Collection highlights, news about acquisitions, events and exhibits, and behind-the-scenes looks at the work and services of Rare Books & Special Collections (RBSC) at Notre Dame.
Since July 2015, when we first welcomed readers to the Rare Books and Special Collections blog, we have enjoyed using this forum to tell readers about recently acquired and newly described items, as well as well-known materials and hidden gems. We publish posts to help you—our readers—better know who we are and what we do, and we provide regular updates on exhibitions and events hosted by RBSC.
To mark the ten-year anniversary of our blog, we have selected a few of the 471 posts we have published so far, written by a variety of curators, librarians, and guest authors. Continue scrolling to find a sample of interesting topics from our second five years.
The tag “RBSC scholars” gathers posts relating to, and sometimes by, the people who do their research within Notre Dame’s Special Collections. (A sometimes related category are posts in the Category “Instruction and Class Visits.”)
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.
We join the Library of Congress, National Archives and Records Administration, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Gallery of Art, National Park Service, Smithsonian Institution, and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in celebrating National Hispanic Heritage Month.
From our Latin American and Latino Studies Archives: Celebration and Resistance
2025 has seen various local and community-based annual public celebrations of Latino heritage scaled-down, postponed, or cancelled altogether out of fears for the safety of participants and community members. Other public celebrations have gone on as planned, with some organizers even rearticulating their yearly “Grito de Independencia” (the September 15th commemoration of the “Cry of Independence” from Spanish colonial rule, specific to the Mexican context) as “Grito de Resistencia” (“Cry of Resistance”). Both paths, however, are guided by a spirit of solidarity, and informed by a history of perseverance, that predate—and are poised to persist beyond—any formal federal recognition of the diverse cultures, accomplishments, and contributions of Latinos in the United States.
Inspired by that same spirit and history, we present three examples, preserved in Notre Dame’s Rare Books and Special Collections, of historical moments when Latino communities organized celebrations of resistance—both public and private, and throughout the calendar year—in direct response to histories and realities of persecution, oppression, exclusion, and erasure.
1969: “La Fiesta de los Barrios”
“The Fiesta De Los Barrios is the Fiesta of all of our people. For the first time the heritage of our cultural past and the richness of our cultural present will be expressed through the creative talent and skill of our barrio artists, writers and performers. […] It is this pride in ourselves and confidence in our future that has made this magazine and indeed the entire Fiesta possible.”
The name “La Fiesta de los Barrios” carries multiple references: it was a community celebration, a literary journal, and an aspiration for the future. The actual “fiesta” took place in early May, 1969, at Lincoln High School in Los Angeles to celebrate the one-year anniversary of the LA Walkouts: a watershed movement through which Mexican American students protested systemic racism, abuses, and neglect on their campuses, and demanded inclusive and unbiased curricula. (For an introduction to the Walkouts, we suggest you watch thisRetro Report hosted by PBS, or this excerpt from PBS’s Latino Americans.)
The journal by the same name, or Fiesta Magazine (MSH/LAT 0099-61), memorialized select verse, prose, and drawings created by community members and event participants, representing a diversity of voices and experiences. And finally, it was the hope, as articulated by photographer Pedro Arias in one of the journal’s opening essays, that all peoples of Mexican descent living in the United States could overcome generational and cultural divides to work together toward common goals: “Y entonces será un día de fiesta, será una FIESTA DE LOS BARRIOS, pero una Fiesta de Los Barrios permanente […]” (And then it will be a day of celebration, it will be a FIESTA DE LOS BARRIOS, but a permanent Fiesta de Los Barrios […]) (7).
1984: “A benefit for Casa El Salvador Farabundo Martí”
“Casa El Salvador Farabundo Martí is a solidarity committee of Salvadoran refugees living in the U.S. Our goals are to inform people about the situation in El Salvador and Central America, to promote friendship with our people, and to discourage U.S. intervention in our country.”
In December 1984, the Chicago-based, refugee-led organization called Casa El Salvador Farabundo Martí hosted a benefit dinner and invited allies and supporters to “share this season of peace with the people of El Salvador.” El Salvador itself, rather than celebrating a season of peace, was deep in a brutal civil war marked by widespread human rights abuses: far from a conflict confined to fighting between armed factions, the government’s military and paramilitary death squads—trained and funded by the United States government—broadly targeted civilian non-combatants. Meanwhile, only a minuscule portion of refugees fleeing El Salvador were granted asylum in the United States. This combination of domestic U.S. policies, enabled by controversial Cold War rhetoric, sparked passionate peace, solidarity, and anti-intervention movements across the country. A snapshot of those efforts, and the array of allies that were involved in them, are captured in this small poster (MSH/LAT 0120 U.S./Central America Cold War Ephemera Collection).
