez. Payton is a Junior, Political Science major; this is her first year working at The Texas Collection. Payton conducted preservation services on the photographs in the Texas Farmworkers in the Midwest Photograph collection, Accession #754.

The newly added Texas Farm Workers in the Midwest Photograph collection tells the story of Texas migrant workers through photographs and articles created by several newspaper media outlets from 1951 to 1969. Eight black and white photos, comprised of candid, posed, and action shots allow access into the lives of Texas migrant farm workers. Many of these workers traveled to Midwestern states such as Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Minnesota, and Indiana in search of work. Different aspects of life can be seen through these photos: travel, family, housing, education, and the labor experiences of migrant farm workers. Specifically, these photos largely tell the story of Mexican American workers coming from Texas, looking for anyone to hire them. Some photographs are accompanied by articles which offer more insight into the photograph itself and the lifestyle these farmers lived.

Migrant farm workers have been around for decades, and these Texas Farm Workers are no different. When these articles were written, an estimated 127,800 people would leave southern Texas to go work on farms in other states, in addition to the almost a million others who traveled from other parts of the southern United States in search of the same goal. Some migrant workers would find work, but most would not, causing this lifestyle to be extremely uncertain and dangerous. Workers often were subjected to harsh climates and tasks that were expected of them, causing this labor-intensive job to be physically demanding and difficult to sustain.

Educational opportunities were severely limited for families as well. Moving around so often prevented children from attending school regularly, leading them to fall behind not only in their education, but also in basic skills. One photograph from 1965 shows Terri Maier of Wisconsin, teaching two children of migrant laborers outdoors. This was part of a program Maier participated in that had a goal of preparing children for regular school when they could go, and not letting them fall too far behind their peers. The state of Wisconsin also attempted to help provide methods of education to these young people in migrant families so that they could keep up with the other children in school year-round. Furthermore, a photo of two young women, Maria and Barbara Lozano, from 1951 has an article attached to it which discusses Minnesota’s attempts of regulating the problem of children’s education. Hollandale, Minnesota, had been described as “the world’s largest garden patch,” drawing in many migrant families from all over the country, including Texas. This in turn meant that many children of migrant families would occupy Hollandale and cause the city to develop a method of fixing this educational dilemma that then had national impacts.

Most of the photos in this collection depict the realities of the day-to-day activities of migrant workers. Their housing was unreliable at best, resembling temporary shacks more than familial homes. Photos of workers physically in the field show them picking cucumbers, cherries, or any other crop they were assigned to. Many of the workers wore full coverage clothing, hats, or other head garments to protect themselves from the sun and other harsh environmental factors. Specifically, the story of Alex Torres and his family is highlighted in an article associated with a photo of him, his wife, and presumably their baby taking a break from their cherry-picking jobs. Torres, a crew leader, oversaw finding work for his family and the people in his crew. Twenty-one people – “10 men and women, 11 children,” Torres was responsible for, and they were luckier than most in finding work at Seth Thompkins’ cherry orchard near Old Mission, Michigan.  They migrated from Texas to Michigan in Torres’ “beat up $350 truck” which was the reason Torres was named leader. These seemingly harsh conditions were the norm for many migrant workers during this time, who lived in uncertainty and hope of finding work.

This small collection of photographs and articles opens a window into 1950s-1960s Texas and America as a whole. The typical life of a migrant worker, their travel plans, their educational complications, and their search for work can all be seen in these photographs and the words written about them.

Sources:

Green, Charles H. “Writer Discovers Migrant Workers Life is Not Easy.” Marshall News Messenger (Marshall, TX). 1963 September 2.
Schaefer, Edward. “Hollandale May Set Pattern in Schools for Migratory Workers.” Minneapolis Star (Minneapolis, MN). 1951 December 25.

This post was written by Elizabeth Rivera, PhD, Baylor University Archivist

In anticipation of stress awareness month in April, Bear Country will celebrate its 91^st Diadeloso on Tuesday, March 28, 2023. This annual day affords students, faculty, and staff a dedicated time to pause, breathe, and enjoy the simple pleasures of life.

When former Texas governor, Pat Neff assumed his role as President of Baylor amid the Great Depression in 1932, students needed a tangible reminder that their educational preparation mattered and was worth the financial commitment before joining the workforce. Therefore, Neff invested in the students’ mental health. He instituted a day of play and suspended classes (all four of them) for the day.

Neff’s organized day of play included the male faculty defeating the male seniors in baseball and the females played their own game of baseball. The female seniors handily upset the female faculty 18 to 4. Then five of Baylor’s Ph.D.’s participated in a yo-yo contest before the barbecue lunch (“First Annual Day”, 1932). This break established a dedicated time for faculty and students to embrace their humanity and find community in being present together.

In more recent years, students have swum with otters (petting otters in a kiddie pool), watched movies on the stadium field (Movies at McLane), and participated in goat yoga (yes, goats standing on students in downward dog pose). The Baylor community continues to have fun together and build relationships. In establishing this day, Neff set a precedent that his presidential successors have continued to embrace. Alexis Whiteford, BU alumna class of 2021, commented that regardless of the activity, DIA (as affectionately referred to by the students) is what you make it.

While the name has undergone various iterations, a 1966 student body vote officially changed the name to Diadeloso, “Day of the Bear.”  The purpose remains constant, food, fun, and fellowship bring people together and promote social understanding. Being a college student and preparing for adulthood is tough. Whether students are navigating the pressures of a crippling economy and their financial performance or managing the pressures of academic achievement, intentional respite restores and rejuvenates crushed spirits.

