Digitized Book of the Week

http://www.archive.org/details/idealsstandardsh00alle
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Published to celebrate the centennial of the University of Illinois' Graduate School of Library and Information Science, these collected essays "reveal how much the School has always been involved in change and at the same time how much the practices of today are embedded in the work of our predecessors." Includes essays by Kathryn Luther Henderson, Terry Weech, Linda Smith, Leigh Estabrook, Selma Richardson, and F. W. Lancaster, among others, and many wonderful photos from early years at GSLIS.

http://www.archive.org/details/vacationontrailp01dave

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This short, engaging book, subtitled "Personal experiences in the higher mountain trails with complete directions for the outfitting of inexpensive expeditions," was penned in 1923 by Eugene Davenport (1856-1941), dean of the College of Agriculture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1895 to1922. Need a rest? Head to the mountains, Davenport advises, for "Nowhere else is there such a succession of details to occupy the attention without mental strain as is afforded on the trail, and if it should chance to lie on the upper levels of the mountains, there is not to be found elsewhere so vast an outlay of nature's best or so changing a display of her mighty works. Altogether, there is nothing to be compared with a vacation on the trail."

http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=title%3A%28old%20fire%20plague%29%20AND%20contributor%3A%28illinois%29

The historical back drop for William Harrison Ainsworth’s 1847 novel Old Saint Paul’s: a tale of the plague and the fire includes two events that occurred during the years 1665 and 1666 in London—the Great Plague, which broke out in 1665, and the Great Fire of 1666, which effectively ended the plague but also destroyed much of the city. During the plague many of the victims, especially among the poor, were buried in communal “plague pits” like the one pictured here in an illustration by John Franklin in volume 2 of the 1847 edition of Ainsworth’s novel. (Source: Contagion: Historical Views of Diseases and Epidemics [Harvard University Library Open Collections Program])

See also "The history of the great plague in London in the year 1665, containing observations and memorials of the most remarkable occurrences, both public and private, during that dreadful period (1832)" digitized by the University of California Libraries.

Selections from the digital image collections at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library are now available on Flickr at http://www.flickr.com/photos/47195550@N05/collections/72157623235499015/. Or browse through a selection of our Flickr photos with the Cooliris viewer below. Just click and drag!

http://www.archive.org/details/lecentredelamour00rol
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One of the more recent additions to the University of Illinois' collection of digitized emblem books, Le Centre de l'amour : decouvert soubs divers emblesmes galans et facetieux (roughly translated "The Center of love: discovered through various emblems, gallant and facetious") is a Valentine's Day offering from us to you!

http://www.archive.org/details/pallisersamerica00pall
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Palliser, Palliser & Company of New York was widely considered the most influential pattern book publishers of the late 19th century. For a small fee, prospective homeowners, builders, and contractors could write to Palliser and obtain a set of architectural plans with elevations and perspective views for the most popular architectural styles of the day. An example of Palliser's Cottage Home No. 35 built on 111th Place in Chicago received Chicago landmark status in 2000. You can see a picture of it at http://www.ci.chi.il.us/Landmarks/P/Palliser.html.

http://www.archive.org/details/joeworkerstoryof00scha
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Joe Worker and the Story of Labor, written by Nat Schachner with art by Jack Alderman, is a fascinating piece of American labor union history. Produced in 1948, it was distributed by the National Labor Service and published by Commercial Comics. "Here is the story of labor in America—dramatic! important! thrill-packed! More exciting than any adventure novel! Join the millions of Americans who have always wanted to know the real, true story of labor and labor unions in this country…All the answers—and plenty more—can be found in this color-splashed, dialoged series of comic strips, with peppy explanatory text. When you have finished this great story, you will have a new understanding and a new pride in the history of the American worker and his fight for better conditions, for a world free of intolerance and prejudice, for a world of decency and unit. A book for every American—regardless of race, color or creed." (from the foreword).

http://hdl.handle.net/10111/UIUCOCA:tenementconditio00city
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In the late 1800s, unscrupulous slumlords took advantage of the Chicago's lax enforcement of housing construction codes to build sub-standard and crowded housing on small lots near the factories and stockyards that employed the waves of European immigrants moving into Chicago. This 1901 study attempted to raise public awareness of the devastating living conditions in some of the worst wards of the city. It paid particular attention to the "double-decker" or "dumb-bell" buildings where front and rear tenement buildings were joined by narrow passageways without proper provision for ventilation and light. "Some apartments have no windows opening upon any other space. The sun reaches the bottom for a few moments only each day, and the lower rooms opening upon it are always dark."

