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Archival research: the thrill of the hunt
Things slow down in the archives. It's best to love that part of archival research. It's about hunting and finding the unexpected. Archival research takes patience, curiosity, perseverance, and an appreciation of the uniqueness of items from the past. Because researchers do not generally have access to where the items are stored, it's a good idea to be friendly with your archivist (probably an introvert) and not piss them off!
Before you head into the archives, you'll be in a good place if you've thought ahead and done some preparation. They shouldn't be doing the thinking for you, their job is to bring you items that you've asked for, or to help you connect the dots and brainstorm for other items, or other ways of looking for them. Despite their obsession with keeping things in order and accessible, they can be true out-of-the-box-thinkers.
They love smiles and thank you's :)
Engagement & Curriculum Collection Librarian
Archives at Murphy Library
Where are the archives at UWL?
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The archives on campus are in the Murphy Library building, across the lobby from the main library. When you are in the lobby, look for room 155 Special Collections/Area Research Center. There is a doorbell near the door, which you must push and then wait for the door to click open. Because of the nature of the "special" collections here, all coats and backpacks must be left in the entryway. You will be asked to register (only once) and then sign in. You can take in camera, computers, paper, and pencils. They have separate hours (M-F 9:30 am-12 pm and 1:00-5:00 pm; Wed eve 7:00-9:00 pm. No weekend hours). Here is their website. |
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What can you find in the archives?
Archival collections are very eclectic and therefore very challenging to classify. In Murphy Library, the archival collections are housed in the Special Collections/Area Research Center (ARC) part of the building. You can find all kinds of unique and rare historic items in all kinds of formats (photographs, posters, books, magazines, poetry, handwritten items, newspaper clippings, brochures, manuscript collections, business papers, yearbooks, handbooks, club papers, faculty papers, etc) that cover subjects created by people living in this local area from the 1850's to the present time.
In looking for protest rhetoric, it's best to keep an open mind and be creative about where you could find such language, because it can be found all over. Because the general public does not have physical access to the content, which is protected behind closed doors, you'll have to think about what kinds of collections you might want to browse. There is not a clear "protest" collection.
The library homepage search box is a good place to start. Think of your search terms and or an author, and try different ones.
One local author who has written about La Crosse history in the 20th century is Susan Hessel. She published a book called A history of La Crosse, Wisconsin in the twentieth century : reinventing La Crosse again and again.
Browsing through it would give you a sense of historic movements or events in La Crosse. From there, you could jot down a list of topics and ask one of staff in the archives for anything related to this topic. With some luck, you might find some textual protest rhetoric.
Here is how a general search for other things she has written would look:
UWL Murphy Library has digitized some archival collections, so you can browse them from the comfort of your couch or coffee shop. Here is how you would find UWL's Digital Collections on the library website:
Digitized Example: The Cuban refugees near La Crosse
Let's take the Cuban refugee crisis of 1980, when The Freedom Flotilla, also known as the Mariel Boatlift, occurred in 1980 after President Carter opened the doors to the United States for hundreds of thousands of Cuban refugees, of which nearly 15,000 would eventually arrive at the resettlement camp at Fort McCoy in Western Wisconsin. Countless regional and national news articles were published following and highlighting both the positive and negative events that followed, many of whom were classified as criminals under the Fidel Castro government. This collection contains photographs that were taken by journalists reporting on the “Cuban Odyssey,” most of whom worked for the La Crosse Tribune, bringing together nearly 250 images of individuals and events directly involved with the Freedom Flotilla.
If you went into the archives, and ask for anything on this topic, they'd bring you the actual photos (that are now digitized) and news articles, pamphlets, and other items they may have. Even if you don't see any textually based protest rhetoric in the photos, you may find something in the "vertical file" that they will bring you, which will be a paper file with textual based items.
Example: 1969 UWL student protests & student newspaper crisis
In 1969, with the Vietnam War protests growing nation-wide, UWL student editor Janel Bladow, of the student-run newspaper, The Racquet, published an article taken from another newspaper in California in the December 12, 1969 issue. The article's apparition created a black lash of trouble for both the student editor and the faculty advisor, Joseph Zobin. Campus President Sam Gates made the unpopular and punitive decision to take away the student newspaper from the student body, and put it under the direct management of the new Communications Department.
You can read many weeks of strongly written editorials and articles in The Racquet, either in the physical copies in Special Collections, or from the digitized copies online. There are also oral histories with the faculty advisor Zobin, student editor Bladow, and President Gates. Other protest rhetoric can be found in student org meeting minutes and files.
Example: Children's books on social justice issues
Children's picture books are another source of protest rhetoric. From picture books to non-fiction and informational books, subjects that have traditionally been ignored, or simply intentionally not treated, in order to protect the young and innocent are now flourishing, as seen in recent publishing trends (both in mainstream as well as independent publishers).
Some of these subjects cover death, divorce, illness, grief, incarceration, domestic violence, sexual orientation, all of the -isms (sexism, racism, etc), religion, poverty, diversity, to name a few, that now challenge librarians, teachers, parents, care-givers, and children to confront and become comfortable with new ways of looking at societal and human conditions.
