August 28, 2008

Trumpet of Freedom

http://www.archive.org/details/trumpetoffreedom00oliv
View the PDF. View the Flip Book.

In anticipation of the 2009 bicentennial celebration of Abraham Lincoln's birth, we recently digitized a small collection of Civil War era sheet music from the University of Illinois Music Library. View the entire collection here.

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August 27, 2008

Autobiography of a fugitive negro : his anti-slavery labours in the United States, Canada & England (1855)

http://hdl.handle.net/10111/UIUCOCA:autobiographyoff00ward
View the PDF. View the Flip Book.

Samuel Ringgold Ward (1817-1866) was a journalist, abolitionist, lecturer, and contemporary of Frederick Douglass. Born the son of American slaves who escaped to New Jersey in 1820 when he was three years old, Ward and his family settled soon thereafter in New York City where Ward was educated at The African Free School, an institution founded by the New York Manumission Society in1787 to provide education to children of slaves and freemen. In 1839, he joined the American Anti-Slavery Society and soon thereafter the new Anti-Slavery Society of Canada. In April 1853 the Canadian society sent Ward to England to seek funds to help the fugitive slaves then pouring into western Canada. He wrote his Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro while living in England. (Dictionary of Canadian Biography).

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July 12, 2008

Chicago gang wars in pictures; X marks the spot (c1930])

http://www.archive.org/details/chicagogangwarsi00rock
View the Flip Book. View the PDF.

According to the My Al Capone Museum website, this week’s featured book was first published anonymously in 1930 because the author, Chicago reporter Harold “Hal Andrews” feared reprisals from the Chicago mob, and probably with good reason. The book contains gory crime scene photos taken at the sites of some of the most notorious Chicago gangland killings of the 1920s. (Warning! Not for the squeamish!) No less a big boy than Al Capone, who is believed to have ordered the notorious 1929 St. Valentine’s Day massacre of a rival Chicago crime gang, reportedly ordered his minions to confiscate every copy of “X Marks the Spot” from Chicago newspaper stands. The University of Illinois' copy of "X Marks the Spot" bears the author's signature and the following inscription "Chicago, in her 100 years of progress, has borne many crosses, but none greater than the cross that marks the spot X."

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July 7, 2008

Il costume antico e moderno, o, storia del governo, della milizia, della religione, delle arti, scienze ed usanze di tutti i popoli antichi e moderni, provata coi monumenti dell'antichità e rappresentata cogli analoghi disegni dal dottor Giulio Ferrario :

http://www.archive.org/details/ilcostumeanticoe82ferr
View the Flip Book. View the PDF.

Giulio Ferrario (1767-1847), of Milan, was an intellectual, publisher, printer and librarian. His monumental work Il costume antico e moderno contains over 1,500 hand-colored plates depicting clothing from the classical period through the early 1800s, as well as many architectural drawings and engravings. The University of Illinois Library recently digitized all 15 volumes of this work that are held in its collection. View all digitized volumes in this series.

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June 29, 2008

The life of Frances E. Willard (1912)

http://www.archive.org/details/lifeoffrancesewi00gord
View the PDF. View the Flip Book.

"Agitate, educate, organize." Frances Elizabeth Willard (1839 – 1898) was a notable American educator and social reformer. In 1873 she became the Dean of Women of the Woman's College of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Willard served as the elected president of the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) from 1879 until her death. Not to be found in this reverential biography by Anna Gordon, Willard's personal secretary of 21 years, is any mention of Willard's unfortunate dispute with anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells. In her attempts to recruit southern women into the WCTU, Willard blamed lynchings not on racism, but on the alcohol fueled rapes of white women by black men. While seeing eye to eye on many other issues of the time, the two women were never able to resolve their differences on this important issue where gender and race intersected so pointedly. See also Woman and temperance : or, The work and workers of the Woman's Christian temperance union (1883) by Frances Willard and The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States by Ida B. Wells.


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June 16, 2008

The life of P.T. Barnum (1888) written by himself

http://www.archive.org/details/lifeofptbarnum00barn
View the Flip Book. View the PDF.

