Virginia Tech is proud to be the alma mater to many pioneers in aerospace engineering, perhaps none as famous as Christopher Columbus Kraft, Jr. The VT Stories team recorded an oral history interview with Kraft in April 2017, and Special Collections now has the full interview and transcript available online. The VT Stories summary of … Continue reading Chris Kraft: Oral History of an Aerospace Pioneer
This past Monday, January 16, was Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the U.S., and here at Virginia Tech we have been celebrating and remembering Rev. Dr. King and his legacy in numerous events all this week. If you haven’t been to any of the events, there are several more scheduled through next Sunday, January … Continue reading Celebrating Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Remembering His Legacy
We talk a lot about items and collections in Special Collections having stories to tell. Sometimes, those stories are full of clear details, exciting new surprises, and a creator about whom we can discover quite a bit. Other times, well, you might get a more interesting mix. The kind that results in some on-going, Scooby-Doo-style … Continue reading To “Friend William:” A Letter from Weldon Railroad, VA, 1864
A Souvenir Menu Recalls Earharts Triumphant Return to the U. S. The recent reports about possible new evidence in the 80-year mystery of Amelia Earharts disappearance reminded me of a little item in our collections: a menu for a 1932 dinner honoring the pilot. Housed, perhaps incongruously, within our Aviation Pamphlets and Brochures Collection (Ms1994-015), … Continue reading Heros Welcome
The university has a lot of ways to identify itself quickly: a university shield and seal, a university logo and athletic logo, a motto (Ut Prosim,“That I May Serve”), a tagline (“Invent the Future”), and many other icons that signify who we are. But these have all changed over the years, along with the official … Continue reading University seals and logos
Behind virtually any collection of personal papers is an ego, a voice saying, I was here. I mattered. Such collections can be indispensable resources in chronicling the lives of the famous and infamous or in offering insights into a particular time or topic. While history may greatly benefit from these collections, however, it is often … Continue reading Less Than the Sum of Its Parts: the W. Dale Parker Papers
One of the first collections we received after I started at Special Collections in 2009 was that of a Union private from Pennsylvania, Charles F. McKenna. (Acquisitions and Processing Archivist Kira here, this week–which I’m only pointing out because this post is about a collection, but also some connections came full circle for me last … Continue reading Where the Rubber (Historical Collection) Meets the Road (Monument)?
Recently added online are a collection of illustrations by Lucy Herndon Crockett, a successful author and illustrator from Southwest Virginias Smyth county. Lucy authored nine books during her lifetime, the most well-known being The Magnificent Bastards in 1954, about her experiences with the U.S. Marine Corps in the South Pacific during World War II. In … Continue reading Illustrations from a Magnificent Character
Many times over the course of this blog either I or one of my colleagues has written about an aspect of the job of being an archivist that can best be described as “discovery.” Typically, we find something … Continue reading Freiheit fur Angela Davis . . . and So Much More: The Black History Pamphlet Collection
Last time I wrote a post, it was on Sherwood Anderson and our newly-acquired copy of The Cornfields, one of Anderson’s poems which was separately printed. In that post, I mentioned a collection relating to Mary Sinton Leitch, which I had recently processed and was indirectlyconnected to Anderson.This time around, I thought I would talk … Continue reading Mary Sinton Leitch & Two-Degrees of Sherwood Anderson