recent acquisitions

Students Propose New Diverse and Inclusive Acquisitions in RBSC

by Rachel Bohlmann, American History Librarian and Curator and Erika Hosselkus, Curator, Latin American Collections

Museums, special collections, and archives acquire materials in a variety of ways, most commonly through donation and purchase. Hesburgh Libraries is no exception.

Last fall, students in the multi-disciplinary class, Stories of Power and Diversity: Inside Museums, Archives, and Collecting, created acquisition proposals for Hesburgh Libraries. Class members were asked to put themselves in the shoes of curators and select materials that would develop the library’s collection in diverse and inclusive ways. The formats of prospective purchases were left fairly open; students could consider a wide range of types of materials–from books to manuscripts to posters and even artifacts (realia). As an incentive (and as a gesture to how libraries and archives compete for and manage resources), the most deserving proposal (determined by class vote) would be purchased, placed in the library’s collections, and featured on the library’s social media (this blogpost!).

Students searched vendor websites and online catalogs and considered some of the following questions.

How complete is this item or collection? Are there significant gaps or pieces missing?
If a collection of photographs, are they identified or identifiable, in terms of locations, dates, names of people?
If it is a printed item (a book, posters, pamphlet), how rare is it? (Use WorldCat.)
Does HL already own it? (Check the library catalog, ask librarians/instructors.)
If the item is a manuscript (not printed or published), does the library hold related items?
What might be the research value? How might researchers (in different disciplines–history, gender studies, art history, etc.) make use of this item(s)? What perspectives does the item convey? What can we learn from it?

The students presented their proposals in class and discussed some of the challenges and satisfaction they discovered along the way. Timi Griffin, who assembled a small but significant collection of printed materials and realia from different vendors about Civil Rights activist, presidential candidate, and comedian Dick Gregory, won the class’s vote for best proposal. Congratulations Timi!

Timi argued that the library should purchase items relating to Gregory’s 1968 presidential campaign, including a poster, flier, buttons, and fake dollar bills with the candidate’s portrait in place of Washington’s, and a signed copy of his 2000 memoir. Taken together, the items contextualize Gregory’s activism and prominence in the Civil Rights movement and American culture and politics in the last decades of the twentieth century.

The students’ presentations showed that they had taken seriously the assignment’s task of strengthening diversity and inclusion in the collections. Rare Books and Special Collections decided to purchase all of the items they proposed adding to the collections. These are:

–a 1914 photograph of the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute Football Team, an African American school in Hampton, Virginia.

Football Team, Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, 1914

–a signed, fine press copy of the first chapter of Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin with an original print by Yoko Ono; created to raise funds to fight AIDS in Africa (2008).

Slipcover and print for Margaret Atwood’s *Blind Assassin*

–an issue of Black Fire, the newspaper of the Black Students Union at San Francisco State University from 1969.

–a collection of nine mid-century lesbian pulp fiction paperbacks and reprinted novels, and a related work.

–an album of photographs, probably by an American, of the Pacific and South-East Asia, including Hawaii, Japan, the Philippines, Ceylon, India, and the Himalayas, circa 1905.

Views from Darjeeling and
“a thorn between two roses”

–diaries of Thaddeus Hayes of Connecticut, created between 1795 and 1803.

Thaddeus Hayes diary page, December 1797 – January 1798

–two photographic essays about Japan by W. Eugene Smith and associates: Japan–a Chapter of Image (1963) and Minamata : Life – Sacred and Profane (1973).

These new acquisitions are welcome additions to the library’s special collections, adding particularly to sources about Southeast and East Asia, and materials created in the last 30 years. The collections need to be strengthened in all of these areas. The newly-purchased materials are currently in the process of being cataloged, organized, and housed so that they can be accessed and used by present and future generations of library users.