Phineas Taylor Barnum (1810 – 1891) was an American businessman and showman who founded the circus that eventually became the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. Barnum once visited Abraham Lincoln in the White House accompanied by the little person Tom Thumb (the stage name of Charles Sherwood Stratton). Given to outrageous self-promotion, Barnum loved a good hoax--his "elephantine farming" hoax (see entry) had the secretaries of every state agricultural association writing for more information about this exciting advancement in farming. A pro-Unionist, Barnum's circus and museum drew large audiences seeking respite and diversion during the American civil war. Barnum wrote several other books, including The Humbugs of the World : An account of humbugs, delusions, impositions, quackeries, deceits and deceivers generally, in all ages (1866) and Struggles and Triumphs, or, Forty years' recollections (1871).

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May 26, 2008

The landscape gardening book, wherein are set down the simple laws of beauty and utility which should guide the development of all grounds (1911) by Grace Tabor.

http://www.archive.org/details/landscapegardeni00tabo
View the Flip Book. View the PDF.

Over 100 classic gardening texts from the University of Illinois' City Planning and Landscape Architecture Library were recently digitized, and many of them with extensive taxonomic content will be contributed to the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Among these are Grace Tabor's The Landscape Gardening Book. "Grace Tabor, one of the first women to identify herself professionally as a landscape architect, was born around 1873 in Cuba, N.Y. She studied at the Art Students League in Buffalo and in New York City, and at the New York School of Applied Design for Women . . . She is best known as a writer on landscape design and architecture. Beginning in 1905, Tabor wrote and drew plans for such magazines as The Garden Magazine and Country Life in America. She also wrote regularly for A Woman's Home Companion. In 1920 she began a garden column for the magazine that ran until 1941. Tabor reached a wide audience through The Woman's Home Companion, which was at the time among the most influential women's magazines in the country." (From Pioneers of American Landscape Design: An Annotated Bibliography edited by Charles A. Birnbaum and Lisa E. Crowder, 1993.)

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May 4, 2008

Musical Scores from the University of Illinois Music Library

http://www.uiuc.edu/goto/music

Nearly 100 musical scores from UIUC's Music Library were digitized recently at the Open Content Alliance/Internet Archive scanning center on campus. Represented in this new online collection are Victor Herbert, John Philip Sousa, Jerome Kern, and Gilbert & Sullivan. The Music Library is one of the largest collections of its kind at a public university, and is currently ranked among the top ten music libraries in the United States. Its collections contain more than 765,000 volumes, including over 55,000 books, 520,000 scores, 19,000 microforms, 150,000 sound recordings, and over 20,000 items in other formats and media.

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April 22, 2008

Bloomington and Normal : past and present, progress and prosperity : spring souvenir ([1905])

http://www.archive.org/details/bloomingtonnorma00bloo
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Need a wife? How about a housekeeper? A husband? Or a handyman? Apparently citizens of Bloomington-Normal in the early 1900s could experience "one-stop shopping" at Mrs. R. Houghton's Old Reliable Employment and Matrimonial Bureau. Stern looking Mrs. Houghton (or was this really Mr. Houghton in drag?) is just one of the upstanding citizens featured in this 1905 souvenir booklet highlighting the businesses of the Bloomington-Normal communities.

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April 5, 2008

John Wilkes Booth; escape and wanderings until final ending of the trail by suicide at Enid, Oklahoma, January 12, 1903 (c1922)

http://www.archive.org/details/johnwilkesboothe00camp
View the PDF. View the Flip Book.

Also, The escape and suicide of John Wilkes Booth : or, The first true account of Lincoln's assassination, containing a complete confession by Booth [1907?]
View the PDF. View the Flip Book.

