Special Collections Research Center

SCRC Launches New Online Request System July 1

As of July 1, 2009, the Special Collections Research Center is using a new online request system. Rather than fill out multiple paper forms by hand, users can now create accounts and request materials online. Requests can be made anywhere you have web access and can be made in advance of a visit. User accounts maintain a list of all the items that individual has requested, making it easier to manage your research.

The new request system can also be used in conjunction with teaching. Working with Special Collections staff, instructors can request a request queue be made for their SCRC class materials. If you are interested in requesting items just for a class, these materials  can be viewed in the instructor's individual account, but are kept separate from items requested for personal research, allowing you to manage multiple projects more easily.

For more information please see our FAQs for more information about this new request system. We also have directions on how to create an account.  

Above, a librarian takes advantage of cutting-edge 1916 technology, placing a request via pnuematic tube. Archival Photographic Files, Series II.

John Steiner Papers

[Pictured, John Steiner recording a performance by, Howard Kennedy (guitar), Spencer Clark (bass saxophone), Squirrel Ashcraft (piano), and Phil Atwood (electric bass), with others]

John Franklin Steiner, a chemist by day, was a jazz aficionado by night. As a teenager growing up in Milwaukee, Steiner started listening to the chipped records his aunt brought home for him. He soon started traveling to Chicago to visit jazz clubs and over time befriended many jazz musicians.

Steiner also recorded and produced music. He started S/D Records with Hugh Davis and eventually purchased the rights to Paramount Records. He reissued early jazz, blues, and gospel and also recorded new material. Artists include Squirrel Ashcraft, Ma Rainey, Preston Jackson, Arthur “Blind” Blake, Johnny Dodds, and Thomas A. “Georgia Tom” Dorsey.

 

[Chicago Theater, undated]

For nearly eighty years, Steiner collected material about jazz music, musicians, recording companies, and many other topics of interest. He was internationally known as an expert on jazz and especially Chicago jazz and often acted as a source or consultant for articles, books, dissertations and theses, documentaries, and other productions of jazz history.

The John Steiner Collection spans 140 years and includes sheet music, articles, photographs, scrapbooks, correspondence, interviews, ephemera, and publications which documents Chicago jazz and blues, musicians, clubs, printed music, recording companies, and recording technology.

The John Steiner Collection was processed and preserved as part of the "Uncovering New Chicago Archives Project," funded with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought Records

 
[Committee on Social Thought, circa autumn 1964. John Nef inspects the troops, from right to left: Friedrich A. von Hayek, Ralph J. Mills Jr., Marshall Stone, James Redfield, Frank Knight, and Marshall Hodgson]

The John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought is a Ph.D.-granting interdisciplinary program of the University of Chicago. Founded in 1941, the committee is a leading center of scholarship in the fundamental issues of society. Notable members of the committee have included Hannah Arendt, Saul Bellow, Allan Bloom, John Coetzee, Mircea Eliade, T.S. Eliot, Friedrich A. von Hayek, Frank H. Knight, Edward Levi, Robert Redfield, Harold Rosenberg, Edward Shils, Mark Strand, and many more.

SCRC holds the records of the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought, which document administrative, educational, and editorial activities within the committee from its founding through the early 1980s. The collection includes administrative records kept by the committee’s founder, John U. Nef, as well as files on committee members and visitors.

A large part of the collection consists of the editorial files of Measure, a journal published by the committee from 1949-1951: This series includes correspondence and typescripts of some of the most important authors, intellectuals and international leaders of the twentieth century: Martin Buber, T.S. Eliot, Martin Heidegger, George Orwell, José Ortega y Gasset, Katherine Anne Porter, Leo Strauss, and Rebecca West are among those who are represented. 

SCRC staff recently completed a finding aid for the collection, now viewable online!

SCRC also holds the John Nef Papers. The finding aid for this collection is not yet available online. Please contact us with any questions about these collections.

Three Expatriate Poets in Japan

The Special Collections Research Center holds three literary collections from American expatriate poets now living in Japan: William I. Elliott, Drew McCord Stroud (Ryu Makoto), and Leza Lowitz.

