Issue 62 2009

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Resources for American Studies Issue 62 2009

Issue 62 2009 Resources for American Studies British Association for American Studies Library and Resources Sub‐Committee

ISSN 1746‐9414 (Print) SSN 1746‐9422 (Online)

Resources for American Studies

British Association for American Studies Library and Resources Sub‐Committee

Resources for American Studies is the annual publication of the British Association for American Studies (B.A.A.S.) Library and Resources Sub‐Committee. The Sub‐Committee aims to bring together those who work in libraries with American Studies interests, to advise on library provision for American Studies and to initiate and co‐ordinate bibliographic projects for scholars and librarians working in the field.

Chair: R. J. Ellis, University of Birmingham

Resources for American Studies is sent free of charge to individuals and institutions on request.

We would like to thank B.A.A.S. and the U.S. Embassy, London, for their financial support.

Resources for American Studies welcomes submissions and books or other materials for review, as well as advertisements:

The Editor, Resources for American Studies The British Library Americas Collections 96 Euston Road NW1 2DB [email protected]

The journal is also available online via the ‘resources’ section of the B.A.A.S. website at: http://www.baas.ac.uk

Contents

TWITTER: WHO’S WORTH FOLLOWING? 1

WWWEB SITES WWWORTH WWWATCHING 3

AFRICAN AMERICANS IN POLITICS 3

READING THE “NEGRO BIBLE”: ONLINE ACCESS TO JET AND EBONY 7

‘AND IF YOU COME BACK I’LL SHOOT YOU...’: COLLECTING FOR AN ELECTIONS ARCHIVE 17

USING THE INTERNET FOR AMERICAN STUDIES 27

VERE HARMSWORTH LIBRARY, ROTHERMERE AMERICAN INSTITUTE, UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD UNIVERSITY 37

THE AFRICAN AMERICAN EXPERIENCE DATABASE (GREENWOOD): 41

Contributors

Bella Adams, Lecturer in American Studies and Director of the American Studies Resource Centre, Liverpool John Moores University

Philip Davies, Director, Eccles Centre for American Studies; Professor Emeritus, DMU

R. J. Ellis, Professor of American Studies, University of Birmingham

Rose Goodier, Faculty Team Librarian, English and American Studies, Drama and Art History, The John Rylands University Library, The University of Manchester

Jane Rawson, Vere Harmsworth Librarian‐in‐Charge, OULS

Matthew Shaw (editor), Curator, US Collections, British Library, [email protected]

Donald Tait, Subject Librarian, Arts & Social Sciences faculty support team, Glasgow University Library, email: [email protected]

Resources for American Studies Twitter: Who’s Worth Following?

Twitter, as readers will know, is the social networking tool of 2009. Short messages – ‘tweets’ – of up to 140 characters allow members to quickly post to the web, whether from the desktop, SMS or smartphone. Its democratic format allows you to follow pretty much anyone, from @StephenFry to @WhiteHouse, and to have your own observations, links and questions followed reciprocally. Conversely, you don’t have to follow ‘followers’, and can block dubious twitters, making it a [www.flickr.com/photos/cc_chapman/565934606/] relatively spam-free medium. ‘Hashtags’ (such as #followfridays or #politics) provide a kind of archiving and searching facility, as well as leading to certain online games (e.g. @trvia or #chainstory) The service is also real-time, reflective of user interests, possibly challenging the dominance of the major search engines and perhaps RSS feeds. Although twitter can be used to ‘broadcast’ to one’s followers, it’s also an excellent way of finding out things in a quicker, more focussed way. • _Americas – Americas Collections at the British Library • AmericanStudies - UEA • Harmsworth – Vere Harmsworth Library, Rothermere, University of Oxford • Larrysabato – the political science professor

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Finally, Twitter is becoming a powerful, and up-to-the minute search engine. See also http://delicious.com/biz/twitter

2 Resources for American Studies WWWeb Sites WWWorth WWWatching

The Office of Public Engagement

BRIEFING ROOM “The White House provides timely and accurate information about the President's latest events and public statements. Here you'll find photos, video, and blogs, as well as proclamations, executive orders, and press releases.” ‐ http://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing_room/

African Americans in Politics

A Multimedia resource from The Schomburg Center for Research in

3 Issue 62 Black Culture, New York.

“Before Barack Obama, there was Crispus Attucks, Frederick Douglass, the Massachusetts 54th Regiments, Mary McCleod Bethune, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. and a host of other heroes and heroines of the African‐ American struggle for freedom and human dignity, fighting to make America and American Democracy real for all of its citizens” ‐ Curated by Schomburg director, Howard Dodson

National Visionary Leadership

• “Co-founded in 2001 by Camille O. Cosby, Ed.D. and Renee Poussaint, The National Visionary Leadership Project (NVLP), a nonprofit, tax-exempt organization, unites generations to create tomorrow's leaders by recording, preserving, and distributing through various media, the wisdom of extraordinary African American elders - Visionaries - who have shaped American history… All of this visionaryproject.org invaluable primary source material is accessible worldwide on the NVLP website, and permanently archived at the Library of Congress, allowing students, scholars and the public to gain a whole new understanding of this country's past, and the lessons to be learned from it. “

4 Resources for American Studies

Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball

www.centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/classroom.php Going by the tagline ‘The Web’s Most Accurate Political Analysis’, electoral guru, Larry Sabato’s site at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics offers a wealth of resources, articles and debates, as well as teaching tools for all aspects of the US electoral process. At the site notes, “Crystal Ball was created just as much for students as for political junkies and reporters” and it includes several lesson plans, such as the ‘Battle for Swing States’, which may have uses in the UK class or seminar room. Larry’s tweets can also be followed at http://twitter.com/larrysabato

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Hathi Trust Digital Library “The HathiTrust Digital Library, a partnership among some of the nation's largest academic research libraries, has launched a new digital catalog search that delivers nearly 3 million records through an Internet browser. ‘We are committed to providing solutions for archiving, and vital support for research," said John Wilkin, HathiTrust executive director and associate university librarian at the University of Michigan. "This new service provides access to the collections of the nation's premier research libraries. It's another step in building a worldwide, highly accessible 21st-century digital library.’” www.hathitrust.org

Cover Browser

Explore ½ million pulp, comic and magazine covers sourced from across the internet under ‘fair use’ copyright (including Jet magazine) www.coverbrowser.com/

6 Resources for American Studies Reading the “Negro Bible”: Online access to Jet and Ebony

Donald Tait

This article gives a very brief account of the rise to prominence of the black owned and run Johnson Publishing Company, with particular emphasis on its earlier years and specifically on the role played by its two most important publications, Ebony and Jet. The late Redd Foxx called Jet, ‘The Negro Bible,’ and a character in one of poet/playwright Maya Angelou's plays said that ‘if it wasn't in Jet, it didn't happen’. It then describes how runs of these two titles, and others from the same publishing house, are now available online from Google Book Search, before looking at some potential uses of these resources as primary source material for research.

