Download event flier (pdf)

University History Lives in Wilson Library
Wilson Special Collections Library
Saturday, May 11, 2013
1-5 pm.
Free and open to the public
Information: (919) 962-3765

Commencement visitors can step back in time during an open house at the Wilson Special Collections Library on Saturday, May 11.

Yearbooks and memorabilia from the reunion classes of 1953, ’58, ’68, and ’73 will be on view. A special class of ’63 slide show will feature music of that year, drawn from the Southern Folklife Collection.

Visitors will also be able to view the exhibitions A Right to Speak and to Hear: Academic Freedom and Free Expression at UNC in the North Carolina Collection Gallery, and the Rare Book Collection exhibition The Encyclopedic Impulse in the Melba Remig Saltarelli Exhibit Room.

Wilson Library is located on the south side of Polk Place, opposite South Building. It is home to the North Carolina Collection and North Carolina Collection Gallery; the Rare Book Collection; the Southern Historical and Southern Folklife collections; and University Archives and Records Management Services.

The open house is sponsored by the Wilson Special Collections Library and the Friends of the Library.

In conjunction with the Wilson Library exhibit A Right to Speak and to Hear: Academic Freedom and Free Expression at UNC, the University Gazette has published a quick quiz about the history of free speech at the University.

Take the quiz and let us know how you do!

You can cram first by visiting the North Carolina Collection Gallery on the main floor of the Wilson Special Collections Library. A Right to Speak and to Hear will be on exhibit through June 2.

Related Links

• UNC academic freedom quiz in the University Gazette (April 17, 2013)
• A Right to Speak and to Hear: Academic Freedom and Free Expression at UNC exhibition information

NEW: View event recording, courtesy of the School of Journalism.

National Public Radio newscaster and radio personality Carl Kasell will be part of a free public program on April 16.

“An Evening with Carl Kasell” will begin at 5:30 p.m. in the Genome Sciences Building, Room GS 200. Joining Kasell in conversation will be WUNC radio host Eric Hodge and UNC journalism student Mike Rodriguez. The discussion will cover Kasell’s career, his involvement with the early days of WUNC radio, and his experience breaking such news stories as the space shuttle Challenger explosion and the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Kasell is a 1956 graduate of UNC. He and fellow UNC broadcast great Charles Kuralt helped to establish WUNC as a student-run FM station in 1953.

Starting at 5 p.m., attendees can enjoy a reception and view items from UNC’s University Archives related to Kasell’s time at UNC, his involvement with the university radio station, and his career at NPR.

The Genome Sciences Building is located at 250 Bell Tower Road, and is adjacent to the Bell Tower. The Ram’s Head Parking Deck provides convenient visitor parking.

Kasell, a Goldsboro, N.C., native first joined National Public Radio in 1975 as a news announcer for Weekend All Things Considered. From 1979 until his retirement in 2009, he was the daily news announcer for NPR’s Morning Edition.

He has since found new fame as the official judge and scorekeeper for the NPR weekly quiz show Wait, Wait… Don’t Tell Me! Lucky winners receive Kasell’s familiar voice recording a greeting on their home voice mail.

Kasell is a 2010 inductee to the National Radio Hall of Fame. Other honors include the Leo C. Lee Friend of Public Radio News Award for lasting commitment to public radio journalism (1996) and induction to the North Carolina Journalism Hall of Fame (2004).

UNC Friends of the Library, the University Archives and Records Management Services, WUNC, and the UNC School of Journalism are the sponsors of this event.

Related Links

• Event live stream, courtesy of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication

Download event flier (pdf)

Rare Book Collection Recent Acquisitions Evening
Tuesday, April 9, 2013
Wilson Special Collections Library
5 p.m. Viewing of exhibition The Encyclopedic Impulse, Melba Remig Saltarelli Exhibit Room
5:30 p.m. Display of recent additions, Grand Reading Room
Free and open to the public
Information: Liza Terll, Friends of the Library, (919) 548-1203

On April 9, the UNC Rare Book Collection (RBC) will host a display of additions to the collection from the past two years.

The 5:30 p.m. event in the Wilson Special Collections Library’s Grand Reading Room is free and open to the public.

“These materials demonstrate the continued growth of UNC’s Rare Book Collection and the many ways it supports intellectual inquiry at the University,” said Claudia Funke, Curator of the Rare Book Collection. “It’s an exciting way for the community to find out what’s new at RBC.”

