Tag Archives: northeastern

from the archive: "queen everett"

16 Thursday Dec 2010

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One of the things I love about working in an archive is the serendipity: the way a search for something else entirely can lead you into a gem of a story that takes you in a whole new direction. This certainly isn’t unique to the archival world — but it’s something that historians and archivists tend to start talking about together when they’re in the same room long enough!

Earlier this week, while hunting down the location of a photograph we had scanned several years ago at Northeastern but failed to properly identify, I was going through a folder of images from Northeastern’s annual Winter Carnival from the 1960s and 70s. Many of the photographs were of the individuals nominated for the position of Winter Carnival Queen — sort of the spring term equivalent of a Homecoming Queen. Lots of 8 x 10 glossies of young women posed alone and in groups, in winter coats throwing snowballs, in ball gowns and (in the case of the girls who won) a sparkling tiara.

Then I came to a small yellowed clipping that featured a photograph of the five young women nominated in 1971 … and the young man, Everett Nau, who had been crowned the Winter Carnival Queen of 1970. The brief caption to the photograph read (in part)

NAU GOOD LUCK GIRLS … Everett Nau, last year’s Winter Carnival Queen, bestows his best wishes upon this year’s recently selected finalists (all girls if you’ll notice). … In this year’s campaign, the judges ruled it mandatory that the contestants be of the female gender.

Well, how could I possibly leave it at that?

So I did a little digging, and here (gentle readers) is what I found out about Everett Nau (class of ’71) and his reign as Winter Carnival Queen of 1970.

Nominees for Winter Queen, 1971
Linda Clare, Kathy McCarthy, Marie Petralia,
Delio Pio, and Everett Nau
(image in Northeastern’s Historical Photographs digital collection)

Nau was an Education major, member of the campus ROTC, columnist for the student newspaper, self-identified as “moderate-right” in political leanings … and also self-identified as male-gendered person.

It appears that Everett’s original nomination barely caused a stir on Northeastern’s campus — most likely because the nominee himself seemed to view the event as something of a lark. The campus newspaper, Northeastern News, offered a full-page spread of photographs showcasing the five nominees on 23 January 1970 (page 5); Everett — like all the other candidates — is shown in a formal head-and-shoulders portrait and more informal poses.  It is in these informal shots that Everett’s gender is highlighted — whereas the women’s photographs bear a resemblance to fashion photographs, Everett is pictured dressed in his ROTC uniform, rifle in hand: we are clearly meant to read him as masculine.  Yet at that moment, this masculinity did not seem to be a barrier to nomination.

And a few weeks later, it was not a barrier to being crowned Winter Carnival Queen.

Once he’d actually been crowned, “Queen Everett” became a bit of an overnight sensation, the Northeastern News reported (13 February 1970).  He was interviewed by newspapers and radio shows nationwide and appearing in news stories as far away as Paris. The 6′ 5″ newlywed (as the newspaper described him) was invited to appear on a game show called To Tell the Truth in which a panel of four celebrities were challenged to identify the true “Queen Everett” among a group of three men (the real Everett and two imposters).

While Nau’s gender was seen as something of an oddity in the context of the Winter Carnival Queen competition, what is striking to a modern-day reader of the newspaper coverage is that his nomination and crowning were not portrayed at the time as any sort of deliberate attempt to disrupt conventional gender roles. Nau’s gender or sexuality is not questioned, and it is only in the aftermath that male candidates are ruled ineligible.

I’ve been unable thus far to find any record of why the post-facto changes in the competition rules were made; I’d be really interested to know who felt Nau’s presence was a threat and why. In the midst of a turbulent year of student protests, women’s liberation, antiwar activism and other upheavals, Nau was hardly positioning himself as a radical — his column for the student paper regularly admonished his fellow students for their disruptive activities (and, as I said, self-identified as “moderate-right” in his politics).  This was not some gender-bending longhair out to mock the system.  Which makes makes me that much more inclined to believe that the subsequent rule changes had much more to do with peoples’ underlying discomfort with cross-gender categorization than Nau as some sort of radical.

