Author: Megan Pearson

With our harvest earlier this month, the IDHH now has 417,946 items from 483 collections. Thanks to our 150 Illinois partners and contributing institutions for making this possible!

Keep checking back here at Illinois Highlights as we promote new collections, highlight older ones, and feature materials relevant to Illinois and national history.

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Healthcare providers play a critical role in caring for patients and saving lives, especially during a pandemic. For roughly a year now, these front-line workers have continued the dedication and sacrifice of the healthcare profession, putting themselves at risk for COVID-19 while taking care of their patients in hospitals, nursing homes, and other facilities around the world.

To celebrate these healthcare providers, the IDHH welcomes our new contributor Methodist College and their History of Methodist College collection. Now a four-year, private, not-for-profit college, Methodist College was established in 1900 as a nurse training program by the deaconesses of the Methodist Episcopal church in Peoria. The History of Methodist College collection reflects the growth of this nurse training program into a four-year college, with over 1,200 items that include class groups, study sessions, diplomas, student bulletins, and patient care throughout the last century.

Here are a few of our favorite items from the collection:

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Browse the full History of Methodist College collection.

View more items in the IDHH related to Nursing and Healthcare.

To learn more about Methodist College, visit Methodist College’s site.

To celebrate Black History Month, the IDHH is featuring the Daily Egyptian Diversity News Archive collection from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale (SIUC). This collection includes select articles from the 1930s to the 1970s relating to the African American populations at SIUC, digitized from the microfilm archives of SIUC’s award-winning student-run newspaper the Daily Egyptian. Begun in 2006, this digitization project was a collaboration between SIUC’s Vice Chancellor for Diversity and Morris Library Special Collections Research Center.

Topics covered include the activities of the local chapters of Alpha Kappa Alpha and Alpha Phi Alpha (the first intercollegiate historically African American Greek-lettered sorority and fraternity, respectively); African American performers visiting the campus; athletics, courses, and faculty; and the struggles of African Americans living in the racially-segregated United States.

Here are a few articles from the full collection:

Want to see more in the IDHH?

Browse the full Daily Egyptian Diversity News Archive

Browse all items from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale

View more items related to African-American cultural heritage and Black History

Happy New Year, everyone! With our first harvest of 2021, the IDHH now contains 471 collections from 146 contributors, for a total of 382,479 items of five different formats: images, text, physical objects, video, and audio. We’d like to start the year by highlighting our two new oral history collections.

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The East Central Illinois Oral Histories collection from Eastern Illinois University features nearly 100 interviews with transcripts, originally recorded between 1977-1989. As the interviewees discuss their lives and histories, the topics covered include the Civilian Conservation Corps, shoe sales, the US Civil War and the World Wars, funeral homes, agriculture and farm life, labor and railroads in Illinois, taxes, temperance and Prohibition, and basketball.

To browse the full East Central Illinois Oral Histories collection, please visit the IDHH here.

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The Recordings of the Illinois Labor History Society collection from Roosevelt University features over 120 recordings, dating from the 1970s to the early 2000s. Topics include labor unions such as the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA) and the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), labor strikes and lockouts, women and African-Americans in labor, and remembrances of the Haymarket Square Riot. Notable voices in the recordings include labor activists Leslie “Les” Orear, Lou Krainock, Ralph Helstein, and Victoria “Vicki” Starr.

To see the full Recordings of the Illinois Labor History Society collection, please visit the IDHH here.