http://www.archive.org/details/faerieqveensheph00spenc
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Holiness, temperance, chastity, friendship, justice and courtesy were among the many virtues that English poet Edmund Spenser attributed to Queen Elizabeth I in his epic poem of praise The Faerie Queen, believed to be the longest poem ever written in English. Shown here are the title page and Spenser's effusive dedication page from the 1609 edition in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Illinois. This volume, along with several others of Spenser's work held by the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, were digitized for inclusion in the Spenser Archive. When completed the Spenser Archive "will serve both as a fully searchable research tool and as a teaching tool that presents a wide range of engaging possibilities to the novice user." View other digitized books by Edmund Spenser from the University of Illinois Library.

Nouvelle méthode de classer les hyménoptères et les diptères. Avec figures (1807)
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Last year, the University of Illinois Library and the Chicago Field Museum submitted a successful grant application to The Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Illinois (CARLI) to digitize approximately 175 volumes on the taxonomy and biology of Hymenoptera, the third largest order of insects that includes over 108,000 species of bees, wasps and ants. Biodiversity researchers from several institutions in Illinois are working on Hymenoptera, including the Field Museum, Illinois Natural History Survey, Northern Illinois University, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Illinois at Chicago, and Western Illinois University. Easier access to what is already known about these insects can only improve their ability to understand hymenopteran biodiversity. Some of these books contain very attractive hand-colored plates and so traditionally have been locked up to preserve them from theft. Digitized copies of these volumes, which will also be contributed to the Biodiversity Heritage Library Project, will make these images much more useable and discoverable. Follow these links for more titles: Hymenoptera, Bees, Wasps, Ants.

http://libsysdigi.library.uiuc.edu/ilharvest/Unica/Books2008-08/anon0001thieig/

Depiction of the infant Jesus from Thirty-eight Woodcuts Illustrating the Life of Christ. Project Unica is an initiative of The Rare Book & Manuscript Library of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to produce high quality digital facsimiles of printed books that exist in only one copy. The concept of a "unicum" is difficult for the average library user to understand, since printed books, by their very nature, exist in more than one copy—that's the genius of Gutenberg's invention, after all. But fate and circumstance has sometime led to the destruction of every copy, save one, of a printed book, and the University of Illinois has quite a number of absolutely unique printed books. The aim of Project Unica is to digitize these supremely rare items and to provide a simple and efficient way of getting this valuable and unique information to scholars when and where they need it.

http://illinois.edu/goto/technograph

The Illinois Technograph is the University of Ilinois' award-winning student-produced engineering magazine. Here we step back 47 years into the Technograph's archives where, tucked in among the articles on magnetohydrodynamic generators and the ads for deep strength asphalt pavement materials, you can find the monthly "Technocutie" column featuring a cheerful co-ed eager to share her phone number and measurements (no, we're NOT talking mass, force, pressure, or density here) with the boys in Engineering Hall. The enrollment of women in the University of Illinois College of Engineering has increased from less than 1% in 1967 to slightly over 16% in 2008 and the Technocutie column is no more. We recently digitized the entire backrun of the Illinois Technograph; issues from 1960 - 1984 are now available in IDEALS. View the complete run.

http://www.archive.org/details/4751664_1
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"In the early 1880's . . . James H. Carpenter, a 42-year-old English born itinerant "draughtsman" in Chicago . . .realized that the need for trained men to finalize designs and produce the working drawings needed for the construction of Chicago's buildings had reached a critical stage. Just what Carpenter's motives were have never before been defined, but it was he who brought eighteen "draughtsman" colleagues together to form The Chicago Architectural Sketch Club in the spring of 1885. This organization, later renamed The Chicago Architectural Club, was responsible for the evolution and development of the Chicago School of Architecture more than any other individual, firm, or professional society. It was through the efforts of this Club that young men, and a few young women, learned the history, the styles, and the functions of architecture to a degree whereby they were able to translate first their employers and later their own clients' needs into buildings." [excerpted from the preface to The Chicago Architectural Club, Prelude to the Modern, by Wilbert R. Hasbrouck (2005). The University of Illinois Library has recently digitized from microfilm the early volumes of the Chicago Architectural Club Annual.

