Collection highlights, acquisition news, events, exhibits, and behind-the-scenes looks at the work and services of Rare Books & Special Collections (RBSC) at Notre Dame.
“Life springs from death, and from the graves of patriot men and women spring living nations.” — P.H. Pearse, August 1915
In 1803, Robert Emmet led a failed rebellion to overthrow British rule in Ireland. In 1848, a group called Young Ireland staged a brief revolt that was hastily crushed. The Fenian Brotherhood invaded British North America in 1866, and the Irish Republican Brotherhood organized a series of unsuccessful raids in Ireland the following year. On Easter Monday, 1916, a small group of Irish insurgents launched a rebellion in Dublin that was quashed in under a week. While these four attempts to create an independent Ireland may have failed, they each gave rise to a powerful romantic narrative that captivated the spirits of the Irish at home and abroad. Out of sacrifice and tragedy sprang patriotic verse, defiant journalism, cultural revival, and eventually, Irish freedom from British rule.
This exhibit features items from Rare Books and Special Collections and the University Archives that document the heroes, martyrs, and idealistic men and women who forged modern Ireland.
This and other exhibits within the Hesburgh Libraries are generously supported by the McBrien Special Collections Endowment.
All exhibits are free and open to the public during business hours.
RBSC will be open regular hours during the University of Notre Dame Fall Break, October 17 – 25.
In 1803, Robert Emmet led a failed rebellion to overthrow British rule in Ireland. In 1848, a group called Young Ireland staged a brief revolt that was hastily crushed. The Fenian Brotherhood invaded British North America in 1866, and the IRB organized a series of unsuccessful raids in Ireland the following year. On Easter Monday, 1916, a small group of Irish insurgents launched a rebellion in Dublin that was quashed in under a week. While these four attempts to create an independent Ireland may have failed, they each gave rise to a powerful romantic narrative that captivated the spirits of the Irish at home and abroad. Out of sacrifice and tragedy sprang patriotic verse, defiant journalism, cultural revival, and eventually, Irish freedom from British rule.
This exhibit features items from Rare Books and Special Collections and the University Archives that document the heroes, martyrs, and idealistic men and women who forged modern Ireland.
The exhibit is curated by Matthew Knight (Irish Studies Librarian and Curator).
Related Events
September 24-7, 2026 | The ACIS Midwest + South Regional Conference will be hosted by the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies and held on the University of Notre Dame campus. The theme of the meeting will be “Irish Studies On The Ground: Place, Presence and Community.” Please visit the conference website to view details.
October 2026 | Special Collections will host a lecture by curator Matt Knight, exact date and time TBD. Check back for more information.
Tours of the exhibit may be arranged for classes and other groups by contacting rarebook@nd.edu.
All exhibits are free and open to the public during business hours.This and other exhibits within the library are generously supported by the McBrien Special Collections Endowment.
This exhibition highlights stories of survival, contemplation, competition, protest, and learning, from six distinct collections in Rare Books and Special Collections. Each section, presented by a different subject curator, focuses on an example of how people over time and in different places, construct community and cultivate hope.
This exhibition highlights stories of survival, contemplation, competition, protest, and learning, from six distinct collections in Rare Books and Special Collections. Each section, presented by a different subject curator, focuses on an example of how people over time and in different places, construct community and cultivate hope.
A Community of Solidarity Natasha Lyandres (Curator, Russian and East European Studies)
Transnational Communities of Resistance during El Salvador’s Civil War Payton Phillips Quintanilla, Ph.D. (Curator, Latin American and Iberian Studies)
This and other exhibits within the Hesburgh Libraries are generously supported by the McBrien Special Collections Endowment.
Please join us for the following public events and exhibits being hosted in Rare Books and Special Collections:
Monday, March 5 at 5:00pm | Italian Research Seminar: M.A. Student Presentations (University of Notre Dame) — This semester’s speakers are: Giorgia Buscema and Madeline Grossman.
This exhibition highlights stories of survival, contemplation, competition, protest, and learning, from six distinct collections in Rare Books and Special Collections. Each section, presented by a different subject curator, focuses on an example of how people over time and in different places, construct community and cultivate hope.
Women Religious in Male Spaces David T. Gura, Ph.D. (Curator, Ancient and Medieval Manuscripts)
Ireland’s Idealized Community Matthew Knight, Ph.D. (Curator, Irish Studies)
A Community of Solidarity Natasha Lyandres (Curator, Russian and East European Studies)
Transnational Communities of Resistance during El Salvador’s Civil War Payton Phillips Quintanilla, Ph.D. (Curator, Latin American and Iberian Studies)
This and other exhibits within the Hesburgh Libraries are generously supported by the McBrien Special Collections Endowment.
