Portraits of Charles Taze Russell (1852-1916), founder of the SocietyThey first called themselves the Zion's Watch Tower Tract Society and they were the earliest incarnation of what are now known as the Jehova's Witnesses.Portrait taken at the 1893 Watch Tower Convention in Chicago (the first major convention) which includes 76 members of the SocietyJust like today's door-knocking Jehova's Witnesses their main purpose was in the publication and distribution of religious tracts. Today they remain a major publisher in the field, printing more than 43 million issues of their various publications a month, totaling over 1 billion annually!These images are from a...
Kaplan Boxing Archive: From Contender To Champ
Poster For An Exhibit of Materials From The Hank Kaplan Boxing Archive.(All Images Courtesy Of Hank Kaplan Boxing Archive At Brooklyn College.)The rags to riches story behind Brooklyn College's Hank Kaplan Boxing Archive just got a little richer: on April 16, 2010 the collection's chief archivist, Professor Anthony Cucchiara, became the winner of a $315,000 endowment from the National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH) to organize the largest and most extensive boxing collection in the world. "This two-year grant will allow us to process and preserve this invaluable collection that spans two centuries of boxing history," says Prof. Cucchiara.Finding the...
Peake Archive Takes British Library To New Heights
Mervyn Peake, Self-portrait, submitted to the Royal Academyin 1931. Now in the National Portrait Gallery.(All Images Courtesy of the Mervyn Peake Estate, mervynpeake.org )He's been been likened to Tolkien, Dickens, Kafka, and Poe, but the work of poet, painter, playwright, author, and illustrator Mervyn Peake (1911-1968) defies comparison. Anthony Burgess wrote in his introduction to the first volume of the Gormenghast Trilogy, Peake's most famous work: "There really is no close relative to it in all our prose literature. It is uniquely brilliant..." Now scholars and readers have a chance to see the creative process of such a singular talent....
Pancho Villa Rides Again Thanks To Mexican Archives.
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." A museum in which visitors can get up close and personal, virtually anyway, with the "people who played out their lives on the Texas frontier." Frontier Texas's "cutting-edge...
Purdue Library Celebrates Wind Beneath Earhart’s Wings
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 University's Virginia Kelly Karnes Archives and Special Collections Research Center proves this phenomenon existed far earlier than the advent of "reality T.V." America's most famous female...