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September/October 2024
Check out what’s new and noteworthy this fall in Special Collections.
Saturday, October 12, 1:30-3 p.m., Roosevelt Library
Learn about the historical resources at the library and across the county that will help you piece together a history of your Minneapolis house, neighborhood or property. Special Collections staff will explain and demonstrate resources, emphasizing online resources in the Digital Collections that will allow you to jump-start your research from home – including permit records, maps, city directories, newspapers, photos and more. This class is best suited for researching properties located in the city of Minneapolis, though some county-wide resources will be discussed. Register online
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Monday, October 28, 10-11 a.m., Minneapolis Central Library
Minneapolis Central Library houses one of the last remaining full-service preservation departments in a public library in the U.S. Learn about the preservation services, tools, and treatments used to prolong the life of the library’s print collections. Collaborator: Minneapolis Community Education. Register online
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Q: What is a favorite project you’ve worked on in any library or archive?
Amy: I had the opportunity to digitize the Edna St. Vincent Millay papers housed in the St. Catherine University Archives. St. Vincent, as she preferred to be called, had a unique relationship with the nuns at the college and kept a robust correspondence with them. She even visited the campus a few times, which is documented with just a single photograph. My colleagues and I digitized all the materials and organized a selection of the items into an online exhibit.
Q: What do you like about working with books, archives and local history?
Amy: I like analyzing the local connections to broader national or international trends. Working specifically with the library organizational records, I get to see how innovative Minneapolis and Hennepin County libraries have been throughout their history, from MPL’s art collections and children’s rooms to HCL’s cataloging. I often wonder about the people who created the materials I work with. Did they think someone would be pouring over their notes in 50, 60, 70, 100-plus years?
Q: What is your favorite collection in the HCL Digital Collections?
Amy: The John F. Glanton Photographs. There’s something about capturing everyday moments that I find intriguing. It makes me wonder who is it that is depicted? What were they were like? Why was that photo taken? So many questions from a single photograph! It reminds me of Robin Coste Lewis’s poetry book, To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness, which was inspired by a cache of photographs found in her grandmother’s home.
Q: Book you’re currently reading or favorite book of all time?
Amy: I just finished Any Person is the Only Self by Elisa Gabbert (no relation, but our shared last name did factor into my decision to pick up the book), a series of essays on memory, identity, and reading. I’m also wrapping up Tommy Orange’s book Wandering Stars, which is fantastic. Orange is a musician and finds inspiration in music and rhythm, and that really comes across in his writing.
Photo: Amy Gabbert-Montag outside the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.
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The Minnesota Digital Library
The Minnesota Digital Library (MDL) began in 2003 as a state-wide effort to provide expertise, services, and an online digital platform for libraries and historical and cultural repositories around the state. MDL staff digitize content provided by participating institutions, assist in creating descriptive metadata, and load the digitized content to their website. MDL currently hosts over 60,000 digital items from 204 participating institutions.
Hennepin County Library first contributed to MDL in 2005 with a set of stereocard images. The library continued to contribute annually to the program until the library ramped up its own digitization program in 2014. MDL staff assisted library staff as we developed our own Digital Collections site. Their instruction has always been much appreciated.
While the library’s contributions to MDL are still online, the library has gradually been mirroring this content in our own Digital Collections, with improved metadata and sometimes new digital scans. This has included the 1940 Minneapolis Atlas, stereocards, business trade cards, and these two new additions:
A set of seven diaries written by teenager Ezra Fitch Pabody (1868-1940) between 1882 and 1890. Pabody’s diaries record many of the changes that took place during Minneapolis’s “boom town” years. He chronicles everything about his daily life, school, family, church, exercise, weather, and explorations of the city, including many interesting historical events: the shooting of Jesse James, the killing of three bears at Lake Calhoun, the day he went with his Aunt Myra to listen to Mark Twain speak at the Grand Opera House, and the new electric light mast at Bridge Square. As a 14-year-old, Pabody, usually referred to as “Fitch,” spent much of his time in the summer of 1882 catching insects, moths and butterflies attracted to the new electric lights. He and his sister Nellie, children of a pharmacist turned minister, were great readers and used the Athenaeum and his school library to borrow books. Pabody continued to live in Minneapolis, working for many years as a drafter for the American Bridge Company (formerly the Gillette-Herzog Manufacturing company).