Join Professor Guyda Armstrong (University of Manchester) and Dr Giles Bergel (University of Oxford) for an interactive workshop showcasing new digital methods for studying early modern printing. This session will introduce the research questions and first findings of Envisioning Dante c. 1472-1630: Seeing and Reading the Early Printed Page, funded by the UK government (c. £1 million; 2022-25). Participants will be given practical, hands-on demonstrations of the techniques and new digital tools developed by the project for analyzing and comparing early printed books.
This exhibition highlights stories of survival, contemplation, competition, protest, and learning, from six distinct collections in Rare Books and Special Collections. Each section, presented by a different subject curator, focuses on an example of how people over time and in different places, construct community and cultivate hope.
Curated by Rachel Bohlmann, Ph.D. (Curator, American History and American Studies), Gregory Bond, Ph.D. (Curator, Joyce Sports Research Collection), David T. Gura, Ph.D. (Curator, Ancient and Medieval Manuscripts), Matthew Knight, Ph.D. (Irish Studies Librarian and Curator), Natasha Lyandres (Curator, Rare Books & Special Collections), and Payton Phillips Quintanilla, Ph.D. (Librarian and Curator for Latin American and Iberian Studies).
This and other exhibits within the Hesburgh Libraries are generously supported by the McBrien Special Collections Endowment.
Rare Books and Special Collections is pleased to highlight its recent acquisition of the George Koyt Short Track Motor Racing Photographs Collection (MSSP 10150). Consisting of 459 photographs from the 1970s through the 1990s, the Koyt Collection visually documents short track and/or dirt track motor racing tracks mostly in small towns and cities around the United States. Shot over the course of three decades by racing enthusiast and avid amateur photographer George Koyt, some photographs feature the racing action on the track, but many of the images focus instead on the racetrack as place. Koyt’s images tend to center the physical structures of the tracks, the signage at the tracks, and the crowds of fans who attended the races. Koyt’s vernacular photographs provide an enduring and substantial visual record of the culture and the built environment at hundreds of the small-town and local racing tracks that dotted the countryside in the late twentieth century.
George Arthur Koyt (1939-2010) lived most of his life in Bucks County Pennsylvania where he worked as an auto mechanic and was a well-known collector of motor sports memorabilia and a respected amateur historian of auto racing. George and his wife Margaret were both fans of short track and dirt track racing, and they were regular attendees at several different tracks in southeastern Pennsylvania and central New Jersey. Starting in at least the 1970s, the Koyts also frequently traveled to visit local race tracks in different parts of the country. George Koyt’s camera documented their experiences at more than one hundred local tracks in 27 states and one Canadian province.
During his travels, Koyt routinely photographed racetrack signs. These sample images from the collection provide a sense of the different types of signage at local tracks in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.
Macon Speedway, Macon, Illinois, 1989 (MSSP 10150-11)West Central Speedway, Fergus Falls, Minnesota, 1982 (MSSP 10150-38)Southern Speedway, Altamahaw, North Carolina, 1980 (MSSP 10150-52)Cedar Lake Speedway, Cedar Lake, Wisconsin, 1989 (MSSP 10150-96)
Koyt also regularly photographed the structures at racetracks, taking pictures of admission booths, spectator stands, judging booths, and other buildings.
Rockford Speedway, Rockford, Illinois, 1989 (MSSP 10150-12)Capitol Speedway, Plymouth, Indiana, 1992 (MSSP 10150-15)St. Francois County Raceway, St. Francois County, Missouri, 1990 (MSSP 10150-41)Schmuckers Speedway, Schmuckers, Pennsylvania, 1976 (MSSP 10150-82)
Koyt also took pictures of the fans and spectators at the racetracks he visited. These images show the people attending the races and document the community who supported tracks in cities around the country.
George Koyt died in 2010 at the age of 71. His dual interests in short track racing and amateur photography helped to preserve the local and grassroots visual history of this persistently popular spectator sport. The George Koyt Short Track Motor Racing Photographs Collection is open and available to researchers.
This exhibition commemorates the end of the Second World War (1939-1945). It showcases over forty works on paper, including posters, maps, propaganda ephemera, illustrated books, photographs, and first-hand accounts. Based predominantly on recently acquired Rare Books & Special Collections European holdings, the exhibition explores a diverse assortment of themes ranging from Fascist Racial Ideology, the Holocaust, Children in War, Resistance, Liberation, and Memories of War.
