Russia’s War on Ukraine: Historical Turning Points

Monday, April 25, 6-7 p.m.

What were the turning points that led to Russia’s current war on Ukraine and its people? Join us for a discussion of the Ukrainian-Russian relationship, including: the Holodomor, WWII and its aftermath, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Budapest Memorandum, the Russian war on Georgia, and the illegal annexation of Crimea.

Speakers:

• Dr. Adele Lindenmeyr, Historian of Russia and the USSR, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Villanova University
• Dr. Mike Westrate, Historian of Ukraine and the USSR, Assistant Vice Provost, Graduate Education and Research, Villanova University

Co-sponsored by Falvey Memorial Library, Villanova University

***EVENT CHANGED TO VIRTUAL-ONLY*** 

Click here to register

Future scholars, staff, and students will want to understand this period of history was like. Who better to describe it than the people who lived through it?

For that reason, Falvey Library, in conjunction with the Albert Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest, is launching a “Documenting COVID-19” collection effort.

All Villanova students, faculty, full and part-time staff, and alumnae/i are invited submit stories, photographs, video, audio, or digital objects that reflect experiences about school, work, home, or events surrounding the BLM protests.

The goal is to ensure that future generations will have original sources of information regarding the lives and times of Villanovans who experienced this global pandemic.

Collecting will be ongoing throughout the pandemic and in the subsequent weeks after the pandemic has passed. People are allowed to submit as many times as they like as events or emotions change. All submissions will be preserved in the University Archives at Falvey Library.

Also, please enjoy this video, created by Beaudry Allen, Preservation and Digital Archivist at Falvey Memorial Library.

Shawn Proctor is Preservation and Digital Archivist at Falvey Memorial Library.

Documenting COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected the Villanova community in unique ways with the swift shift to online learning; seniors not being able to attend in-person commencement; NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Tournament cancelled; our faculty and students in the Nursing School called into service; the campus closed; the uncertainty of what fall 2020 will look like; and the ever-growing disruptions to our personal lives.

The University Archives, in partnership with Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest, invites you to contribute your recollections of how you are experiencing the ongoing situation around COVID-19 to the archives’ collection.

The project is meant to capture the stories and thoughts so future researchers and community members can look back to know and understand what this period was like for those who lived through it.  The project is also an opportunity to share in the experience and your memories matter, so your experiences are an important part of our shared Villanova history.

How to participate

We invite you to submit your experience to the University Archives where the materials will be preserved and made publicly available for future research. The submission form can be found here.

And all members of the community– students, faculty, staff, and alumni– are welcome to submit:

• stories of their experience
• photographs
• social media posts
• video or audio recording
• digital artwork

How you submit your thoughts and experiences is up to you! For instance, you can write in the form of a journal entry,  save your social media posts, take photos and/or videos of life as you see it, or create multimedia works of digital storytelling.

Also, you may submit as many times as you’d like. Share your experience once or monthly!

If you have any questions about the form or the project please contact: documentingcovid@villanova.edu

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Jason Steinhauer, Director of Lepage Center, for spearheading the collaboration. Thank you to Mark Hewlett and Kaitlin Gottuso in assisting with review. And many thanks to the our Falvey colleagues’ David Uspal and Joanne Quinn for form set-up and graphics.

By Rebecca Oviedo

“It would be a dangerous error to think of the Holocaust as simply the result of the insanity of a group of criminal Nazis. On the contrary, the Holocaust was the culmination of millennia of hatred, scapegoating and discrimination targeting the Jews, what we now call anti-Semitism.”

–  UN Secretary-General António Guterres, January 27, 2017

January 27 marks the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1945 and is designated by the United Nations General Assembly as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. It commemorates victims of the Nazi regime and promotes Holocaust education throughout the world. This week also marks the next event in The Albert Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest’s six-part series Revisionist History: “Revising the Holocaust.”

“Historical revisionism,” when associated with the Holocaust, is usually applied dangerously and disingenuously by Holocaust deniers attempting to deny, obscure, or trivialize the genocide of six million Jewish people and others by Nazi Germany during World War II, and to disguise their denial as academic or legitimate historical fact.

Once again we will be joining the Lepage Center with a selection of items from Distinctive Collections on display before the event. Our selections will focus primarily on publications from the United States, during or leading up to World War II. These items help to contextualize the Holocaust and serve as a reminder that we must recognize and be vigilant against hatred and discrimination.

