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Well, that’s not very lady-like of you!

Posted on by Kimberly Lerch

 

The book, Unbecoming a lady : the forgotten sluts and shrews who shaped America by Therese Oneill is a whirlwind read! I finished it in two days and found it a page-turner, a can’t-put-downer (although I had to for one night) read that had me laughing at the casual and humorous style of the author but still providing nuggets of new information and topics to think about after I finished the book. The author provides a list of further reading on the topic as well as a generous “works consulted” section at the end of the book.

The women highlighted in this book lived during the turn of the 20th century. You know, when women were ladies that knew their place and were happy in it, not like the modern women lamented by many of the current manosphere podcast or YouTube creators. The women that want rights (including to vote), the ones that choose to have tattoos and facial piercings while making up their own minds and not being “led” by the men (hopefully only the one man she will be smart enough to snatch up and marry while in her late teens) in her life. The crazy ones, the ones that don’t know a good thing when he’s standing there right in front of her next to his restored 1977 Pontiac Firebird Grand Am (nicknamed “Good Girl”) with the “screaming chicken” hood art and his faithful dog, Sweetie. Continue reading “Well, that’s not very lady-like of you!” →

Bringing Your Whole Self to Work in 1957

Posted on by Geoffrey Ross

This summer a museum in Chicago donated a box of miscellaneous newspapers to the History, Philosophy, and Newspaper Library. One interesting discovery in the donation was a paper called Can Worker, a union newspaper for workers at Continental Can Company, Plant Number 5, located at 5401 West 65th Street in Chicago, in a neighborhood known as Clearing. Continue reading “Bringing Your Whole Self to Work in 1957” →

Call for Applications: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Library Research Travel Grant, 2026-2027

Posted on by Celestina Savonius-Wroth

Call for Applications: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Library Research Travel Grant, 2026-2027

We are delighted to announce that the 2026 call for applications for the Library Research Travel Grant is now open.

The University of Illinois Library Research Travel Grant exists to support scholars wishing to travel to Urbana-Champaign to conduct research in any of the Library’s collections. Funded by donors, the Travel Grant is a joint project of the University Library and the Department of History. The Travel Grant program began in 2018, and has attracted researchers from a broad range of scholarly disciplines, including Classics, History of Science, Gender Studies, Sports History, Environmental History, Children’s Literature, Latin American Studies, African Studies, French Literature, and more.

Travel grant awards typically range from $1,000 to $2,500 per recipient. Funds may be applied toward round-trip travel, and accommodations and expenses in Urbana-Champaign, IL.

For more information, including eligibility, application requirements, and deadlines, please see the University of Illinois Library Research Travel Grant page.

A Little “Advice” from James Madison

Posted on by Kimberly Lerch

by Kimberly Lerch  |  Published: May 1, 2026

David B. Mattern’s 1997 book, James Madison’s “Advice to My Country” is a nice, little, readable book of quotes, advice as it were, from our fourth president, James Madison.

According to Wikipedia, James Madison (March 16, 1751(March 5, 1750) – June 28, 1836) was “an American statesman, diplomat, and Founding Father who served as the fourth president of the United States from 1809 to 1817. [Madison] was popularly acclaimed as the “Father of the Constitution” for his pivotal role in drafting and promoting the Constitution of the United States and the Bills of Rights. and the Bill of Rights…. Madison helped form the Democratic–Republican Party.” Continue reading “A Little “Advice” from James Madison” →

Black Women’s History Month: A New Book Review

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Black Women’s History Month: A New Book Review

One thing I have been doing this semester is creating display boards that feature a specific subselection of the HPNL’s New Book Collection. In February, I did a display on Black History Month, in March, I did a display on Women’s History Month, and now, for April, it’s time to combine all of that for a new display on Black Women’s History Month. As the History, Philosophy, and Newspaper Library is also the African-American reference center, we have a ton of books for me to choose from to go on this display. As April is also National Stress Month, I wanted to get into something mental health-related, as stress has such an impact on a person’s mental health every day. So, I chose to find a book on mental health specifically relating to black women for this article. 

Continue reading “Black Women’s History Month: A New Book Review” →

Using the Illinois Digital Newspaper Collections: Women’s Labor in Wartime and the Women’s Land Army of America

Posted on by Jessie Knoles

March is Women’s History Month and to celebrate, this month’s HPNL blog post explores an aspect of women’s history through the use of digitized newspapers. 

As Illinois is a state rich with labor history, I was originally going to focus this post on women in Illinois labor movements and their roles in pioneering and supporting the organization of, and participation in, labor strikes in Illinois. Women’s roles in labor rights, union organization, and reform are well known in this state, and figures such as Jane Addams and “Mother” Mary Jones are sufficiently represented in historical newspapers. Alongside these figures, I wanted to consider the many unnamed women, such as those who fought for rights during the 1910 Chicago Garment Strike, as there are many articles about them, but then my interests turned elsewhere… 

Using the Illinois Digital Newspaper Collections, this blog post highlights how women’s labor evolved during the first and second world wars.  