http://www.archive.org/details/forbiddentomarry01bank
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Forbidden to Marry by Isabella Varley Banks (1821-1897) typifies the "triple-decker" novel, which was a standard form of publishing for British fiction from the early 1800s until the 1890s. The market for this form of fiction was closely tied to commercial "circulating libraries," such as Mudie’s and W. H. Smith. Unlike free public libraries, these circulating libraries charged patrons to borrow books, much like video rental stores do today. Publishing longer works of fiction was quite expensive, and by releasing them in multiple parts publishers captured an audience who eagerly awaited the next installment while proceeds from the first volumes paid for the printing of later volumes. Often sensational in subject matter, the genre was populated by heroines in danger, misdirected letters, amazing coincidences, characters in disguise, potions and poisons. This copy of Forbidden to Marry contains an autographed photograph of and inscription by the author. The University of Illinois Library holds one of the largest collections of triple-decker novels and will be digitizing many of them over the coming year. To see more titles as they are added, visit http://illinois.edu/goto/triple_deckers

http://www.archive.org/details/trumpetoffreedom00oliv
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In anticipation of the 2009 bicentennial celebration of Abraham Lincoln's birth, we recently digitized a small collection of Civil War era sheet music from the University of Illinois Music Library. View the entire collection here.

http://hdl.handle.net/10111/UIUCOCA:autobiographyoff00ward
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Samuel Ringgold Ward (1817-1866) was a journalist, abolitionist, lecturer, and contemporary of Frederick Douglass. Born the son of American slaves who escaped to New Jersey in 1820 when he was three years old, Ward and his family settled soon thereafter in New York City where Ward was educated at The African Free School, an institution founded by the New York Manumission Society in1787 to provide education to children of slaves and freemen. In 1839, he joined the American Anti-Slavery Society and soon thereafter the new Anti-Slavery Society of Canada. In April 1853 the Canadian society sent Ward to England to seek funds to help the fugitive slaves then pouring into western Canada. He wrote his Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro while living in England. (Dictionary of Canadian Biography).

http://www.archive.org/details/chicagogangwarsi00rock
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According to the My Al Capone Museum website, this week’s featured book was first published anonymously in 1930 because the author, Chicago reporter Harold “Hal Andrews” feared reprisals from the Chicago mob, and probably with good reason. The book contains gory crime scene photos taken at the sites of some of the most notorious Chicago gangland killings of the 1920s. (Warning! Not for the squeamish!) No less a big boy than Al Capone, who is believed to have ordered the notorious 1929 St. Valentine’s Day massacre of a rival Chicago crime gang, reportedly ordered his minions to confiscate every copy of “X Marks the Spot” from Chicago newspaper stands. The University of Illinois' copy of "X Marks the Spot" bears the author's signature and the following inscription "Chicago, in her 100 years of progress, has borne many crosses, but none greater than the cross that marks the spot X."

http://www.archive.org/details/ilcostumeanticoe82ferr
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Giulio Ferrario (1767-1847), of Milan, was an intellectual, publisher, printer and librarian. His monumental work Il costume antico e moderno contains over 1,500 hand-colored plates depicting clothing from the classical period through the early 1800s, as well as many architectural drawings and engravings. The University of Illinois Library recently digitized all 15 volumes of this work that are held in its collection. View all digitized volumes in this series.

http://www.archive.org/details/lifeoffrancesewi00gord
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"Agitate, educate, organize." Frances Elizabeth Willard (1839 – 1898) was a notable American educator and social reformer. In 1873 she became the Dean of Women of the Woman's College of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Willard served as the elected president of the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) from 1879 until her death. Not to be found in this reverential biography by Anna Gordon, Willard's personal secretary of 21 years, is any mention of Willard's unfortunate dispute with anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells. In her attempts to recruit southern women into the WCTU, Willard blamed lynchings not on racism, but on the alcohol fueled rapes of white women by black men. While seeing eye to eye on many other issues of the time, the two women were never able to resolve their differences on this important issue where gender and race intersected so pointedly. See also Woman and temperance : or, The work and workers of the Woman's Christian temperance union (1883) by Frances Willard and The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States by Ida B. Wells.