Women for Peace and Disarmament

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 commemorating and encouraging the study, observance and celebration of the vital role of women in American history by celebrating Women’s History Month.

by Rachel Bohlmann, American History Librarian and Curator

RBSC recently acquired a long, but incomplete run of the Women Strike for Peace’s Legislative Alert, the organization’s monthly newsletter. It notified members about Congressional and other governmental actions around nuclear weapons treaties and military initiatives, as well as anti-peace developments around the world. Hesburgh Library’s copies span from 1983 to 1999 with some gaps, as well as the first two issues, from 1963 when the Legislative Newsletter (as it was called then) began.

Women Strike for Peace was an anti-nuclear, anti-war activist group founded in 1961, during a particularly fraught period of the Cold War and its nuclear arms race. The Soviet Union had announced resumption of above-ground nuclear testing and one Washington, D.C. woman, Dagmar Wilson, responded by organizing a one-day demonstration of women for peace and disarmament. That grass-roots action, on November 1, 1961, brought together 50,000 women and girls across 60 US cities and focused the attention of President Kennedy. In its aftermath Women Strike for Peace (WSP) formed.

With their slogan, “End the Arms Race not the Human Race,” WSP contributed to the successful signing of a nuclear test-ban treaty between the US and the Soviet Union in 1963 (Kennedy himself credited the group with this achievement). The organization became one of the most successful social movements in US history as part of the global Cold War peace movement. WSP leaders skillfully used their identities as mothers and homemakers to argue for peace and disarmament, a strategy that appealed to like-minded women around the world and also proved difficult for their opponents to counter.

Opposition to the war in Vietnam became WSP’s main concern during the late 1960s and early 1970s. By the 1980s, however, the group refocused on nuclear disarmament and ending nuclear testing, as well as opposing US military interventions around the world.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s the Legislative Alert featured several illustrations on its cover page—a small graphic in the upper right corner of women demonstrating and holding signs for disarmament (an homage to the 1961 event that began the movement)—and a political cartoon that captured that month’s peace and disarmament challenges. In its content, the publication sought members’ support of or opposition to pieces of Congressional legislation or presidential military actions or treaties.

In the fall of 1983, for example, WSP criticized President Ronald Reagan’s invasion of Granada, a tiny, independent island nation in the Caribbean with a Communist government. The next spring WSP featured opposition to the president’s nuclear arms buildup as reflected in the administration’s military budget. The accompanying cartoon compares Reagan’s military aspirations to a school boy’s Star Wars-like fantasy. By 1993, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, WSP kept its attention on the world’s dangerous stockpile of nuclear weapons. A fall newsletter shows a cavernous storage unit stuffed with old military hardware in front of which President Bill Clinton considers “Post Cold War Problems.” At the end of the decade WSP continued to push for arms reduction, urging members to ask their representatives to support the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which would ban nuclear weapons testing worldwide and slow arms development.

The Women Strike for Peace’s Legislative Alert adds to the library’s collections on the history of peace movements in the United States and globally, and is now available to researchers!

Due to renovation work, RBSC (and the west entrance to the Hesburgh Library) will be closed during Notre Dame’s Spring Break week, March 13-17, 2023.

RBSC staff and curators will be available via online channels.

Black History Month 2023

We join with 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 paying tribute to the generations of African Americans who struggled with adversity to achieve full citizenship in American society.

African American Women Activists and Athletes in 1970s Feminist Magazines

by Rachel Bohlmann, American History Librarian and Curator and Greg Bond, Sports Archivist and Curator, Joyce Sports Research Collection

We celebrate Black History Month with a selection of magazine articles by or about African American women from a number of popular, feminist periodicals created across the decade of the 1970s that RBSC has recently added to our collections. In these publications, which largely targeted white audiences, Black women claimed new platforms for their voices and ideas.