Eugenics in the United States

Before World War II, eugenic-sterilization laws were well established in the United States, with more than 30,000 people in twenty-nine states undergoing forced sterilization. Published in 1922, Eugenical sterilization in the United States detailed Harry H. Laughlin’s study of existing sterilization laws.

Following publication, several more states adopted sterilization laws and Laughlin’s ideas influenced the Nazi Party’s sterilization law passed in 1933. Support for eugenics in the United States waned after the Nazi atrocities became known and with the increasing worldwide discussions of human rights.

Antisemitism and Jewish Response

The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem is Part I of a four-volume set of reprints from a series of articles appearing in Henry Ford’s newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, in the early 1920s.

In contrast, The “Protocols,” Bolshevism and the Jews: an address to their fellow-citizens is a pamphlet that was distributed by American Jewish organizations as a response to the circulation of fraudulent antisemitic documents and specifically, The Dearborn Independent’s “attacks of extraordinary virulence upon the Jews.”

As founder of the Ford Motor Company, Ford was wealthy and influential. His publications have been cited as having influenced Adolf Hitler and Nazism.

Father Coughlin and “Social Justice” 

Father Charles Coughlin was an influential and outspoken American Catholic priest who gained prominence and wide audience through radio and his publication, Social Justice, which ran 1936-1942. He was eventually forced off the air in 1940 for increasingly pro-fascist and antisemitic commentary. Special Collections has the full run of this periodical.

We will have additional items with us from Special Collections at the event as well as some selected recent scholarship from the Falvey Memorial Library general collection. We encourage you to review subject librarian Merrill Stein’s course guide on genocide and mass killing and Director of Research Services Jutta Seibert’s course guide on The Holocaust in Eastern Europe.

We also highly recommend the History Unfolded project by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which collects submissions from teachers, students, and any participant about different Holocaust-era events as reported in contemporary local newspapers in the United States.

“Revising the Holocaust” will take place Tuesday evening, January 28, in Driscoll Auditorium. Laura Bang, Distinctive Collections Librarian, and I will be there at 6 p.m. The event starts at 7 p.m.

For panelists and more information: https://www1.villanova.edu/villanova/artsci/lepage/events/revisionist_history.html.

Rebecca Oviedo is Distinctive Collections Coordinator at Villanova University.

This Wednesday we will be joining The Albert Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest for the next event in their six-part series on “Revisionist History”: Revising the Cold War. Rebecca Oviedo, Distinctive Collections Coordinator, and Laura Bang, Distinctive Collections Librarian, will be there before the start of the event with some selections from Special Collections to whet your appetite and help get the conversation going. Our Distinctive Collections have plenty of primary sources to offer different perspectives, contemporary insight, and aid “revisionist history.”  Here is a sneak peak of just a few of the items we will be bringing:

These striking illustrations from popular weekly magazine Collier’s, August 5, 1950 issue depict a burning New York City under nuclear attack. The imagined scenario ran in the article titled, “Hiroshima, U.S.A.: Can Anything be Done About It?,” written by John Lear. The first page of the article explains “the story of this story”:

For five years now the world has lived with the dreadful knowledge that atomic warfare is possible. Since last September, when the President announced publicly that the Russians too had produced an atomic explosion, this nation has lived face to face with the terrifying realization that an attack with atomic weapons could be made against us. But, until now, no responsible voice has evaluated the problem constructively, in words everybody can understand. This article performs that service. Collier’s gives it more than customary space in the conviction that, when the danger is delineated and the means to combat it effectively is made clear, democracy will have an infinitely stronger chance to survive.

The article appeared almost exactly 5 years after the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Though imaginary, the images and data are still arresting. Today, with advanced technology, computer simulation and interactive maps, users can view the frightening effects of nuclear detonation with panelist Alex Wellerstein’s NukeMap.

We’ll also have on hand this 1984 publication, “Watermelons Not War: A Support Book for Parenting in the Nuclear Age.” Published by the Nuclear Education Project (NEP), a group of five women who came together shortly after the accident at Three Mile Island in 1979. Concerned about parenting in a nuclear age, they developed this guide to help parents and others develop a sense of hope and “find ways to answer our children’s soul-shaking questions about the world.”

