1973: Rebellious Teen from Madison County

Me at age 14, September 1973

This post was submitted by Ann, one of our docents here at the Special Collections Building. It is part of our ongoing A Look Back at 1973 series, crowd sourced from readers of the blog. If you have a story to tell, read more about this project HERE.

In 1973...I entered the rebellious stage of puberty as social unrest and protest movements swept the nation.  I was half way through the eighth grade and my Madison county [Georgia] girlfriends were boy crazy and mad for the new blue mascara from Maybelline, but I was obsessed with the war in Vietnam and feared that my little brother and my best guy friends would be drafted into battle where they would be maimed or killed like my KIA cousin. We debated the ERA in school and wondered if its passage would subject girls to the draft.  Would we be sent to 'Nam as well?

Wounded Knee II and the American Indian Movement informed my youthful poetry and I wrote my ninth grade term paper on the Yippee Revolution.  I organized protests against excessive library fines (ten cents), the middle school lunch program, and even my local city hall where my best friend and I marched with homemade banners reading "Make Love, Not War, " and "Down with the Draft."  I persuaded my buddies to join me in a letter-writing campaign to Senators Talmadge and Nunn concerning the problems encountered by migrant farm workers.  I played my old Bob Dylan LPs until the grooves wore out.  This young teen believed in the power of the people.

A Look Back at 1973

In May we opened our latest feature exhibit here at the Russell Library, Now and Then: 1973. The exhibit looks back at a pivotal year in modern American history and considers the impact of events that filled the public mind for a moment in time.

1973 was the year of the Roe v. Wade decision and the return of POWs from the war in Vietnam. It was the year President Richard Nixon proclaimed he was not a crook, even as the Watergate scandal unfolded on national television. It was the year of the Yom Kippur War, the Arab oil embargo, the launch of Skylab, and passage of the Endangered Species Act. Forty years later, history reveals 1973 to be a pivotal year in American history with a lasting legacy.
  
In crafting the exhibit, our outreach staff got into the habit of asking everyone who crossed our paths what they recalled about 1973. And we'd like to take this opportunity to ask you, our blog readers, the same question: How do you remember 1973? 

We're interested to know where you were and what were you doing in 1973. Tell us a story about your life in that year in 2-3 paragraphs, paired with a picture that you don't mind us posting to the blog site (http://www.rbrl.blogspot.com). We'll accept submissions through the end of October 2013.

If you're interested in this opportunity, send an email to russlib@uga.edu and a member of our staff will respond with further information. We look forward to hearing from you!

Dean Rusk Oral History Transcripts Now Available Online

The Russell Media and Oral History Unit is delighted to announce that researchers may now access 172 transcripts from interviews with Dean Rusk  and his colleagues between 1984-1989 online at http://tinyurl.com/Rusktranscripts. The interviews document Rusk's life from early childhood in the 1910's through his teaching career in the 1980's. The interviews contain information on Rusk's service as U.S. Under Secretary and Secretary of State during the administrations of Presidents Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson and his involvement in foreign relations including the Korean War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Vietnam War. The interviews also document his position as president of the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1950s. 

The interviews are an important part of a larger collection of materials related to Rusk available for research onsite at the Russell Library. You can check out the finding aid HERE.

Special thanks to Callie Holmes and Mayowa Pius (pictured above next to a Dean Rusk bust) for their hard work on this project!

New Exhibit, Now and Then: 1973

There are some moments in history that become powerful touchstones, revisited to reflect and inform a better understanding of the present day. Now and Then: 1973, the Richard B. Russell Library’s latest feature exhibit, looks back at a pivotal year in modern American history and considers the impact of events that filled the public mind for a moment in time. The exhibition explores the interactions of the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial branches of government – how the decisions made by each conflicted with one another, and with public opinion, in choosing a path for the United States. 

1973 was the year of the Roe v. Wade decision and the return of POWs from the war in Vietnam. It was the year President Richard Nixon proclaimed he was not a crook, even as the Watergate scandal unfolded on national television. It was the year of the Yom Kippur War, the Arab oil embargo, the launch of Skylab, and passage of the Endangered Species Act. Forty years later, history reveals 1973 to be a pivotal year in American history with a lasting legacy.

“We originally considered an exhibit focused exclusively on the anniversary of the Watergate scandal,” said outreach archivist Jan Levinson, “but after some preliminary research found that there were so many big events happening in 1973 that touched on our key collecting areas, we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to take a look a multiple events.”

Both Levinson, who curated the exhibit, and her colleague Jill Severn, Russell Library’s Head of Access and Outreach, saw that the events of 1973 shared easy connections with current events and issues that Americans are struggling with today. “In creating the text and selecting objects from our collections, we tried to highlight the connections between past and present, as well as to prompt visitors to consider the interactions of various branches of government in dealing with public issues,” said Levinson.