Selected Items from the Exhibit

Material will range in date from the 16th to the 20th centuries. Among the items on display will be:

• The first book by the first feminist of the New World, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s Inundación castálida de la única poetisa, musa dezima (1689);
• Galileo Galilei’s last book, Discorsi e dimostrazioni matematiche intorno à due nuove scienze (1638), a gift of UNC Professor Lawrence Slifkin and Miriam Slifkin;
• One of the early and extremely rare bookseller’s catalogues issued by the great scholar-printer Robert Estienne (1546), an important addition to the RBC’s collection of over 500 Estienne imprints;
• William Wordsworth letters, Romantic literature, and Lake District guides from the collection of UNC professor Mark L. Reed III;
• Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s (‘41) sketchbook with original drawings and the first and early versions of his poem “The Canticle of Jack Kerouac” (1987);
• Classic modern fine-press books including Robinson Jeffers’s Granite & Cypress (1975) from the collection of James R. Patton (’48) and Mary M. Patton;
• James Malcolm Rymer’s The String of Pearls, or, The Barber of Fleet Street (1850), the expanded edition of the best-selling serial that created the enduring Sweeney Todd legend, known in only one other copy.

Visitors to the event will also have a chance to view the exhibition The Encyclopedic Impulse in the Melba Remig Saltarelli Exhibit Room, starting at 5 p.m. The exhibition examines the human desire to assemble and organize the world’s information.

Learn More

The event is sponsored by the Rare Book Collection and Friends of the Library. For information about the Rare Book Collection, contact Claudia Funke at cfunke@email.unc.edu or (919) 962-1143.

Related Links

• Rare Book Collection
• The Encyclopedic Impulse exhibition information

“When I Was at UNC”: Preserving the Work and Legacy of Student Organizations through Documentation

Student organizations have long been integral to the UNC experience, with more than 600 clubs, societies, and other groups in existence today.

On Tuesday, March 26, the University Archives will host “‘When I Was at UNC’: Preserving the Work and Legacy of Student Organizations through Documentation” at 5:30 p.m. in the UNC Student Union Room 3201.

The program will describe how student organizations can make their mark on Carolina permanent and ensure that their accomplishments are remembered by future generations.

It will also feature a display of manuscripts and photographs on the history of student organizations at UNC, scrapbooks from early fraternities, the original charter of the Campus YMCA, and old Yackety Yack yearbooks.

The event, sponsored by University Archives and Records Management Services and the Office of Student Activities and Organizations, will be presented by graduate students Carla Davis-Castro and Morgan Jones.

Students who have or know of materials relating to student organizations at UNC can also contact UNC Archivist Jay Gaidmore at (919) 962-6402 or gaidmore@email.unc.edu.

Related links:

• Why Donate Your Organization’s Records (Information from University Archives and Records Management Services)
• Student organizations virtual exhibit from the Virtual Museum of University History

Download exhibit poster (pdf)

A new exhibition in the North Carolina Collection Gallery of Wilson Library explores the long history of free speech controversies at UNC.

A Right to Speak and to Hear: Academic Freedom and Free Expression at UNC will use original letters, documents and photographs to examine some of the University’s most contentious moments from the nineteenth century to the present.

It marks the fiftieth anniversary of the passage of the Speaker Ban. The controversial 1963 law forbade known members of the Communist party or those who advocated the overthrow of the federal or state government from speaking on campus. The Ban was overturned in 1968.

Visitors to the exhibit will see original materials from the Library’s North Carolina Collection, Southern Historical Collection, and University Archives and Records Management Services. Highlights include:

• A page from the early 19^th century “Laws of the University of North Carolina” barring students from delivering “indecent, profane, or immoral” speeches.

• The November 1939 “Sex Issue” of the Buccaneer. The student council ordered this issue of the student humor magazine burned. The Buccaneer had frequent run-ins with campus authorities and was banned from campus at one point.

• Video of UNC police chief Arthur Beaumont ordering Herbert Aptheker, a member of the Communist Party, off the campus in March 1966 during the Speaker Ban.

• A letter from David Duke, Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, to the Daily Tar Heel. Students shouted down Duke when he attempted to speak on campus in January 1975. He criticized the protesting students for “suppressing” his right to speak and for limiting their classmates’ right to hear.

• Postcards sent to Chancellor James Moeser as part of the Family Policy Council’s organized protest of the University’s summer reading selection for 2002, Approaching the Qu’ran: The Early Revelations by Michael Sells.

On April 11, former UNC student body president Robert Spearman (’65) will deliver the annual Gladys Hall Coates University History Lecture in conjunction with the exhibition.

Spearman—now an attorney in Raleigh—will recall student efforts to repeal the Speaker Ban, including his own testimony before a state commission tasked with revising the law.

The human desire to assemble and organize the world’s information is the inspiration for The Encyclopedic Impulse, an exhibition at UNC’s Wilson Special Collections Library.

The exhibition marks the three-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Denis Diderot, editor and principal author of the great eighteenth-century Encyclopédie, which sought to bring together and disseminate the world’s knowledge. Visitors to the exhibition can see multiple volumes of the Encyclopédie from the Rare Book Collection.

Other materials will explore the process of defining and compiling knowledge and the literal translation of “encyclopedia” from the Greek as a “circle of learning.” Publications on view will include an early printed edition of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, the ancient text often identified as the first encyclopedic work; writings on knowledge by scientist, philosopher, and statesman Francis Bacon, a contemporary of Shakespeare; Athanasius Kircher’s Turris Babel (1679); and Pierre Bayle’s Projet et fragmens d’un dictionaire critique (1692), a forerunner of the Encyclopédie.