Since DIA is a time to relieve stress, let’s come together, celebrate, and make fun memories. This year’s lineup proves to be slated with diverse fun opportunities— glow in the dark roller skating, archery, human wac-a-mol, caricature drawings, and more (“Attractions”, 2023). From The Texas Collection, be you and seize the DIA at BU!    

References:

First Annual Day of Fun Attended by Student Body. (1932, May 12). The Daily Lariat, p.  1-2.

https://digitalcollections-baylor.quartexcollections.com/Documents/Detail/the-daily-lariat-waco-texas-vol.-34-no.-121-thursday-may-12-1932/77823?item=77855

Attractions. (2023, March). Baylor University, https://diadeloso.web.baylor.edu/attractions

This article was written by Amy Swanson, Rare Books Catalog Librarian

Southern Baptist women played a significant role in the missionary movement of the latter half of the nineteenth century.  The mission societies Baptist women created continue to thrive today, creating funding, education, and other opportunities for missionaries, and those who support them, at home and abroad.

Baptist women began organizing the first mission societies in Texas in the 1830s, though some of the work of these societies was already being done in more informal ways through groups such as female prayer societies (Hunt 4).  By 1880, following a resolution by the national Southern Baptist Convention two years prior, women from various local mission societies, as well as from the Baptist State Convention organized the Texas Woman’s Missionary Union in 1880, despite some male opposition.  This was followed by the formation of the national Woman’s Missionary Union in 1888.  Both the Texas and the national unions were an auxiliary to the Southern Baptist Convention. 

One of the goals of the Texas Woman’s Missionary Union (known as the Baptist Women Mission Workers (BWMW) by 1886) was to educate women and children on the importance of missionary and charitable work.  In doing so, the organization hoped to increase the chances of women collecting and contributing money to the organization’s causes and their getting involved in missions themselves.  Other goals were to provide information about ongoing missions, organize and connect mission societies, and aid in similar initiatives (Bullock).

A good way to promote these societies to Baptist women was with the distribution of publications.  One such publication was the newspaper, Texas Baptist Worker.  The monthly paper “published in the interest of woman’s work in Texas” (Texas Baptist Worker) was founded in 1889 by the first president of the BWMW, Fannie Breedlove Davis.  Davis was also the editor of the paper. 

The paper was published in San Antonio by the Women Mission Workers of Texas and had an almost entirely female staff.  This is important to note as the Southern Baptist leadership structure at the time was male dominated.  Publications such as Texas Baptist Worker gave women the opportunity to lead and have a voice.

In keeping with the goals of the BWMW, the Texas Baptist Worker helped gain support for and provide information about domestic and foreign missions, highlight opportunities for female missionaries, and solicit contributions for missions and other charitable causes. 

The paper also featured a section titled “Children’s Corner,” with stories to teach children about Christian principles and the value of missions.  The newspaper helped promote various events and meetings held by local societies and provided updates from mission societies around the state.  Advertisements for and articles related to Baptist institutions or organizations were often included.  The 1895 issue pictured above includes an article about the impressive education for women at Baylor College.

While certainly not the only means by which information was disseminated, publications such as Texas Baptist Worker played an essential role in helping to increase monetary contributions to missions in Texas.  In the span of the fifteen years from 1880 to 1895, mission offerings went from $35 to $23,193 (DeLoach).

Early organizational literature such as this paper set a precedent for the caliber of publication expected from the BWMW in the years to follow.  Today, the BWMW, now known as the Woman’s Missionary Union of Texas, has several publications: Bridge Magazine, as well as an active blog.  The Woman’s Missionary Union of Texas has grown and expanded over the past 143 years, but the core values of the organization established by Fannie Breedlove Davis and her contemporaries remain today.

Works Cited

Bullock, Karen O’Dell. “Texas Woman’s Missionary Union.” Texas State Historical Association, December 1, 1995; updated May 26, 2017.  https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/texas-womans-missionary-union. Accessed March 14, 2023.

DeLoach, Clyde M. “Davis, Fannie Breedlove (1833-1915).” Texas State Historical Association, December 1, 1994; updated August 31, 2016.  https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/davis-fannie-breedlove. Accessed March 14, 2023.

Hunt, Alma. History of Woman’s Missionary Union. Convention Press, 1964.

WMU of Texas. WMU of Texas, 2023, https://www.wmutx.org/. Accessed March 10, 2023.

Texas Baptist Worker. San Antonio, Women Mission Workers of Texas, vol. 6, no. 5, March 1895.

The Texas Collection posts newly accessible resources each month. If you have any questions or would like to use these materials, please let us know and we would be happy to assist!

Manuscript Collections

James Edward and Miriam Amanda Wallace Ferguson papers #1913
The James Edward and Miriam Amanda Wallace Ferguson papers contain correspondence, lists of pardons, petitions, motions, and other legal documents regarding several cases with which the Fergusons were involved.

Ruby Bell Hall McCormick papers #861
The Ruby Bell Hall McCormick papers include materials regarding genealogical research, societies and organizations, and information about Georg Schlumbach in Germany during World War II.

Eleanor “Nell” Jurney Pape papers #2313
The Eleanor “Nell” Jurney Pape papers contains documents relating to Nell Pape’s life in Waco after her return from Europe. The papers include letters, planning documents, clippings, photographs, and records relating to civic projects, garden clubs, and a bound manuscript of Nell Pape’s unpublished memoir, Hideaway. The collection also includes personal documents from those close to Pape including letters written to her father, Richard Jurney, letters written by her husband, Gustav Pape, and financial documents from Gustav Pape’s business.

Baylor University Records