San Francisco’s first annual “Encuentro del Canto Popular” (“Gathering of Popular Song”) was organized by volunteers from the community newspaper El Tecolote in 1982. The event was inspired by the life and legacy of Víctor Jara, a Chilean educator, activist, and singer-songwriter who was one of the founding figures of Chile’s—and, ultimately, Latin America’s—nueva canción (new song). This folkloric genre was imbued with such deep social commitment that it became an international movement (the Smithsonian offers an introduction to la nueva canción in their Folkways series). Jara was kidnapped, imprisoned, tortured, and executed by Chile’s military just after the U.S.-backed coup that ousted the democratically-elected president, Salvador Allende, and which began the 17-year military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.
Acción Latina, a community organization based in San Francisco’s Mission District that grew out of El Tecolote, took part in U.S.-based protests against Pinochet’s regime (as can be seen in this post from the Bancroft Library, which now preserves a substantial Acción Latina archive), as well as later solidarity movements. The poster featured here was created for the Encuentro’s 20th year, celebrated in 2001 under the stewardship of Acción Latina. Its lineup of musicians from Nicaragua for this “tribute to 20 years of culture and resistance” was a nod to the protest and dissent expressed in both Nicaragua and the United States following the CIA-led formation in 1981 of the Contras (an umbrella organization of anti-Sandinista combatants), a covert project that ultimately culminated in the Iran-Contra Scandal. The musician wearing the symbol of the United Farm Workers on her shirt speaks to solidarity within and between Latino communities.
Historian Gert Gielis has recently explained the importance of these university writings:
“As the first official statements concerning Luther’s heresy, they were imperative steps in branding his teaching as heretical. Conveyed to Rome by Johannes Eck in March, 1520, the academic condemnations eventually influenced the official papal condemnation of Exsurge Domine, issued [by Pope Leo X] a few months later.”
—Gert Gielis, “«Post exactam et diligentem examinationem». How the Louvain Theologians condemned Luther’s Theses (1519): Context, Practices and Consequences,” Annali di Storia delle università italiane 2017, no. 2: p. 121.
The Louvain theologians produced 13 articles and Cologne authored its own set of 10; both faculties presented them to the pope’s representative in Germany, Cardinal Cajetan, for his comments. In early November 1519, the Louvain faculty also sent the text of their condemnation to their Dutch colleague Adriaan Florensz Boeyens, Bishop of Tortosa, who within a few years would become Pope Adrian VI. He answered with a letter on December 4, 1519, expressing his critical views on Luther and supporting the condemnation by Louvain. Both sets of condemnations, along with the letter from Boeyens, were published at Louvain in February 1520. By March 27, Luther had finished a lengthy critique of the universities’ views.
This volume includes the full text of the articles of condemnation issued by both Cologne and Louvain, Boeyens’ letter criticizing Luther, and the first edition of Luther’s rather lengthy reply—which constitutes the majority of the text.
We have identified only three other North American holdings of this Wittenberg edition.
In honor of Labor Day, Rare Books and Special Collections is pleased to highlight three recently acquired 1937 issues of the scarce monthly publication Sport Call, The Official Organ of The Workers’ Sports League of America. Published during the 1930s, Sport Call’s tagline explained that it was “a periodical devoted to the physical education of the working class,” and it promoted healthful sports and recreation for laborers and workers.
Front page of Sport Call, February 1937.
During the turbulent years of the Great Depression, Sport Call and the Workers’ Sports League of America (WSLA) were active participants in national and international socialist movements. Headquartered in New York City, the League—through its official journal—offered a decidedly pro-labor view of sports and athletics that critiqued, what it saw as, capitalist exploitation of laborers and athletes. Sport Call also fervently opposed the rising tide of fascist politics during the 1930s and endorsed sports as a potential unifying and democratizing force.
Sport Call supported, for example, a January 1937 conference organized by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) that aimed to establish a permanent Labor Sports Movement. Speaking to more than 150 delegates, Siegfried Lipschitz, President of the Workers’ Sports League, described the principles of Workers’ Sports International—the parent organization of the WSLA. “The Workers’ Sports International,” he said, “is a pillar of world democracy.”