View the diaries online
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By 1912, Minneapolis was no longer the grain hub of the US (having lost that title to Buffalo, NY), but the city was still feeling its oats, as it were, and on the eve of WWI its increasingly diversified economy was booming. Real Estate agent George Odlum reflected this energy with this small portfolio of photographs of the streets and buildings in downtown. Odlum, proud of his city, wished to show how built up and modern it was. Indeed, to contrast it with images of the city from the 1850s, it is remarkable how much the city had grown in little more than a half-century. Much of this Minneapolis is gone now, of course, most of the buildings swept away and the brick streets paved over. What might be most curious to the modern viewer is the number of houses still scattered about downtown, including some large estates, such as T. B. Walker’s, or even the old Levi Stewart house, on the site of what is now the Gay 90’s. View the album online
Compare these images with Joseph Zalusky’s similar set of photographs from the early 1940s.
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In addition to the above two updated collections, we’ve added 225 more restaurant menus to the Menu Collection—including menus from the 1980s without copyright. View the collection online
Wrestling matches at the old Minneapolis Auditorium were a regular and highly popular fixture of the Minneapolis pop-culture scene from the 1940s to the 1960s. Former wrestler and sports promoter Tony Stecher published a weekly program/newsletter Sports Facts hyping the contests and rivalries between the wrestlers in dramatic, over-the-top words and images. The simulated violence (“kayfabe”) and strutting antics of the wrestlers provided entertainment that was as much performance art as athletic competition. View the collection online
Find dozens of photographs of pro wrestling in the Minneapolis Newspaper Photographs Collection.
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Leigh Kamman was a radio announcer, narrator, and writer with a long career promoting jazz through the airwaves. He was best known as host of The Jazz Image, a weekly program produced by Minnesota Public Radio, broadcast in markets nationwide. During his time as a radio announcer, he interviewed many of the jazz greats including Ella Fitzgerald and Illinois Jacquet (both pictured above), Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, and Duke Ellington.
Kamman was deeply involved in the jazz scene of the Twin Cities, regularly interviewing local musicians and highlighting jazz events on his radio show. He acted as a board member of the Twin Cities Jazz Society and co-taught jazz history classes at the McPhail Center for the Arts. In the 1980s, Kamman hosted two jazz education series at the Walker Art Center, with notable co-hosts such as Dizzy Gillespie and John Hammond. In 2003, Kamman was inducted into the Minnesota Museum of Broadcasting Hall of Fame and is considered an American Broadcasting Pioneer by the Broadcaster’s Foundation.
Materials in this collection include day planners, correspondence, musician biographical information and press releases, newspaper clippings, radio scripts and photographs. The bulk of the collection covers Kamman’s career as a radio announcer in the Twin Cities during the 1960s-1980s. View the finding aid and see photos from the collection in the Digital Collections
Four scrapbooks documenting the work of Minneapolis real estate developer Ray Harris. Materials include photographs, brochures and promotional materials, newspaper clippings, and correspondence. Two scrapbooks document the development of Calhoun Square; one book includes a proposal for Block E (The Pageant); and the fourth book includes Calhoun Square, the Pageant, Greenway Gables, Manor Homes of Lowry Hill, Mount Curve Place, and proposed renovations of the Sears Building on Lake Street (Great Lake Center). View finding aid
Hennepin County Library Organizational Records
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James K. Hosmer Special Collections
Hennepin County Library
Minneapolis Central Library
300 Nicollet Mall
Minneapolis, MN 55401
Hours: Monday - Thursday, 9am - 4:30pm.
Appointments are not necessary, but you do need to call Special Collections or check-in at the 4th floor reference desk upon arrival for department access. You can speed up your visit by requesting materials be pulled in advance. Photocopier and scanners are available. Please bring a flash drive to store your scanned images.
Photo: Inside the climate-controlled Special Collections vault, where rare books, negatives, and AV material is stored.
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