SMU Libraries Digital Collections Update: April 2025

In April 2025, SMU Libraries uploaded 416 items into SMU Libraries Digital Collections. Highlights include:

115 negatives, ca. 1936-1937, from the Robert Yarnall Richie Photographs collection. Highlights include 5 photographs from Merchants Distilling in Terre Haute, Indiana and a series of 32 images depicting the steamships RMS Queen Mary and SS Normandie, which were the two fastest ships crossing the North Atlantic at the time. The ships’ terminal U.S. port was New York City.

9 historic Texas cookbooks, 1908-1950, comprising 1,631 pages, were added to the DeGolyer Library Cookbook Collection, including a bridal book that contains recipes for newlywed women, and “Let’s Eat,” a cookbook published to raise funds for the Sunnyside School in Port Arthur. This project was made possible by a grant from the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services and Texas State Library and Archives Commission (Grant Number LS‐256843‐OLS‐24).

82 negatives, ca. 1956-1957, from the Richard Steinheimer Photograph Collection. Subjects include a woman standing next to a pile of redwood logs, a railroad employee waving a flare, and sparks flying as a man does maintenance at Taylor Yard.

88 photographs (1 album comprising 82 photographs, and 6 other photographs), ca. 1890-1945, from the Hamburg America Line, Ships collection. The album includes exterior and interior views of several luxury passenger liners of the Hamburg-American Line, including the MS St. Louis, which carried Jewish refugees seeking asylum from Nazi persecution in 1939. The refugees were refused entry into Cuba and the United States, and the ship returned to Antwerp where they disembarked. Several of the remaining photographs depict German U-boats with snorkels and an American steamboat.

40 photographs and 1 button, ca. 1903-1928, from the Elmer and Diane Powell Collection on Mexico and the Mexican Revolution, featuring the life and career of the 46th President of Mexico, Alvaro Obregon. Photographs show Obregon with his family, children, and close associates, and photos document his rise through the Mexican military during the Revolution, his time as President, and his life afterwards. The time covered spans from the prerevolutionary period of the 1900s to 1928, when Obregon was assassinated.

76 photographs, ca. 1881-1939, from the Linwood W. Moody Photographs, showing locomotives from the Nevada Central Railroad and its short-lived subsidiary Austin City Railway. Nevada Central was a 3-foot narrow gauge railway that ran between Battle Mountain, Nevada and Austin, Nevada from 1879 to 1938.

4 oral history interviews were added to the SMU Oral History Projects digital collection. These interviews, with Ademide Adeoye, Krysta Davis, Kriss Gamez, and Paola Sotomayor, are part of the Voices of SMU project.