Amazing what lengths we will go to preserve the binary gender system.

from the archives: making archival images accessible online

24 Wednesday Nov 2010

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Last week, I finally finished the scanning and metadata entry project I began over a year and a half ago at Northeastern: Two photo albums and a scrapbook compiled between the 1890s-1920s by Marjorie Bouvé, a young Boston woman who founded a school of physical education. The photographs and scrapbooks document her adolescence and college education (she attended Bradford Academy and Smith College), and her work as a teacher. Hopefully, hopefully, early in 2011, I’ll be able to link to the interactive database containing all the images and records I created.

Nearly 2,000 of them.

But for now, I thought I’d give you a taste of what it means to create what we in the archives world call “digital surrogates” of archival images. Partly ’cause I think it’s interesting. Partly ’cause I took a phone call from a gentleman this week at the Massachusetts Historical Society who didn’t understand why all our records weren’t just digitized and up online (as our Collections Services director would say: “if you see it online, it wasn’t elves that put it up there!”).

So what does it mean to enter metadata for each digital image we create? Well, here’s a sample record I pulled from the database, which is the metadata (the information about the creation and content of the image) associated with one page of a letter in Marjorie’s scrapbook.  You sill see from the file name that this is the ninth item cataloged from page one of volume four from the Marjorie Bouvé papers (collection M89).


m89_s4p001v009b\.jpg

Item separated from m89_s4p001v005. Item related to m89_s4p001v008.
Letter to members of the Rainy Day Club from M. Anagnos, 20 August 1892.
Aganos, M.
Perkins Institution and Massachusetts Asylum for the Blind
Marjorie Bouvé Papers (M89), Box 1
1892-08-20
2010-10-23
Copyright Northeastern University
Haidt, Marie
3215 x 4073 pixels
7.75 x 10.0 inches
Social Stationary
Boston (Mass.)
South Boston (Mass.)
Correspondence — Massachusetts — Boston
Correspondence — Massachusetts — South Boston
Scrapbooks
Social stationary
Aganos, M.
Bouvé, Marjorie, 1879-1970
Caverly, Edith L.
Eaton, Alice
Kelly, Edith A.
Smith, Lillian
Smith, Marion E.
Wilkins, Christel W. 
Perkins Institution and Massachusetts Asylum for the Blind 
BookEye 3 A1AJC
400dpi2010-07-21
B001927
m89_s4p001v009

This record is in XML (eXtensible Markup Language) and can be read by a variety of web-based display programs (at Northeastern, we use a content management system called Greenstone).The information I enter, and enclose in tags) allows the content management system to display the images and the information about them in a prettier, user-friendly format. See, for example, the images in the Freedom House Collectionwhich Hanna (and a team of others) worked on a few years ago.

Some of the information is generated automatically by Greenstone, but all of the data in the file set you see here was entered by me.  Fingers crossed it all pays off in the end, when y’all get to flip through a digitized version of some pretty cool turn-of-the-twentieth-century pictures and ephemera … all from the comfort of your very own personal computers.

from the archive: the "celebrated Regan Water Curtain"

12 Tuesday Oct 2010

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I’m cataloging images from the Marjorie Bouve scrapbooks this afternoon, and ran across a theater program from Tremont Theatre (Boston, Mass), 1909, which trumpeted themselves as “the safest theatre in Boston,” being equipped with “three celebrated Regan Water Curtains which are positive in their action. Also an asbestos curtain.” Obviously, this required a thirty-second search through Google to find out what, exactly, a “water curtain” might be. The image on the right shows the water curtain in action, as pictured in Public Opinon, vol 29 (January – December 1905).

This technique of fire containment was patented by Chief Regan of the Boston fire department as a method of keeping fires from leaping from building to building and also from destabilizing the front of buildings. As the Public Opinion describes:

The fire department can cope with the average fire when it is no higher than the sixth floor, but above that all that is needed to have a second Baltimore fire is a high wind and an outbreak. Tie fire would leap from building to building, say above the sixth floor, and we should see a long row of buildings in the great financial centers, with all their tops burning and the bottom floors intact. This may be remote, or it may not be, but, as fire insurance men know, it must be figured in the table of insurance rates. The Regan water

curtain is designed to prevent flames from leaping across a street and the front of a building from warping by heat. On the eighth floor and on the fifteenth floor, on the Broadway side of the Manhattan Life Building, 3 1/2-inch pipes were connected with the city water system in the street. The nozzles of the pipe were split into three tiny slots, so that the stream spread into fine spray. This system of pipes stretched across the front wall of the building made a canopy of water, covered the front of the building, and ran off in great streams for a block up and down the curb of Broadway.