The Russell outreach team will spend this summer planning an exciting slate of public programs scheduled for fall 2013, that complement the key themes and topics of the exhibit. In the coming weeks they hope to launch an interactive appeal to the public, soliciting photographs from 1973 for display in the gallery and on the Russell Library blog (www.rbrl.blogspot.com).     

The exhibit will remain on display in the Harrison Feature Gallery of the Russell Library Gallery through December 15, 2013. The galleries of the Special Collections Building are open from 8am-5pm Monday through Friday and 1-5pm on Saturdays; admission is free. For more information contact Jan Levinson at jlevinso@uga.edu or by calling 706-542-5788. To schedule a tour of the Special Collections Libraries Galleries, contact Jean Cleveland at jclevela@uga.edu or by calling 706-542-8079.  

Oral History Intern - Final Thoughts

My internship with the Reflections on Georgia Politics Oral History Collection has finally come to a close, although I feel like I just started. To reiterate my thoughts from an earlier post, the experience has been twofold: I got some priceless hands-on archival training and learned a wealth of political history about my home state. The training has equipped me to sort through an oral history collection, narrow in on the important topics, figures, and dates, and create description using common encoding and content standards: EAD and DACS. It’s also given me experience with Archivist’s Toolkit and furthered my familiarity with using name and subject headings. I’m happy to have made my mark on the collection by taking a long, unwieldy finding aid and breaking it down into several smaller, more manageable ones so that resources are easier to locate.

On the history side of things, I feel like I’ve taken an advanced class on Georgia’s modern political history, but all of my instructors are speaking from firsthand experience. Every Wednesday since January I’ve had the opportunity to hear stories from former governors, campaign managers, commissioners, secretaries, civil rights leaders, and legislators on the state and national level. The personal accounts of different interviewees often weave together, presenting a variety of perspectives on key events and people. Across the collection, discussions of campaigns, policies, controversies, and important leaders interconnect to form a vast and complex body of knowledge filtered through the personalities that shine through each speaker.

One such speaker I will leave you with is Bill Shipp, a towering figure in Georgia journalism, and, as of this post, the most recently interviewed subject for the collection. Between Mr. Shipp and his interviewer, the perennial Bob Short, the air in the room is thick with erudition on Georgia politics (at one point Bill and Bob briefly raise the question of which one of them has more expertise). Shipp does an amazing job of packing in a career’s worth of history and experience into this hour and seventeen minute discussion. In covering the civil rights struggle, the major elections since 1946, and a range of other topics, the interview acts as a very nice representative slice of the overall ROGP collection.

Post by Steve Armour, Intern, Russell Library

Dialogues in Diversity Event @ Russell Library

Dialogues in Diversity: Red and Blue, Not Just Black and White:
Politics and Diversity in Georgia
The Office of Institutional Diversity in partnership with the Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies invites you to a lunchtime discussion around diversity, demographics and politics.

Demographic changes have direct implications on public policy and politics. The recent general and presidential elections highlighted changes in both the US population and the electorate. Georgia's changing demographics place the state in the forefront of anticipated changes in public policy and politics. This dialogue will provide an opportunity for faculty and staff to discuss the political implications, challenges and opportunities resulting from changing demographics nationally and within the State of Georgia.
Dr. Charles S. Bullock, III, Richard B. Russell Professor of Political Science in the department of Political Science in the School of Public and International Affairs will facilitate this discussion.

Friday, April 19th from 12:00 to 1:30pm in the Richard B. Russell Building, Special Collections Libraries, Room 285

Lunch is provided and therefore prior registration is required. The series is free and spaces will be filled on a first come basis.

To register for this dialogue, please send an email with your name and department to rsvpOID@uga.edu

Sowing Success with Commissioner of Agriculture Tommy Irvin

Few people could tell us more about agriculture in Georgia than Tommy Irvin. From his humble beginnings as the son of sharecroppers in White County, Irvin would go on to become Georgia’s Commissioner of Agriculture in 1968. Maintaining this post until his retirement in 2010, he would be the longest serving agriculture commissioner in the U.S. In the opening minutes of his interview for the Reflections on Georgia Politics Oral History Collection, Irvin speaks about his qualifications for the job:

"I know when I was chosen as Commissioner of Agriculture, one of the editorial writers for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution wanted to know what I knew about farming.  I said, “Well, you know, I guess I knew everything that you needed to know. I knew how to tie a handspring and I knew “gee” and I knew “haw” and knew what that meant. And I knew how to keep the cow -- keep the horse from walking on the cotton when it was young and step on it. And I knew how to put on a set of Johnson wings.”  He said, “What’s that?”  I said, “Well, I thought that’s where I’d lose you!”