http://www.archive.org/details/lifeofptbarnum00barn
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Phineas Taylor Barnum (1810 – 1891) was an American businessman and showman who founded the circus that eventually became the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. Barnum once visited Abraham Lincoln in the White House accompanied by the little person Tom Thumb (the stage name of Charles Sherwood Stratton). Given to outrageous self-promotion, Barnum loved a good hoax--his "elephantine farming" hoax (see entry) had the secretaries of every state agricultural association writing for more information about this exciting advancement in farming. A pro-Unionist, Barnum's circus and museum drew large audiences seeking respite and diversion during the American civil war. Barnum wrote several other books, including The Humbugs of the World : An account of humbugs, delusions, impositions, quackeries, deceits and deceivers generally, in all ages (1866) and Struggles and Triumphs, or, Forty years' recollections (1871).

http://www.archive.org/details/landscapegardeni00tabo
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Over 100 classic gardening texts from the University of Illinois' City Planning and Landscape Architecture Library were recently digitized, and many of them with extensive taxonomic content will be contributed to the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Among these are Grace Tabor's The Landscape Gardening Book. "Grace Tabor, one of the first women to identify herself professionally as a landscape architect, was born around 1873 in Cuba, N.Y. She studied at the Art Students League in Buffalo and in New York City, and at the New York School of Applied Design for Women . . . She is best known as a writer on landscape design and architecture. Beginning in 1905, Tabor wrote and drew plans for such magazines as The Garden Magazine and Country Life in America. She also wrote regularly for A Woman's Home Companion. In 1920 she began a garden column for the magazine that ran until 1941. Tabor reached a wide audience through The Woman's Home Companion, which was at the time among the most influential women's magazines in the country." (From Pioneers of American Landscape Design: An Annotated Bibliography edited by Charles A. Birnbaum and Lisa E. Crowder, 1993.)

http://www.archive.org/details/klondikechicagor00chic
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In the late 19th century, gold was discovered along the Klondike River near Dawson City, Yukon, Canada. The discovery kicked off a frenzy of immigration to the area by would be gold diggers. This handy manual, published by the Chicago Record in 1897, contained "every known practical and contemplated route to all the gold fields in the north . . . comprehensively and minutely described, with maps and tables of distances which are absolutely reliable. Everything which a gold- seeker should know that can be placed in type is contained in this book." (From the preface)

http://www.uiuc.edu/goto/music

Nearly 100 musical scores from UIUC's Music Library were digitized recently at the Open Content Alliance/Internet Archive scanning center on campus. Represented in this new online collection are Victor Herbert, John Philip Sousa, Jerome Kern, and Gilbert & Sullivan. The Music Library is one of the largest collections of its kind at a public university, and is currently ranked among the top ten music libraries in the United States. Its collections contain more than 765,000 volumes, including over 55,000 books, 520,000 scores, 19,000 microforms, 150,000 sound recordings, and over 20,000 items in other formats and media.

http://www.archive.org/details/bloomingtonnorma00bloo
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Need a wife? How about a housekeeper? A husband? Or a handyman? Apparently citizens of Bloomington-Normal in the early 1900s could experience "one-stop shopping" at Mrs. R. Houghton's Old Reliable Employment and Matrimonial Bureau. Stern looking Mrs. Houghton (or was this really Mr. Houghton in drag?) is just one of the upstanding citizens featured in this 1905 souvenir booklet highlighting the businesses of the Bloomington-Normal communities.

http://www.archive.org/details/johnwilkesboothe00camp
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Also, The escape and suicide of John Wilkes Booth : or, The first true account of Lincoln's assassination, containing a complete confession by Booth [1907?]
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On April 14, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated while attending a performance of Our American Cousin at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C. After entering Lincoln's theater box and shooting the President in the head with a .44 caliber Derringer, the soon to be infamous assassin, actor John Wilkes Booth, jumped from the theater box to the stage floor, and despite injuring his leg, managed to exit the theater. He was pursued by 25 Union soldiers through the Virginia countryside, where he was eventually captured and shot to death twelve days later. But in the years following the assassination and Booth's death, sensational theories of Booth's escape and subsequent wanderings and death were promoted. In this week's featured books by William Parker Campell and Finis Langdon Bates, Booth supposedly assumed a new identity as David E. George and eventually committed suicide in Enid, OK, in 1903. Bates even toured the country exhibiting David George's mummified corpse, claiming it was the body of John Wilkes Booth.

