Geography Awareness Week begins Monday, Nov. 15. Established by a presidential proclamation more than 25 years ago, National Geographic created the annual public awareness program to demonstrate the importance of geography. From National Geographic: too many people are “unable to make effective decisions, understand geo-spatial issues, or even recognize their impacts as global citizens.” Aiming to raise awareness of these issues, more than 10,000 Americans participate in Geography Awareness Week (Nov. 15—Friday, Nov. 19) annually. Join Falvey Memorial Library, the Department of Geography and the Environment, the Department of History, and Gamma Theta Upsilon (GTU) for these Geography Awareness Week events:

Undergraduate Research Symposium Poster Display (Monday, Nov. 15–Friday, Nov. 19)

Falvey Memorial Library’s Digital Scholarship Lab and Room 205; 8 a.m.–5 p.m.

Please visit Falvey Memorial Library’s Digital Scholarship Lab and Room 205 to view student posters from the Villanova Student Undergraduate Research Symposium. Check out Falvey Memorial Library’s blog to view daily posts from current and former GEV students on their past GIS mapping and geography projects!

Falvey Forum: Creating Interactive GIS Maps with Leaflet and R (Wednesday, Nov. 17)

Virtual Workshop; 12:30–1:30 p.m. 

Join Erica Hayes, Digital Scholarship Librarian, on Wednesday, Nov. 17, 12:30–1:30 p.m. for a virtual workshop entitled “Creating Interactive GIS Maps with Leaflet and R.” You’ve likely used ArcGIS Online to display maps online, but have you considered using free and open-source tools for web mapping? Leaflet is one of the most popular open-source JavaScript libraries for creating interactive maps. Here’s an example Interactive Map Tracking Charges & Enforcement Related to Covid-19 created with Leaflet by two researchers in Canada. This workshop will introduce you to Leaflet for R (a statistical programming language), an R package, which makes it easier to integrate and control Leaflet maps.

REGISTER HERE. A Zoom link will be sent to registrants one day prior to the workshop.

GIS Day Lecture: Signe Peterson Fourmy, JD, PhD, Villanova University, on “Digital Mapping & Last Seen Ads”  (Wednesday, Nov. 17)

Virtual Workshop; 5:30–6:30 p.m.

Please join us virtually on Wednesday Nov. 17, 5:30–6:30 p.m. as Signe Peterson Fourmy, JD, PhD, Director of Research and Analysis of the “Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery” digital humanities project, will be discussing mapping the ads of formerly enslaved people after emancipation.

Formerly enslaved people placed thousands of “Last Seen” ads in newspapers after emancipation searching for family and friends. By mapping these ads, the “Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery” project makes visible the forced dislocations that not only reflect the personal loss and trauma of slavery but also the geographic impact of the Domestic Slave Trade and post-emancipation migration. This interactive GIS mapping feature of the project allows users to visualize how this displacement affected individuals, when they and their loved ones were sold, and to explore the origins of those who formed post-war Black communities.

Biography:

Signe Peterson Fourmy earned her JD from the University of Houston Law Center in 2001 and her PhD in History at the University of Texas at Austin in 2020. Currently, she serves as the Director of Research and Analysis at Villanova University for the digital humanities project, “Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery.” She is also a lecturer in the Department of History at UT Austin.

REGISTER HERE. 

GTU Honor Society Talk & GEV Colloquium Lecture: Gordon Coonfield, PhD, on “How Neighborhoods Remember: Mapping Memory and Making Place in Philadelphia” (Thursday, Nov. 18)

Mendel Science Center, Room 154 and Virtual Livestream; 5:30–6:30 p.m. 

Join us on Thursday, Nov. 18, 5:30–6:30 p.m. in Mendel Room 154 or register virtually as Gordon Coonfield, PhD, Department of Communication and Media Studies will be discussing his mapping project: Kensington Remembers.

Biography:

Gordon Coonfield, PhD, Associate Professor of Communication at Villanova, utilizes multimedia to document the ways in which changes to the built environment impact cultures of memory. His Kensington Remembers project incorporates story mapping, photography, and ethnographic writing to explore vernacular memorial sites in one of Philadelphia’s most impoverished neighborhoods.

 REGISTER HERE.