On April 14, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated while attending a performance of Our American Cousin at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C. After entering Lincoln's theater box and shooting the President in the head with a .44 caliber Derringer, the soon to be infamous assassin, actor John Wilkes Booth, jumped from the theater box to the stage floor, and despite injuring his leg, managed to exit the theater. He was pursued by 25 Union soldiers through the Virginia countryside, where he was eventually captured and shot to death twelve days later. But in the years following the assassination and Booth's death, sensational theories of Booth's escape and subsequent wanderings and death were promoted. In this week's featured books by William Parker Campell and Finis Langdon Bates, Booth supposedly assumed a new identity as David E. George and eventually committed suicide in Enid, OK, in 1903. Bates even toured the country exhibiting David George's mummified corpse, claiming it was the body of John Wilkes Booth.

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March 28, 2008

The story of the stadium (1921)

http://www.archive.org/details/storyofstadium00univ
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A wonderfully illustrated classic piece of Illini history, The Story of the Stadium, is a 1921 "call to all Illini everywhere" to contribute towards the building of what was to become Memorial Stadium. Named in honor of the 183 Illini who died in World War 1, Memorial Stadium would, in the words of former President David Kinley, "bring a touch of Greek glory to the prairie." With each $100 pledge, a faithful Illini could secure a good seat in the stadium for 10 years. In 2008, Memorial Stadium is undergoing a dramatic renovation with the Illinois Renaissance Project; upon it's completion, the University of Illinois is hopeful that Memorial Stadium will remain eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places and for designation as a National Historic Landmark.

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March 16, 2008

Historia de la guerra europea de 1914 : ilustrada con millares de fotografías, dibujos y láminas ([1914-1919])

http://www.archive.org/details/historiadelaguer01blas
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The Historia de la Guerra Europea de 1914 is a nine volume profusely illustrated history of World War 1 by the Spanish writer Vicente Blasco Ibañez, best known for his World War 1 novel Los cuatro jinetes del apocalipsis, which was filmed in 1921 as The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Many thanks go to Sr. Gaston Fernandez of Argentina who has generously sponsored the digitization of this remarkable work.

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March 10, 2008

On the banks of the Boneyard; Illinois tales of events from the early days of the Illinois industrial university to the advent of Dr. Thomas Jonathan Burrill as acting president (1942])

http://www.archive.org/details/onbanksofboneyar00kile
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"Most of us were boys and girls from the farms and towns of Illinois; we looked as though we had been born between two rows of corn, and I fear we acted like it also." So remembers Charles Albert Kiler, UIUC Class of 1892, in this charming memoir written for the 50th reunion of the Class of 1892 on May 31, 1942. Read about the time when there were 27 men and "three ladies" on the UIUC faculty and when fraternities, or "secret societies," were strictly forbidden. Then there was the lecture delivered by Mae Wright Sewell urging women to throw off their tight fitting corsets and adopt a loose fitting sailor suit type dress. As a result, forty women students dressed in their liberated sailor suit attire hid in the back of the Library's bookstacks before marching in solidarity into a gathering of students and faculty where they caused such a stir that "every man in the band dropped his instrument and fainted" and George Huff kicked his bass drum across the platform.

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February 29, 2008

The Republican campaign songster, for 1860 (1860)

http://libsysdigi.library.uiuc.edu/oca/Books2007-10/republicancampai60burl/
View the PDF. View the Flip Book.

Hillary Clinton has Celine Dion's "You and I." For Barack Obama it's Stevie Wonder's "Signed, Sealed, Delivered I'm Yours." And John McCain's apparently switched to ABBA's "Take A Chance on Me" after John Mellencamp asked the Republican frontrunner to stop using his "Our Country." What is it? The campaign song! "Campaign songs are partisan ditties used in American political canvasses and more especially in presidential contests. The words were commonly set to established melodies like "Yankee Doodle," "Hail, Columbia," "Rosin the Bow," "Hail to the Chief" "John Brown's Body," "Dixie" and "O Tannenbaum" ("Maryland, My Maryland"); or to tunes widely popular at the time." [source: Dictionary of American History by James Truslow Adams, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1940] This week you can enjoy some of Abe Lincoln's.

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February 23, 2008

Chicago race riots (c1919)

http://www.archive.org/details/chicagoraceriots00geor
View the PDF. View the Flip Book.