Some samples of the covers of issues of Jet and Ebony 7 Issue 62

As yet, there are few twentieth-century magazine archives freely available online (Time being a notable exception). By contrast, there is an increasing amount of newspaper content becoming digitised, much of it via Google News Archive Search1, and available free of charge. Yet perhaps even more so than newspapers, magazines can be hugely important tools for historical research, carrying as they do a range of content such as articles, reviews and advertisements which cumulatively allow unique insights into the cultural mores and attitudes of readership of any given title. Within the African American community, for example, titles like Ebony and Jet, from the Johnson Publishing Company have long been considered as one of the most important places where have African Americans have been able to see their lives, culture and beliefs reflected. Study of these titles can reveal the fascinating changes that occur over time in such beliefs and attitudes: to take one tiny example, in the light of the historic victory of Barack Obama in the 2008 US Presidential election, it is interesting to note that a Gallup poll reported in Jet, in 1969, noted 67% of Americans would vote for a black presidential candidate, up from 38% from a similar poll done in 1958. To understand how significant these magazines were for black Americans, it is necessary to look into their origins. The Johnson Publishing Company, started by John H. Johnson in Chicago in 1942 with a $500 loan from his mother, rose to become one of the most successful black-owned businesses in America. Today it is the world's largest African-American owned and operated publishing company, and has diversified into areas such as cosmetics, television production and fashion. It currently has offices in New York, Los Angeles, Washington, DC, Detroit, London and Paris, a far cry from its humble beginnings with its first publication, Negro Digest, produced by Johnson himself in a second floor office in Chicago when he was working as editor

1 http://news.google.com/archivesearch 8 Resources for American Studies of the company newsletter for the black-owned Supreme Liberty Life Insurance. The timing for such a bold venture was right, coming as it did when black GIs were returning from fighting for “freedom” in World War Two to find they were less than free at home, and facing a climate of racial injustice and prejudice. The feeling amongst the African American community in general was that the American media did not reflect their culture and way of life, and so they were receptive to the new magazines. The subsequent success of the company was primarily due to two key publications, the monthly title Ebony (started in 1945) and the weekly Jet magazine (stared in 1951). Both these titles were to epitomise the Johnson philosophy whereby the company always aimed at emphasising the positive aspects of black life, and ‘increasing African-Americans' pride in themselves by presenting their past and present achievements to America and to the world’.2 This editorial approach differed markedly from other contemporary black periodicals and the black newspaper press which were beginning to concentrate their attention on highlighting the topics of segregation, lynching and battle for civil rights. Such concerns were not absent from Johnson publications, but were not given such prominence as they were in these other titles. Thus a typical issue of either Ebony or Jet would include features on African-American film, television, and music stars, as well as sportsmen and women, businessmen, fashion models and beauty queens. Ebony, (modelled after Life and Look magazines) became a showcase for, in the words of the Encyclopaedia of African American History, ‘beautiful black people - in all walks of life but with a special emphasis on celebrities.’ 3

2 Taken from the Johnson company website, at http://www.johnsonpublishing.com/assembled/about_overview.html, accessed on 11 June 2009 3 Encyclopaedia of African American History: 1896 to the Present. (Oxford, 2009), vol. 2, p. 120. The volumes in this set provided much of the background information for this article 9 Issue 62

The formula clearly worked. Johnson was able to secure advertising revenue from both black and white sources, enabling him to employ the best journalistic and photographic talent available at time, frequently acquiring his writers and photographers from rival black publications. Circulation figure for both titles soared and they became widely disseminated throughout black communities, both in smaller towns and rural communities as well as in the large cities and urban conurbations. They could be found in locations as diverse as bookshops and newspaper stands as well as dentists’ and doctors’ waiting rooms. Jet was to acquire the nickname of “The Negro Bible”, and as Johnson himself noted a character in one of poet/playwright Maya Angelou's plays said that ‘if it wasn't in Jet, it didn't happen’. As well as writers, Johnson set out to attract advertisers who previously would have used black newspapers. By the mid 1950s Ebony was describing itself as the ‘key national medium for advertising to black consumers’, and was able to attract advertising from brand names like Chesterfields, who placed the first full colour adverts in a black magazine. Ebony grew to become widely regarded as the top black magazine in terms of circulation and influence. The company was able to build, in 1971, a new 11-story HQ on South Michigan Ave, at a cost of £8 million, as well as opening additional offices overseas in London and Paris. Johnson became a figure of national importance, mixing with the great and the good: in 1966 was awarded the Spingarn medal, the highest honour from the NAACP, and in 1995 he received from Bill Clinton the presidential Medal of Freedom Award, along with Rosa Parks and nine other recipients. Not everyone within the African American community was happy with the company approach. By the mid-fifties and increasingly into the sixties and seventies, events such as the Civil Rights movement, and the rise of Black Power and Black Consciousness were changing the dynamics of the target audience. The publishing house had to take on board the climate of militancy and anger amongst a large proportion of its 10 Resources for American Studies readership, and so consequently the coverage of events in the political sphere took on a greater significance. Of particular importance in this context was the role of Jet in covering the murder of Emmett Till in 1955, and especially the photographs it chose to publish. Till, a young Negro boy from Chicago had come down to Money, Mississippi, a small town in the state's Delta region, to visit relatives. After chatting to a white woman in a general store in a way that enraged the woman’s relatives, Till was seized from the house where he was staying, brutally murdered and his body thrown in the Tallahatchie river. When the corpse was discovered 3 days later, the face was so mutilated that identification was only possible based on the ring that Till was been wearing. His right eye was missing, his nose was broken, and there was a hole in the side of his head. His body was taken back to Chicago for burial where his mother, Mamia Till Bradley, decided to leave the casket open and to allow people to view it and take photographs, because, in her own words, ‘I wanted the world to see what they did to my baby.’ The image of the young Emmett Till, a handsome young man, was taped to the coffin for comparison.