Our final sneak-peak is the January 1959 cover of Bohemia magazine, the first of a three-part special “Edicion de la Libertad” (Liberty Issue) published in Havana after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution. A portrait of Fidel Castro accompanies the headline “Honor and Glory to the National Hero” – the first time he was called a hero in any Cuban print media. The three issues together represent a turning point in Cuban history and for the publication as well – Bohemia, a popular weekly journal, was founded in 1908 and is still published today. One million copies of this landmark issue were printed to meet expected demand. With 210 pages, it is filled with graphic images of bloodied corpses and bodies of the dead at the hands of Batista’s regime. The stark images stand out between the advertisements for alcohol, tires, cigarettes, and face cream.[1]

“Revising the Cold War” will take place Wednesday evening, November 6, in Driscoll Auditorium. We’ll be there at 6 pm! The event starts at 7 pm. For panelists and more information: https://www1.villanova.edu/villanova/artsci/lepage/events/revisionist_history.html 

[1]Special Collections holds three issues of Bohemia magazine published in Havana, Cuba in January 1959 upon the occasion of the victory of the revolution. Bound presentation volume of Jose Bustamente with title, date, and “Jose Bustamente” on front cover. All issues of Bohemia published between 1910 and 2013 have been digitized and are available on line through The Digital Library of the Caribbean. See also: Richard Denis, “UNA REVISTA AL SERVICIO DE LA NACIÓN: BOHEMIA AND THE EVOLUTION OF CUBAN JOURNALISM (1908-1960)” MA diss., University of Florida, 2016. Retrieved from https://ufdc.ufl.edu/UFE0050550/00001. And Yoani Sanchez, “Bohemia, Latin America’s Oldest Magazine, Destroyed by Censorship,” HuffPost, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/latin-americas-oldest-mag_b_831747. Accessed November 5, 2019.

U.S. Army frock coat of Major General Sherman, 1864.

This week brings the next event in The Albert Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest at Villanova University’s six-part series on “Revisionist History”: Revising the Civil War. The series brings together national and local experts to explore how today’s events compel us to re-examine critical periods in American and global history. Lepage Center director Jason Steinhauer says the goal of the series “is to show how revision is critical to all historical scholarship, and how new events and new sources continually challenge us to re-think what we know about the past.”

Here at Falvey Memorial Library we are continually bringing new sources and new scholarship to our community. We digitize new items each week for the Digital Library from our own Distinctive Collections as well as partner institutions. We want to share our enthusiasm for “Revisionist History” and this week’s event by inviting you to dig into some of our Civil War-era sources.

One of our most prominent items is the U.S. army frock coat of General William Tecumseh Sherman, on (mostly) permanent display in our Special Collections Rare Book Room. The coat is an eye-catching treasure, and it can easily be used to open a dialogue on how we remember and learn about the Civil War. It is relevant to the discussion of what has been traditionally collected, or not collected, by libraries, archives, and museums, as well as the recent debates surrounding public monuments of Confederate generals. Who have been the writers and preservers of history? What were their motives? Sherman’s coat has been part of our collection for nearly 100 years. In more recent years, part of our mission has included an ongoing effort to identify and acquire materials that relate to under-represented groups in order to diversify the collection and share a more inclusive history.

Here are some additional Digital Library sources from 19^th-century America and the Civil War:

Sherman Thackara Collection

The coat is part of this collection, donated by the family of General Sherman’s daughter Eleanor, who lived in Rosemont and attended St. Thomas of Villanova church. The correspondence in this collection contains courtship letters exchanged between Eleanor Sherman and Alexander M. Thackara, and letters from Eleanor to her father, frequently referencing public events and personalities, as well as many local individuals, events, and institutions of Philadelphia and the Main Line in the 1880’s and 1890’s. A unique part of the collection is A. M. Thackara’s correspondence, photographs, and memorabilia relating to his years at Annapolis up until his marriage. Here can be found an unusual first-hand picture of Navy life in the post-Civil War period.

Dime Novel and Popular Literature Collection

This unique and distinct category of literature was the main popular reading matter for average readers, both adult and juvenile, during the Civil War and up through the early 20^th century. Separate from strictly “news”-oriented newspapers of the day, these materials were created for and read by a mass audience and can be a useful source reflective of the cultural outlook of the period. Here is a search of “Civil War and Dime Novel” in the Digital Library.