http://www.archive.org/details/storyofstadium00univ
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A wonderfully illustrated classic piece of Illini history, The Story of the Stadium, is a 1921 "call to all Illini everywhere" to contribute towards the building of what was to become Memorial Stadium. Named in honor of the 183 Illini who died in World War 1, Memorial Stadium would, in the words of former President David Kinley, "bring a touch of Greek glory to the prairie." With each $100 pledge, a faithful Illini could secure a good seat in the stadium for 10 years. In 2008, Memorial Stadium is undergoing a dramatic renovation with the Illinois Renaissance Project; upon it's completion, the University of Illinois is hopeful that Memorial Stadium will remain eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places and for designation as a National Historic Landmark.

http://www.archive.org/details/historiadelaguer01blas
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The Historia de la Guerra Europea de 1914 is a nine volume profusely illustrated history of World War 1 by the Spanish writer Vicente Blasco Ibañez, best known for his World War 1 novel Los cuatro jinetes del apocalipsis, which was filmed in 1921 as The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Many thanks go to Sr. Gaston Fernandez of Argentina who has generously sponsored the digitization of this remarkable work.

http://www.archive.org/details/onbanksofboneyar00kile
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"Most of us were boys and girls from the farms and towns of Illinois; we looked as though we had been born between two rows of corn, and I fear we acted like it also." So remembers Charles Albert Kiler, UIUC Class of 1892, in this charming memoir written for the 50th reunion of the Class of 1892 on May 31, 1942. Read about the time when there were 27 men and "three ladies" on the UIUC faculty and when fraternities, or "secret societies," were strictly forbidden. Then there was the lecture delivered by Mae Wright Sewell urging women to throw off their tight fitting corsets and adopt a loose fitting sailor suit type dress. As a result, forty women students dressed in their liberated sailor suit attire hid in the back of the Library's bookstacks before marching in solidarity into a gathering of students and faculty where they caused such a stir that "every man in the band dropped his instrument and fainted" and George Huff kicked his bass drum across the platform.

http://libsysdigi.library.uiuc.edu/oca/Books2007-10/republicancampai60burl/
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Hillary Clinton has Celine Dion's "You and I." For Barack Obama it's Stevie Wonder's "Signed, Sealed, Delivered I'm Yours." And John McCain's apparently switched to ABBA's "Take A Chance on Me" after John Mellencamp asked the Republican frontrunner to stop using his "Our Country." What is it? The campaign song! "Campaign songs are partisan ditties used in American political canvasses and more especially in presidential contests. The words were commonly set to established melodies like "Yankee Doodle," "Hail, Columbia," "Rosin the Bow," "Hail to the Chief" "John Brown's Body," "Dixie" and "O Tannenbaum" ("Maryland, My Maryland"); or to tunes widely popular at the time." [source: Dictionary of American History by James Truslow Adams, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1940] This week you can enjoy some of Abe Lincoln's.

http://www.archive.org/details/chicagoraceriots00geor
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This Socialist labor pamphlet, published shortly after a violent race riot in Chicago during the summer of 1919, was digitized from the original in the Lawrence J. Gutter Collection of Chicagoana in the Library of the University of Illinois at Chicago. The passage below is from the article "Our Real Enemy" by Mary Marcy, who urges black and white workers to organize together against their mutual exploitation by capitalist interests, in this case the owners of Chicago's meat packing businesses. Mary Marcy (1877-1922), born in Belleville, Illinois, was a columnist and editor of the International Socialist Review, published in Chicago from 1900 to 1918.

http://images.library.uiuc.edu/projects/blueprints/

This week's feature is not a book, but a collection of images not to be missed. The Illinois Built Environment collection provides to the public for the first time, a first-hand view of select original documents used to shape the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Among others, items include hand sketches of campus plans, original trace and linen drawings of many of the Central Quadrangle buildings, four separate proposed sketches for the original Library, now known as Altgeld Hall, and watercolor renderings for the display of the Alma Mater and many buildings. Many of the documents are common elevation architectural drawings. Some provide information that can inform the educated eye about building materials and the use of various construction techniques. Many are reflective of design trends of the times and some show comments and notes of the architect. This collection will grow over time as more original drawings, sketches and renderings are released for public use. Pictured below are four photographs taken during the construction of the fifth stack addition to the Main Library. The digitization of this collection was spearheaded by Joanne Kaczmarek, Archivist for Electronic Records, and funded by the Library's Large Scale Digitization Project in 2007.