It is especially interesting to consider the language and messages in international children's books as protest rhetoric, because of the variety of perspectives on any of the subjects mentioned above.
Example: Postcards
Ideas and suggestions for sources from the La Crosse area and UWL
The first step is to have a loose working sense of how items are arranged in the archives in Murphy, then choose a topic that you'd like to investigate, then to consider different formats. There are many things that are not indexed or cataloged, so it's best to work with your friendly librarian, who has access to the strange organizational system and a very strong sixth sense.
How the Murphy archival collections are arranged
Behind the closed doors, items are usually kept either by format or by collection. If you don't work there, it's difficult to explain and not worth anyone's time to read about here, so what you need to know is that you should ask the staff there if they have anything about your topic. They will know to check all kinds of formats for you.
Topics to consider
- National movements on a local level (Prohibition, WWI, WWII, the Vietnam War, Civil Rights, Women's Movement, refugee crises, etc)
- Local manufacturing that might have led to movements or strikes (breweries, The La Crosse Rubber Mills, The Pearl Button Company, Gundersen Lutheran, etc)
- Local conflicts based on race, religion, politics, gender, etc.
Formats
- Photographs and postcards
- School yearbooks
- Student organization files
- Personal letter collections
- Business collections
- Oral histories
- Newspapers
- Children's books
Example: The Martindale sisters letter collection
The Katharine Martindale Family Papers is a very large collection of personal correspondence among family members of a one of the oldest and most prominent families of La Crosse, the Martindale family. Letters between two of the sisters, Katharine and Henrietta, show protest rhetoric in handwritten form. These two young women lived at the beginning of the 20th century, when women were pushing boundaries against society and traditional family structure. Henrietta was the entrepreneurial free spirit sister, and Katharine the dutiful peace keeper who gave up a career to return home and take care of the family. Here is a website to explore and see images of letters and photos of the people who wrote them.
Here are a few examples of what kinds of themes appear in the letters: a young woman voicing her opinion about the U.S.A. entering WWI, her inability to conform to how she thinks early 20th century society and her parents want her to be, WI politics at the time, her driving desire to carve our her own destiny, her questionable life choices, single mothers living before the time of the Welfare Program.
Example: 1920 strikes at the Rubber Mills factory in La Crosse
There were violent city-wide strikes in La Crosse in 1920. The Rubber Mills, a factory that had employed generations of La Crosse citizens, was no exception. You can find contextual background information and other primary source material, such as this oral history (transcribed and recorded). Further searching will bring you images or protest signs and other written information in the vertical files, found in Special Collections.
Searching guidelines:
From there...
Example: Local events or news items
The Ten Commandments monument in La Crosse's public park, Cameron Park, has had a long history of conflict in La Crosse. Stakeholders on both sides have protested the presence of the monument since it was first set up. The issues of free speech, religion, separation of state and church have consistently been brought up, protested, defended, and interpreted in courts at various levels. 
Other examples
Other Digitized Collections
Free Online Digitized Collections
- Digital Public Library of AmericaThe Digital Public Library of America brings together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world. Far more than a search engine, the portal provides innovative ways to search and scan through the united collection of millions of items, including by timeline, map, format, subject, and partner.
- Duke U Women's Liberation Movement Print CultureThis collection contains manifestos, speeches, essays, and other materials documenting various aspects of the Women's Movement in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. The Women's Liberation Movement refers to a series of campaigns for reforms on issues such as reproductive rights, domestic violence, and equal pay. Feminist print culture, such as the examples provided in the collection, supported and sustained the Women¹s Movement and connect it to other movements for social justice. The newly launched collection includes image scans of all documents and is full-text searchable. Photographs, flyers, planning documents, and responses to the 1968 and 1969 Miss America pageant protests, which launched Women's Liberation in the public consciousness, have been added to the collection.
- EuropeanaThe material you find here comes from galleries, libraries, archives and museums from all over Europe that want to share their collections with a wider audience, whether it is for work, learning, or just to enjoy.
- Harvard U Chilean Protest MuralsMany hundreds of protest murals were created in Chile during the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990). The photographer Andrés Romero Spethman worked alongside muralist brigades representing political parties such as the Partido Socialista and the Izquierda Cristiana. Created in and around Santiago between 1983 and 1990, the murals document the spirit, force, and iconography of political protest during an important period of Chilean history. Common pictorial themes were the Moneda Palace in flames, images of the deposed president Salvador Allende, the martyred musician Víctor Jara and the poet Pablo Neruda. Most of these murals were destroyed by government authorities soon after their creation. Andrés Romero Spethman's negatives have been cataloged and digitized and are available through VIA.
- Library of Congress American MemoryAmerican Memory provides free and open access through the Internet to written and spoken words, sound recordings, still and moving images, prints, maps, and sheet music that document the American experience. It is a digital record of American history and creativity. These materials, from the collections of the Library of Congress and other institutions, chronicle historical events, people, places, and ideas that continue to shape America, serving the public as a resource for education and lifelong learning.