A Jewish German emigré, lawyer, journalist, and activist, Lipschitz knew first hand the necessity of fighting reactionary politics: “The International and its affiliated organizations reject dictatorship in all its forms,” he declared. “To them it is an eternal creed that Labor cannot live and flourish,” Lipschitz concluded, “except in an atmosphere of free speech, free press, and the fullest expression of popular sentiments.” (March 1937, p. 3).
Sport Call well understood the connection between sports and politics, and an anti-fascist theme runs throughout these three issues. In February 1937, the journal editorialized strongly against the upcoming heavyweight championship fight between German Max Schmeling and American James Braddock. The editors wrote that they were “vehemently opposed to the spreading of Nazi propaganda in Sports!,” and they elaborated:
“The fact that Max Schmeling is a Nazi is known everywhere. The fact that Schmeling is a first-class propaganda merchant of Hitler’s is also well known. The opportunity to spread Nazi filth in this country must not be given to Hitler! The Braddock-Schmeling fight must not be staged!”
Similarly, the Workers’ Sports League had advocated for boycotting the 1936 Berlin Olympics in protest of Nazi Germany’s policies. The following year, the League supported and promoted the Third International Workers Olympiad held in Antwerp, Belgium, as an alternative and more egalitarian athletic competition.
In an editorial titled, “Forward to Antwerp,” the March 1937 issue of Sport Call endorsed the call to action of George Elvin, the General Secretary of the British Workers Sports Association. The purpose of the Workers Olympiad, Elvin said, was to promote: “The unity of the people against war; the determination to continue the fight for clean, healthy, and beneficial sport; the maintenance of liberty and democracy.”
Venue for the swimming events at the 1937 Third International Workers Olympiad as pictured in Sport Call March 1937, page 2.
More specifically, Elvin elaborated that there will be “none of those regrettable incidents, which mar other sports meetings. Working class leaders will not refuse the hand-clasp of congratulations to victors as Hitler did to Jesse Owens, because he did not approve of the color of his skin.” (March 1937, page 1).
The Workers’ Sports League and Sport Call consistently participated in anti-fascist events around New York and sought to include sports programming in socialist and pro-labor gatherings. In February 1937, Wilhelm Sollmann, a German politician and a former Minister of Labor in Germany’s Weimar government, gave a lecture in New York City titled, “What After Hitler?” As part of the event, members of the Workers’ Sports League put on a sports exhibition.
Athletes at Anti-Nazi Meet: Members of the Workers’ Sports League pose with American flags and a banner reading: “Welcome son of German soil, may freedom be yours” (March 1937, page 5).
Sport Call also favorably covered the Second Annual World Labor Athletic Festival held on July 11, 1937, at New York City’s Randall Park. More than 20,000 “trade unionists and sports fans,” according to the journal, attended and participated in the meet. The cover of the July 1937 issue of Sport Call featured members of the Workers’ Sports League performing “their rhythmic calisthenic drill.”
In addition to supporting national and international causes, the Workers’ Sports League also promoted the health benefits of recreation. Sport Call regularly printed health and recreation tips for readers and workers. In February 1937 (page 4), an article encouraged “Exercise in Winter” and featured a picture explaining, “It’s a lot fun and warmer than you think!”
A letter to the editor of the March 1937 issue further discussed the importance of the participatory and egalitarian nature of labor sports organizations:
“The Workers’ Sports League, building upon its program of solidarity with the working class and its aspirations, physical development of the masses rather than individual “stars,” real amateurism rather than quasi-professionalism, equal welcome to all regardless of race and color, and democratic organization control, can be built into a mighty organization—and become itself the “official” sports movement.” (March 1937, page 6)
These Sport Call issuesare available to researchers. RBSC welcomes new donations to expand our holdings of this scarce and important title.
Note about Sport Call publication history: This hard-to-find and relatively obscure journal is held by few repositories. It apparently began publication as the German-language Arbeiter-Sport in Amerika (Workers’ Sport in America) in about 1930. The journal changed titles to Proletarian Sports and adopted English in 1934, before changing titles again to Sport Call in about 1936.
RBSC is closed Monday, September 1st, for Labor Day.
Rare Books and Special Collections welcomes students, faculty, staff, researchers, and visitors back to campus for Fall 2025! We want to let you know about a variety of things to watch for in the coming semester.
This exhibition traces the global journey of Dante’s masterpiece through rare and valuable printed editions, highlighting how translators, artists, and printers have popularized and reshaped the Commedia. These volumes reveal a dynamic dialogue between Dante’s poetry and the world. A global literary perspective transforms Dante from a monumental yet isolated figure of the European Middle Ages into a central presence in the ongoing international conversation about humanity, the universe, time, eternity, and the power of literature.