So there’s your history tidbit for the day. Don’t you feel more informed?

from the archive: new collections

11 Wednesday Aug 2010

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It’s been a while since I put up a post about the work Hanna and I do during our regular working hours as librarian/archivists at Northeastern, Countway Medical Library, and the Massachusetts Historical Society (we both work independently at Countway and the MHS and then job share a position at Northeastern with one other woman).


Hanna and I have both recently finished processing new collections at Northeastern — “processing” being the archive-speak term for taking newly-acquired collections, organizing them, doing what we can to preserve them, and then making them accessible to the public. For each collection, Northeastern has a “finding aid” that details the scope and content of the collection, and provides some basic historical background on the person or organization.

One of the things I really like about my job at Northeastern is that we actively collect materials from under-represented communities and social justice organizations in the Boston area — specifically the queer community, the Latina/Latino community, Chinese and African-American communities.

Hanna recently completed processing 14 boxes of records from Fenway Health, the community health center where she and I both receive our primary care. The staff there are preternaturally awesome and we suspect that they may come from a race of highly advanced alien beings who have made it their mission to provide high-quality healthcare to the human beings on this woeful little planet that can’t get their act together to make universal healthcare a human right (Doctors Without Interstellar Borders?) You can check out the press release Hanna put together or the finding guide to the records if you’re interested in how these materials are organized and made available for researchers.

My collection was a much more modest two boxes, the papers of Keri Lynn Duran, an AIDS / HIV activist and educator, Keri Duran, who herself was diagnosed with AIDS and died in 1995 at the age of 32, after six years of organizing, protesting and educating. After working with materials that mostly date from the nineteenth-century and earlier at the MHS (although the Historical Society is still actively collecting), it was a little disconcerting to be arranging material from someone whose life and work encompassed such recent events. Her personal journals, I thought, were particularly illuminating in describing her health struggles and her anger about the slow political response as she and her friends were dying. You can read the finding guide online at the NU website.

Even though a lot of the material in both of these collections is widely available to the public now (journal articles on AIDS, public health pamphlets, brochures on artificial insemination, etc.) and may not seem very historically relevant, they are already historical in that they help to document a particular moment in the history of the queer community, in public health care, and activism surrounding AIDS / HIV. And hopefully — if we archivists do our jobs right! — these materials will now be around for decades to come, so that 200+ years down the road (when the events of the 1990s are as far behind us as the events of the Revolutionary War are to us today) these documents will still be here for historians of the future to access and recreate our stories from.

from the archive: "the librarian’s image"

28 Monday Jun 2010

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I’m processing a collection at Northeastern donated by Michael Meltsner, one of the faculty at the School of Law. On an op-ed page from the New York Times, 13 October 2003, I came across the following letter to the editor.

To the Editor:

Your Oct. 9 Arts pages article about the librarian action figure modeled on Nancy Pearl referred to librarians who found the figure offensive as the ”humorless reaches of librarianship.” A number of my colleagues have taken offense at being described as such. We are opposed to the action figure not because we are ”humorless” but because it perpetuates a stereotype that is demeaning to our profession.

Perhaps public librarians are not directly affected by the dowdy librarian stereotype, but as law librarians we provide library services to some of the most prestigious firms in the country and must maintain a professional image.

The librarian doll with the ”amazing push-button shushing action” damages the professional image that we have worked so hard to achieve.

TANIA DANIELSON

Port Washington, N.Y., Oct. 9, 2003

I think it’s the second to last paragraph that really takes the cake. I’m fascinated by the way it combines a total lack of willingness to enjoy the light-hearted, self-depricating humor embodied by the action figure — not to mention the way the action figure is an ironic commentary on the stereotype she’s unhappy with — and professional snobbery at the expense of public librarianship. I mean really: who in their right mind disses public librarians? I guess now we have our answer!