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The Emmett Till photographs in JET

The response was amazing : tens of thousands of people, almost entirely African Americans, queued in an unending procession to see the body, and Jet published two photographs in its 15 September 1955 issue which drew immediate intense public reaction, and which were to reverberate round the world, turning Till's murder into an international story. For the first time in its history, Jet had to reprint an issue, and the photographs have since become iconic images of the Jim Crow era. The subsequent trial of two white men was covered by journalists from all over America. When the 2 defendants were acquitted, the verdict was

12 Resources for American Studies denounced throughout much of America and elsewhere around the world. It was, wrote David Halberstam in his 1993 book, The Fifties, ‘the first great media event of the civil-rights movement’. The anger and outrage among African Americans, together with the realisation that they were still vulnerable to such treatment at the hands of whites who could subsequently escape justice, meant they would be receptive to the message of those who were beginning to formulate the Civil Rights movement. Hence, subsequent issues of Jet and Ebony went on to chronicle the great events of the Civil Rights era, such as the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the events at Selma and Little Rock, and the life, career and assassination of Martin Luther King. The company continued to prosper throughout the seventies and eighties, adding new titles to their range of publications, some of which were more successful than others. It also ventured into other areas, such as videocassettes, greeting cards and home and bath products. John Johnson continued to play in active role in the firm well beyond the conventional retirement age of 65. He died in 2005, aged eighty seven, by which time the company was actually being run by his daughter, Linda Johnson Rice. In 2006, for the first time the company chose an editor from outside its own ranks, with both Jet and Ebony now under combined editorship. Clearly, like all print-based publications in an age of electronic access to information and entertainment, the firm is facing tough times, and indeed there has recently been speculation that the joint publication is at risk.

Finding the Titles Online It is important to note that at the time of writing this article, the online access to Jet and Ebony resides only within Google Book Search, although eventually the company hopes to make the content available via Google News Archive Search, or indeed via the standard Google search, To find one of these magazines, you can go Google Book Search, opt to do an 13 Issue 62

[advanced search] and then opposite the [content] button, put a check against [magazines] and then enter, for example, the title of a specific magazine, e.g. Jet. Despite requests, as yet Google are not providing a specific list of magazine titles, but another way to access such materials would be to use one of the directories which have appeared and which list all the magazines titles that have been currently been digitised - there is a useful one contained within a blog from the University of Iowa on the web at http://blog.lib.uiowa.edu/hardinmd/2008/12/10/google-magazines-titles/

Browsing/Searching Once you navigate to a particular issue, there are then a number of options to explore the content: by clicking on [browse all issues], you can browse by decade to navigate to the issues for any month or year that you are interested in. In magazines, the basic record unit is the issue, and within a particular issue you can use the toolbar to • display one page at a time • display 2 pages • display thumbnails of all the pages in any issue. • go backward or forwards a page at a time • jump to any particular page There is also a contents dropdown box that allows you to jump to any article within a particular issue. It is also possible to search across all issues of a particular title, simply by checking the [search in all issues] box found on the left hand side of the page, and then entering your search term in the [search in this magazine] box. It is this feature that will perhaps be most useful for research. It is worth pointing out that the images in magazine content should be better than other Google Book Search content, since as Jim Gerber, director of content partnerships at Google, explains, many of the publishers ship hard copies of their magazine archives to Google, where 14 Resources for American Studies sheet-fed scanners perform the digitization, giving a better image that that obtained by using non-destructive scanning, which is the method used with the book materials obtained from library partners. (Currently, magazines like Jet and Ebony come into Google Book Search from the Publisher Partner side of Google, rather than from library partners, with Google offering free digitization)

Current content • Issues of Jet are available from 01 Nov 1951 – 20 Oct 2008 • Issues of Ebony are available from Nov 1959 – Nov 2008 • Issues of Ebony JR, a short-lived youth orientated publication, launched in 1973, are available from May 1973 – Oct 1985 • Issues of Black World/Negro Digest are available from Nov 1961– Apr 1976

Research potential The potential for research topics using these materials as primary sources seems almost limitless. Apart from the coverage of Civil Rights topics as noted above, the nature of these titles means they could be used to explore all areas of cultural, economic and social life. In music, for example, one could delve into back numbers to discover articles and reviews on topics such as record labels like Tamla Motown or Stax; musical genres such as Rap, Soul or Hip Hop; or to explore the careers of individual artists and groups as diverse as Stevie Wonder, the Jacksons, the Supremes, Sam Cooke, Otis Redding etc. In sport, you could look at individuals like Ali, Liston, Tiger Woods, Lee Elder, etc., or sports where African Americans made such an important contribution, such as baseball, basketball, American football, and track and field athletics. 15 Issue 62

Popular magazines in general can also provide endless opportunities to research areas like the history of advertising - because Google’s indexing of these titles picks up all the advertisements, you have a rich source to tap into, so that you can find out what cars people drove, what clothes they wore, what music they listened to, what films they watched, and what they ate and drank. So whether you are interested in the social, cultural, political or economic aspects of the African American experience in the latter half of the twentieth century, it is difficult to envisage not profiting from a look at these titles.

Future Developments and related titles • Later, these magazine articles will be available through the Google News Archive as well as the main Google search. • Pre-1960 issues of Ebony and Negro Digest will be available. • Currently, magazine articles appear with advertisements next to them, as with the regular Google Book Search, although there is apparently an option for publishers to opt out of this. Additionally, Google is planning to have a version of magazine search that can appear on a publishers own website for their own publications.4 Of related interest to those looking at American Studies are titles already available, such as Billboard (1942 –1999) and New York Magazine (1968

– 1997). Google are committed to expand their coverage of magazine content from a wide range of publications.

4 http://searchengineland.com/google-book-search-puts-magazines-online-15762, accessed on 04 July 09 16 Resources for American Studies ‘And if you come back I’ll shoot you...’: Collecting for an elections archive Philip Davies

It is rare that a UK citizen appears on an American presidential campaign button, but it happened in 2008. A ‘Kucinich for President’ button pictures the US Member of Congress for Ohio’s 10th District alongside his

English wife

Elizabeth.