This exhibit is co-sponsored by the Center for Italian Studies and the Devers Program in Dante Studies. It is curated by Salvatore Riolo (Notre Dame Italian Studies doctoral candidate) and co-curators Giulia Maria Gliozzi (Notre Dame Italian Studies doctoral candidate), Inha Park (Notre Dame Italian Studies doctoral candidate), and Peter Scharer (Yale Comparative Literature doctoral candidate). Theodore J. Cachey Jr. (Notre Dame) and Jacob Blakesley (Sapienza Università di Roma) served as consultants on the exhibit.
Few 19th-century antiquarians matched the obsession or eccentricity of English baronet Sir Thomas Phillipps (1792-1872). A self-described “vello-maniac” (lover of parchment), Phillipps spent his life and fortune amassing what became the largest manuscript collection of his time. It included more than 60,000 manuscripts and 20,000 printed works.
Upon his death, Phillipps mandated that his collection never be dispersed, nor that any Catholic ever be permitted to view his library. After his will was contested, however, Phillipps’ descendants began the century-long process of ridding themselves of the burdensome trove. This exhibit features five manuscripts that have made their way from the Phillipps collection to the University of Notre Dame, testifying to the fraught legacy of one of history’s most extreme collectors. In this exhibit, three medieval charters, a medieval codex, and an early modern treatise are now available for all to see, in direct contrast to Phillipps’ restrictive wishes.
This exhibit is curated by Anne Elise Crafton, 2024-2025 Rare Books and Special Collections Postdoctoral Research Fellow.
This exhibit displays a medieval sermon composed from a variety of preaching aids and sourcebooks: bibles, summae, florilegia, and other systematized anthologies. The sermon was the most influential vehicle for religious and moral instruction: virtues, vices, canon law, and living the faith all reached the masses in urban centers through preaching. The physical formats of the manuscripts themselves provide insight into pastoral care in the medieval world. This exhibit emphasizes a few of the many items from the Hesburgh Library’s collection of medieval manuscripts created for and used by actual medieval preachers.
This exhibit is curated by David T. Gura, Ph.D., Curator, Ancient and Medieval Manuscripts, Concurrent Professor of Classics and the Medieval Institute.
These 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.
Special Collections’ Classes & Workshops
Throughout the semester, curators will lead instructional sessions related to our holdings to undergraduate and graduate students from Notre Dame, Saint Mary’s College, and Holy Cross College. Curators may also be available to show special collections materials to visiting classes, from preschool through adults. If you would like to arrange a group visit and class with a curator, please contact Special Collections.
Events
This program is free and open to the public.
Friday, September 12 from 2:00 to 3:30 pm | Exhibit Open House: Drop in to meet and speak informally with curator Salvatore Riolo (Notre Dame Italian Studies doctoral candidate) about the new exhibit, Mapping Global Dante in Translation. Learn how translators, artists, and printers have popularized and reshaped the Divine Comedy over the centuries and across the world and discover the Library’s many Dante editions.
Remembering the Harrisburg TrojansThe First Women’s Political PartyDiscovering Fianna: The Voice of Young IrelandReading the Gay Rodeo Ephemera Collection for Pride MonthSome of the recent acquisitions highlighted on the blog in the past year.
Anticipated Closures
Rare Books and Special Collections is regularly open 9:30am to 4:30pm, Monday through Friday. The department will be closed for the following holidays and events:
September 1, for Labor Day (Monday)
November 27–28, for Thanksgiving (Thursday and Friday)
Our last day open before the campus closure for Christmas Celebration will be Tuesday, December 23. We will reopen on January 5, 2026.
This edition includes for the first time a scathing attack on the Protestant Reformation by Gabriel de Saconay (1527-1580), which elicited a reply from Jean Calvin. In his preface, Saconay offers a polemical summary of the previous 45 years, including discussions concerning Calvin, Luther, and Zwingli.
Also reproduced in the preface are letters by Erasmus and St. John Fisher concerning the work, as well as a letter from Pope Leo X that appeared in the preface of the first edition.
We have identified only six other North American holdings of this edition.
In observance of LGBTQ Pride Month, Rare Books and Special Collections is pleased to highlight the recently acquired Gay Rodeo Ephemera Collection (MSSP 10128). Containing programs, posters, fliers, and other printed material, the collection documents the history of rodeo organizations and rodeo events by and for LGBTQ people.