By examining these topics through images created by both ordinary people for personal use and for state-sponsored propaganda purposes, the exhibition presents a visual narrative of the war’s profound impact on individuals and societies, offering deeper insight into how war was experienced and remembered.
Robert M. Citino (American military historian and the Samuel Zemurray Stone Senior Historian at the National WWII Museum) will present his lecture “The Fascist Lair: the Battle of Berlin.”
Tuesday, April 22, 2025 – 4:30 pm
Curator-led tour will be offered at 3:30 pm
Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) Program commemorating the victims of Holocaust and featuring a live performance of “I Never Saw Another Butterfly” by Lori Laitman, performed by Anne Slovin (Soprano, University of Notre Dame) and Jason Gresl (Clarinet, Saint Mary’s College). This piece features musical settings of texts by children living in the Theresienstadt ghetto.
Following the performance, a discussion on the spiritual resistance of the arts during the Shoah will be led by Philip B. Bohlman (Ludwig Rosenberger Distinguished Service Professor in Jewish History, Music and Humanities, University of Chicago) and Nicolette van den Bogerd (Postdoctoral scholar in Jewish Studies, Indiana University).
The exhibition is open in the Rare Books & Special Collections exhibit room, Hesburgh Library, Monday-Friday 9:30am-5:00pm. All events will take place in the main Reading Room.
Curator-led tours and all events are free and no reservations are required.
Exhibition tours may also be arranged for classes and other groups by contacting rarebook@nd.edu.
Thus wrote former Southern Methodist University football player turned professional wrestler Jack Adkisson to Dallas-area wrestling promoter Ed McLemore in a September 1953 letter. Using the inside language of professional wrestling, Adkisson was explaining that he had found success wrestling as a villain—or “heel”—instead of as a fan favorite—or “babyface.”
Adkisson, a Texas native, got his start as a professional wrestler under McLemore and then traveled to New England to get more seasoning under the tutelage of promoter Tony Santos, Sr. Adkisson elaborated on his new “heel” persona to McLemore: “I have been working as Fritz Von Eric, the German Giant from Munich, Germany.”
Less than a decade after the end of World War II, Adkisson gained prominence in the ring by riling up and angering wrestling crowds with his Nazi-infuenced German villain. He explained to McLemore:
“I have gone over exceptionally well with the crowds as a heel, and once or twice I have had to literally fight my way to the dressing room. In Revere [Massachusetts], Santos was trying to hold the crowd back from me, and he was practically trampled. That was one night that my heart was in my throat. I couldn’t have felt more helpless in a cage of wildcats.”
The star-crossed von Erich family, a mainstay of professional wrestling in the second half of the twentieth century, is the subject of a soon-to-be-released motion picture The Iron Claw starring Zac Efron. The origin story of Fritz von Erich, the family’s patriarch, is partially documented in the Jack Pfefer Wrestling Collection—one of the most popular and heavily used manuscript collections in the Joyce Sports Research Collection.
Jack Pfefer was a wrestling manager and promoter whose influential career lasted from the 1920s through the 1960s. Pfefer unapologetically embraced the showmanship and theatrical spectacle of professional wrestling, and he routinely advertised and emphasized the entertainment aspects of his bouts.
Envelope advertising Ed McLemore’s Dallas-based wrestling shows at the famous Sportatorium. Adkisson used this envelope to mail a letter to Jack Pfefer in 1953. (PFE850-12-77)
Pfefer also meticulously saved his records. His papers, which Hesburgh Library acquired in the 1970s, fill more than 200 boxes and include voluminous correspondence, financial records, thousands of programs, and tens of thousands of photographs. The Pfefer Collection is one of the largest publicly accessible wrestling archival or manuscript collections in the country, and it documents nearly all aspects of professional wrestling during the middle years of the twentieth century.
The full five-page letter Jack Adkisson sent to Ed McLemore in 1953 describing his success wrestling as “Fritz von Eric” in New England. (PFE850-12-77)
The 1953 letter from Adkisson to McLemore eventually wound up in Pfefer’s possession, and, along with other material in the Pfefer collection, helps to to chart the rise of Fritz von Erich to legendary wrestling status.
But in 1953, Addkisson was still toiling near the bottom of the industry, and he complained to McLemore:
“I am making a living from this, but that is all. I am not saving anything to speak of. And if a guy can’t save some money in this business, what’s the use in staying? I have got to put away some money…”
Nevertheless, Adkisson remained hopeful: “I am more optimistic about my potential as a bad boy,”
The November 1963 issue of Big Time Wrestling magazine featured an article on Fritz von Erich. The headline claimed that von Erich had insured his right hand, which he used for the Iron Claw, for one million dollars. (PFE780-1-2)
Adkisson was right about his potential. Using his signature maneuver, the “Iron Claw,” von Erich and his German “bad boy” routine, rose up the ranks of the sport to make him one of professional wrestling’s more famous and bankable stars in the 1960s.