Kallie Stahl ’17 MA is Communication and Marketing Specialist at Falvey Memorial Library.

By Jutta Seibert

Villanova University faculty, students, and staff now have electronic access to all volumes in the acclaimed Studies in Imperialism series published by Manchester University Press. For close to forty years the series has retained its relevance in academic circles by steadily expanding its cross-disciplinary scope. John M. MacKenzie, the founding editor of the series and an occasional contributor, explored the cross-fertilization or, as some would argue, the cross-contamination between the usurper and the usurped in Propaganda and Empire (1984), the first volume in the series. The series’ continued success reflects the pervasive and persistent bonds between metropolis and periphery in the post-colonial period.

As general editor, MacKenzie has promoted cross-disciplinary research in imperial studies through his research and editorial work for more than thirty years. In Propaganda and Empire MacKenzie explored the impact of imperialism on British popular culture. As the editor of the following volume, Imperialism and Popular Culture (1986), he invited other scholars to further explore the same topic. During his tenure as general editor, MacKenzie continued to push Studies in Imperialism into new directions. Examples include his foray into environmental history with The Empire of Nature, which appeared in 1988, followed by Imperialism and the Natural World (1990), a collection of essays edited by MacKenzie. His Museums and Empire (2009) introduced museum studies to the series. Later volumes on imperial museums and exhibitions include Exhibiting the Empire (2015), a collection of essays edited by MacKenzie that explored the domestically promoted imperial narrative, and Curating Empire (2012), a collection of essays edited by Sarah Longair and John McAleer.

The Library’s catalog includes records for all available print and electronic editions of individual volumes in the series. Access to the complete series is also available via the Library’s Databases A-Z list under S.

Learn more about Studies in Imperialism

• Thompson, Andrew (ed.) Writing Imperial Histories. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013.
  Volume 100 reflects and celebrates Studies in Imperialism.
• Thompson, A. S. (ed.). (2013). Complete List of the Manchester University Press Studies in Imperialism Series, 1985–2013. In Writing Imperial Histories (pp. vii–xii). Manchester University Press.
• Ward, Stuart. “The MacKenziean Moment in Retrospect (or How One Hundred Volumes Bloomed).” In Writing Imperial Histories, edited by Andrew Thompson, 29-48. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013.
• MacKenzie, John M. “Afterword.” In Writing Imperial Histories, edited by Andrew Thompson, 268-274. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013.

Related resources

• British Library Newspapers (Gale)
  Includes over 160 newspaper titles spanning the years 1732 to 1950. The archive reflects diverse and distinct regional attitudes, cultures, and vernaculars, providing an alternative viewpoint to the London-centric national press.
• Times (London) Digital Archive, 1785-2012 (Gale)
• Times of India, 1838-2010 (ProQuest)
• British Periodicals (ProQuest)
  Provides access to British periodicals published from the 17th through the early 20th century with the majority of content from the 19th century. Covers a broad range of topics.
• 19th Century UK Periodicals (UK)
  Features digital access to a selection of 19th century British magazines on women, children, leisure and sport, humor, anthropology, travel, missionaries, and colonies.
• Age of Exploration (Adam Matthew Digital)
• China: Trade, Politics and Culture, 1793-1980 (Adam Matthew Digital)
• Empire Online (Adam Matthew Digital)
• Frontier Life: Borderlands, Settlement and Colonial Encounters (Adam Matthew Digital)
• India, Raj and Empire (Adam Matthew Digital)

Jutta Seibert is Director of Research Services & Scholarly Engagement at Falvey Memorial Library.

Word of the Week: Friluftsliv (pronounced free-loofts-liv) 

The expression literally translates as “open-air living” and was popularized in the 1850s by the Norwegian playwright and poet, Henrik Ibsen, who used the term to describe the value of spending time in remote locations for spiritual and physical well being. 

Today, the phrase is used more broadly by Swedes, Norwegians, and Danes to explain anything from lunchtime runs, to commuting by bike, to getting away for a weekend in the woods. 