The picture makes no attempt to disguise the fact that

Elizabeth is a head taller and 30 years younger than her husband. But the striking appearance of the politically and socially committed Mrs K is a small part of what was already an unusual campaign. As the youngest mayor of a major US city Kucinich took Cleveland, Ohio into financial default in the battle to protect the public ownership of the city’s electricity company. The cost of this stance was nearly two decades in the political wilderness before winning his congressional seat in 1996. The stands that he sees as progressive prompt observers to see him on the left of the

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Democratic Party. And in both 2004 and 2008 he has run campaigns for his party’s nomination as its presidential candidate.

A rich web of stories can be traced from the accumulated debris of US election campaigns. More than 300 different campaign buttons from the

2008 presidential campaign will be among the materials shortly to be added to the Philip and Rosamund Davies US Elections Archive in the

Harmsworth Library at Oxford University’s Rothermere American

Institute. On the Democratic side they remind of the candidacies, the wishful thoughts of hopefuls, or sometimes just supporters’ wishful thoughts about possibles who never actually declared their interest at all.

Senator John Edwards, more recently most known for an extramarital affair, is pictured with his wife and children on a button proclaiming that they should be ‘America’s First Family’. ‘For earth’s sake: Al Gore’, state some buttons promoting the former Vice President, and the appearance of

Senator Evan Bayh, then Senator Joe Biden, General Wesley Clark,

Governor Howard Dean, Senator Chris Dodd, Senator Russ Feingold,

Senator Mike Gravel, Governor Bill Richardson, Governor Tom Vilsack and Governor Mark Warner gives some idea of the talent pools from which the party traditionally draws its nominee.

In more than 50 different designs Hillary Clinton is presented not just as a candidate of women (including the inevitable appearance of a ‘Rosie the

Riveter’ image), but for Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, Hispanic-

Americans (in English and Spanish), Californians, Southerners, New

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Yorkers, New Jerseyans, the Hearing Impaired, Hippies, Labor, Teachers,

Deadheads, Lesbians/Gays/Bisexuals/ Transsexuals and of daughter

Chelsea (‘Vote for My Mom’). ‘Play it Safe’, with a very traditional baseball image, might have been aimed to raise concerns about the very non-traditional figure of Barack Obama. ‘Thank You New Hampshire’ and ‘I Found My Voice in New Hampshire’ refer directly to the role that state’s primary played in rescuing the Clinton campaign from a first round failure in Iowa, while the ‘Comeback Kid’ and ‘I’m in to win’ echo husband Bill’s campaign and express well the tenacity of her own.

The range of Republican hopefuls prompted pundits mistakenly to predict that party’s primary battle could last the longest. Many of the names on button indicate more hope than anything else. The supporters of

Bill Frist, Newt Gingrich, Chuck Hagel, George Pataki and Condoleezza

Rice failed to persuade them to declare as official candidates. George

Allen fell from presidential hopeful to rejected Senator when controversy emerged during his own 2006 re-election campaign. Jim Gilmore declared, but became an early casualty, withdrawing from the race six months before the primary season opened. Tommy Thompson left the race about the same time, after a poor showing in an Iowa straw poll. Sam

Brownback lasted three months longer. After nearly three years campaigning Tom Tancredo pulled out of the race just days before the

Iowa caucus. Duncan Hunter did not last through January 2008. Of those

Republicans left competing for the party imprimatur the 1988 Libertarian

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Party nominee for the presidency, Ron Paul, retained a faithful band of followers, but never enough to challenge successfully for the Republican nomination. Fred Thompson’s button reference to his TV career (‘Elect the D.A.’) rather than to his period as a US Senator did not save his campaign. And the button claiming ‘Floridians for Giuliani’ proved totally incorrect and identified the central flaw of that failed campaign. The clean cut appearance of Mitt Romney and the ‘Aw Shucks, Vote for Huck’ slogan of Mike Huckabee appealed to different and competing factions within the Republican party but these divisions did not elongate the campaign as much as had been expected.

The slogans on buttons for the Republican nominee stress that this

‘Straight Talking’

‘American Hero’,

a ‘Man from the

West’ and

‘Senator, Soldier,

Statesman’

supported by

‘Veterans’, ‘Sportsmen’ (code for gun owners) and ‘Southerners’ will be

‘Ready from Day One’ with ‘Experience, Leadership, Integrity’ to

‘Restore Faith and Trust’ while putting ‘Country First’ and remaining

‘Israel’s Best Friend’. Supporters of potential vice presidential nominees often create buttons pairing their prospect with the putative leader, but a

20 Resources for American Studies mistake in 2008 had McCain elevated to be the companion of Christ, rather than being paired with the more electorally eligible Florida Governor

Charlie Crist. The nomination of Sarah Palin gave an opportunity for another version of ‘Rosie the Riveter’, as well as the chance to re-stress

McCain’s cross-party credentials, with the label ‘The Maverick and the

Barracuda’, though ‘Elect Gidget and the Geezer’ seems to encompass a more ironic appeal.

Candidates other than Republicans and Democrats get on the ballot, though they generally attract less funding, produce fewer campaign materials, and their distribution networks are weaker. Former Democrat, former Republican, now Independent Mayor Mike Bloomberg of New

York City was not persuaded to run for the presidency in 2008, though his support was evidenced in a number of buttons. Brian Moore and Stewart

Alexander were the nominees of the Socialist Party of the USA, on the ballot in eight states, including Vermont where they appeared as the

Liberty Union party’s candidates. Gene Amondson and Leroy Pletten became the 2008 Prohibition Party candidates, appearing on the ballot in three states. Cynthia McKinney, who had been, as a Democrat, the first

African American woman from Georgia elected to the US Congress, ran for the White House as the Green Party candidate in 2008. The nominees of other small political parties who appeared on the 2008 USA ballot are not yet represented in this collection.

