In the Spotlight

Historic African Photo Collection Now Online

Winterton Website is Now Available

"From the moment we acquired the Humphrey Winterton collection in 2002," says David Easterbrook, curator of the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies, "we knew it would be of interest to an international body of scholars and educators. So it was immediately a very high priority to digitize it and make it available online."

The collection includes more than 7,600 photos chronicling the European colonization of East Africa between 1860 and 1960. Taken by European explorers, colonial officials, settlers, missionaries, military officials, travelers, and early commercial photographers, the photos document the changing relationships among Africans and between Africans and Europeans during a period of dramatic change.

But in addition to digitizing the materials, the Library set itself a further challenge with the Winterton project. Assembled over a 40-year period by Winterton, the collection contained seventy-six photo albums, scrapbooks, and boxes of loose items like postcards and stereoscopic slides. "To a researcher," says the Library's head of Digital Collections Claire Stewart, "it might be important to be able to browse the collection exactly as it was originally physically organized, or it might be more important to be able to search it as a database, with dates or keywords. So we felt it was important to design a site that would do both."

The resulting website, launched this June, achieves both those goals: making an extraordinary historical collection available to other universities, secondary schools, and museums worldwide, and inviting users to explore it in a variety of creative, intriguing ways.

The scope of the materials is remarkable, Easterbrook says. The earliest images, from the 1860s, portray life in Zanzibar off the east coast of Africa. They were taken and annotated by explorer and British abolitionist James Augustus Grant, best known for his 1864 book A Walk Across Africa: Or, Domestic Scenes from My Nile Journal. A set of pictures from the Abyssinian Campaign of 1868 preserves the first surviving use of photography in a military campaign.

Jonathan Glassman, an associate professor of history at Northwestern who has used the Winterton collection extensively, says its special value lies in its unusual subject matter. "The most familiar photographs of this era," he says, "tend to dwell on what the photographer considered the glamorous aspects of East Africa: wildlife, landscapes, settler life, the occasional posed portrait of an African sultan or Maasai warrior. What makes the Winterton collection stand out is the large number of items that document more prosaic matters. Such matters are precisely the most difficult for the student of African history to get a handle on."

A generous grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) enabled the Library not only to digitize the images, but to design the innovative software that lets the user "see the collection as the collector saw it." A user can choose to browse through the images exactly as they were organized in the collector's original albums, scrapbooks, and boxes, either by displaying pages of thumbnails or by using a feature that reproduces the experience of flipping quickly through the pages of a photo album.

Because the images are tagged with extensive metadata, they can also be searched by date or certain kinds of keywords. A school group viewing the site in its pilot stage, for example, asked Easterbrook to check if there were any photos related to the ancestry of President Barack Obama. That search yielded a group of 31 photos of people and places.

Designed in consultation with both a group of K-12 educators and members of Northwestern's renowned Program of African Studies, the site also includes a "Winterton in the Classroom" feature that explains how elementary and secondary school teachers can use the collection for classroom projects and curricula, and links to other resources on teaching about Africa.

Remembering Tiananmen Square

On its 20th anniversary, a new library exhibit "Remembering Tiananmen Square 1989" document's key events from this historical movement in China. In addition to the exhibited materials, a mini film fest will take place on June 4, the anniversary of the culmination of the protests.

1:00 pm / The Tank Man
2:45 pm / Tragedy at Tiananmen: The Untold Story
4:00 pm / The Gate of Heavenly Peace
All films will be viewed in the Library's Forum Room.

The exhibit, which runs June 1 - June 30, is located on the first floor of the Library and is open to the public Monday through Friday from 8:30 am - 5 pm and Saturday from 8:30 am - 12 pm. For more information call 847-467-5918.

New Library Remote Book Drop

A drive-up book drop is now available on the Evanston campus north of Locy Hall in the Fisk Hall parking lot. Books are picked up once a day, Monday through Friday. Time sensitive items such as recalled books, CDs, DVDs, videos, and reserve materials should be returned directly to the Library. Call Library Circulation for more information at 847-491-7633.

"The Murder that Wouldn't Die": A Library exhibit on Leopold & Loeb

Contemporaries called the murder of 14-year-old Bobby Franks by Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb the "Crime of the Century." The trial—with Clarence Darrow masterminding the defense—mesmerized Chicago and America in the summer of 1924, and the case has continued to fascinate writers, film-makers, legal scholars, and their audiences ever since.

"The Murder that Wouldn't Die: Leopold & Loeb in Artifact, Fact, and Fiction" is a new exhibit highlighting the library's extraordinary collection of materials related to the case. These include the original ransom note that Leopold and Loeb sent to Bobby Franks' parents; original transcripts of the confessions that Leopold and Loeb made in the State's Attorney's office shortly after their arrest; the psychiatric and medical evaluations ordered by Darrow; and one of the most complete original trial transcripts known to have survived.

The exhibit uses these materials, plus contemporary photographs and other documents, to tell the story of both the murder and the court case that followed: How two promising University of Chicago graduate students decided to kill a randomly selected child and then see if they could extract a ransom from his family. How a typewriter and a pair of spectacles gave them away to police. How Clarence Darrow seized the chance to defend them as an opportunity to crusade against the death penalty.

The exhibit also explores the many ways the crime has been portrayed and interpreted in the past 85 years—sometimes by artists and writers who used the University's collection to do their research. Simon Baatz's recent book For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder that Shocked Chicago was based partially on the use of the Library's collection, as was Crimes of the Century: From Leopold & Loeb to O.J. Simpson, a legal analysis co-authored by Gilbert Geis and Northwestern University Law Professor Leigh B. Bienen.