This Week at Falvey  

Monday, Oct. 4

Mindfulness Mondays / 1– 1:30 p.m. / ZOOM / https://villanova.zoom.us/j/98337578849 

Tuesday, Oct. 5

Midterms Stress Buster Pop-Up / 12-2 p.m. / Old Falvey Patio

Wednesday, Oct. 6

Fall 2021 Falvey Forum Workshop Series: Citation Management Using Zotero / 12:30-1:30 p.m. / ZOOM / Register Here 

Friday, Oct. 8

Villanova Gaming Society Meeting / 2:30-4:30 p.m. / Speakers’ Corner / Free & Open to the Public 

This Week in History 

Oct. 4, 1957 – Sputnik launched 

The Soviet Union inaugurates the “Space Age” with its launch of Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite. The spacecraft, named Sputnik after the Russian word for “satellite,” was launched at 10:29 p.m. Moscow time from the Tyuratam launch base in the Kazakh Republic. 

The first U.S. satellite, Explorer, was launched on January 31, 1958. By then, the Soviets had already achieved another ideological victory when they launched a dog into orbit aboard Sputnik 2. The Soviet space program went on to achieve a series of other space firsts in the late 1950s and early 1960s: first man in space, first woman, first three men, first space walk, first spacecraft to impact the moon, first to orbit the moon, first to impact Venus, and first craft to soft-land on the moon. 

Jenna Renaud is a graduate student in the Communication Department and graduate assistant in Falvey Memorial Library.

Word of the Week: Resplendent / adj. 

“Brightly colored in an impressive way” 

It’s officially fall! Although fall technically started on Sept. 22, the weather is starting to catch up with crisper mornings and bright fall foliage or – should I say – resplendent fall foliage. My favorite time of year is when we start to see the leaves change color and sweatshirts become a wardrobe staple!

Check out this fall foliage map to see when the leaves are predicted to be at their peak. 

This Week at Falvey  

Monday, Sept. 27

Mindfulness Mondays / 1–1:30 p.m. / ZOOM / https://villanova.zoom.us/j/98337578849 

Wednesday, Sept. 29

Fall 2021 Falvey Forum Workshop Series: Storytelling with GIS / 12:30–1:30 p.m. / ZOOM / Register Here 

Friday, Oct. 1

Villanova Gaming Society Meeting / 2:30–4:30 p.m. / Speakers’ Corner / Free & Open to the Public 

This Week in History 

September 29, 1982 – Cyanide-laced Tylenol kills seven 

Flight attendant Paula Prince buys a bottle of cyanide-laced Tylenol. Prince was found dead on Oct. 1, becoming the final victim of a mysterious ailment in Chicago. Over the previous few days, six other people had died of unknown causes in northwest Chicago. After Prince’s death, Richard Keyworth, and Philip Cappitelli, firefighters in the Windy City, realized that all seven victims had ingested Extra-Strength Tylenol prior to becoming ill. Further investigation revealed that several bottles of the Tylenol capsules had been poisoned with cyanide. 

While bottles of Extra-Strength Tylenol were recalled nationwide, the only contaminated capsules were found in the Chicago area. The culprit was never caught, but the mass murder led to new tamper-proof medicine containers, as well as a string of copycat crimes. 

If you want to read more about how the crisis was handled from a public relations perspective, read this case study. 

Jenna Renaud is a graduate student in the Communication Department and graduate assistant in Falvey Memorial Library.

By Jutta Seibert

Bloomsbury History: Theory & Method is a brand new digital resource dedicated to historiography and the examination of historical theory and methods using a global approach. It features cutting-edge scholarship in the form of exclusive articles contributed by historians from 25 different countries. At the core of the collection are the recently published four-volume survey Historiography: Critical Readings edited by Q. Edward Wang and 100 essays that explore key concepts, thinkers, debates, and methods as well as a small selection of classical texts that shaped the discipline. Examples of topics include medievalism, social movements, agency, causality, microhistory, environmental history, and public history to name just a few. The collection also features digital access to more than 60 previously published monographs and essay collections that focus on historiography, theory and methods. Included are the following titles:

• The Concept of History (2017) by Dmitri Nikulin
• Historiography: An Introductory Guide (2012) by Eileen K. Cheng
• Theories of History: History Read across the Humanities (2018) by Michael J. Kelly and Arthur Rose (eds.)
• Global History, Globally: Research and Practice around the World (2018) by Sven Beckert and Dominic Sachsenmaier (eds.)
• Contesting History: Narratives of Public History (2014) by Jeremy Black

New content will be added continuously in the coming years. Trial access will be available until October 22, 2021. A link to the collection is available on the Library’s Databases A-Z list under B. Get in touch if you would like to recommend this resources for the Library’s permanent collection.