http://www.archive.org/details/germanemigrantso00diet
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Written for a juvenile audience, and reflecting the strong anti-slavery sentiments of many 19th century German emigrants to America, The German emigrants; or, Frederick Wohlgemuth's voyage to California, tells the story of Fred Wohlgemuth, a young Prussian boy, who with his family emigrates from Germany to California during the Gold Rush era. During the voyage over, the emigrants' ship encounters the grim wreckage of a Portuguese slave ship and rescues a lone surviving slave, Quaquatalexera. The author has Quaquatalexera relate the gruesome story of the slave ship so "that it becomes a necessary branch of information to young people, especially as none of them know but what, sooner or later, they may emigrate with their parents or relations to those countries where negro slavery is tolerated by law." Upon reaching Cuba later on in their journey, the emigrants join an unsucessful attempt to free a group of black slaves in Havana. Fred and his family finally arrive in San Francisco where they strike it rich in the gold mines.

http://www.archive.org/details/goodrecipes00winn
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This week's book Good Recipes, published by the Woman's Society of the Winnetka Congregational Church in 1906, is one of a collection of 643 community cookbooks donated to the University Library by Mrs. Hermilda Listeman, who collected cookbooks her entire life. The cookbooks can be read for their 'receipts' as well as for their representation of American food preferences, the advancement of technology in the kitchen and the evolution of nutritional theory. Visit the online exhibit Communal Cuisine: Community Cookbooks 1877-1960. View more digitized cookbooks from this collection.

http://www.archive.org/details/watsekawondersta00stev
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What did Harry Houdini, Mary Todd Lincoln, and Horace Greeley have in common? They all believed in the possibility of communicating with the spirits of the dead, a central tenant of the American spiritualism movement, which raged throughout the U.S. from the decade before the Civil War through the early years of the 20th century. Spiritualism was alive and well in Illinois during this time; the prominent and long-running American spiritualist weekly The Religio-Philosophical Journal was published in Chicago from 1865 through 1905. This pamphlet by physician E.W. Stevens recounts the story of a Watseka, Illinois, girl named Lurancy Vennum, whose body, for sixteen weeks in 1878, was supposedly possessed by the spirit of Mary Roff, another Watseka native who had died in a mental institution thirteen years previously.

Trailer for a really spooky movie based on The Watseka Wonder!

http://www.archive.org/details/warsgreatestwork00arse
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Established by an Act of Congress in 1862, Rock Island Arsenal sits on Arsenal Island in the middle of the Mississippi between Davenport, Iowa, and Rock Island, Illinois, and has been one of the country's largest manufacturers of artillery and military equipment since the 1880s. During the Civil War, Arsenal Island was also home to Union army prison camp that housed over 12,400 Confederate prisoners. During its peak of production during WWI, it employed 14,778 employees. Congress appropriated over $1.6 billion in today’s dollars to the Rock Island Arsenal during that war. In addition to artillery, the arsenal produced over 1.5 million bacon cans, 649,000 canteen covers, and 858,344 haversacks for the war effort. This illustrated history of the arsenal is also a rich source of historical and genealogical information about the tri-cities of Rock Island, Moline, and Davenport. See also Rock Island arsenal, in peace and in war : with maps and illustrations (1898)
http://libsysdigi.library.uiuc.edu/oca/Books2007-06/rockislandarsena00till/

http://www.archive.org/details/5418478_1
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The Chicago Foreign Language Press Survey was published in 1942 by the Chicago Public Library Omnibus Project of the Work Projects Administration of Illinois. Its purpose was to translate into English and classify selected news articles appearing in the Chicago area foreign language press from 1861 to 1938. The project consists of a file of 120,000 typewritten pages translated from newspapers of 22 different foreign language communities in Chicago. UIUC Library is now digitizing this entire set from microfilm. The excerpt below is from the September 14, 1917 issue of the Chicago Czech language newspaper Denní Hlasatel. Also included in the set are English translations of Albanian, Chinese, Croatian, Danish, Dutch, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Jewish, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovene, Spanish, Swedish, and Ukrainian language newspapers from the late 19th and early 20th century Chicago area immigrant communities.

