Members

Caroline Fuchs, Asst. Professor/Outreach Librarian at St. John’s University, Queens

On June 5, 2009, I will be presenting a paper as part of a panel on Celebrations at The 30^th Conference on New York State History in Plattsburgh, New York.  The annual three-day conference  is a wonderful meeting place for historians, librarians, archivists, curators, educators, scholars, researchers, students and enthusiasts of New York State history.  It is sponsored by the New York State Historical Association and the New York State Archives Partnership Trust, and is supported by the New York Council for the Humanities.

My paper –“Reasons to Celebrate: New York and the Opening of the Erie Canal”—explores the implications of this very public, very elaborate celebration that took place in early nineteenth-century New York. From October 26^th to November 4^thin 1825, hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers—from Buffalo to Manhattan—participated in an enormous state-wide celebration. Unparalleled in size and scope, the celebration marking the opening of the Erie Canal was the biggest party that New Yorkers—and Americans—had ever thrown.  Even celebrations for Independence Day and Evacuation Day paled in comparison. Parades, flotillas, aquatic displays, fireworks, illuminations, processions, dinners, speeches, balls, toasts, songs, odes, commemorative souvenirs, medals, headdress, printed texts and memoirs were integral parts of the festivities.

Why all the fuss?

In my paper I will show that the answer to this question is quite complex. At face value, the celebration marking the opening of the Erie Canal was simply an outward expression of the triumph felt by New Yorkers for having built the canal—it was a joyful expression of man’s accomplishment over nature, of New York’s success in planning, building and completing the canal project, and a hopeful glimpse toward the future economic endeavors that the canal would bring.

But the opening of the “Grand Canal” represented a great deal more to New Yorkers—this was a New York-style party celebrating the state and its people.  A closer look at these events and a brief examination of the history behind the building of the canal reveals multi-layers of intent, purpose and politicking.  A picture slowly emerges of an intricate local, national and international agenda, on the part of the celebration organizers—and it is this agenda that underlay the ten-day program of activities.

This presentation is a modified version of my MA history thesis.

Kathleen Collins, whose new book “Watching What We Eat: The Evolution of Television Cooking Shows” is due to come out in May 2009.

Like Julia Child, who did not begin her legendary cooking career until her mid-thirties, I came to realize my calling relatively “late” in life.  In researching this book, I spent many satisfying hours in the stacks of various university and public libraries and donned the white gloves and hushed tones required in archives and special collections reading rooms. While this book began its life before I began my library career, the process of writing it played a big part in why I finally decided to embrace what has been an enormously rewarding career change.

In this book, I focus on the ways that television, food and American culture intertwine. As I had suspected at the outset, this TV genre is a unique lens through which to review the last half century and then some. There are reasons the genre is as old as television itself and still expanding – and only some of those are economic. Cooking shows have a hold on our psyches – both individual and societal – and I hope to explain how and why.

And this may be of particular interest to some of you: I was told by a cataloguer at the Library of Congress that this book triggered a new cutter number at PN1992.8.C (C for cooking under “other special topics” in television programs). Needless to say, as a librarian, I could imagine no greater honor.

Thank you for expressing interest in Watching What We Eat. I hope you will find it as interesting to read as I found it interesting to write. Enjoy! 

Heather Saunders, Art Librarian at Purchase College SUNY, and a working artist in her own right.

I am presenting in a panel called ‘Gendering the Book’ at the 44^th International Congress of Medieval Studies this May in Kalamazoo. My presentation is entitled “Redefining Medieval Patronage: Female Circulation of Books of Hours”. If you’re unfamiliar with books of hours, they were wildly popular prayer books that were particularly associated with medieval women.

My topic is a direct result of enrolling in an art history Masters immediately after completing my MLIS. I was thrilled to take a course with a professor I knew from my undergraduate studies in art and art history, but I also felt a sense of trepidation, as many years had passed since I’d given medieval art a passing thought. Since my undergraduate degree, I’d focused my attention entirely on contemporary art.  Suddenly, I was surrounded by budding medievalists, many of whom went on to PhD studies. ‘What could I possibly bring to a classroom like this?’ I asked myself.

I concluded that in my program where you get out of it what you put into it, it’s best to be honest about your station in life and to take inspiration from who you really are, instead of putting on airs. For me, that meant drawing on the philosophy I’d learned in library school.

The course was in patronage, and I decided to examine books of hours as these immensely popular objects passed hands through bequests, silent networks, and other interesting means. I thought about the librarian’s approach to acquisitions and circulation. In libraries, it’s not the initial acquisition that validates a book, but its frequency of use over time. Also, many users benefit from library books that they could never afford, and the same was true of books of hours in medieval times. For example, someone might inherit a book or be able to acquire one secondhand, but they would never have the financial means to actually act as a patron. This perspective, which I never would have had without going to library school, allowed me to redefine patronage in this context.

I’m really pleased to have the opportunity to bring a librarian’s perspective to an art historians’ conference, as it will promote librarians as scholars in their own right. Wish me luck!