Jutta Seibert is Director of Research Services & Scholarly Engagement at Falvey Memorial Library.

By Jutta Seibert

Bloomsbury’s Cultural Histories are multi-volume sets that survey the social and cultural construction of specific subjects through the ages. All volumes in a set explore the same themes. For example, the Cultural History of Western Empires consists of six volumes covering antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Age of Enlightenment, the Age of Empire, and the modern age. Each volume in the set includes a chapter on race written by an expert in the field. Compare the chapter on race by Cord Whitaker from the volume covering the Middle Ages in the Cultural History of Western Empires to the chapter on race by Vanita Seth from the volume covering the Age of Enlightenment to gain a better understanding of what the series has to offer.

The digital platform currently comprises 24 subjects ranging from animals to work. Recently added subjects include comedy, education, home, memory, and peace. Color, democracy, fairy tales, genocide, medicine, and sport are among the subjects currently in production.

The collection also includes a small selection of complementary cultural and social history books from Bloomsbury Academic, Berg, and Continuum. Among them are David Sutton’s exploration of the relationship between food and memory in Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memory (Berg, 2001) and Mark M. Smith’s Sensory History (Berg, 2017), to give just two examples.

Visual resources from the Wellcome Collection, the Rijksmuseum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art round out the collection, which also includes an interactive timeline and lesson plans for the undergraduate classroom. Remote access is provided through the Library’s Databases A-Z list under B.

Jutta Seibert is Director of Research Services & Scholarly Engagement at Falvey Memorial Library.

Word of the Week: Bibliosmia 

“The smell and aroma of a good book.” 

Bibliosmia, or book-smell, is caused by the chemical breakdown of compounds within the paper. When you smell a book, you are essentially smelling the book’s slow death, which explains why the older the book is, the better it smells! 

This Week at Falvey  

Monday, Sept. 20

Mindfulness Mondays / 1–1:30 p.m. / ZOOM / https://villanova.zoom.us/j/98337578849 

Tuesday, Sept 21

1842 Day is Villanova’s annual day of giving, a 24-hour event for the entire Villanova community to come TOGETHER to make a gift of any size to the designation of their choice. Tuesday, September 21 marks the University’s fifth annual 1842 Day. This is our opportunity to show pride and gratitude for the impact Villanova has on each of us, in our communities and around the world.

Wednesday, Sept. 22

Fall 2021 Falvey Forum Workshop Series: ArcGIS Online Field Apps / 12:30 p.m.-1:30 p.m. / ZOOM / Register Here 

Friday, September 24th 

Villanova Gaming Society Meeting / 2:30-4:30 p.m. / Speakers’ Corner / Free & Open to the Public 

This Week in History 

September 24, 1789 – The first Supreme Court is established  

The Judiciary Act of 1789 is passed by Congress and signed by President George Washington, establishing the Supreme Court of the United States as a tribunal made up of six justices who were to serve on the court until death or retirement. That day, President Washington nominated John Jay to preside as chief justice, and John Rutledge, William Cushing, John Blair, Robert Harrison and James Wilson to be associate justices. On September 26, all six appointments were confirmed by the U.S. Senate. 

The current members of the Supreme Court in 2021 are Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Clarence Thomas, Justice Stephen Breyer, Justice Samuel Alito, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Justice Elena Kagan, Justice Neil Gorsuch, Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Justice Amy Coney Barrett.  

Jenna Renaud is a graduate student in the Communication Department and graduate assistant in Falvey Memorial Library.

“I’m very happy to be working with Distinctive Collections and Irish Studies. With this graduate assistantship, I feel like I’m getting the best of both worlds.”

Emily Poteat recently joined the Falvey Memorial Library staff as graduate assistant for Distinctive Collections and Digital Engagement and Villanova’s Irish Studies Program. Working primarily with the Irish American Collection in Distinctive Collections, Poteat has discovered many voices of Irish-Americans living in the early 20th century and has begun transcribing their stories. She is currently examining a travel diary by Joseph McGarrity.