Given that this was a random letter to the New York Times from seven years ago, I’m not really out to slam Ms. Danielson for what I sincerely hope are now outdated sentiments! But I was really impressed by the elitism this letter was saturated with, and I’m amusing myself on this stifling hot Monday in June by re-posting it here.

theatrical amusements, circa. 1910s

02 Wednesday Jun 2010

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So as longtime readers are aware, I’ve been working for the past year or so on a scrapbook digitization project at Northeastern University’s Archives and Special Collections. I started at Northeastern in the fall of 2008 as a processing intern and have been there in one capacity or another since (I was just recently hired as a part-time Archives Assistant, in which capacity I get paid to do reference work and processing). Anyway, the scrapbook thing has been a very very part-time gig, but lots of fun because I get to look at photographs of young women doing turn-of-the-(twentieth)-century calisthenics in woolen jumpsuits and read turn-of-the-(twentieth)-century recipes for flapjacks.

Incidentally, if anyone knows what it meant to “go fussing” in 1910s-era Boston (as in: “I went out fussing at least once this past weekend”), let me know! Thus far, my investigations in slang dictionaries have failed.

So back to the content of Marjorie Bouve’s scrapbooks. This past week, I reached a run of playbills for dramas, operas, musical comedies and other theatrical entertainments engaged at Boston theatres from during the first few years of the twentieth century. I don’t have anything particularly insightful and/or deconstructionist to say about these — not being a theatre historian — but I did want to highlight a couple of gems for your amusement.

I was attempting to catalog these playbills in the scrapbook for our online database, and ran across one with no cover, simply the cast list and synopsis of acts, which read thusly (courtesy of Google Books)

A search through Google for “spoopju land” (I mean really, how many can there be??) landed me this little gem by Mssrs. Gustav Luders and Frank Pixley, published in 1901.

With the following table of contents

The other intriguing play was one called “A Messanger from Mars,” which I happened to show to Hanna (who also works at Northeastern). She said it sounded familiar so I did a search and came up with this New York Times story covering the premier of the show in London 23 November 1899.

The London production starred the same actor, Charles Hawtrey, who performed in the touring production Marjorie Bouve saw in Boston in 1903. Hawtrey later went on to star in the 1913 silent film version, which is what was niggling at Hanna’s memory when she saw the title.

Every so often, I step back from idle exploratory searches like this — searches that took me about naught-five seconds to perform at my workstation while I was waiting for my database to back up the data I’d entered — and remember that time Before The Internets (yes, I’m definitely old enough to remember B.T.I.) when this kind of thing would have required, at bare minimum, a trip to the local public library or (in this case) upstairs to the regular research library stacks, where you’d hope they had something in a book somewhere about one of these plays. An index to twentieth-century American theater that would point you toward the writer, which in turn might (if you were lucky) point you toward the actual play. Eventually.

It’s hard to hate Google too much, despite their octopoidal presence, when they make it possible to explore these works from anywhere you have access to the world wide web.

"i think i might be gay…now what do I do?"

29 Thursday Apr 2010

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At one of my places of work, Northeastern University Archives & Special Collections, I’m in the early stages of processing the papers of Keri Lynn Duran (1962-1995), an AIDS activist and educator. On Tuesday, I came across two pamphlets from the mid-90s titled “I think I might be gay…now what do I do?: A Pamphlet for Young Men” and the corresponding “I think I might be lesbian…now what do I do?” (you can see updated versions of these — lesbian and gay — online at Advocates for Youth).

My reading of these was quite possibly colored by the fact I’d spent the afternoon reading literature on AIDS prevention and clinical drug trials . . . but I was struck by the muted tone of the pamphlets. They were in no way irresponsible or shaming: the text was affirming of non-straight sexuality, encouraged young people not to be pressured into settling on a single sexual identity, acknowledged the homophobia they may encounter, and provided additional resources.

But what I felt was missing was, you know, joy.