This Socialist labor pamphlet, published shortly after a violent race riot in Chicago during the summer of 1919, was digitized from the original in the Lawrence J. Gutter Collection of Chicagoana in the Library of the University of Illinois at Chicago. The passage below is from the article "Our Real Enemy" by Mary Marcy, who urges black and white workers to organize together against their mutual exploitation by capitalist interests, in this case the owners of Chicago's meat packing businesses. Mary Marcy (1877-1922), born in Belleville, Illinois, was a columnist and editor of the International Socialist Review, published in Chicago from 1900 to 1918.

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February 16, 2008

University of Illinois Built Environment

http://images.library.uiuc.edu/projects/blueprints/

This week's feature is not a book, but a collection of images not to be missed. The Illinois Built Environment collection provides to the public for the first time, a first-hand view of select original documents used to shape the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Among others, items include hand sketches of campus plans, original trace and linen drawings of many of the Central Quadrangle buildings, four separate proposed sketches for the original Library, now known as Altgeld Hall, and watercolor renderings for the display of the Alma Mater and many buildings. Many of the documents are common elevation architectural drawings. Some provide information that can inform the educated eye about building materials and the use of various construction techniques. Many are reflective of design trends of the times and some show comments and notes of the architect. This collection will grow over time as more original drawings, sketches and renderings are released for public use. Pictured below are four photographs taken during the construction of the fifth stack addition to the Main Library. The digitization of this collection was spearheaded by Joanne Kaczmarek, Archivist for Electronic Records, and funded by the Library's Large Scale Digitization Project in 2007.

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February 9, 2008

The German emigrants; or, Frederick Wohlgemuth's voyage to California ([185-?])

http://www.archive.org/details/germanemigrantso00diet
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Written for a juvenile audience, and reflecting the strong anti-slavery sentiments of many 19th century German emigrants to America, The German emigrants; or, Frederick Wohlgemuth's voyage to California, tells the story of Fred Wohlgemuth, a young Prussian boy, who with his family emigrates from Germany to California during the Gold Rush era. During the voyage over, the emigrants' ship encounters the grim wreckage of a Portuguese slave ship and rescues a lone surviving slave, Quaquatalexera. The author has Quaquatalexera relate the gruesome story of the slave ship so "that it becomes a necessary branch of information to young people, especially as none of them know but what, sooner or later, they may emigrate with their parents or relations to those countries where negro slavery is tolerated by law." Upon reaching Cuba later on in their journey, the emigrants join an unsucessful attempt to free a group of black slaves in Havana. Fred and his family finally arrive in San Francisco where they strike it rich in the gold mines.

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February 2, 2008

Good recipes (c1906)

http://www.archive.org/details/goodrecipes00winn
View the PDF. View the Flip Book.

This week's book Good Recipes, published by the Woman's Society of the Winnetka Congregational Church in 1906, is one of a collection of 643 community cookbooks donated to the University Library by Mrs. Hermilda Listeman, who collected cookbooks her entire life. The cookbooks can be read for their 'receipts' as well as for their representation of American food preferences, the advancement of technology in the kitchen and the evolution of nutritional theory. Visit the online exhibit Communal Cuisine: Community Cookbooks 1877-1960. View more digitized cookbooks from this collection.

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January 27, 2008

The Watseka wonder; a startling and instructive psychological study, and well authenticated instance of angelic visitation. A narrative of the leading phenomena occurring in the case of Mary Lurancy Vennum .. (1878)

http://www.archive.org/details/watsekawondersta00stev
View the PDF. View the Flip Book.

What did Harry Houdini, Mary Todd Lincoln, and Horace Greeley have in common? They all believed in the possibility of communicating with the spirits of the dead, a central tenant of the American spiritualism movement, which raged throughout the U.S. from the decade before the Civil War through the early years of the 20th century. Spiritualism was alive and well in Illinois during this time; the prominent and long-running American spiritualist weekly The Religio-Philosophical Journal was published in Chicago from 1865 through 1905. This pamphlet by physician E.W. Stevens recounts the story of a Watseka, Illinois, girl named Lurancy Vennum, whose body, for sixteen weeks in 1878, was supposedly possessed by the spirit of Mary Roff, another Watseka native who had died in a mental institution thirteen years previously.