“He [McGarrity] brings so much nuance to his diary. I’ve read works by him for an audience and this diary is clearly just for him because he’s not taking care with his handwriting, its very scrawly. In some instances, he may have been writing while traveling the Irish countryside because there’d be a mark across the entire page where the pen just dragged. Delving into the history of Ireland, its really interesting to hear that perspective from an Irish-American who was so involved in Irish Republican activities.”

Another project Poteat has been working on is Mary Linehan’s Irish-American Poetry Commonplace Book. “We couldn’t tell which poems were written by Mary and which poems were commonplace. The only two we were able to identify as not penned by Mary was a poem about Mary Queen of Scots and a newspaper clipping that Mary had cut out and pasted onto a page of her book. It has been very interesting hearing the voices of different people and getting a small glimpse into their lives.”

Graduating from Elon University with a BA in history and minors in political science and German studies, Poteat has conducted a variety of archival research throughout her undergraduate career. Working as a intern with The MacArthur Memorial, she researched the Korean War and worked alongside their archival and curatorial department doing exhibition research where she had the opportunity to transcribe General Douglas MacArthur’s communique’. “The end result of that project was a research paper focusing on journalism during the Interwar period and how MacArthur’s communique’ was discussed throughout WWI and WWII.”

Her senior thesis focused on British identity at the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the Indian Rebellion of 1857: She examined cartoons of both events published in Punch Magazine, analyzing aspects of British identity that were put on display for the public. For another project, she traced the history of the Red Army Faction (the Baader–Meinhof Group) and documented its transition from student-led operation to German militant organization.

A graduate student in the Department of History at Villanova University, Poteat plans to continue her study in modern German. Fluent in the language, she will focus her research on Nazi propaganda. “I want to focus on Volksgemeinschaft (people’s community) and examine the ways propaganda emerged and how it was distributed and communicated to the German public. I’m hoping to continue exploring geo-politics between Russia and the United States with the atomic bomb during the Cold War.”

In her free time, Poteat enjoys watercolor painting, copperplate calligraphy, and modern script calligraphy. She is looking forward to transcribing meeting minutes of the Irish Republican committees and societies in the United States. “I have a passion for special collections and archives. [This job] is a joy…This is always what I dreamed of doing.”

Follow Poteat’s work on the Falvey Library blog:

• Green Voices of the Past: First Reflections
• Green Voices of the Past: A Trip Through Ireland with Joseph McGarrity

Kallie Stahl ’17 MA is Communication and Marketing Specialist at Falvey Memorial Library.

By Jenna Newman

I hope you’re rocking your green today because it’s St. Patrick’s Day! This week I wanted to dive deeper into the history of St. Patrick’s Day and answer some FAQs about St. Patrick’s Day and typical ways of celebrating.

Who was St. Patrick? Saint Patrick was the patron saint of Ireland and its national apostle. He was brought to Ireland as a slave when he was 16, but later escaped. Later, he returned to Ireland and is thought to have brought Christianity to Ireland.

When did people start celebrating St. Patrick’s Day? Since the ninth or 10th century, people in Ireland have been celebrating the feast day of St. Patrick on March 17; however, the first St. Patrick’s Day parade actually took place in the United States! Records show that in 1601 there was a parade in the Spanish colony that is now St. Augustine, Florida. In 1772, homesick Irish soldiers in the English militia marched in New York City to honor the saint – celebrations have only grown from there!

What’s the significance of shamrocks? One of the most told legends regarding St. Patrick is that he used a three-leaf Irish clover (a shamrock!) to explain the Holy Trinity to the Irish people when he brought Christianity to the country. 

What do leprechauns have to do with St. Patrick’s Day? Legends of leprechauns and their pots of gold at the end of rainbows go back centuries, although it was more recently that they became tied to St. Patrick’s Day. One theory has to do with a movie Walt Disney released in 1959 called Darby O’Gill and the Little People, which was about an old Irish man and his experiences with magical leprechauns. This movie became increasingly popular in the United States right around the time that celebrations of St. Patrick’s Day also were becoming more popular. Since St. Patrick’s Day is about celebrating Irish culture and leprechauns are a large part of Irish folklore, the connection is fitting. 