I’m far from the first person to suggest that our cultural attitudes toward the sexuality of children and young adults yo-yos back and forth from the clinical to the hysterical, from “just the facts” to “omg! think of the children!” without a lot of room left for pleasure. For embracing human sexual intimacy as one of the great joys in life. (See, for example, Jessica Fields, Judith Levine and Heather Corinna for starters.) And I understand the urge — particularly in the age of lethal sexually-transmitted diseases — to take a public health approach and deluge young people entering sexual maturity with the information to protect themselves from these infections (as well as from unintended pregnancy, physical and emotional abuse, etc.). But in dumping all of this cautionary information on top of them, while freaking out every two seconds about their sex lives (it constantly amazes me how much adults in the media enjoy speculating about the sex lives of youngsters), we somehow forget to talk about how freakin’ awesome sex is.

And I’m not talking about how “hot” or “sexy” sex is — as in “girls gone wild,” performative sex. I’m talking about, you know, why all of us everyday folks (the people who don’t look like the models in Vogue or GQ) enjoy sexual intimacy with our partners. We don’t talk about why sexual intimacy is, at the end of the day, worth pursuing if engaging in sexual activity truly entails all the risks we tell young people it entails: a broken heart, a viral infection, an unplanned pregnancy, possible death.

I believe this is because our culture views young people as sexually insatiable. We assume they’re perpetually horny. And we assume that, being horny, surrounded by other equally-horny teenagers, they automatically (magically?) know how to access all of the enthusiastic, joyful, athletic (dare we say “innovative, bordering on the avant garde”?) sex they want whenever and with whomever. We somehow (I guess?) imagine that young people have access to the language to talk about their desires, their loves, what turns them on, who turns them on, how to act on those feelings even though I doubt that picture of adolescence is one most people remember from their own teenage years.

Or possibly we don’t invoke pleasure, joy, and desire in these conversations because we often still struggle to articulate them for ourselves — let alone feel confident enough to speak of them to young people with less experience and even more questions than ourselves.

This silence makes me sad. Growing up, it seems to me, is scary enough without adults constantly taking it upon themselves to remind young people just how scary it is. Again, these pamphlets were providing encouraging information to young people they assumed were already struggling. And none of their advice seems, to me, particularly misplaced. They’re not wrong in what they do provide. But . . .

I just wish the answer to “now what do I do?” (for all teens, regardless of orientation) could be a little less like a public service announcement and a little more, well, more confident in teens ability to grow into their adult sexuality with grace — stumbling along the way, to be sure (we’re all human, after all, teenagers too) — but with generosity, tenderness, energy, creativity, passion, resilience, intelligence, and joy. Backed up by the message that we’re available in the background to listen, converse, support, and provide information and resources whenever they might need them.

But really, we shouldn’t forget to mention the joy.

from the archives: "to lady patrons"

31 Wednesday Mar 2010

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Working on my digitization project yesterday, I came across this announcement printed in a theater program for a production of Shakespeare’s King Henry V performed at the Hollis St. Theatre here in Boston in April of 1901.

TO LADY PATRONS

The established rule at the Hollis St. Theatre, requiring ladies to remove their hats, bonnets, or other head-dress while witnessing the performance, applies to all parts of the auditorium, including the boxes and loges. It is essential to the comfort and convenience of all of our patrons in general that this rule be strictly enforced.

Ladies who are unwilling or unable to conform to the rule are earnestly requested to leave the Theatre without delay, and to recieve the price of their ticket at the box office.

I’m sure someone who knows a great deal more about theater history than I do could talk at more length about the shift in attitudes this represents in the cultural acceptance of women attending the theater and, bless me, being encouraged to sit in a public space with bare heads! I think my favorite bit is the “earnestly requested,” as it has such a polite imploring tone. Contrast that with the “turn off your cell phone” announcements today, which are so often couched in cajoling humor. Not that one method is better or worse, but I do think it says something about the audience that the managers of the theater expected their plea to be taken seriously.

on my plate: year three

11 Friday Sep 2009

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Today is the first official day of classes for me at Simmons, where I am entering my third year as a dual-degree student in the History and Archives Management Master’s program. So what does that mean in terms of the shape of my daily life?

Well, for starters, I continue to work four days a week at the Massachusetts Historical Society, with a great team of librarians and archivists who have been unfailingly supportive of my studies and given me the chance to learn the (shall we say) trade secrets of providing archival reference service. If you’re interested in the work that goes on at a place like the MHS (oldest historical society in the Western Hemisphere), check out my colleague & friend Jeremy Dibbell’s blog, the Beehive, hosted by the MHS website. I will also put in another plug for following John Quincy Adams on twitter, where he is tweeting posthumously his line-a-day diary entries from an 1809 voyage to Russia.

