Murdered "Mill Girl" Memorialized At Maine Library March 10, 2010

Illustration From: Mary Bean Or The Mysterious Murder by Miss J.A.B., Cincinnati: H.M. Rulison, 1852. Saco, Maine 1850: The partially-clad body of a beautiful, young woman is found, bound to a board, floating in a stream. An immediate scandal ensues when the local police cannot identify the body. Newspaper reports take on an alarmist tone: Where is the girl’s family? Why is she alone and far from home? Who has brought about her untimely death,…

Pancho Villa Rides Again Thanks To Mexican Archives. March 8, 2010

General Pancho Villa in Mexico City in 1914. (Courtesy of Casasola Archives.) “Riding with Pancho Villa,” a new photography exhibit, has just opened in Abilene, Texas, celebrating the centennial of the Mexican Revolution, and held in conjunction with events honoring the founding of the Republic of Texas (1836-46). Hosting the events is Frontier Texas!, a nearly seven-acre Disneyland-meets-the-Wild-West historical theme park of sorts, designed to revive “the Old West with the help of state-of-the-art technology.”…

Medical Library’s Contagious Exhibit Sure To Go Viral March 5, 2010

She may be…a bag of TROUBLE. Syphilis – Gonorrhea. U.S. Public Health Service,United States, 1940s.Photomechanical print: color; 41 x 51 cm. Artist: “Christian.”A sultry, heavily-made-up woman squints provocatively, while smoking a cigarette. WWII posters usually addressed men, and fingered promiscuous women as the source of contagion. They are an unholy alliance of science, art, medicine, politics, history, advertising, and propaganda. Dramatic images use visual shorthand to convey danger, disease, and death. Shadows, crowds, skeletons, vermin,…

Purdue Library Celebrates Wind Beneath Earhart’s Wings March 4, 2010

George Palmer Putnam and Amelia Earhart, circa 1935. (All photos courtesy of Purdue University libraries.) The modern “manufacturing” of celebrities involves finding a camera-friendly face and figure with a charismatic personality, plus an indefinable personal magnetism, and using the power of mass media to create an overnight sensation. Result? A legion of people famous for being famous. Accomplishment is no longer a prerequisite for stardom: savvy promotion trumps talent. But a new exhibit at Purdue…

New Swiss Library Will Run Like Clockwork March 1, 2010

A Bird’s Eye View Of The Rolex Learning Center. (All Images Courtesy Of SANAA.) Viewed from above it looks like a flat, wavy rectangle full of randomly placed holes– and it’s Swiss. A cheesy description, perhaps, but one that fits a glorious modernist library which opened on February 22, 2010 in the city of Lausanne. The Japanese architectural firm known as SANAA has created a single-story, slice-like structure so sublimely constructed it seems to float…

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