Jacky Johnson, Archivist at Western College Memorial Archives, and editor of Finding Freedom: Memorializing the Voices of Freedom Summer (Miami University Press), has compiled the first book to provide detailed information about the Freedom Summer Memorial on the campus of Western College at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. The monument was dedicated in 2000 to commemorate Western’s role in Freedom Summer and to serve as a memorial to James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman, the Freedom Summer trainees subsequently murdered in Mississippi. Their deaths focused national and world attention on the continuing existence of segregation and violent racism in the United States. Ultimately, Freedom Summer marked an important milestone in the history of the civil rights movement.

The book contains essays from participants in the 1964 training sessions at Western College, including essays by Oxford residents who supported the Friends of the Mississippi Project. An essay by Freedom Summer Memorial architect Robert Keller, a poem by Miami University alumna and National Medal of the Arts winner Rita Dove, and period photographs by nationally-known photographer George Hoxie are joined by essays by Chude Allen, Ann Elizabeth Armstrong, Carole Colca, Phyllis Hoyt, Mark Levy, Rick Momeyer, Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons, and Jane Strippel. Filmmaker Keith Beauchamp contributes a preface.

Finding Freedom: Memorializing the Voices of Freedom Summer touches a diverse range of disciplines, including history, architecture, anthropology, jurisprudence, ethics, photography, print journalism, religion, media studies, social studies, psychology, women’s studies, African-American studies, music and education. As such, the book is targeted to a wide audience. It will be of interest to elementary, secondary school, and college educators and students; to libraries, museums, cultural centers, civic groups, photojournalists, documentary producers, and news agencies; and to researchers interested in Ohio history, the history of education, and the history of the civil rights movement.

To learn more about Freedom Summer visit the Freedom Summer A/V and Freedom Summer Text collections.

Miami University Libraries will be celebrating Black History Month with its 24th Annual African American Read-In on Wednesday, February 20th between 11 and 2 in the Howe Writing Center, located on the first floor of King Library.  Participants in the Read-In often read poetry and fictional prose, but many choose to read from non-fiction sources, such as memoirs, historical documents, and speeches.  It’s a great opportunity to highlight the struggles and triumphs that define the African American experience.  Miami’s Special Collections department houses many items, both print and manuscript, that help to illuminate African American history for us today.  Among the materials related to African American history in our collections are print and manuscript sources on slavery and the abolition movement, the Civil War, and the civil rights movement.

In addition to print slave narratives and anti-slavery pamphlets and periodicals, one of the highlights of our Miscellanea Collection is a letter, dated December 19, 1831, from Catharine Sedgwick to Lydia Maria Child in reply to Child’s query of why Sedwick was not an abolitionist.  Both women were established novelists and Child would later publish An Appeal in Favor of Those Americans Called Africans (1833) and edit Harriet Ann Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), two landmark abolitionist works.  Catharine Sedgwick had been raised by Elizabeth Freeman, a former slave who in a famous legal case was able to gain her freedom through the Massachusetts courts in 1781.

Though our history collections are generally stronger for the nineteenth century and earlier, some of our most interesting twentieth century materials are related to African Americans’ struggle for civil rights.  Among these resources are several pamphlets published by the Communist Party promoting racial equality, promotional literature for the Urban League of New York, and publications of other important civil rights organizations like the Southern Regional Council and the NAACP.  One of my favorites is the NAACP’s 1963 publication of the speeches of the leaders of that year’s March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, including Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech.

This semester students in Dr. Nishani Frazier’s History 206, the research and methods class, are studying African American history and the class visited Special Collections to view many of the materials described above.  It’s always a pleasure to talk to students about the resources available to them in Special Collections and even more rewarding when the students return to use the collection for their research.

Kimberly Tully
Special Collections Librarian

Portrait of Defoe, frontispiece from an 1816 copy of Robinson Crusoe, published by J. Gleave

One of the most widely published books in history, Robinson Crusoe is a novel by Daniel Defoe, first published on April 25, 1719 under the original title The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver’d by Pirates. The book is a fictional autobiography of the title character, who spends 28 years on a remote tropical island.

Robinson Crusoe was well received in the literary world; within the first year of its publication the book had already run through four editions. It has since spawned numerous sequels and adaptations for stage, film, and television.

Third edition, published by W. Taylor in 1719

The Walter Havighurst Special Collections is home to approximately 70 different printings of Robinson Crusoe, many of which are housed in the Spiro Peterson Center for Defoe Studies collection. The Spiro Peterson Center for Defoe Studies collection includes more than 550 volumes, 100 reels of microfilm, and various documents, maps, notes, and files. The collection is made up of materials in over thirteen different languages. I have included a few of my favorite editions here.

Robinson Crusoe in Words of One Syllable, by Mary Godolphin published in 1882

Illustration from a German language edition, published in 1922

A 1905 edition that replaces the characters with various animals. Crusoe is portrayed as an elephant, while Friday is portrayed as a bear.

A Russian version from 1894

Small chapbook from 1810

A publisher’s binding edition from the 1860’s

This edition was published in 1895

Illustration by Elenore Plaisted Abbott, from a 1920 publication

These are just a small handful of the many editions of this popular title found in the Walter Havighurst Special Collections.

Ashley Jones
Preservation Librarian

One of the fascinations of the PBS Masterpiece series Downton Abbey is its depiction of the highly-structured world of the servants living below stairs. The Walter Havighurst Special Collections hold some volumes that describe the real world behind the fictional lives of the Downton servants.

The Footman: His Duties and How to Perform Them (Houlston’s Industrial Library No. 16) London: W. Foulsham [ca. 1880], and Household Work; or, The Duties of Female Servants … (Finchley Manuals of Industry, No. 3) London: J. Masters, 1863, are examples of guides published for those learning to work in the serving class. They describe the duties expected in these positions, give advice on how to perform them, and offer moral encouragement. These primary resources – materials contemporary to their topic – offer us insight in the training and expectations of those employed in domestic service. The footman is instructed in cleaning boot-tops, preserving knives and forks from rust, brushing clothes, the duties of a valet, preparing razor strops, and waiting at table – breakfast, luncheon, dinner and tea – among other things. The female servants are taught how to carry out the various duties of maid-of-all-work, house-maid, and laundry-maid. Whether you need to know how to light a fire, clean a brass door-plate, take ink-stains out of mahogany, arrange a tea table, destroy black beetles, wash a variety of clothes or clean white kid gloves – among many, many other responsibilities – the answers are here.

Servants were not limited to the great houses of England. In 1897 American progressive historian Lucy Maynard Salmon (left), founder of the history department at Vasser College, published the first academic study of American servants based on surveys she distributed to employers and employees. Her Domestic Service (New York: Macmillan, 1897) provides a wealth of historical and statistical material, identifies social and economic benefits and problems, and suggests remedies to the challenges of domestic service. The first edition is available in Special Collections.

And finally, from 1941, Household Workers (New York: Harper) encourages teenage girls and boys to consider the many benefits of entering domestic service as a career. This volume in the Picture Fact Books series, which describes a variety of careers, promotes the advantages and opportunities of domestic service as an alternative to the standard careers available for women at the time – secretary, nurse or teacher – and points out the earning potential of cooking for men as well as women. Did it make a convincing case? Perhaps it didn’t matter. The U.S. declaration of war at the end of the year changed the career plans of many men and women.

If you’re curious about the lives of Bates and Anna and Carson and Mrs. Hughes and the rest of the Downton staff, their vanished world is well represented in the Special Collections stacks.

Elizabeth Brice
Assistant Dean for Technical Services and
Head, Special Collections & Archives