[Pictured: William Elliott in his University of Chicago dormitory room, undated]

William I. Elliott first went to Japan in the 1950s with the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society. He taught at Kanto Gakuin University in Yokohama and founded the Kanto Poetry Center in 1967. The author of several books of poetry, essays, and articles, Elliott is also known for his translations of contemporary Japanese poetry, particularly Shuntarō Tanikawa. The William I. Elliott Papers document his missionary, literary, and teaching career, and include manuscripts, Japanese translations, correspondence, teaching material, artwork, audio, articles, reviews, and photographs.

Drew McCord Stroud (Ryu Makoto) taught Spanish at the University of Arizona and Northern Arizona University, British and American Literature at Wan Hua University in Taipei, and was associate professor of English, Spanish, Latin American, and Asian Studies at the Temple University branch campus in Tokyo. He is also the founder and editor-in-chief of SARU "monkey" Press International with offices located in Yokohama, Japan, Seattle, Washington, and New York City. The Drew McCord Stroud (Ryu Makoto) Papers document Stroud's family, academic career, and role as editor-in-chief of SARU Press and contain manuscripts, drafts, proofs, poems, published articles, correspondence, record albums and cassettes, newspaper clippings, fliers and Japanese ephemera.

 

Leza Lowitz was a lecturer at San Francisco State University, Rikkyo University in Tokyo, and Tokyo University. Lowitz worked as an advertising copywriter for Kanebo Cosmetics. She wrote about Japanese literature and art for the Japan Times, Art in America, the Asahi Evening News and Tokyo Journal, and The San Francisco Chronicle. Her essays on expatriate life were broadcast regularly on NHK Radio’s “Japan Diary.” Lowitz, alongside Edgar Honetschlager, co-wrote a Japanese film entitled MILK. She was also a corresponding editor for “Mānoa.” The Leza Lowitz Papers document her work as a professional writer and translator and contain correspondence, photographs, Japanese ephemera, articles, literary reviews, art and literary publications, artwork, drafts and manuscripts, audio-visual material.

SCRC Plays Key Role in Keeping Abbott-Sengstacke Family Papers in Chicago

It wasn’t long after Robert Sengstacke met with directors of the University of Chicago’s Special Collections Research Center that the son of a longtime Chicago Defender publisher decided his archive of family papers should remain in Chicago.

Read more and watched related videos . . .

For a finding aid to the Collection, visit the Mapping the Stacks Web site, created by the Library’s Digital Library Development Center.

University of Chicago Blackfriars Records

[Blackfriars student actors in "Naughty Nineties," 1919]

The University of Chicago Blackfriars was a student dramatic organization. The Blackfriars Records include by-laws, contracts, lists of productions and officers, printed and manuscript scores of productions, posters, photographs, and recordings.

The Blackfriars was formed in late 1903 by Frank R. Adams, the first Abbot of the order. Named after the notable theater of Elizabethan London, the Blackfriars was inspired by Harvard's Hasty Pudding, Princeton's Triangle, and other early collegiate musical comedy groups.

Membership was restricted to male students, and included one man from each University fraternity as well as any campus actors "fitted for amusing themselves and others". The first production, a satire of the Department of Political Economy titled "The Passing of Pahli Kahn," was presented in the spring of 1904. The new organization proved to be so popular that original Blackfriars musical comedies became an eagerly awaited feature of every spring season.

[Photo from "The Passing of Pahli Kahn," 1904]

While the early shows sometimes suffered from awkward staging, the Blackfriars satires of the 1920's and 1930's benefited from shrewd publicity and the aid of professional designers and directors. In the wake of the Depression and World War II, however, lavish extravaganzas were abandoned for productions of a more modest scale. In the 1950s the Blackfriars began admitting women. The group remained an active group on the University campus, finally merging with the University Theater in 1986.

Paul Carroll Papers

 
[Photo of Paul Carroll with Allen Ginsberg]

Paul D. Carroll (1927-1996) was a poet, editor, and educator who taught at the University of Illinois-Chicago. The Paul D. Carroll Papers document all aspects of his work and are open for research.

Early on, Carroll was known for his involvement with Chicago Review and Big Table. He served as the poetry editor of Chicago Review from 1957-1958.