Trailer for a really spooky movie based on The Watseka Wonder!

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January 19, 2008

War's greatest workshop, Rock Island arsenal; historical, topographical and illustrative ... published with the approval of the War department (1922)

http://www.archive.org/details/warsgreatestwork00arse
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Established by an Act of Congress in 1862, Rock Island Arsenal sits on Arsenal Island in the middle of the Mississippi between Davenport, Iowa, and Rock Island, Illinois, and has been one of the country's largest manufacturers of artillery and military equipment since the 1880s. During the Civil War, Arsenal Island was also home to Union army prison camp that housed over 12,400 Confederate prisoners. During its peak of production during WWI, it employed 14,778 employees. Congress appropriated over $1.6 billion in today’s dollars to the Rock Island Arsenal during that war. In addition to artillery, the arsenal produced over 1.5 million bacon cans, 649,000 canteen covers, and 858,344 haversacks for the war effort. This illustrated history of the arsenal is also a rich source of historical and genealogical information about the tri-cities of Rock Island, Moline, and Davenport. See also Rock Island arsenal, in peace and in war : with maps and illustrations (1898)
http://libsysdigi.library.uiuc.edu/oca/Books2007-06/rockislandarsena00till/

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January 11, 2008

Chicago Foreign Language Press Survey: Czech (1878-1924)

http://www.archive.org/details/5418478_1
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The Chicago Foreign Language Press Survey was published in 1942 by the Chicago Public Library Omnibus Project of the Work Projects Administration of Illinois. Its purpose was to translate into English and classify selected news articles appearing in the Chicago area foreign language press from 1861 to 1938. The project consists of a file of 120,000 typewritten pages translated from newspapers of 22 different foreign language communities in Chicago. UIUC Library is now digitizing this entire set from microfilm. The excerpt below is from the September 14, 1917 issue of the Chicago Czech language newspaper Denní Hlasatel. Also included in the set are English translations of Albanian, Chinese, Croatian, Danish, Dutch, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Jewish, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovene, Spanish, Swedish, and Ukrainian language newspapers from the late 19th and early 20th century Chicago area immigrant communities.

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December 21, 2007

The giraffe in history and art (Volume Fieldiana, Popular Series, Anthropology, no. 27) (1928)

http://www.archive.org/details/giraffeinhistory27lauf
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Mohammed Ali, Pasha of Egypt in the early 1800s, was fond of sending giraffes to European monarchs. Unfortunately, the one he sent King George IV of England, survived only a few months at Windsor Palace, but the young female he sent to the king of France in 1826 thrilled Parisians for almost twenty years, inspiring songs, poems, and the realm of fashion (dresses à la girafe, hats and neckties à la girafe, and combs à la girafe.) From Egypt to Africa to China, and from the ancient Greeks through the Renaissance and into modern times, this volume from the Chicago Field Museum's Popular Anthropology series of Fieldiana is a small treasure trove of information and stories about Giraffidae, tallest of all mammals.

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December 15, 2007

Correction of echoes and reverberation in the Auditorium, University of Illinois ([1916])

http://www.archive.org/details/correctionofecho00watsilli
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UIUC's Foellinger Auditorium, designed in the Beaux Arts classical style by C. H. Blackall, a University alum, has seen the likes of John Phillip Sousa, Jane Addams, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Spike Lee grace its stage. But 100 years ago, the "limited appropriations for the building made it impossible to embellish the surface of the walls and ceiling, and therefore, they were left practically plain, which increased their power to reflect sound and create echoes." As described in Bulletin No. 87 of the UIUC Engineering Experiment Station, 3,315 square feet of Akustikos Felt mounted on wooden ribs built out from the walls finally managed to correct the problem. The Engineering Experiment Station was established in 1905 by an act of the University's Board of Trustees to "carry on investigations along various lines of engineering, and to make studies of problems of importance to professional engineers." Digitization of all of the Engineering Experiment Station Bulletins was recently completed and the bulletins will be available soon through Illinois Harvest.