The exhibit, on the main floor of the Library at 1970 Campus Drive on Northwestern's Evanston campus, has been extended through June 30, 2009. Public hours: Monday - Friday 8:30 a.m. - 5 p.m.; Saturday 8:30 a.m. - 12 noon. May 21 is the 85th anniversary of the crime.

You can also watch a Chicago/NBC TV Channel 5 news story on this exhibit.

How Sci-Fi Art Evolved: A New Exhibit in Deering

Deering Library's third-floor exhibit space features a new display called The Artist's Telescope: Science Fiction and Illustration. This engaging installation charts how the depiction of interplanetary worlds has changed over the course of three centuries. For instance, the earliest authors illustrated their writings with fantasy visions of future worlds, but in the 19th century, authors like Jules Verne could base lunar or Martian landscapes on maps printed from images seen with powerful telescopes. In the late 20th century, as space flight became a reality, illustrated science fiction favored artists such as Chesley Bonestell who had technological expertise.

in 1974, Jules M. Traxler donated approximately 3,000 science fiction paperbacks and magazines to the McCormick Library of Special Collections, which formed the core of the science fiction collection. Members of the Northwestern University science fiction club, Galaxy Rangers, created a departmental card file to make the collection accessible until it was cataloged.

Open to the public from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday, and 8:30 till noon on Saturday, the exhibit runs through June 30.

Spiderman and Other Marvels in Our Comic Collection

You might be surprised to learn that among the Library's Hidden Treasures is a copy of the 1963 first edition of The Amazing Spider-Man—the first Marvel comic issue completely devoted to the now legendary superhero and his alter-ego, Peter Parker. And it's only one of thousands of comic books housed in our McCormick Library of Special Collections.

Why does Northwestern have a comic collection? In 1972, an undergraduate named Juan Cole donated his personal collection of 1,100 comic books to Special Collections. An enterprising friend of Juan's wrote to an editor at Marvel Comics to announce that Northwestern was establishing a collection, and Marvel responded by offering to send Spiderman's co-creator Stan Lee to campus to dedicate the collection. The dedication ceremony took place on February 7, 1973, and the ensuing publicity led to the donation of an additional 1,100 comic books by a Chicago woman named Arlene Hoffman. Over the years, generous gifts from other NU and non-NU fans have augmented the collection.

You might be surprised to discover other Hidden Treasures in the Library's collections, too. You can find a guide to all our special libraries and collections online or stay tuned to the home page, where we'll feature them from time to time.

"Africa Embraces Obama": An Exhibit for the Inauguration

When David Easterbrook was traveling in Africa in 2007, virtually everyone he met was talking about Barack Obama's newly launched presidential bid. "The excitement was palpable," Easterbrook recalls. And since Easterbrook is the curator of the largest library of Africana anywhere in the world, he decided that whether Obama should win or lose, he couldn't miss the chance to document the historic event—from Africa's point of view. So even before Obama's nomination was official, Easterbrook began putting the word out to an international network of scholars, students, and other African contacts about what he was looking for.

Now, with President-Elect Obama's inauguration fast approaching, Northwestern University Library is displaying an assortment of the remarkable objects Easterbrook has received. The exhibit "Africa Embraces Obama" features more than a dozen CDs and DVDs that celebrate Obama in musical genres from praise-song to rap, including one called "Obama Be Thy Name" and another called "Jaluo in the House," ("Jaluo" referring to the Kenyan ethnic group from which Obama descends, and "the House" being of course, the White one). There are baseball caps and buttons, bumper stickers and rearview mirror ornaments, magazines and newspapers, and scores of T-shirts, including a neon orange Tanzanian shirt with Obama's face on the front and the slogan "Change You Can Believe In" in Swahili on the back.

Some of Easterbrook's personal favorites:

• A hand-carved wooden Obama mask with traditional symbolic African elements. Northwestern anthropologist Caroline Bledsoe ran across the wood-carver's stall in Gambia, and not only sent Easterbrook the mask, but included a 15-minute interview she conducted with the artist.
• A bottle of "Special Edition" beer labeled "President Lager." (The label is pasted on upside-down, as though a little too much celebrating was already in progress.)
• A T-shirt proclaiming "O₃" that pictures Obama's face along with those of Kenyan prime minister Raila Odinga and Kenyan football superstar Dennis Oliech.
• A framed portrait of Obama's face, painted on wood, purchased by English professor Evan Mwangi from a street vendor in Nairobi, which Easterbrook says evokes the importance of portraiture in everyday African life.

What comes across clearly is the exuberance and exhilaration with which African nations have embraced Obama's election. "It sends a message of hopefulness about the possibility for change," Easterbrook says, "a possibility many Africans want to see realized in their own countries."

Some of the items were originally displayed in connection with the election in November. After BBC radio interviewed Easterbrook about that exhibit, additional contributions came in from listeners who heard the interview in Africa. The exhibit has now been updated and expanded, with new items arriving daily.

While libraries don't typically collect pop culture artifacts, Easterbrook says they're an integral part of what Northwestern's Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies has always done. "Of course we document African history and culture at the scholarly level," he says, "but future scholars will want to see what was going on in Africa at the popular level." The library holds extensive ephemera from the 1950s and 1960s relating to African independence movements, and its collection documenting the life and work of Nelson Mandela is so extensive that the Nelson Mandela Foundation requested some of its materials when planning Mandela's international 90th birthday celebration last summer.

Two locations within the Main Library building at 1970 Campus Drive in Evanston are displaying items from the Obama collection: the Reference Room on the main floor, and the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies on the fifth floor of the East Tower. They will remain on view through the end of February.

Image Credit: Front page of the South Africa Mail & Guardian, November 7-13 edition, 2008.