News from the DeGolyer Library
May 2021
Southern Methodist University
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Our Latest Virtual Exhibit
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Fossils to Film brings together highlights from libraries and special collections across campus, including the DeGolyer Library’s collections.
This virtual exhibit features a number of DeGolyer Library items currently on display at the Meadows Museum. Explore the items here, and from March 14th to June 20th, 2021, visit the Meadows Museum to view over 100 works of art, specimens, historical documents, and artifacts, many of which are exhibited outside of their home departments for the first time.
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SMU Heritage Hall Curator Gerry York was not sidelined this year by Covid, nor by the DeGolyer being closed. During the past year, after several years of research, he has published a documentary film on the 1935 SMU Mustang Football team. That year the team was undefeated, crowned number one in the Southwest Conference, rated top in the nation by national sportswriters, and went to the Rose Bowl. Central to the team were the four men from Gerry’s hometown of Corsicana: Billy Stamps, Bobby Wilson, Maco Stewart, and Bob Finley. Using game footage, photographs, ephemera, oral histories, and scrapbooks, the film weaves a story about SMU winners. We think Gerry is a winner, too.
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Professor Hillary Mushkin recently published ‘Survey to Surveillance’ in the 2021 issue of Places Journal. The article examines the U.S.-Mexico border not as a linear physical demarcation, but as a network of bodies and databases. Muskin was a 2019 Clements Center Fellow who researched at the DeGolyer, and thanks the library in her acknowledgments.
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With summer approaching, Samantha Dodd chose to highlighted the career of Kendra North and her 1970s sunbathers photographs. North is a Dallas fine arts photographer who specializes in color processes and is known for her work with dye transfer materials. Her ‘Sunbathers Series’ captures subjects from 1976 to 1982 and focuses on the body in the landscape.
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New Finding Aids and Collections
Thomas Moore Paschal was a Texas lawyer, judge, and United States Congressman (1893-1894). This collection contains legal documents from his law practice, his father’s law practice, and other family legal papers. Correspondence, speeches, mining documents, and photographs are also included.
Virginia Whitehill (1928-2018) was a civic activist and champion of women’s reproductive rights in Dallas, Texas. She founded the Dallas Committee to Study Abortion in 1969, and helped cofound numerous women’s rights groups. This collection comprises materials from local, regional, and national organizations and includes: correspondence, newsletters, reports, directories, legislative agendas and notices, guides, ephemera, flyers, meetings files with agendas and minutes, pamphlets, brochures, statistics, programs, papers, and other printed materials.
Recently Accessioned
A2021.0018c – Rev. William Goodwin Williams correspondence
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Collection Highlight
Pictured here is a section of ‘A Map of New England and New York’ printed in 1676, part of John Speed’s The Theater of the Empire of Great Britain atlas, printed by Thomas Basset and Richard Chiswell in London. The map marked the Native American tribes of the region, including the Kechemeche, Wampanoag Confederation, and Raritan. It also described terrain (such as detailing the ‘Kats Kill’ Mountains) with attention to the wild game of the area. It’s considered one of the most detailed early cartographic depictions of the Northeast and notably, it’s one of the first to document the English colonial takeover of previous Dutch holdings. This is best illustrated in that it’s one of the first printed maps to use the term New York for both Manhattan (instead of ‘New Amsterdam’) and New York State, as well as being one of the first maps on which New Jersey appears. We haven’t added this map to our digital collection yet, but you can explore a version of the map in greater detail by clicking this link.
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Recent Accessions
We recently unpacked a beautiful 1699 printing of Aesop’s Fables, translated by Sir Roger L’estrange and printed in London. The first volume is a third edition, while the second volume is a first edition (and contains pages that are much more worn than what’s found in the first volume.) This printing features a frontispiece engraving of L’estrange and one of Aesop surrounded by animals. There’s a small ownership note, dated to 1710, on the inside cover. Translator Roger L’estrange was an English author, MP, courtier, and pamphleteer. He rose to power during the Restoration as a strong supporter of Charles II, but lost power during the reign of James II, and left politics as the Glorious Revolution swept in a new political order. In retirement, he focused on writing and producing translations of Greek and Roman classical works, such as Seneca the Younger’s Morals, Cicero’s Offices, and Fables, which is now considered his most enduring legacy.
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Newly Digitized Items
192 images from the John Miller Morris Real Photographic Postcards and Photographs of Texas collection were added to the digital library this month. The images feature Texas towns including Nacodoches, Longview, and Matagora. One notable image, featured right, shows four men standing in chest-deep water during the 1915 Port Arthur flood. The event, which flooded all one-story buildings in the city, was a result of Sabine Lake overflowing its banks during the 1915 Galveston hurricane. The digitization was made possible thanks to a grant from the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services and the Texas State Library and Archives Commission. Click here to view more images.
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