http://www.archive.org/details/giraffeinhistory27lauf
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Mohammed Ali, Pasha of Egypt in the early 1800s, was fond of sending giraffes to European monarchs. Unfortunately, the one he sent King George IV of England, survived only a few months at Windsor Palace, but the young female he sent to the king of France in 1826 thrilled Parisians for almost twenty years, inspiring songs, poems, and the realm of fashion (dresses à la girafe, hats and neckties à la girafe, and combs à la girafe.) From Egypt to Africa to China, and from the ancient Greeks through the Renaissance and into modern times, this volume from the Chicago Field Museum's Popular Anthropology series of Fieldiana is a small treasure trove of information and stories about Giraffidae, tallest of all mammals.

http://www.archive.org/details/correctionofecho00watsilli
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UIUC's Foellinger Auditorium, designed in the Beaux Arts classical style by C. H. Blackall, a University alum, has seen the likes of John Phillip Sousa, Jane Addams, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Spike Lee grace its stage. But 100 years ago, the "limited appropriations for the building made it impossible to embellish the surface of the walls and ceiling, and therefore, they were left practically plain, which increased their power to reflect sound and create echoes." As described in Bulletin No. 87 of the UIUC Engineering Experiment Station, 3,315 square feet of Akustikos Felt mounted on wooden ribs built out from the walls finally managed to correct the problem. The Engineering Experiment Station was established in 1905 by an act of the University's Board of Trustees to "carry on investigations along various lines of engineering, and to make studies of problems of importance to professional engineers." Digitization of all of the Engineering Experiment Station Bulletins was recently completed and the bulletins will be available soon through Illinois Harvest.

http://www.archive.org/details/wgnhandbookofnew00chic
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When the Chicago Tribune was founded by Joseph Medill in 1847, Chicago's population was a mere 16,000; Galena was still the commercial center of Illinois; Queen Victoria was on the throne of England; Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre had just been published; the Chicago River still ran into Lake Michigan, and Abraham Lincoln was just 38 years old. From the Civil War, through the great Chicago Fire, through World War I (when the Tribune began publishing the Army Edition of the Tribune in Paris), and ending in 1922 with the announcement of an architectural contest to design the building that was to be known throughout the world as the Tribune Tower, this illustrated early history of the "world's greatest newspaper" is a page turner not to be missed!

http://www.archive.org/details/diemenschlichest00meye
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Since the 1940’s the University Library has amassed a collection of over 600 emblem books written from 1540-1800, published in Germany, France, Italy, Spain and England. No other American library has such extensive holdings. Emblem books can possibly be looked upon as the multi-media publications of the 17th and 18th centuries. Each emblem is composed of three constitutive elements - a motto, an illustration or “pictura” in the form of a woodcut or engraving, and an explanatory poem or "subscriptio." An emblem is more than the sum of its parts, because the interplay between text and image produces a greater meaning than any of the individual components can provide. In 1998 the University Library began collaborating with Professor Mara Wade of the German Department to provide enhanced access to the German emblem books through digitization. The initial digitization efforts were funded by the UIUC Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research. Die menschliche sterblichkeit, unter dem titel Todten-tanz, in 61 original-kupfern (1759) is the first emblem book to be digitized at the UIUC Open Content Alliance scanning center. Visit the German Emblem Book Project website.

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http://www.archive.org/details/birdobservations00farw
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Ellen Drummond Farwell was born in Chicago, December 29, 1859, and was elected an Associate of the American Ornithologists' Union in 1896. In the following year she became one of the chief organizers of the Illinois Audubon Society and was a director or vice-president during the rest of her life. She was much interested in birds and kept notes on the various species that she observed from time to time. Eight years after her death these notes were published under the title 'Bird Observations near Chicago,' with an introduction by her sister, Mary Drummond. (Source: The Auk, Volume 70, Number 4, October, 1953)

http://libsysdigi.library.uiuc.edu/ilharvest/Unica/Books2007-10/anon0001blabir/
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Mahlon Day (1790-1854) was an early New York City printer, who specialized in books for children. The Black-bird's Nest relates what happens to little boys who tell lies. Mahlon Day's tone is decidedly didactic: “Such is the progress of vice. Do not deceive yourselves: detection is certain...The first slip of your memory, will throw you into such confusion, as will naturally lead to discovery; then follow disgrace, shame, and the punishments you justly deserve.” This book was digitized as part of the Unica Project in UIUC Library's Rare Book and Manuscript Library. According to Worldcat, UIUC's copies of these books are the only known copies in existence. View more Unica Project books.