African American women were a foundational part of the United States’ women’s movement and 1970s feminism. The athletes interviewed in womenSports, for example, identified how sexism intersected with racism in sports and in larger contemporary society.

womenSports magazine, founded in 1974 by tennis star Billie Jean King in conjunction with the Women’s Sports Foundation, was one of the earliest popular magazines focused on women athletes. The glossy publication reported on professional and amateur sports and also provided practical tips to readers on everything from self-defense to the recently enacted Title IX legislation.

womenSports covered the athletic triumphs and biographies of African American women and often introduced Black sportswomen to wider reading audiences for the first time. Writers and editors frequently documented and wrote about the gender discrimination experienced by women athletes–Black and white–but they tended to devote less attention to racial prejudice encountered by African American women in sports. Black athletes themselves frequently spoke to the entwined race and gender bias they encountered.

In the pages of womenSports in 1974, Wyomia Tyus, the Olympic champion sprinter, described economic consequences of prejudice she faced on the professional track circuit. After a corporate sponsor dropped her event, Tyus explained, “all the women in our event are black, but if we had a white woman in it, I think the … company would’ve picked us up.” And about a recent meet in San Francisco, Tyus observed, “the men who won got television sets, and the women who won got medals. That just isn’t fair. Settling for left-overs.”

Two years later Olympian Madeline Manning Jackson, a middle-distance runner, pointed to the lack of funding for a sport that featured many African American women athletes. Jackson had recently declined an invitation to compete in the Pan American Games for the United States after the Amateur Athletic Association, which governed track and field events, failed to fund her trip or provide any compensation. “I could have gone even if they didn’t pay,” she explained, “but it made me mad–not just for me but for all the other girls who have to put up with this kind of treatment. . . . I could have gone. I just wouldn’t.”

In addition to womenSports, the library recently acquired two titles that bracket the 1970s and represent different voices within the American feminist movement. Cellestine Ware’s article, “Black Feminism,” appeared in an annual publication of the radical wing of the movement, Notes From the Third Year: Women’s Liberation. Ware was a member of the Stanton-Anthony Brigade, a circle of radical feminists in New York City, and author of Woman Power: The Movement for Women’s Liberation (1970). In this article, Ware articulates a model of Black feminism and warns that the “complaint that black women challenge black men is further proof of the threatening nature of female independence to most men.”

The oral history of Texan Annie Mae Hunt, a 70-year old African American woman and civil rights activist, appeared at the end of the decade in Chrysalis, a Magazine of Women’s Culture. Hunt described her life of work, childbearing and rearing, political activism, and reflected on inequalities she experienced because of her race and sex.

The athletes in womenSports identified how racial and gender discrimination intersected. Ware’s new Black feminist theory and Hunt’s history explained how race, gender, and class inequality developed historically. African American women created a platform for their ideas within these 1970s feminist magazines.

Rare Books and Special Collections holds a growing collection of printed and other material documenting African Americans and women during the late twentieth century. The publications described here will be on exhibit in RBSC through March.

Previous Black History Month Blog Posts:

2022: Searching for Claude Monroe Paris, Unheralded African American Basketball Pioneer: Documenting Black History Using Notre Dame’s Joyce Sports Research Collection

2021: Paul Laurence Dunbar’s New Literary Tradition Packaged to Sell

2017: African Americans and Populism

New to the Collection: Scrapbook of the Corona Rolling Devils—Pioneering Wheelchair Basketball Team

by Greg Bond, Sports Archivist and Curator, Joyce Sports Research Collection

*Team photographs of the Corona Rolling Devils. Dr. Gerald Gray, who introduced wheelchair basketball to Corona Naval Hospital, is kneeling on the left*.

“Tonight will bring … one of the most unique athletic contests ever witnessed” wrote the Riverside Enterprise newspaper in March 1947 before a wheelchair basketball game between the local Riverside College basketball team and the Rolling Devils from the Corona Naval Hospital in Corona, California, on the outskirts of Los Angeles.

This is one of many clippings from a significant new acquisition by the Joyce Sports Research Collection—a scrapbook documenting the short career of the Corona Rolling Devils, one of the first successful and popular wheelchair basketball teams in the country. The 12×15 inch scrapbook features about 20 double-sided leafs and contains newspaper clippings, ephemera, and about 30 original photographs documenting the career of the Rolling Devils during the spring and summer of 1947.