Why do you wear green on St. Patrick’s Day? It all has to do with the leprechauns! Leprechauns are known for their trickery and supposedly pinch everyone they come across. But, leprechauns also cannot see the color green, so we wear green on St. Patrick’s Day to avoid being pinched! Green is also one of the prominent colors in the Irish flag.

As part of your celebrations, I encourage you to take a deeper look into one of Falvey’s digital exhibits, Rambles, Sketches, Tours: Travellers & Tourism in Ireland. This exhibit highlights Irish travel narratives and related materials, primarily from the Joseph McGarrity Collection, in Falvey Memorial Library’s Special Collections.

Jenna Newman is a graduate assistant in Falvey Memorial Library and a graduate student in the Communication Department.

By Jenna Newman

Now that we’ve read through Angela’s Ashes (1996) as part of the Read with the Other Jenna book club, it’s time to go deeper into the McCourt family, the writing of Angela’s Ashes, what happened after, and where to find more resources. Frank McCourt shared with the readers his childhood, starting in New York and then moving to Limerick, Ireland. We learned the heartbreaking details of his father’s descent into alcoholism until he was no longer present and the poverty that struck the McCourt family.

Three out of Frank’s six siblings died in early childhood, yet four of the McCourt brothers survived against all odds. At the end of the memoir, Frank gets off the boat from Ireland, back into New York, ready to start a new life.

But now, we are left with the question: what happens next?

Frank struggles to gain a foothold in New York at first, which he writes about in his second memoir ‘Tis (1999). However, eventually he becomes a city school teacher where he taught for 30 years after getting a degree in English Education from New York University and a master’s in English from Brooklyn College. Frank talks about his experiences as a teacher in his third and final memoir Teacher Man (2005). In 1994, Frank married Ellen Frey McCourt, who he was married to until he passed away in 2009 from metastatic melanoma at age 78. Frank is survived by his wife, Ellen, his brothers, Malachy, Alphie, and Mike, his daughter, Maggie McCourt, and three grandchildren.

Although Frank took on the voice of his childhood self while writing Angela’s Ashes, he did not write the memoir until he was in his 60s. He struggled with the writing process until writing a small anecdotal section, where he took on the voice of himself as a child, and ultimately found the voice we see throughout the entire memoir. The book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1997 and was made into a movie by British director Alan Parker in 1999. 

The eldest son, Frank McCourt, however, was not the only McCourt to take his hand at memoir writing. Malachy McCourt, the second eldest son, wrote two memoirs about his life after traveling to America. The first, A Monk Swimming (1999) about traveling through America and then the second, Singing my Him Song (2001) about his journey from being a drunk to a sober, loving father and grandfather. The four living McCourt brothers also became the topic of two documentaries, shot by Malachy’s son Conor McCourt. The first focused on their time in Ireland, The McCourts of Limerick, while the second focused on New York, The McCourts of New York.

If you’re interested in learning more about Irish culture, history, or the McCourt family, I’ve linked to a variety of different resources. 

• McCourt Family Memoirs
  • ‘Tis by Frank McCourt
  • Teacher Man by Frank McCourt
  • A Monk Swimming by Malachy McCourt
  • Singing My Him Song by Malachy McCourt
• Irish Studies Librarian, Jutta Seibert, can be reached by email here or schedule an appointment with her here. More information about the Irish studies collection can be located here.
• Falvey’s special collections also hold two distinctive collections focused on Irish history and culture.
  • The McGarrity Collection consists of around 3,000 monographs focusing on Irish history, literature, folklore, description and travel, music, and Irish-American history. This collection also includes a complete run of the Irish Press.
  • The Limited Editions collection holds almost an entire collection of limited edition books and broadsides printed by the Cuala Press, an Irish press in Dublin operating in the first half of the twentieth century. 

Make sure to tune in tomorrow on Instagram and Facebook Live as I continue to dig deeper into the questions and themes posed in Angela’s Ashes.

Jenna Newman is a graduate assistant in Falvey Memorial Library and a graduate student in the Communication Department. Current mood: Adding all the other McCourt memoirs into my Amazon cart.