Souvenir Program, 2nd Annual Golden State Cowboys Round Up.
One of the earliest organized groups of gay rodeo enthusiasts was the California-based Golden State Cowboys (GSC) founded in 1969. In the introduction to the 1972 Souvenir Rodeo Program for the 2nd Annual Golden State Cowboys Round Up (MSSP 10128-01), GSC President Ernie Wilbanks described the group’s early history and explained the organization’s mission:
“Admittedly, we have had problems and growing pains but we have never lost our self respect and hopefully can become an even greater source of community pride. Without a goal no race is ever won and we believe the same criteria can apply to an organization without a purpose. Our purpose is one of friendship in performing those facets of service to our community that promote the honor and acceptance of our fellow man.”
Images of social events and activities from the Golden State Cowboys 1972 program.
A relatively small social organization for fans of rodeo and rodeo culture, the Golden State Cowboys folded by about 1976. Other organizations soon sprung up in the late 1970s and early 1980s—particularly in Nevada, California, and Colorado—that sponsored some of the first rodeos that explicitly featured and celebrated LGBTQ rodeo participants.
Although originating in the Western United States, organized gay rodeos slowly spread around the country. One of the earlier significant gay rodeos was held in New York City in Madison Square Garden on Saturday, October 1, 1983. Sponsored by the pioneering gay rights organization, Gay Men’s Health Crisis, Inc., the “World’s Toughest Rodeo” was an AIDS Benefit fundraiser (MSSP 10128-002).
The cover of the program for the World’s Toughest Rodeo (left), and page 5 (right) with the following dedication: “We dedicate this special evening to the memory of our many loved ones who have died and to the lovers, families, and friends who have endured these losses. We salute their courageous spirit and extend our continued support. Unity has given us this strength.”
Paul Popham, the President of Gay Men’s Health Crisis, Inc., described the purpose of community-building activities like the “World’s Toughest Rodeo” in the program for the event:
“What emerged as a horrifying disease that sapped our physical strength has resulted in newly-found strength in other areas. We have discovered communal strength, spiritual strength, and political strength. We find that we are truly more powerful than we had ever dreamed. By transcending the various social boundaries that kept us apart as strangers, we find that we are not only a nation, but an entire world of brothers, sisters, and friends.
A battle it has been and continues to be. But as we march, in greater numbers, and with greater courage, love, and hope, our victory seems more possible with every step.”
Gay rodeos increased in popularity during the 1980s and 1990s, culminating in the founding of the International Gay Rodeo Association (IGRA) in 1985. The IGRA sponsored the first International Gay Finals Rodeo competition in Hayward, California, in September 1987. RBSC’s Gay Rodeo Ephemera Collection includes a production copy of the poster for the inaugural IGRA championships (MSSP 10128-08-F2).
The collection includes other programs, posters, and pieces of ephemera that demonstrate the proliferation of gay rodeos. The holdings include, for example, a poster for the 1994 12th Annual Rocky Mountain Regional Rodeo sponsored by the Colorado Gay Rodeo Association (MSSP 10128-09-F2) and the program for the 1996 North Star Regional Rodeo and Great Northern Shindig in Lake Elmo, Minnesota, sponsored by the North Star Gay Rodeo Association (MSSP 10128-06). As seen on these two items, the newfound popularity of gay rodeos attracted corporate sponsors that helped to fund these events.
The Gay Rodeo Ephemera Collection is open and available to researchers. RBSC welcomes new donations to expand the contents of this important collection.
In honor of Asian / Pacific American Heritage Month, we are pleased to highlight the recently acquired bookHawai hōjin yakyūshi : yakyū ippyakunensai kinen—titled in English, The Japanese Baseballdom of Hawaii. Written by Rev. Chinpei P. Goto in 1940, this prolifically illustrated 772-page book chronicles the history of baseball played by Japanese and Japanese-American athletes in Hawaii. Featuring nearly 100 pages of photographs and engravings, the book exhaustively documents the history of Japanese-Hawaiian baseball.
Chinpei P. Goto was born in Iwate-Ken, Japan in 1887, and he immigrated to Hawaii with his parents in 1899. Soon after arriving, Goto attracted attention as a talented baseball player, particularly with the Asahi club, one of the earliest successful Japanese teams in Hawaii. He would remain associated with the game in his adopted home for the rest of his life, and, after his playing days, he became a tireless baseball booster and historian.
Asahi Baseball team in about 1906. Chinpei Goto sits in the front row on the left.