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December 9, 2007

The W.G.N. : a handbook of newspaper administration, editorial, advertising, production, circulation, minutely depicting, in word and picture, "how it’s done" / by the world’s greatest newspaper. (1922)

http://www.archive.org/details/wgnhandbookofnew00chic
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When the Chicago Tribune was founded by Joseph Medill in 1847, Chicago's population was a mere 16,000; Galena was still the commercial center of Illinois; Queen Victoria was on the throne of England; Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre had just been published; the Chicago River still ran into Lake Michigan, and Abraham Lincoln was just 38 years old. From the Civil War, through the great Chicago Fire, through World War I (when the Tribune began publishing the Army Edition of the Tribune in Paris), and ending in 1922 with the announcement of an architectural contest to design the building that was to be known throughout the world as the Tribune Tower, this illustrated early history of the "world's greatest newspaper" is a page turner not to be missed!

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November 28, 2007

Die menschliche sterblichkeit, unter dem titel Todten-tanz, in 61 original-kupfern (1759)

http://www.archive.org/details/diemenschlichest00meye
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Since the 1940’s the University Library has amassed a collection of over 600 emblem books written from 1540-1800, published in Germany, France, Italy, Spain and England. No other American library has such extensive holdings. Emblem books can possibly be looked upon as the multi-media publications of the 17th and 18th centuries. Each emblem is composed of three constitutive elements - a motto, an illustration or “pictura” in the form of a woodcut or engraving, and an explanatory poem or "subscriptio." An emblem is more than the sum of its parts, because the interplay between text and image produces a greater meaning than any of the individual components can provide. In 1998 the University Library began collaborating with Professor Mara Wade of the German Department to provide enhanced access to the German emblem books through digitization. The initial digitization efforts were funded by the UIUC Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research. Die menschliche sterblichkeit, unter dem titel Todten-tanz, in 61 original-kupfern (1759) is the first emblem book to be digitized at the UIUC Open Content Alliance scanning center. Visit the German Emblem Book Project website.

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November 24, 2007

Bird observations near Chicago ([c1919]) by Ellen Drummond Farwell

http://www.archive.org/details/birdobservations00farw
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Ellen Drummond Farwell was born in Chicago, December 29, 1859, and was elected an Associate of the American Ornithologists' Union in 1896. In the following year she became one of the chief organizers of the Illinois Audubon Society and was a director or vice-president during the rest of her life. She was much interested in birds and kept notes on the various species that she observed from time to time. Eight years after her death these notes were published under the title 'Bird Observations near Chicago,' with an introduction by her sister, Mary Drummond. (Source: The Auk, Volume 70, Number 4, October, 1953)

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November 18, 2007

The Black-bird's nest: an instructive and amusing tale, by Mahlon Day (1832)

http://libsysdigi.library.uiuc.edu/ilharvest/Unica/Books2007-10/anon0001blabir/
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Mahlon Day (1790-1854) was an early New York City printer, who specialized in books for children. The Black-bird's Nest relates what happens to little boys who tell lies. Mahlon Day's tone is decidedly didactic: “Such is the progress of vice. Do not deceive yourselves: detection is certain...The first slip of your memory, will throw you into such confusion, as will naturally lead to discovery; then follow disgrace, shame, and the punishments you justly deserve.” This book was digitized as part of the Unica Project in UIUC Library's Rare Book and Manuscript Library. According to Worldcat, UIUC's copies of these books are the only known copies in existence. View more Unica Project books.

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November 10, 2007

Was it a fair trial? An appeal to the Govenor of Illinois by Gen. M. M. Trumbull in behalf of the condemned anarchists (1887)

http://hdl.handle.net/10111/UIUCOCA:wasitfairtrial00trum
View the PDF.