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Barack Obama’s

victory is reflected in

approximately one

hundred different

button designs. The

overriding impression

is upbeat. A smiling

Obama is associated

repeatedly with positive expressions about the future. ‘Change we can believe in’, ‘Hope,

Action, Change’, ‘Change for the Better’, ‘Together we can Change

America’ and, with the more sombre portrait that became a kind of brand in the later stages of the campaign, just ‘Hope’. The standard state and regional endorsements can be found, from ‘North Carolina’,

‘Michiganders’, ‘Texans’, ‘Southerners’ (again), ‘Californians’,

‘Pennsylvania’, ‘New York’ and claiming him as a ‘Georgia Peach’.

Groups on the buttons for Obama include ‘Soccer Moms’, ‘Labor’, ‘Rural

Americans’, ‘Catholics’, and more specifically, ‘Progressive Catholics’.

The ‘Obama Mama’, and ‘Kid for Obama’ is joined by ‘White Older

Women’ (WOW), and there are buttons in Chinese and Vietnamese. The buttons look to history, with images of Lincoln, Martin Luther King, the

Kennedys, at the same time as stressing the age difference between the

Democrat and his Republican opponent: ‘A New Generation for America’.

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Unusually among these 2008 buttons policy features in the Obama selection as in ‘It’s the Economy’, ‘Healthcare for All’ and ‘Protecting Our

Environment’. And on the inauguration buttons there emerges an appeal for a broad national vision: ‘Not Red States or Blue States ... “United”

States’, and ‘A President for All Americans’.

US election campaigns are fought with all kinds of weapons, and an

Obama doll, Obama playing cards, Hillary nutcrackers, George Bush squidgy ball and a variety of campaign tee shirts will join the existing archive. Many of these are produced by private entrepreneurs, entering the market with an eye to which candidates will provide them with the best sales for their promotional items. The very earliest US election campaigns attracted this kind of participation. In 1789 button makers in New York and Connecticut commemorated the first presidency under the new US

Constitution on their wares. These were actual buttons, not the pin-back badges that the American language now terms buttons. They were presumably meant to be sewn to some clothing (perhaps a waistcoat) in celebration of the election result. The known designs from that first election include one bearing the inscription ‘Long Live the President’, another showing an endless chain of thirteen links, each bearing the initials of one of the thirteen original states, surrounding the initials ‘GW’, and a third, picturing an eagle and a sunrise, reputed to have been worn by

Washington at his inauguration. Elections continue to provide a valuable opportunity for profits to be made and closely fought races with popular

23 Issue 62 candidates stimulate speculation into all kinds of favours and souvenirs.

Over production can benefit the collector after the election has finished, and this too is no new aspect of the business. An advertisement on 10

November 1852 by a Hartford, Connecticut medallion seller referring to the election that had taken place days before noted, ‘Pierce and Scott selling at a discount’.

The official campaigns of the various candidates do produce their own buttons, to be sold for fund-raising, or handed out to encourage loyalty to the ticket, and both official campaign headquarters and state elections offices are responsible for the range of posters, leaflets, sample ballots and examples of canvassing sheets from the 2008 campaign that will also be added to the existing stock in the archive. Federal Election law demands that all election material produced by the campaigns or by the parties has its originator clearly identified. The canvassing sheets come from my two days with the Obama campaign in New Hampshire during the final weekend of the race. We were in a fairly rural area, but on the whole the reception was positive, or at least polite. Just one householder was incensed at the very mention of Obama’s name. Her anger increased rapidly as her speech accelerated, climaxing on, ‘If he were here I would shoot him. And if you come back I’ll shoot you too.’ For someone whose many years studying the USA have dispelled many prejudices, but confirmed a few, there was something exquisite about this moment, even as we put the car sharply into reverse.

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Other materials in the archive also come from the 2008 campaigns in New

Hampshire, including posters retrieved the day after the election. I particularly like the one in Republican Senator John Sununu’s campaign colours saying ‘Stand with Bush, Stick with Sununu’ – a man who went down true to his principles, I thought to myself before getting close enough to see the small print indicating that this poster was ‘Paid for by the New

Hampshire Democratic Party’.

Friends, colleagues, candidates and campaigners have contributed to the archive. Some of these have helped repeatedly and I can imagine the sigh of recognition each election season when I ask them to help again. Like the voter in New Hampshire, they may wish I would not come back, but instead they continue to support the collection. One item received from such a source is the official 2008 ballot for Leicester, Vermont which lists eight pairs of candidates for President/Vice President, six candidates for 25 Issue 62

US Congress, seven candidates for Governor, four candidates for

Lieutenant Governor, three for State Treasurer, four for Secretary of State, three for Auditor of Accounts, four for Attorney General, two for State

Senator (for two positions), two for State Representative and one for High

Bailiff. A voter who exercises all her choices, without abstaining, may vote in 387,072 permutations. In case that is not enough choice, there is also a ‘Write-in’ line provided on the ballot. Not knowing what a High

Bailiff was for, I wrote to the Governor of Vermont and received the reply that this was the office holder who had the power to arrest a Sheriff if that need arose. The Lord Mayor of Leicester, UK tells me that the same holds in his fiefdom. That similarity notwithstanding, my ballot generally affords me but one pencilled cross.

The archive in Oxford holds examples of materials from US elections at all of these levels: local, state and national, and from a variety of minor political parties and independent candidacies as well as the two main parties. The materials are drawn from many different states of the union, and from a range of dates. By far the majority of the material comes from elections from the late 1970s to the present, but there are some earlier items in the collection, the oldest being a William Henry Harrison medallion of 1840. The Rothermere American Institute is in the early stages of planning an event to take place in 2010 focussing on the US elections archive. Perhaps it will be an opportunity to produce its own campaign button.