Carroll, along with fellow editor Irving Rosenthal, published several of the "Beat" writers in the Autumn 1958 issue, including excerpts of William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch. After its release, reporter Jack Mabley wrote the article "Filthy Writing On the Midway," which appeared in the October 25, 1958 issue of the Chicago Daily News. Carroll and Rosenthal planned to continue excerpts of Burroughs' Naked Lunch and publish "Old Angel Midnight" by Jack Kerouac in the Winter 1959 issue.

After discussions between Rosenthal and members of the University of Chicago administration, Rosenthal resigned his editorship on November 17, 1958, followed the next day with the resignations of other Chicago Review editors including Carroll. The planned Winter 1959 issue was not published. On December 25, 1958, Rosenthal and Carroll founded the short-lived, but highly influential, journal Big Table.

Rosenthal edited the premier issue of Big Table, published on March 17, 1959, which published the Burroughs' Naked Lunch excerpts and Kerouac's "Old Angel Midnight" from the planned Winter 1959 issue of Chicago Review. The United States Post Office impounded over 400 copies and refused to deliver it because of "obscenity and filthy contents.” The initial court decision "found Big Table 1 obscene and filthy.” This decision was appealed, and Judge Julius Hoffman reversed the initial decision and stated that Big Table was not "obscene."

Carroll edited four more Big Table issues from 1959-1960. The fifth and final issue appeared after Hoffman's decision. Big Table published works by poets such as John Ashbery, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, Barbara Guest, LeRoi Jones, Denise Levertov, and others.

Carroll also pursued an academic career. Carroll became a Professor of English at the University of Illinois Chicago, where he founded the Program for Writers, the school's graduate program for creative writing, in 1974. He retired as Professor Emeritus in 1992.

Carroll authored several books including The Poem in Its Skin (1968), The Luke Poems (1971), New and Selected Poems (1979), The Garden of Earthly Delights (1986), and The Beaver Dam Road Poems (1994).

Carroll was also a pioneer in bringing poetry to the larger Chicago community. In 1968, he organized poetry readings at the Museum of Contemporary Art, primarily to promote the publications of Big Table Books, started in 1969. Eventually, these events developed into The Poetry Center of Chicago, which held its first official event, "Poets Look at Paintings," in 1974.

2009-2010 Special Collections Research Fellowships Named

Seven visiting researchers have been awarded short-term fellowships to support their use of original sources in the Special Collections Research Center from July 1, 2009 until June 30, 2010. Now in its fourth year, the Special Collections Research Fellowships, funded by anonymous gifts, provide up to $3,000 toward travel and research expenses. The program gives priority to projects for which Special Collections materials are central to the project and to scholars at the beginning of their career. Five of the seven are Ph.D. candidates.

Among the collections to be consulted by this year’s awardees are the Saul Bellow Papers and the Stephen A. Douglas Papers; the papers of atomic scientists organizations, University of Chicago social anthropologists and sociologists; and biblical manuscripts. For a full listing of the awardees and their projects, see Special Collections Research Fellowship Recipients.

Due to construction, the Special Collections Research Fellowship program will be suspended for 2010-2011.

 

Stephen A. Douglas Papers Unavailable

The Special Collections Research Center is currently undertaking a project to process the Stephen A. Douglas papers and integrate additional material within the collection.  While this archival work is continuing, no research access to the collection will be possible.  The processing project is expected to conclude in the autumn of 2009.

We encourage you to contact us with any questions.

Chicago Poetry Symposium Photos

The second annual Chicago Poetry Symposium was held at the Special Collections Research Center on Saturday, April 18, 2009. For the full program and description of the afternoon, please see the symposium's blog page.

Joel Felix and David Pavelich discuss the life and work of Ralph J. Mills, Jr.

Chris Glomski questions Andrew Joron on his talk concerning the Chicago Surrealist Group.

Judith Goldman responds to Liesl Olson's talk on Gertrude Stein's visits to Chicago and her impact on "middle-brow" readers.

Liesl Olson shows and discusses the typescript of John Ashbery's "The Impossible," his 1957 review of Gertrude Stein's Stanzas in Meditation.

Poets Andrew Joron, Chris Glomski, Joel Felix, and Garin Cycholl.

Poet Peter O'Leary inspects Mortimer Adler's Diagrammatics.

Speakers at the post-event reception.

Judith Goldman and Andrew Joron at reception.