Women’s labor in wartime 

“Government Bulletin Shows War Opportunities for Women,” Daily Illini, May 10, 1918, p.5 [link]
Despite coming off the heels of decades of labor conflict and milestones—in part due to the visible and invisible labor of women, including working class and immigrant women and those organizing in union auxiliary chapters—in the era of the World Wars, many middle-class women were still working in the domestic sphere.  

However, the onset of war forced men overseas or into different positions. Women were employed to fill these absences, and at the same time, fill an increased demand for the production of certain goods. These realities posed a problem for American production, and, throughout the country, women were encouraged to work in traditionally male-dominated industries such as manufacturing and agriculture. Wartime also saw an emergence of new needs, and in response, women labored in ammunitions factories and built war equipment like ships, planes, and tanks, among other work. 

This was not an American phenomenon, of course, as women throughout Europe were filling empty factory roles while men left to serve in the war. Many American newspapers reported on the status of British, French, and German female laborers in agriculture and factory work, such as munitions factories, as early as 1914. 

In America, over 1 million women worked in war industries during WWI, and over 6 million worked in war industries during WWII. Continue reading “Using the Illinois Digital Newspaper Collections: Women’s Labor in Wartime and the Women’s Land Army of America” →

Developing Representative Collections

Posted on by Rachel Sudbeck

Collections are one of, if not the, most important things in a library. That may seem obvious to say, but the management of a library’s collection is something that is integral to communities in a way we may not fully understand as patrons. This semester, I am in a class aptly titled “Collection Development” that aims to expose library and information science students to the processes and theories surrounding how collections are developed. As we come into Black History Month, I want to bring further awareness to the responsibility that librarians have to underrepresented groups and some of the things we should be conscious of during the collection development process.

Something I have struggled with during my time as a student here at the library is the power that librarians have over their collections. I feel uncomfortable being the person to make those decisions as I am aware of how much I could be missing. However, the alternative would be to, what, have a machine do it? I suppose as AI continues to advance I am probably not that far off, but AI will also need a human’s code behind it, telling it what to pick. So ultimately, the power of choice will most likely always be in the hands of a human, sometimes one individual. And there is a lot of responsibility that comes with that role.

Continue reading “Developing Representative Collections” →

The Story of the “Farmer’s Wife” (Part 2)

Posted on by Geoffrey Ross

Empowered Women, Better for Business

The Webb Publishing Company enjoyed a quick success with the Farmer’s Wife. One driver of that success was the company’s ingenious use of market segmentation: to advertisers, they pitched the publication as half-farm newspaper and half-women’s magazine, a hybrid publication uniquely capable of providing access to a supposedly untapped market hiding at the intersection of two valuable demographics: rural Americans and women. The rural demographic was valuable both for its size and its unrealized spending power. This spending power, Webb argued, could best be exploited through the women, not the men, because the “farm women pull the purse strings” in the family.1 In other words, the Farmer’s Wife was, at least in part, a business that sold access to farm women. According to the publisher, the typical farm woman was independent, accomplished, and assertive, a person with considerable business sense and a can-do attitude. Webb contrasted the resourceful farm wife with what it portrayed as the pampered, functionless housewife of the nation’s cities.2 Farm wives acted independently of their husbands; they were the decision-makers and the money-spenders for their households. Webb repeatedly used the “purse strings” as a metonym for women’s power: contrary to expectations, the woman, not the man, controlled them. It wasn’t just that women spent the money, but that they personally determined how and where it would be spent. Continue reading “The Story of the “Farmer’s Wife” (Part 2)” →

An Infamous 50th Anniversary Just Passed

Posted on by Kimberly Lerch

 

I think she’s definitely a textbook narcissist; maybe even a psychopath. I’d have to have some concrete examples to fill in the Machiavellian part of the Dark Triad equation though. But I’m just armchair quarterbacking on the psychology here, informally trained by watching several YouTube videos on personality disorders.

Even the experts brought in to assess her, with little cooperation from Sara herself, couldn’t come to an agreement on a diagnosis. Histrionic, borderline, and/or bipolar personality disorders were listed on various reports written after meeting with her after her arrest but before her trial—before she could even be considered competent to stand for trial. Sara would not let her lawyer claim insanity or diminished mental capacity at the time of her alleged crime. Continue reading “An Infamous 50th Anniversary Just Passed” →

AI in Historical Research

Posted on by Rachel Sudbeck

This probably is not the post you would expect on Halloween. My defense for this, however, is that AI is a bit of a scary topic to broach in this day and age.

I mostly mean this as a joke, but in all seriousness using AI makes me…uneasy despite the fact that I am part of the generation who should be embracing it.

As part of our work at the History, Philosophy, and Newspaper Library, staff and graduate assistants often lead classes on conducting historical research. In my first year of instruction, I generally stayed away from the topic of AI. Now that it has become obvious to me that more and more students are using AI in a variety of ways for research, it is more and more important that we address it as part of the research process.

Continue reading “AI in Historical Research” →