As recounted in the recent book Wheels of Courage by David Davis, wheelchair basketball was originally devised in 1946 by Bob Rynearson, the Assistant Athletic Director at the Birmingham Veterans Administration (VA) Hospital in Van Nuys, California, to provide recreation and rehabilitation for World War Two veterans who were paralyzed. Due to medical advances during the 1940s, it became increasingly common for soldiers to survive spinal cord injuries, and, in the aftermath of the war, the VA rushed to provide care for an unprecedented number of veterans with paralysis. Rynearson’s adaptation of rules for wheelchair basketball was an immediate hit among veterans at the hospital.

In early 1947, Dr. Gerald Gray, a reconstructive surgeon at the Corona Naval Hospital, visited colleagues at the nearby Birmingham VA hospital and happened to see patients there playing the new wheelchair basketball game. After conferring with Rynearson, Dr. Gray immediately introduced wheelchair basketball at the Corona Naval Hospital and organized a team, who dubbed themselves the “Rolling Devils.”

In February 1947, the wheelchair basketball team from the Birmingham VA traveled to Corona to play the Rolling Devils. The visiting team was victorious in one of the first recorded wheelchair basketball games in American history. The Rolling Devils quickly recovered from this loss, however, and went undefeated for the rest of 1947, garnering significant public attention in the process.

The newly acquired scrapbook documents the Rolling Devils impressive winning streak. Most of their opponents were teams composed of non-disabled players who had to quickly adapt to playing basketball while in a wheelchair. The Rolling Devils’ victories over teams like Riverside College, the La Verne American Legion, the Pomona Veterans, and the Bonita All Stars are documented in newspapers stories, programs, advertisements, and photographs. The Devils also convincingly won a return match with the Birmingham VA hospital 41-10.

*Newspaper Advertisement for game between the Rolling Devils and the Bonita All Stars*.

As recounted in the scrapbook, in the spring of 1947, the Rolling Devils made two trips to Northern California. The Devils beat the varsity basketball teams from St. Mary’s College and the University of California. In a game in May sponsored by the Oakland Tribune, the Devils also defeated the semi-pro Oakland Bittners, a top AAU team led by former Stanford star and future Minneapolis Laker Jim Pollard. The Devils even invited California governor Earl Warren to their sold-out game against the Oakland Bittners, but he telegraphed his regrets.

*Telegram from California Governor Earl Warren to Dr. Gerald Gray about the Rolling Devils*.

Throughout their winning streak, the Rolling Devils received praise for their skill. After beating St. Mary’s, a local reporter enthused, “The veterans, who learned to use the chairs through necessity, scooted around the floor like a bunch of spiders, while the college boys gave the spectators a three-ring circus by running into everything in sight and alternating between falling on their noses and backs.”

*Rosters and special rules for the Rolling Devils and University of California game*.

Some accounts of the Rolling Devils exploits, though, were tinged with a patronizing sentiment towards the wheelchair athletes. Before the game against the Bittners, for example, Alan Ward, a sports columnist for the Oakland Tribune, melodramatically recounted “the moral courage which prompts 10 young men to perform a collective feat which verges on the impossible.”

In mid-June, the Rolling Devils visited Sacramento for what would prove to be their final hurrah. They beat a local college all-star team in a fundraising game to record, reportedly, their 22nd consecutive victory. After the game, the Devils visited the California legislature and finally met Governor Earl Warren who presented the players with honorary scrolls. Upon returning home, however, the Rolling Devils abruptly disbanded. As the United States military began discharging or transferring patients out of the Corona Naval Hospital, players on the team went their separate ways.

*Members of the Rolling Devils relax in a swimming pool during the trip to northern California*.