26 Resources for American Studies Using the Internet for American Studies

Bella Adams with R. J. Ellis

For American Studies students and academics in the UK, the development of the World Wide Web in the 1990s has undoubtedly made researching the US easier, offering, as it does, open access to freely- available information (as was intended at the Web’s inception). Whether mainstream or more obscure, scholarly texts and an ever-expanding variety of primary resources (such as archives, facsimiles and images) are often only a 'click' away. As Sue Currell puts it, for the study of the US as a geographical, political, social and cultural space,

… the Internet can provide immediate access to local news (http://www.refdesk.com/paper.html), cultural events, previously inaccessible archives (e.g., http://www.archives.gov/index.html, or http://www.baas.ac.uk/resources/archives/archives.asp) and statistical data, such as [US Government and Federal statistics] (http://www.usa.gov/Topics/Reference_Shelf/Data.shtml; http://www.fedstats.gov/). To provide central access to relevant sites and serving as a hub for the exchange of current pedagogical information in American Studies, the Crossroads website (http://crossroads.georgetown.edu/) is

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a central point of information for American Studies teachers.5

The current world leader in Internet search engines, Google, gives access to such resources through a basic web search facility (http://www.google.co.uk/), based upon simple usage criteria, though with some weighting introduced via commercial link-ups. But the results, particularly if the search lacks specificity, can run into many millions of items. Google results are also indiscriminate, with no distinction made between irrelevant, inappropriate or unreliable sources and more rigorous, reliable and scholarly information sources. It is this lack of distinction, and the lack of time and/or the wherewithal to make such distinctions, that worries academics and even – though not often enough – their students as well. While Google does offer more specialised search tools, for example, Google Scholar and Google Book Search (http://scholar.google.co.uk/; http://books.google.com/), there is still a tendency among many students to resort to a basic Google web search that (for example) typically gives Wikipedia as the first, or at least a top result. This resource may be checked by volunteers and strives, if not always successfully, for neutrality and reliability, but all of us have come across its limitations.6 Like the Internet, Wikipedia demands a 'developed sense of judgement and [an] understanding of bias'. Indeed, both need to be approached in 'a constructive and critical manner'.7 However, Internet research skills are rarely taught with sufficient depth to American Studies students, not least because their lecturers often lack the skills or time to teach ICT. Students

5 See Sue Currell, ‘American Studies and the Internet’, http://www.llas.ac.uk/resources/gpg/422, accessed July 2009. 6 On the question of reliability, with specific reference to vandalism, see BAAS Panel, 'Google Scholarship, WikiScholarship: A Roundtable Discussion', Resources for American Studies: The Journal of the British Association for American Studies Library and Resources Sub-Committee 60 (2007), pp. 4-7. 7 BAAS Panel, 'Google Scholarship, WikiScholarship', pp. 3, 16. 28 Resources for American Studies thus risk falling into a number of easily-avoided 'traps', which may see them receiving poor grades because 'they rely too heavily on search engines or wikis for their research and miss key academic sources, or because they do not evaluate the information they find online and cite inappropriate sources'.8 The 'Internet for American Studies' tutorial, developed with Intute’s guidance and based on its experience, on feedback and on its evolving template, is designed to help students in further and higher education avoid these traps by developing Internet research skills in a systematic way, and one that has the added advantage of being highly useful not only for their studies but also for their employment prospects. The 'Internet for American Studies' tutorial is part of the Virtual Training Suite (VTS) offered by Intute, a service that began life in 2000. Funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), Intute is a consortium of seven British universities, including Bristol, Manchester and Oxford, that work in partnership with others (for example, in the Arts and Humanities with the Archaeology Data Service, the Higher Education Academy’s English Subject Centre and Subject Centre for Philosophical and Religious Studies, the Institute of Historical Research, the Senate House Library, University of London, and the South Asia Archive and Library Group) to deliver … a free online service providing access to the very best of web resources for education and research. All material is evaluated and selected by a network of subject specialists to create the Intute database …. The Intute database makes it possible to discover the best and most relevant resources in one easily accessible place. You can explore and discover trusted information, assured that it has been evaluated by specialists for its quality and relevance.9

8 'Welcome to the Internet for American Studies', http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk/tutorial/americanstudies, accessed July 2009. 9 'About Intute', http://www.intute.ac.uk/about.html, accessed July 2009. 29 Issue 62

The Intute database is divided into four Subject Groups: 'Arts and Humanities', 'Health and Life Sciences', 'Science, Engineering and Technology' and 'Social Sciences.' Browsing 'American Studies' in 'Arts and Humanities' currently produces 572 results, from the Arkansas Slave Narratives to Zora Neale Hurston. All results are annotated, and the site provides a 'rate this resource' facility. For example:

"Them dark days": the Arkansas slave narratives "Them Dark Days" is published on the Old State House Museum website, which is devoted to recording and publishing resources on Arkansas history. "Them Dark Days" is a database of transcribed slave narratives that were gathered from 1940-41 by the Works Progress Administration as part of the New Deal. The narratives cover all aspects of slave life, including everyday life, marriage, miscegenation, religion, escape and abuse. The narratives can be searched by keyword, or browsed by the interviewees surname or by topic. Most of the narratives discuss life in Arkansas just prior to and during the American Civil War, and life during Reconstruction. http://www.oldstatehouse.com/exhibits/virtual/slave_narratives.asp. 10

Teaching students how to find these scholarly resources via Intute and other websites is the focal point of the Intute Virtual Training Suite (VTS), which includes the 'Internet for American Studies' tutorial. Taking about one hour to complete, this tutorial is divided into four main sections: • TOUR – the best of the Web for American Studies; • DISCOVER – how to find information online; • JUDGE – which internet resources are appropriate for university work;

10 'Them Dark Days: The Arkansas Slave Narratives', http://www.intute.ac.uk/cgi- in/search.pl?term1=arkansas++slave++narratives, accessed July 2009.

30 Resources for American Studies

• SUCCESS – an example of a student using the Internet for research. All four sections feature links to important websites in American Studies that can be accessed immediately or saved and explored later via its 'Links Basket' facility.

Crucially, however, the 'Internet for American Studies' tutorial is much more than an annotated list of links. It is also a source of information about the process of academic research, including peer review, academic publishing and others forms of scholarly communication. This information is further reinforced in the 'discover' and 'judge' sections of the tutorial, both of which aim to include students in the process of academic research by developing their skills in finding relevant and reliable information on the Internet that are appropriate for academic work. In the longest section of the tutorial, the 'tour', students can visit ten main sites:

• Educational materials gives free access to a range of online textbooks and reference books from academic and commercial sources, as well as course materials and other elearning materials • Primary and secondary sources features a range of links to academic, commercial and library sites that also aims to

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reflect the multidisciplinary nature of American Studies, for example, film, history, literature and politics • Electronic journals mainly references a selection of journals that are free to access, as well as including a section on newsletters by organizations and societies important to American Studies Of the remaining seven sites - Bibliographic databases, Library catalogues, Specialist internet research tools, Professional organisations, Conference and events, Social media and News and media – students keen to learn more about the American Studies community will find the links to important conferences, as well as American Studies blogs and social networks particularly useful. After all, similar to real tutorials, the 'Internet for American Studies' virtual tutorial recognizes the importance of not only finding relevant information but sharing it as well.11

11 The internet is also, of course, ‘a tool for communication between students and researchers, or … a site for dissemination of information and new ideas as well as a point to access them

(for some examples of online syllabi see: http://crossroads.georgetown.edu/webcourses.html).