The exhibition will also probe how encyclopedias relate to other reference works, such as Samuel Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary of the English Language, and to one another. The famous 11^th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica will be on view, as well as encyclopedias from Germany, China, and Spain.

Twentieth-century works including H. G. Wells’s The Idea of a World Encyclopedia (1936); Jorge Luis Borges’s Library of Babel (1943); and Luigi Serafini’s Codex Seraphinianus (1981) will reflect on the concept of the encyclopedia.

For hours and exhibition information, contact the Wilson Special Collections Library, (919) 962-3765 or wilsonlibrary@unc.edu.

Related Links

• Rare Book Collection
• Mythic Quest for the Universal Library is Topic of Feb. 27 Lecture

Hurricane Hazel at Carolina Beach, 1954. Photograph by Hugh Morton.

The Wilson Library exhibit Photographic Angles: News Photography in the North Carolina Collection will remain on view until Feb. 10, 2013.

The exhibit is in the North Carolina Collection Gallery on the main floor of Wilson Library.

The extension offers an additional week to view 30 published and unpublished photographs taken for the News & Observer of Raleigh, the Daily Tar Heel, the Durham Herald-Sun, and other newspapers from 1891 through 2000. The images show how photographers use low camera angles, wide-angle lenses, and personal perspectives to create compelling news photographs.

The photojournalists represented include Hugh Morton (UNC ’43); UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication faculty members Jock Lauterer (UNC ’67) and Paul Cuadros; Roland Giduz (UNC ’48), former editor of The Chapel Hill News Leader and The News of Orange County; Charlotte Observer photographer Don Sturkey; and The Hatterasman author Ben Dixon MacNeill.

The exhibit is sponsored by the North Carolina Collection and draws on the holdings of its North Carolina Collection Photographic Archives.

Download exhibit flier (pdf)

Visualizing American Roots Music
Through Dec. 31, 2013
Wilson Special Collections Library
Pleasants Family Assembly Room
Free and open to the public
Information: Steve Weiss, Southern Folklife Collection, 962-7105

Twenty rare and unique photographs of iconic musicians are now on view in the Pleasants Family Assembly Room of the Wilson Special Collections Library. Johnny Cash, The Byrds, Mississippi John Hurt, and The Maddox Brothers and Rose, are among the celebrities depicted.

The photographs come from Wilson Library’s Southern Folklife Collection. They showcase a wide spectrum of American Roots Music—ranging from the blues, bluegrass, and country, to rock and roll—and highlight its popular and commercial development over the last century.

Visualizing American Roots Music will be on view through Dec. 31, 2013.

The Wilson Special Collections Library is open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays, 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturdays, and 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. Sundays. The Pleasants Family Assembly Room is not available at all times. Call (919) 962-0104 for exhibit availability.

Related Links

• Southern Folklife Collection
• Wilson Special Collections Library

Download flier (pdf)

Silent Sam in History and Memory
Tuesday, Jan. 22, 2013
Free and open to the public
Wilson Special Collections Library
5 p.m. Display viewing | 5:30 p.m. Program
Information: Liza Terll, Friends of the Library, (919) 548-1203

The early history of UNC’s controversial “Silent Sam” statue will be the topic of a free public lecture Jan. 22 at the Wilson Special Collections Library. “Silent Sam in History and Memory” marks the centennial of the Confederate memorial.

The program will consist of the following:

• Silent Sam exhibit from the Wilson Library special collections – 5 p.m.

View photographs and postcards; the address that Julian Shakespeare Carr delivered at the monument’s dedication on June 2, 1913; letters about UNC’s involvement in construction of the monument; and materials documenting protests against the monument.

• Original poetry reading – 5:30 p.m.

Will McInerney and C.J. Suitt, Chapel Hill community activists, will perform an original poem about the history of racism in Chapel Hill. The two are members of the Real Silent Sam Coalition and the Sacrificial Poets.

• “Silent Sam in History and Memory” Lecture – 5:35 p.m.

Fitz Brundage, William B. Umstead Distinguished Professor of History at UNC, and doctoral student Adam Domby will discuss the original impulse behind the monument, the role of the University community in building it, and changing views of the statue over time.

The lecture will also mark the formal release of the Library website Commemorative Landscapes of North Carolina. Brundage was scholarly advisor to the site, which documents the state’s history through its monuments, shrines, and public art.

Silent Sam is one of 200 current entries, each one described, geo-referenced, and linked to a database of thousands of digitized postcards, photographs, print publications, and manuscript materials. Brundage and his students continue to add to the site.

The lecture is sponsored by the University Archives and Records Management Services in Wilson Library, Friends of the Library, and the Chapel Hill Historical Society.