*#1 Jerry Fesenmeyer smiling for the camera*

Despite the team’s relatively short existence, the Rolling Devils had been instrumental in popularizing the sport of wheelchair basketball and educating the public about expanded athletic opportunities for people with disabilities. Author David Davis explains in Wheels of Courage that, “Thanks to the publicity generated by events like the Rolling Devils’ groundbreaking road trips, the spread of adaptive sports beyond the VA hospitals was on the horizon.”

The Rolling Devils scrapbook is available to the public in the Joyce Sports Research Collection.

Welcome to Spring 2023 in Rare Books & Special Collections

Upcoming Events: January

Please join us for the following event being hosted in Rare Books and Special Collections:

Thursday, January 26 at 5:00pm | Italian Research Seminar: “The ‘Literary Canon’ of Early Venetian Humanism (1374-1446) between the Classics and the Moderns “ by Rino Modonutti (University of Padova). Sponsored by the Center for Italian Studies.

Spring Semester Exhibits

The spring exhibit Printing the Nation: A Century of Irish Book Arts will feature selected books from the Hesburgh Libraries’ Special Collections to demonstrate the art and craft of the Irish book since 1900. The exhibit, curated by Aedín Ní Bhróithe Clements, will open in January and run through the semester.

The current spotlight exhibits for are Hesburgh Library Special Collections: A Focus on W. B. Yeats (November 2022 – January 2023) and The Ladies Flower-Garden of Ornamental Annuals (December 2022 – January 2023). Later in the month, we will be installing the spring semester spotlight, which will explore changes in language within select Middle English manuscripts and early printed books from the 15th through 17th century (January – April 2023).

Classes in Special Collections

Throughout the semester, curators teach sessions related to our holdings. If you’re interested in bringing your class or group to work with our curators and materials, please contact Special Collections.

Special Collections acquires new material throughout the year. Watch our blog for announcements about recent acquisitions.

An Annotated 17th Century Handbook on Excommunications

by Alan Krieger, Theology and Philosophy Librarian

Hesburgh Libraries has recently acquired an interesting and extremely rare early modern work, Alessandro Ludovisi’s Catalogus Excommunicationum, quae extra Bullam Coenae Domini sunt reservarae Papae, vel Episcopo, vel Nemini, iussu illustrissimi… (Bononiae, 1613). Ludovisi (1554-1623), a native of Bologna who would later become Pope Gregory XV from 1621-1623, compiled what is essentially a handbook that details which types of persons—religious and secular—can be excommunicated, for what reasons, and who has the particular authority to do so.

For example, chapter one concerns the excommunication of prelates (cardinals, bishops, nuncios, etc.) by the Pope himself; chapter two covers lesser clerics, chapter four, nuns and chapter six, Inquisitors. Chapter seven deals with secular lords and nobility, while chapter eight discusses various professions, including magistrates, university rectors, governors, and scholars. Chapter ten concerns all those who can be excommunicated by a bishop alone.

In addition, manuscript annotations add interest to this particular copy, attesting perhaps to various canon law interpretations prevalent during this period.

Manuscript annotations on the beginning pages of Chapter 3 (left) and Chapter 8 (right).

We have found no other copies of this title held by other North American libraries.

Rare Papal Bull in French to Convoke the Council of Trent

by Alan Krieger, Theology and Philosophy Librarian

Hesburgh Libraries has recently acquired an unusual and extremely rare document in early modern church history, a French-language edition of the bull issued by Pope Paul III to convoke the Council of Trent (1545-1563), La Bulle de nostre sainct Père le Pape Paul troisiesme sur le Concile general qui se celebrera, le quatriesme dimanche de la Caresme prochaine (Lyon, 1544). The Council was originally planned to begin in November 1542, but because of the conflict between King Francis I of France and Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, the convocation was delayed. This Council would prove to be a pivotal event in modern church history, essentially launching the Catholic Reformation across a range of important doctrinal issues.