With this in mind, the end goal of many Internet projects is the presentation of findings to a community of scholars (for example, in the form of an online exhibition) as much as the discovery of previously inaccessible information sources. A useful set of examples on a variety of pedagogical uses of technology is available at http://www.umuc.edu/virtualteaching/module1/strategies.html. The Internet is also being used to establish contact with overseas scholars and institutions so that studies can be placed in a global context. Academic discussion groups exist for many topics/fields. Most of these have searchable archives that students can access without joining the mailing list – making available the discussions of specialists and experts in the field. To search for collections of

US based discussion groups click on the H-Net group of lists at http://www2.h- 32 Resources for American Studies

Once students have seen the ten sites, ideally whilst also saving important references in their 'Links Basket', they can move onto the more interactive parts of the tutorial: 'discover' and 'judge.' In the 'discover' section students learn more about where best to find relevant information, for example, in course handbooks, library catalogues and on the 'Hidden Web.' 'Discover' also refers to other, newer ways of finding information via social bookmarking, along with instructing students about how information can be delivered to them through RSS newsfeeds and alerts. While students do make use of these sources for their research, more typical perhaps is their use of the open web; this tutorial teaches them the importance of more frequently using the more specialized methods. The 'Internet for American Studies' tutorial identifies three search tools, specifically, a Google Scholar search, an Intute search and a basic Google web search, for use on the open web, also identifying their pros and cons. The advantages of using an Intute search in terms of the manageability, appropriateness and reliability of the results, in contrast to those produced by a basic Google web search, are reinforced on the

net.msu.edu/lists/. As well as becoming a teaching tool, the Internet has introduced new topics for consideration by the academic community in all disciplines. These include issues of pedagogy (see, for example, the Visible Knowledge Project at http://crossroads.georgetown.edu/vkp/), questions relating to information technology and power, the analysis of visual culture, electronic communities, hypertextual narratives and cyberculture (see the Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies at: http://www.com.washington.edu/rccs/)’. Sue Currell, op. cit. To this need to be added the increasingly valuable resources offered by blogs – at least, for some (mostly contemporary)

American Studies topics.

33 Issue 62 interactive 'Try it!' pages. Here, students are asked to enter 'Mark Twain' into the three different kinds of search tools and compare the results. A further way students can refine their search strategy is by identifying the best keywords and search terms to use, with the final 'Try it!' helping to draw their attention to the fact that a basic search produces different results depending on how keywords are presented using 'and', 'or' and inverted commas. The 'judge' section of the tutorial continues the interactive theme through the use of quizzes in response to questions about the appropriateness and reliability of online sources for academic work. This section is organised around three key questions identified by Intute as the 'WWW technique: Who? What? When?' This technique is intended to refine students' analytical skills by asking them to consider three main points. Firstly, the status of the author, publisher and reviewer. Can they trust the source of the information? The tutorial also features a quiz about how understanding the component parts of web addresses (URLs), particularly organisational codes and country codes, can help students judge the value of an online source for academic work. Secondly, the resource’s relevance, validity, accuracy, and bias and the evidence used in the resource. Can students trust the content of the resource? Thirdly, the date of publication. Does the date the information was produced and published affect its value? The final section of the tutorial, 'Success', gives a practical example of a student using the Internet for an assignment on Spike Lee's 1989 film, Do the Right Thing. It is written with an understanding that however much lecturers try to encourage students to use academic websites, the temptation for students to do a quick Internet search using Google and Wikipedia is sometimes too strongly felt. In this example, neither a basic Google web search nor Wikipedia yield particularly useful results for Do 34 Resources for American Studies the Right Thing. The student is thus forced to utilize knowledge gained in the 'Internet for American Studies' tutorial and to develop a search strategy more likely to deliver relevant and reliable information appropriate for academic work. On the 'Finally' page of the 'Success' section within the 'Internet for American Studies' tutorial there is a feedback form. We should deliberately encourage American Studies students to complete this form, especially as the Intute VTS team seem to respond positively to reviewer feedback. The ‘Notes to VTS authors’ that were used when writing the 'Internet for American Studies' tutorial, for Intute, for example, highlighted the changes made to this tutorial’s template to make it more student- friendly without compromising academic content. It is also hoped that the 'Internet for American Studies' tutorial is lecturer-friendly. We will certainly be citing it in our American Studies module handbooks, if only to avoid phrases that we seem to repeat a little too often and a little too forgettably: ‘“.com” is a commercial site, while “.ac.uk” and “.edu” are academic sites, and so are more appropriate to scholarly work' or 'Wikipedia is not a scholarly source. By all means use it has a starting point for your research, by consulting and researching the bibliography, but it does have issues over its reliability.' In addition to its relevance for teaching and learning, you may even find the 'Internet for American Studies' tutorial useful for your own research. It has certainly allowed us to refresh our knowledge of American Studies sites, particularly with respect to social media. We hope that if we have learnt more about American Studies from researching the Intute database, then some others will, too, but by completing the tutorial. It is, we hope, a valuable resource for the American Studies community. Intute have also indicated their preparedness to support a fundamental increase in the number of sites that browsing 'American Studies' in 'Arts and Humanities' realizes. Instead of only producing 572 results (as is currently the case) Intute wants the American Studies community to 35 Issue 62 provide examples of good web resources that deserve listing. These will be subjected to a review process (using a panel of referees).

flickr.com/photos/cainandtoddbenson/3530131102/

If you have examples of sites that you believe deserve to be added, do email [email protected] with a title and the URL, and, preferably, a short paragraph detailing why the resource is of value.

Go on: do it now! Another valuable resource for our students (and even ourselves) could then result.

36 Resources for American Studies Vere Harmsworth Library, Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford University Jane Rawson

The Vere Harmsworth Library houses the University of Oxford’s collections relating to the United States. It was opened in 2001 as part of the new Rothermere American Institute, an international centre of excellence dedicated to the interdisciplinary and comparative study of the

United States, and is managed as part of Oxford University Library

Services.