In addition, I have a very part-time job at Northeastern’s Archives and Special Collections, where I spend four hours a week slowly constructing a database of images from the scrapbooks of Marjorie Bouve, the founder of Northeastern’s Bouve School of Physical Education. Nothing has gone live online yet, but I can promise links when (fingers crossed!) the images are web-published. Lots of great early-twentieth-century snapshots of young women (and occasionally men) engaged in such activities as cycling, sailing, sight-seeing, and amateur theatricals.

As a graduate student, my work this year turns decisively toward my thesis research on the creation of the Oregon Extension program during the mid-1970s. I will be exploring the various cultural and educational threads that came together to shape the way in which the OE was developed as an educational program and a particular communal space. To that end, one of my two classes this fall is an independent study, which provides me with dedicated time to prepare logistically and theoretically for my oral history field work. If I can find ways to share this on-going project on the blog without a lot of additional time and mental strain, I will . . . if not, you should be seeing the fruits of my labors sometime in December of 2010 (again, fingers crossed!).

I am also in Archives, History, and Collective Memory, the dual-degree capstone course, of sorts. Since it focuses on “the relationship between historical events, the creation and maintenance of archival records, and the construction of collective memory” I look forward to applying the concepts we discuss in class to my own research: what is oral history, after all, but the creation of archival records and a collective construction of historically-minded personal narratives?

And finally, of course, come all of the continued pleasures and duties of domestic life: the morning and evening commute, leisure reading, movie watching, shopping and meal preparation, laundry, cleaning, weekend outings, keeping up with far-flung family members, and (above all) regularly-scheduled time with Hanna.

Given all of this real-world activity, I’m sure how much I’ll be blogging during the coming months. Obviously, home life, work, and school commitments come first. For those of you who follow my blog as a way of keeping up long-distance with what’s going on in my life, I’ll definitely try to post pictures and piffle as the opportunity arises. For those of you who check in from elsewhere in the blogosphere, I’m still reading your blogs, even if I lack the time to join in the conversation!

As always, shoot me an email or (gasp) put pen to paper and write me a letter and I will respond, later if not sooner (but hopefully sooner). You know where to find me! In the meantime, I do think of you all and hope your fall projects are getting underway with creativity, productivity, and pleasure. Don’t forget to enjoy the autumn weather, wherever you may be.

*photograph of the T crossing the intersection of Harvard and Beacon at Coolidge Corner by scleroplex @ Flickr.

From the Archives: Creating a digital collection

04 Thursday Jun 2009

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Two weeks ago, I started my new part-time job at Northeastern’s Archives & Special Collections (where I interned this past academic year). The project I’ve been asked to complete is the creation of a digital collection that gives researchers virtual access to a series of scrapbooks put together at the turn of the twentieth century by Marjorie Bouve, a Boston University alumna and founder of Northeastern’s Bouve School of Physical Education. This involves scanning each page of the scrapbooks and then cropping each TIF image file so that we have both a full-page image and individual images of each photograph of item on the page. Thus, I spent seven hours Tuesday doing this:


Once all of the images have been created, we have to enter all of the “metadata” (library-speak for “information about information”) into our database and customize the interface Northeastern uses to show their digital collections, an open source software program called Greenstone. Hanna worked tirelessly on the last Northeastern project, the Freedom House Photographs, which you can view online to get a feel for what the end product may look like.

Since this is a scrapbook collection, and we are hoping to emulate the feeling of looking at individual scrapbook pages to a limited extent (sans fancy software like the British Library uses for their prize collections) we’re looking to do something similar to what Simmons College did with the scrapbooks of one of their own alumni, Ruth Mitchell Wunderly, also a fun collection to flip through.

Next time I do some scanning on Northeastern’s spiffy book scanner, I’ll take my digital camera and get some shots of the contraption in action — it’s pretty awesome, despite the fact it reminds me of the radial x-ray machine they use at my dentist’s office.