He first published a history of the sport in 1919 in his book Hawai hōjin yakyūshi—English title Japanese Balldom of Hawaii. He wrote this updated second edition, Japanese Baseballdom of Hawaii, in conjunction with the reputed 1939 centennial of the invention of baseball. Renowned for his knowledge of the sport on the islands, his obituary on the front page of the March 13, 1954 Honolulu Star Bulletin called him simply “the father of Japanese Baseball in Hawaii.”
Oversize foldout picture, depicting “scenes at initial game of Honolulu Japanese Baseball League, March 4, 1923.”
In his Introduction to Japanese Baseballdom of Hawaii, Goto wrote that on the ball field there was no “distinction… between a millionaire or an ordinary worker,” and, he argued, “in this commonality lies the ideal of true democracy.” He emphasized the importance of the sport to both American and Japanese societies. He explained that he hoped his book would “raise awareness of the nation’s culture” and wanted to see “Hawaiian baseball… continue to flourish.”
Inter-Island Japanese Baseball Championship, c. 1920.
In the book’s foreword, Tadaoki Yamamoto, a Japanese Olympic Team official and a leader in the YMCA movement, praised baseball as “a wonderful and eternal bridge” that “connects the hearts of the people of our nation to the people of the United States with Hawaii as its base.” [All approximate translations provided by the author and any mistakes are mine].
Kaneohe Japanese YMA Baseball Team, Jan. 29, 1939.
Goto’s two remarkable history books are responsible for much of our knowledge of Japanese baseball in Hawaii, and they are still essential reading for any student of this topic. Japanese Baseballdom of Hawaii features plentiful images of important and noteworthy baseball teams, players, and administrators dating back to the nineteenth century.
Honolulu Professional Baseball Team, c. 1916.Two-page spread featuring images of prominent Japanese baseball players in Hawaii.
These publications were funded in part by patrons who purchased advertisements to support Goto’s historical writing. As a testament to the importance of baseball to the Japanese-American community in Hawaii, a wide range of business bought advertisements, including daily newspapers, beauty salons, and service stations.
Examples of advertisements that supported the publication of Japanese Baseballdom of Hawaii.
Chinpei Goto (standing left) and family in 1939.
Goto converted to Christianity as a young man, and he was eventually ordained as a Methodist minister. He founded and led several churches in Hawaii during the inter-war period. Throughout his life he was known on the islands both for his encyclopedic knowledge of baseball and for his compassionate ministries. If you would like to learn more about the long history of Japanese baseball in Hawaii, Rev. Chinpei P. Goto’s Japanese Baseballdom of Hawaii is available to all researchers.
Please join us for the following public events and exhibits being hosted in Rare Books and Special Collections:
Tuesday, May 13 at 1:30pm | “Potawatomi in Un/Expected Places: Archives, Stories, and the Native American Initiative of Notre Dame” by Zada Ballew.
Last year, Ballew spent nine months at Hesburgh Library researching on behalf of the Native American Initiative (NAI) of Notre Dame. Her goal was to better understand the role that Indigenous peoples have played in the founding and shaping of Notre Dame’s history. What she found surprised her in ways that she didn’t expect. In this talk, she will share some of the most important findings with the people who helped make this work possible.
Presented by the Professional Development Committee (PDC) of Hesburgh Libraries.
Thursday, May 15 at 3:00pm | Hesburgh Libraries’ 2024-2025 Rare Books and Special Collections Postdoctoral Fellow Anne Elise Crafton (MI PhD ‘24) will discuss the major research and collections project they completed during their postdoc year. Crafton catalogued over 270 previously undescribed medieval and early modern documents in the Hesburgh Libraries’ collection. They will discuss the challenges and discoveries which emerged from the project and reflect on the intensive work of making the hitherto unknown documents accessible for scholars, students, and faculty at Notre Dame and beyond.
There are currently no events scheduled to be hosted in June or July.
The exhibition Tragedies of War: Images of WWII in Print Visual Culture runs through the summer and closes in late July. Learn more about the exhibit in this video, and plan your visit this summer.
The current spotlight exhibit is Building a Campus Boycott to Support Midwestern Farmworkers (January – May 2025). In May, we will install spotlights highlighting Medieval charters (May – August 2025) and Medieval homiletics (May – July 2025) from our collections.
Rare Books and Special Collections is open regular hours during the summer.
RBSC will be closed Monday, May 26, for Memorial Day and Friday, July 4th, for Independence Day.