The core of the collection was originally housed in the Bodleian

Library of Commonwealth and African Studies at Rhodes House, prior to the opening of the new Institute. The collection focuses predominantly on the history – social, economic and political – of the United States from colonial times to the present day, and comprises some 200,000+ volumes in print and microform. Our holdings are particularly strong for the

American Revolution, slavery and secession, Lincoln and the Civil War, the Progressive Era, New Deal, 1960s and Nixon. We also have a substantial collection of government documents, including the

Congressional Record and 19th century volumes of the Serial Set, as well as a large number of printed Congressional committee hearings and reports from the mid 20th century. Our holdings of primary sources and newspapers in microform and online is ever-growing; major acquisitions in 37 Issue 62 the last few years include the James Buchanan Papers, the Papers of the

NAACP, Diplomatic Instructions of the Department of State 1801-1906, and online access to the Evans collection of Early American Imprints,

Declassified Documents Reference System, American Periodicals Series

1740-1900, and historical archives of the New York Times, Washington

Post and Chicago Defender. The Library is also home to the Philip and

Rosamund Davies US Elections Archive, a rich and growing collection of campaign materials and ephemera. For more information on our collections, please see the collections guides on our website.

Over the last few years, the library has been at the forefront of the web 2.0 movement within Oxford libraries, expanding our web presence beyond our own site to provide new services and connect with users elsewhere on the internet. We have a page on Facebook, a news blog and a Twitter presence, and also a page on delicious.com where we are saving links to free web resources relating to US studies. This last has proved particularly useful as a way to gather together some of the many sites on the web that provide a wealth of primary sources for Americanists, both to help us as staff in responding to enquiries but also to recommend to users who are often bewildered by the vast amount of information that a simple

Google search can produce. In addition, we upload our new accessions onto LibraryThing each month as well as listing them on our website.

Exploring the potential and practicalities of web 2.0 tools has been an interesting experiment – finding out what works (how much easier some of

38 Resources for American Studies these tools can make tasks, such as distributing news to many places at once via the blog and RSS feeds, and using delicious instead of a manually-compiled links list on our website), and what doesn’t (expecting users to contribute or use these tools to comment, feedback and discuss).

It has also raised the profile of the Vere Harmsworth Library within the library service as we have shared our experiences with other librarians in

Oxford.

Another current highlight for the library is an exhibition of materials from both here and the Bodleian relating to Abraham Lincoln, running throughout the summer to accompany a major conference held at the RAI to celebrate the bicentenary of his birth. The conference explored the global influence of Lincoln, and so the materials included in the exhibition were chosen to illustrate how Lincoln was perceived abroad, with examples from Britain, Ireland, Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia,

Russia, Japan and elsewhere. This is the latest in a series of exhibitions relating to events at the Rothermere American Insitute and in the United

States more generally. In previous years we have displayed facsimiles of the Camp David Accords and preparatory notes (provided by the Carter

Library in Georgia) to coincide with President Carter’s visit to the Institute in 2007, and books and news clippings in the run up to the 2008

Presidential Election.

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The Vere Harmsworth Library exists primarily to support the community of US studies researchers throughout the University – academics, graduate students and visiting Fellows associated with the

Rothermere American Institute. However it is open to anyone with an interest in US studies, and we are happy to welcome researchers from elsewhere any time. For more information, please visit our website.

Links

• Website: http://www.ouls.ox.ac.uk/vhl

• Rothermere American Institute: http://www.rai.ox.ac.uk

• Oxford University Library Services:

http://www.ouls.ox.ac.uk

• SOLO (Oxford libraries union catalogue):

http://solo.ouls.ox.ac.uk

• Blog: http://vereharmsworthlibrary.blogspot.com

• Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Oxford-United-

Kingdom/Vere-Harmsworth-Library/9212837151

• Twitter: http://twitter.com/vhllib

• Delicious: http://delicious.com/vhllib

• LibraryThing: http://www.librarything.com/catalog/vhllib

40 Resources for American Studies The African American Experience database (Greenwood): A report from The John Rylands Library at The University of Manchester Rose Goodier

Greenwood’s African American Experience database, purchased by The

John Rylands Library at The University of Manchester in 2007, has proved to be an increasingly popular e-resource. It is used extensively by students of English and American Studies at The University of Manchester. The first database to have been published in Greenwood’s American Mosaic series, it provides wide coverage of a range of topics relating to African

American culture and history.

More than 35,000 articles from over 450 sources are available on the database, along with more than 4,000 primary documents and over 1800 images. The inclusion of early texts dating back to the beginning of the nineteenth century makes this database a particularly rich information resource in the field of American history and heritage studies. The

41 Issue 62 publisher’s introduction draws attention to the inclusion of “a wealth of primary sources” in which African Americans speak for themselves.

These primary sources have the potential to be of considerable value to researchers, including, as they do, more than 4,000 narratives and interviews with former slaves, collected by the Work Projects

Administration between 1936 and 1938. Known as the WPA Slave

Narratives, they were originally published as an 18 volume set by

Greenwood Press in the 1970s. First hand accounts of social injustices, social customs and living conditions are presented, and as the interviews were recorded in dialect, researchers can also gain a perspective of the variations in spoken language used at the time of recording.

Other useful and fascinating primary sources range from a digitized version of Quotations in Black by Anita King, being a list of popular quotations arranged by country of origin, to Acts of the Anti-slavery

Apostles by Parker Pillsbury. A variety of traditional recipes are listed, along with song lyrics, political tracts and fables.

Some examples of our own students’ queries to the Library which were resolved by searching this database, along with other resources, include:

• An undergraduate student researching the topic of how the wives

of white plantation owners were perceived by the slave

population in the American Southern states.

42 Resources for American Studies

• A postgraduate looking into the influence of African American

folk tales on modern American Literature

• An undergraduate researching the changing nature of hip hop

music and culture over the past decade

Comments on the database by our students have been generally favourable.

The uncluttered layout is popular and our customers have commented that it is generally easy to use, interesting, diverse and well-designed.

Resources for American Studies is also available online at the BAAS website: www.baas.ac.uk – follow the links for Resources