For the uninitiated, “gee” and “haw” are verbal commands for steering a plough horse. To learn what Johnson wings are you’ll have to check out the interview yourself (about 3 minutes in).  These tidbits may seem irrelevant and stuck in a bucolic past, but as Irvin continues about his memories and his life’s work, it becomes clear that such experiences informed the career of a statesman who shaped agriculture policy in Georgia for over forty years. And on more recent matters, Irvin is no slouch. He goes on to discuss a number of contemporary issues that affect agriculture in Georgia and beyond, including food safety, foreign trade, food prices, and the role of illegal immigration. Aside from his work with agriculture, Irvin has also been a huge advocate for education, serving on local and statewide school boards and collaborating with Richard Russell to implement the School Lunch Program. And it all started with Johnson wings.

Post by Steve Armour, Intern, Russell Library

RBRL Donor Lorena Weeks Featured in PBS Series

Russell Library donor and trailblazer for equity in the workplace, Lorena Weeks featured in new PBS series, Makers

Lorena Weeks, a native of Wadley, Georgia won a landmark sex discrimination case against Southern Bell in 1969.  Two years earlier, Weeks applied for a promotion at her longtime employer, for the position of a switchman, which promised an increase in pay and a significantly shorter commute to work. Despite her seniority with the company, she was denied the promotion because she was a woman and it was a job reserved for men.

Weeks knew about the 1964 Civil Rights Act passed by President Lyndon Johnson and felt that Southern Bell had violated her rights under the law, which specified that an employer could not discriminate on the basis of sex. Although she initially lost the case, she appealed, and with the help of National Organization of Women (NOW) attorney Sylvia Roberts, brought her case before Judge Griffin Bell in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. Weeks finally won her case on appeal. She became a switchman at Southern Bell, a position she held until her retirement in 1983 after more than thirty years of service to the company.

Weeks’ shares her battle for justice along with other key people involved in the case in the new PBS Series on the Women’s Movement, Makers.  Russell staff members are delighted to see Lorena’s trailblazing efforts reach a national audience. 

“Lorena Weeks is truly one of the unknown heroes of the Women’s Movement. She is unassuming in demeanor but possesses the strong sense of right versus wrong and was unwilling to accept blatant discrimination from her longtime employer, a company for which she still expresses a loyalty today. We deeply appreciate her persistent courage to take that step forward for women,” said Russell Library Director, Sheryl Vogt.

View clip from the Makers program: http://video.pbs.org/video/2331436057/

View full interview from the Russell Library interview with Ms. Weeks:  http://www.libs.uga.edu/russell/media.html#weeks

Mrs. Weeks donated her papers to the Russell Library in 2010 and they are open and available for research.  Learn more about these materials at http://russelldoc.galib.uga.edu/russell/view?docId=ead/lweeks.xml;query=;brand=default

First Person Project Day - April 19th

Join the Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies for the First Person Project, a new oral history series documenting the experiences of everyday Georgians, on Friday, April 19, 2013 in the Richard B. Russell Building for Special Collections Libraries.

Six sets of partners will be accepted for this First Person Project session, scheduled for Friday, April 19th between 9:00am and 4:00pm. Each audio recording session takes one hour to complete. Photographs will also be taken for each session. The Russell Library will archive the interviews to add to its documentation of life in post 20th century Georgia and will provide participants with a free digital download of the recording and photographs. A $10 donation is suggested for each participant pair.

If you have a friend or family member with a story to tell, become a part of the First Person Project. Reservations are on a first come first serve basis and can be made by calling 706-542-5788 or registering online at http://www.libs.uga.edu/russell/fpp/fpp_register.html.

For more information on this event and other upcoming First Person Project days, please email russlib@uga.edu or call (706) 542-5788.

More About the First Person Project
Modeled roughly on StoryCorps, a national initiative partnered with National Public Radio and the Library of Congress, the First Person Project is smaller in scale but similar in concept, providing tools to would-be oral history interviewers and interviewees, including tips on how to create questions and conduct interviews. The project was inspired by the belief that everyone is an eyewitness to history, and that everyone, sometimes with a little encouragement, has a story to tell.

To learn more about the Richard B. Russell Library, visit:
http://www.libs.uga.edu/russell

Spotlight on Tour at 2!

A short video spotlighting the Special Collections Building's weekly Tour at 2, which takes place every Tuesday from 2:00-3:00PM, if featured on the UGA homepage today! Check it out below.