On May 4, 1886, labor leaders in Chicago organized a rally at Haymarket Square near the corner of Randolph and Des Plaines streets to protest the killing on the previous day of four striking workers during a rally for the eight-hour work day. As police began to break up the peaceful demonstration, someone threw a bomb into the crowd, and the police began shooting; by the time the ensuing chaos had ended, seven policemen and four workers were dead. Eight men were arrested in connection with the bomb throwing--August Spies, Albert Parsons, Adolph Fischer, George Engel, Louis Lingg, Michael Schwab, Samuel Fielden and Oscar Neebe. After a 63 day trial, during which no evidence was presented that tied any of the eight to the bomb throwing, all were found guilty and seven sentenced to death by a jury that had deliberated a mere three hours. Fielden’s and Schwab’s sentences were commuted to life in prison by Governor Richard James Oglesby, and Louis Lingg committed suicide in jail. On November 11, 1887 Spies, Parsons, Fischer, and Engel were hung to death in a Cook County jail. In 1893, Illinois governor John Altgeld concluded that all eight had been wrongfully convicted, and in a move that ended his political career, pardoned Fielden, Schwab, and Neebe. Numerous books about what has come to be called the Haymarket Riot have been digitized from the collections of the libraries of UI Chicago and UIUC. Click here for a complete list.

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November 5, 2007

Die Akropolis von Athen [microform] (1896) by Hermann Luckenbach.

http://www.archive.org/details/4626151
View the PDF file.

In 2000, the Classics Library at UIUC received a $85,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to microfilm its Dittenberger-Vahlen Collection of rare, priceless and perishable 19th century European dissertations and other short scholarly works on Latin and Greek literature, history and civilization. The grant was part of a $885,000 NEH grant to the Committee on Institutional Cooperation's (CIC) Center for Library Initiatives. Now, this microfilmed set is being digitized in a pilot project conducted jointly by the UIUC Library and the Internet Archive to do mass digitization of microfilm. The UIUC Library acquired the private collections of Wilhelm Dittenberger (1840-1906) and Johannes Vahlen (1830-1911) in 1907 and 1913, respectively. Dittenberger's collection consists of 5,600 books and 2,000 pamphlets; Vahlen's consists of 10,000 books and 15,000 pamphlets.

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October 28, 2007

The Jews of Illinois : their religious and civic life, their charity and industry, their patriotism and loyalty to American institutions, from their earliest settlement in the State unto the present time (1901])

http://www.archive.org/details/jewsofillinoisth00elia
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The Reform Advocate was a Jewish weekly published in Chicago from 1891 through 1946. Edited by Emil G. Hirsch, the magazine was an advocate of progressive Judaism. The May 4,1901 issue featured here focused on Jews in Illinois, "their religious and civic life, their charity and industry, their patriotism and loyalty to American institutions, from their earliest settlement in the State unto the present time." From the Lawrence J. Gutter Collection of Chicagoana at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

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October 24, 2007

Fighting the traffic in young girls; or, War on the white slave trade; a complete and detailed account of the shameless traffic in young girls .. (c1910])

http://hdl.handle.net/10111/UIUCOCA:fightingtraffici00bell
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In the early years of the 20th century, a moral panic broke out in urban America after Illinois-born George Kibbe Turner, a reporter and muckraker, wrote a sensational article in McClure's Magazine about white women being forced into prostitution by Asian and southern European immigrants. Turner's article fed on racial fears in post-emancipation America and led to a vigorous anti-prostitution movement in the 1910s. In 1910 Congress passed the White Slave Traffic Act, also known as the Mann Act after James Mann, U.S. representative from Illinois who introduced it. Hiroyuki Matsubara, in The 1910s Anti-Prostitution Movement and the Transformation of American Political Culture, observed that "the forced sex labor of white women appeared to be the worst nightmare, or the reality, in the post-emancipation era. As if replacing black slaves, white women were dragged down by un-American intruders to a filthy corner of a city crowded with poor workers and immigrants. After the formal end of black slavery, Americans were now afraid of being confronted with white slavery." See also The Social Evil in Chicago (1911), The Social Menace of the Orient (1921), and Chicago's Black Traffic in White Women (1911).

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