Paul III, whose pontificate spanned the years 1534-1549, also published Latin-language versions in Cologne, Ingolstadt, Magdeburg, Nurnberg, and Rome, while a German edition was issued in Augsburg. In this edition, the bull is preceded by a letter written by the Pope to the Archbishop of Lyon concerning the Council.

We have located only one other copy of this French version among recorded holdings worldwide, in France’s Bibliotheque Nationale.

National Hispanic Heritage Month 2022

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.

United Farm Workers

by Erika Hosselkus, Curator, Latin American Collections

The United Farm Workers, an organization with deep ties to the Mexican American community, came into existence in 1965, under the leadership of labor leader Cesar Chavez. It merged two existing groups of farm workers, one primarily Mexican and one primarily Filipino. Under Cesar Chavez’s leadership, United Farm Workers became a highly influential, multi-racial labor movement. It orchestrated the most successful consumer boycott in American history, against California grape producers, between 1965 and 1970. By allying with national and local unions and building boycott houses in 10 major cities, the UFW effectively shut down the U.S. market for grapes in protest over treatment of farmworkers. In July of 1970, after a final, failed attempt to offload rotting grapes in Europe, twenty-six grape growers capitulated and signed collective bargaining agreements with the UFW, a major victory for the country’s farm workers.

This post highlights some of Rare Books and Special Collections’ ephemeral material related to the history of the United Farm Workers organization, a beacon of Chicano strength and power.

Andrew Zermeño, a graphic artist who created a number of political cartoons for United Farm Workers, produced this large bilingual poster in 1968. It connects the president-elect, Richard Nixon, to the abusive practices of California grape growers and warns that if “La Raza,” or the Mexican American population, doesn’t stop Nixon, he will stomp, or crush, them.

Portrayed in a grotesque fashion, Nixon waves his characteristic “V” for victory sign and greedily devours grapes. A grape grower is literally in Nixon’s pocket and farmworkers are crushed under his stomping feet. Small signs in Spanish and English refer to the boycott. A man representing La Raza lies inert in a pool of grape juice at the bottom of the poster.

In 1969, the Scholastic, the University of Notre Dame’s student magazine, recognized the grape boycott. Its editors published the striking emblem of the Delano strike on the cover of the November 7 issue. Inside, the first of two articles on the farmworkers’ actions, authored by Steve Novak, describes the formation of the UFW and the history of the grape boycott. Novak observes that, “the Delano strike has done much for the Mexican-American people of the United States,” making them more visible, uniting them, and bringing their struggles to light.

This final item is a modest poster promoting a United Farm Workers benefit held in Madison, Wisconsin, at Freedom House, a small venue. Likely also dating to the era of the grape boycott, the poster features the strike emblem and a group of three protestors, one with arm raised and one wearing a farm worker’s hat.

Together, these items reflect the national impact of the Delano grape strike. It spawned protest posters by Mexican American artists like Zermeño, merited a place on the cover of university student magazine in South Bend, Indiana, and prompted organization of a benefit in Madison, Wisconsin. The impact of this event was widespread and impressive, and it is an important part of the legacy of the U.S.’s Mexican American population.

Previous Hispanic Heritage Month Blog Posts:

2021: Migratory History from a Child’s Point of View
2020: The Woodcuts of Consuelo Gotay
2019: Latinx Ephemera Collection
2018: Puerto Rican Artists
2017: Sergio Sánchez Santamaría

A 17th Century Reexamination of a 4th Century Saint’s Legend

by Alan Krieger, Theology and Philosophy Librarian

Hesburgh Libraries has recently acquired a fascinating and important early modern work on the story of St. Ursula, a fourth-century British princess who tradition relates was martyred along with her 11,000 female followers by the Huns while on a pilgrimage to Rome. Vita et Martyrium S. Ursulae et Sociarum Undecim Millium Virginum etc. (Coloniae Agrippinae, 1647) by the Jesuit Hermann Crombach is an extensive defense of the legend’s historical veracity, as well as a detailed attempt to identify as many of her virgin companions as possible.