Publicity photo of “Fritz von Erich the Worlds Greatest Athlete,” c. 1960. (PFE700-36-6)
von Erich did eventually succeed in saving money, and he became a wrestling promoter in his own right, particularly in his home state of Texas. Fritz von Erich also had six sons, five of whom followed him into the ring. Tragically, five of the von Erich sons died young, leading to talk of a family curse. Fritz von Erich died at the age of 68 in 1997.
The movie Iron Claw, which tells the story of the ill-fated von Erich family, opens widely in theaters on December 22, 2023. The Jack Pfefer Wrestling Collection is open and available to the public for research.
Rare Books and Special Collections recently acquired a small archive that documents the Bonus Army—a Depression-era protest by World War veterans and their families. Lonore Kent (1907-1993), a journalist living in Washington DC at that time, created and assembled these sources.
In 1924, Congress had rewarded World War soldiers for their service with certificates of investment that would be payable by the government in 1945. By 1932, however, many veterans, like millions of Americans, were desperate after nearly three years of the nation’s disastrous economic depression. Former soldiers began to demand that President Herbert Hoover pay out the promised veteran bonus immediately, given the national (and global) crisis. The men’s plea caught the attention of people who thought the federal government should be doing more to address the economic depression and people’s real need. By the spring of 1932 legislation began moving through the House of Representatives’ Ways and Means Committee.
Some veterans, in a determined effort to put the case directly to their Congressional representatives, embarked for Washington. In early May, 300 former soldiers left Portland, Oregon, bound for the capital. Quickly dubbed the Bonus Army, they were joined by a trickle and then a river of veterans and their families nationwide. By June 40,000 Bonus Army marchers were in Washington; some huddled in makeshift shelter amid construction sites downtown, but the largest concentration of marchers settled on a muddy stretch of the Anacostia River, in an encampment of thousands of men, women, and children.
On June 15, 1932, the House passed enabling legislation, but the Senate blocked the bill two days later. This spared Hoover the embarrassment of vetoing it, which he had promised to do, citing budgetary constraints. Most Bonus Army members stayed put, hoping for some form of government relief. By the end of July, as Hoover looked to his re-election prospects in November, the President ordered city officials to disperse the Bonus Army. When some squatters resisted, Hoover called in US Army General Douglas MacArthur to restore order. MacArthur exceeded his instructions, however, using armed troops, tanks, and cavalry to drive Bonus Army families out of their shacks and tents, and burning the Anacostia River encampment to the ground.
Lonore Kent’s collection offers a perspective on MacArthur’s violent overreach on the night of July 28 and the charred remains the next day. In a letter to her parents, Kent described how she used her press pass to get onto the Anacostia Bridge between Maryland and Washington, where a line of soldiers—bayonets drawn—fired tear gas at the evicted and homeless Bonus Army to keep them from crossing the bridge and entering the city. Beyond the soldiers, Kent saw the Bonus Army camp in flames.
Kent drew a map of where she was that night—in relation to the soldiers, the encampment, and what she saw. (She identifies the river as the Potomac, probably short for the “Eastern Branch of the Potomac,” commonly-used for the Anacostia River.) The next day she returned to the burned-out site and documented some of the destruction. Kent reflected on the Bonus Army, noting, “Probably the granting of the bonus is unsound economically, but you can’t expect people to be impressed with such arguments when they are starving.”
Hoover’s mistreatment of the Bonus Army and general mishandling of veterans’ requests for economic assistance fatally soured the nation on his administration. The brutal ousting of the Bonus Army came to symbolize Hoover’s callous indifference to Americans’ suffering and his inability to govern amidst a national economic disaster. In the fall, Franklin Delano Roosevelt decisively defeated Hoover and implemented federal-level economic and social reforms to address the magnitude of the Great Depression. The Bonus Army, although defeated in 1932, re-formed and continued to press for an early payout, which Congress granted in 1936.
Rare Books and Special Collections is closed today (May 29th) for Memorial Day and will be closed on July 4th for Independence Day. Otherwise, RBSC will be open regular hours this summer — 9:30am to 4:30pm, Monday through Friday.
During June and July the blog will shift to our summer posting schedule, with posts every other Monday rather than every week. We will resume weekly publication on August 7th.