Newspaper Collection

This collection contains hundreds of national and regional newspaper titles. Some of the more relevant titles for this time period with more than one issue include: New-York Weekly Tribune (New York, select issues from 1852); The Citizen (Irish newspaper published in New York, issues date between 1854-1856); Olive Branch (Doyletown, Norristown, 1842-1859); National Defender (Norristown, Pa, issues currently range from 1856-1876, with current ongoing digitization of later years); I.C.B.U. Journal (Philadelphia, Irish Catholic Benevolent Union, issues range from 1883-1900); Weekly Wayne Gazette from one of our newest digital partnerships (Wayne, issues from 1871-1872); and of course our own college newspaper The Villanovan begins in 1893.

Humbert Collection

This is the personal paper collection of Augustus Humbert which includes correspondence and orders related to the hunt for the assassin of President Lincoln – John Wilkes Booth – and the failed assassin of Secretary of State Seward – Lewis Payne; Confederate States of America currency; and his Pennsylvania Officer’s State Militia certificate.

John F. Ballier Papers

This collection from the German Society of Pennsylvania includes the Scrapbook of John F. Ballier, circa 1831-1889.  It includes numerous documents from Ballier’s service in the Civil War, including correspondence, military orders and newspaper clippings, as well as memorabilia going back to his apprenticeship as a baker in Aurich (Vaihingen), Wurttemberg, and related to his activities in Philadelphia during the rest of his life, including significant German-American festivities such as the Humboldt centennial in 1869, the Friedensfest in 1871, and the unveiling of the Schiller statue in Fairmount Park in 1886. Included is a manuscript note in the hand of Abraham Lincoln, dated 25 March 1863, addressed to Pennsylvania Governor A. G. Curtin, concerning Ballier’s being allowed to resume his commission.  Also includes an early day edition of the newspaper – Evening Star – April 15, 1865, prior to the announcement of the assassination of Lincoln.

William C. White Letters

William C. White was an Irish Catholic Union soldier from Philadelphia. White began his Civil War service as a volunteer with the 69th Regiment of Pennsylvania Volunteers on August 19, 1861 and served in some of the bloodiest and most important battles of the War – Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville and Gettysburg. This collection contains letters from White to his parents in Philadelphia, recounting his experiences during the war.

Robert M. O’Reilly Papers

Robert Maitland O’Reilly (1845-1912) was the 20th Surgeon General of the United States Army serving from September 7, 1902 to January 14, 1909. O’Reilly served a long military medical career beginning as a medical cadet in August 1862 during the Civil War. This collection includes correspondence, military paperwork, personal papers, and ephemera. The majority of the collection is correspondence between O’Reilly and his family and friends, the bulk being letters sent to his mother, Ellen O’Reilly, and his sister Mary O’Reilly between 1864 and 1900. The letters that O’Reilly sent in 1864 document his service during the Civil War when he was stationed in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Autographs of C.S.A. prisoners taken during the Civil War and held at Johnsons Island.

This manuscript contains signatures of American Confederate prisoners of war held at the Johnson’s Island prison in Lake Erie. It is part of a collection of papers of Eleanor C. Donnelly, 1838-1917, a figure on the Philadelphia literary scene. She was known as “The Poet of the Pure Soul” and was a contributor to numerous Catholic magazines and newspapers.

Candle-lightin’ time / by Paul Laurence Dunbar; illustrated with photographs by the Hampton Institute Camera Club and decorations by Margaret Armstrong

Paul Laurence Dunbar was born in Dayton, Ohio in 1872 to parents who had been enslaved in Kentucky. He became one of the first influential black poets in American literature and was internationally acclaimed for his dialectic verse. Included in this volume is the poem, “When Dey Listed Colored Soldiers,” with photographs accompanying each page of poetry.

“Revising the Civil War” will take place Wednesday evening, October 30 at 7-8:30 p.m. in Driscoll Auditorium. For panelists and more information: https://www1.villanova.edu/villanova/artsci/lepage/events/revisionist_history.html

Stay tuned for our next post on “Revising the Cold War” and come see our table at that event for some selected sources from Distinctive Collections!