Illustrated title page (left) and full title page (right).

There was a resurgence of St. Ursula’s cult in the seventeenth century that witnessed the publication of a number of titles related to her; this tome “provides the most encyclopedic hagiographic coverage of the cult ever published.” ( Cartwright, The cult of St Ursula and the 11,000 virgins, 2016, p.21-22). This renewal of interest in the saint should probably be seen through the lens of the Catholic Reformation, in which detailed investigations into the authenticity of relics, saints’ legends, etc. were held up as proofs of the church’s reliability in transmitting her traditions.

Crombach’s exhaustive approach even included an attempt to identify as many of Ursula’s companions as possible and the inclusion of three finely engraved maps attempting to trace the route of the retinue from southwest England to Rome, before they turned north and were martyred in the defense of Cologne—besieged at the time by the Huns.

The first map, added between pages 270 and 271.

We have identified only five North American library holdings of this work.

A Day in a Life of the Warsaw Ghetto in Photographs

by Natasha Lyandres, Head of Special Collections and Curator, Russian and East European Collections

Special Collections recently acquired two World War II era photo albums featuring original photographs from within and outside of the Warsaw Ghetto’s walls.

Although the albums lack dates and inscriptions, they probably belonged to а German soldier who visited Warsaw sometime after the establishment of the Ghetto in November 1940 and before the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in April 1943. At the height of its existence in 1941, the Warsaw Ghetto included more than 500,000 Jews from Warsaw and surrounding towns. They lived in subhuman conditions in a small area segregated from the rest of the city by wire and brick walls. Fueled by years of massive Nazi propaganda, the occupied Warsaw was a popular destination for Wehrmacht soldiers who came here to see for themselves the “authentic” East European Jews and their culture.

Three men standing in the Warsaw Ghetto. (MSE/REE 0042-1, fol. 4r)

The first album presents a broad spectrum of people and activities taking place inside the Ghetto walls. It comprises twenty-four photographs probably taken during a single day as the photographer strolled through the streets documenting his encounters with the doomed inhabitants. The images vary from close up portraits of people directly facing the camera to more general depictions of the busy street life, misery, and suffering.

Old man wearing a winter coat and hat and an armband with the Star of David.
(MSE/REE 0042-1, fol. 7r)

People arriving to the ghetto.
(MSE/REE 0042-1, fol. 21r)

The photographer captured “typical Jewish” men with long beards wearing traditional attire, women with strollers in the park, rickshaws used for transporting people and goods, crowded marketplaces with inhabitants trying to make a living by selling potatoes, warm water, and the obligatory Star of David armbands, uprooted families arriving to the Ghetto from nearby towns, homeless children begging for food, and people collapsing and dying on the sidewalks from hunger and diseases.

The Old town. (MSE/REE 0042-2, fol. 18r)

The second album presents forty-seven photographs depicting mostly street views and buildings on the “Aryan” side of Warsaw, including images of the Ghetto wall (Ulica Graniczna), views of the Old town with its charming narrow streets and alleys, palaces with Nazi flags and German soldiers, and historical monuments, many of which were later destroyed. This album also contains several aerial views of the soon to be destroyed city and bridges over the Vistula river.

View of the ghetto ruins
and people collecting bricks.
(MSE/REE 0042-2, fol. 2r)

Taken by a perpetrator, these photographs serve as important historical evidence of the Holocaust and Nazi atrocities in Poland.

The albums are currently on display as the September spotlight exhibit in Special Collections. After the exhibit closes, they will be digitized. They will soon be available on the Marble (Museums, Archives, Rare Books and Libraries Exploration) online platform.

Tag: recent acquisitions

Students Propose New Diverse and Inclusive Acquisitions in RBSC

Women for Peace and Disarmament

Due to renovation work, RBSC (and the west entrance to the Hesburgh Library) will be closed during Notre Dame’s Spring Break week, March 13-17, 2023.

RBSC staff and curators will be available via online channels.

Black History Month 2023