Digitized Book of the Week

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.

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.

http://www.archive.org/details/johnwilkesboothe00camp
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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?]
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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.

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.

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.

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.

http://libsysdigi.library.uiuc.edu/oca/Books2007-10/republicancampai60burl/
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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.

http://www.archive.org/details/chicagoraceriots00geor
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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.

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.

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.

http://www.archive.org/details/goodrecipes00winn
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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.

http://www.archive.org/details/watsekawondersta00stev
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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!

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/

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.

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.

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.

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!

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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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)

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.

http://hdl.handle.net/10111/UIUCOCA:wasitfairtrial00trum
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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.

http://www.archive.org/details/4626151
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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.

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.

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).