http://hdl.handle.net/10111/UIUCOCA:wasitfairtrial00trum
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On May 4, 1886, labor leaders in Chicago organized a rally at Haymarket Square near the corner of Randolph and Des Plaines streets to protest the killing on the previous day of four striking workers during a rally for the eight-hour work day. As police began to break up the peaceful demonstration, someone threw a bomb into the crowd, and the police began shooting; by the time the ensuing chaos had ended, seven policemen and four workers were dead. Eight men were arrested in connection with the bomb throwing--August Spies, Albert Parsons, Adolph Fischer, George Engel, Louis Lingg, Michael Schwab, Samuel Fielden and Oscar Neebe. After a 63 day trial, during which no evidence was presented that tied any of the eight to the bomb throwing, all were found guilty and seven sentenced to death by a jury that had deliberated a mere three hours. Fielden’s and Schwab’s sentences were commuted to life in prison by Governor Richard James Oglesby, and Louis Lingg committed suicide in jail. On November 11, 1887 Spies, Parsons, Fischer, and Engel were hung to death in a Cook County jail. In 1893, Illinois governor John Altgeld concluded that all eight had been wrongfully convicted, and in a move that ended his political career, pardoned Fielden, Schwab, and Neebe. Numerous books about what has come to be called the Haymarket Riot have been digitized from the collections of the libraries of UI Chicago and UIUC. Click here for a complete list.

http://www.archive.org/details/4626151
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In 2000, the Classics Library at UIUC received a $85,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to microfilm its Dittenberger-Vahlen Collection of rare, priceless and perishable 19th century European dissertations and other short scholarly works on Latin and Greek literature, history and civilization. The grant was part of a $885,000 NEH grant to the Committee on Institutional Cooperation's (CIC) Center for Library Initiatives. Now, this microfilmed set is being digitized in a pilot project conducted jointly by the UIUC Library and the Internet Archive to do mass digitization of microfilm. The UIUC Library acquired the private collections of Wilhelm Dittenberger (1840-1906) and Johannes Vahlen (1830-1911) in 1907 and 1913, respectively. Dittenberger's collection consists of 5,600 books and 2,000 pamphlets; Vahlen's consists of 10,000 books and 15,000 pamphlets.

http://www.archive.org/details/jewsofillinoisth00elia
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The Reform Advocate was a Jewish weekly published in Chicago from 1891 through 1946. Edited by Emil G. Hirsch, the magazine was an advocate of progressive Judaism. The May 4,1901 issue featured here focused on Jews in Illinois, "their religious and civic life, their charity and industry, their patriotism and loyalty to American institutions, from their earliest settlement in the State unto the present time." From the Lawrence J. Gutter Collection of Chicagoana at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

http://hdl.handle.net/10111/UIUCOCA:fightingtraffici00bell
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In the early years of the 20th century, a moral panic broke out in urban America after Illinois-born George Kibbe Turner, a reporter and muckraker, wrote a sensational article in McClure's Magazine about white women being forced into prostitution by Asian and southern European immigrants. Turner's article fed on racial fears in post-emancipation America and led to a vigorous anti-prostitution movement in the 1910s. In 1910 Congress passed the White Slave Traffic Act, also known as the Mann Act after James Mann, U.S. representative from Illinois who introduced it. Hiroyuki Matsubara, in The 1910s Anti-Prostitution Movement and the Transformation of American Political Culture, observed that "the forced sex labor of white women appeared to be the worst nightmare, or the reality, in the post-emancipation era. As if replacing black slaves, white women were dragged down by un-American intruders to a filthy corner of a city crowded with poor workers and immigrants. After the formal end of black slavery, Americans were now afraid of being confronted with white slavery." See also The Social Evil in Chicago (1911), The Social Menace of the Orient (1921), and Chicago's Black Traffic in White Women (1911).