- Library of Congress Digital CollectionsThe Library of Congress has made digitized versions of collection materials available online since 1994, concentrating on its most rare collections and those unavailable anywhere else. The following services are your gateway to a growing treasury of digitized photographs, manuscripts, maps, sound recordings, motion pictures, and books, as well as "born digital" materials such as Web sites. In addition, the Library maintains and promotes the use of digital library standards and provides online research and reference services.
The Library provides one of the largest bodies of noncommercial high-quality content on the Internet. By providing these materials online, those who may never come to Washington can gain access to the treasures of the nation’s library. Such online access also helps preserve rare materials that may be too fragile to handle. - Library of Congress National Women's Party ProtestsThis collection includes 448 digitized photographs selected from approximately 2,650 print photographs in the Records of the National Woman's Party, a collection of more than 438,000 items, housed in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress. The images span from 1875 to 1938 but largely were created in the years between 1913 and 1922. The images depict the tactics used by the militant wing of the suffrage movement in the United States—including picketing, petitioning, pageants, parades and demonstrations, hunger strikes and imprisonment---as well as individual portraits of organization leaders and members. The photographs document the National Woman's Party's push for ratification of the 19th Amendment as well as its later efforts for passage of the Equal Rights Amendment.
- Newberry Library French Revolution PamphletsThe Newberry Library's French Revolution Collection consists of more than 30,000 pamphlets and more than 23,000 issues of 180 periodicals published between 1780 and 1810. The collection was acquired by the Newberry between 1957 and 1961 from Michel Bernstein, a book dealer in Paris. There are complete runs of well-known journals, as well as many rare and unknown publications. The collection represents the opinions of all the factions that opposed and defended the monarchy during the turbulent period between 1789-1799 and also contains innumerable ephemeral publications of the early Republic. While the majority of the pamphlets were printed in Paris by the Imprimerie nationale, there are also significant numbers of provincial publishers and fictitious imprints.
- New York Public Library Digital ImagesThis site is a living database with new materials added every day, featuring prints, photographs, maps, manuscripts, streaming video, and more.
- Penn State Political Protest Thomas Benson CollectionThe Thomas W. Benson Political Protest Digital Collection is a unique educational and scholarly resource documenting and exploring themes associated with the student anti-war movement and campus unrest in America during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Consisting of 75 iconic political protest posters and accompanying memorabilia—the core produced by student activists affiliated with the University of California (UC)-Berkeley’s Political Poster Workshop—the collection was assembled by Professor Thomas W. Benson, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Rhetoric, Department of Communication Arts and Sciences, The Pennsylvania State University during his early years as a faculty member affiliated with UC-Berkeley and the State University of New York at Buffalo.
- Political Posters U of MI Labadie CollectionThe Joseph A. Labadie Collection contains posters which have been acquired over the past 100 years. This database consists of images of those posters covering social protest movements such as Anarchism, Civil Liberties, Colonialism, Communism, Ecology, Labor, Pacifism, Sexual Freedom, Socialism, Women, and Youth/Student Protest. Some are from the first half of the 20th century, but the majority are from the 1960s and later. Many are undated. All originals are held in the Joseph A. Labadie Collection.
- UW La Crosse Digital CollectionsThe digital objects contained within this collection are comprised of thousands of items, and tens of thousands of individual pages that have been scanned for or by Murphy Library. These items offer users instant and free access to unique and hard-to-find books, manuscripts, photographs, maps, academic publications, and other La Crosse and UWL related materials.
A few examples are the Leaping La Crosse newsletters of the local lesbian community (1979-2007), the Wisconsin Labor Advocate newspaper (1886-1887), the UWL student newspapers (1910-present), the UWL student yearbooks (1910-1994), the UWL Steam Ticket literary magazine (1996-present), the Freedom Flotilla Photograph Collection (1980 Cuban refugees), to name a few. All of the physical items can be found in Special Collections, Murphy Library. - UW Madison Digital CollectionsSince its founding in early 2000, the University of Wisconsin Digital Collections Center has worked collaboratively with UW System faculty, staff, and librarians to create and provide access to digital resources that support the teaching and research needs of the UW community, uniquely document the university and State of Wisconsin, and provide access Memorial Library Mallto rare or fragile items of broad research value. The UWDCC has also partnered with cultural heritage institutions and public libraries throughout Wisconsin to create digital resources.
Resources within the collections are free and publicly accessible online. They are loosely organized into collections that span a range of subjects including art, ecology, literature, history, music, natural resources, science, social sciences, the State of Wisconsin, and the University of Wisconsin. Digital resources include text-based materials such as books, journal series, and manuscript collections, photographic images, slides, maps, prints, posters, audio, and video. - World Digital LibraryThe World Digital Library (WDL) is a project of the U.S. Library of Congress, carried out with the support of the United Nations Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization (UNESCO), and in cooperation with libraries, archives, museums, educational institutions, and international organizations from around the world.
The WDL makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from all countries and cultures.