UTA Special Collections

07/12/2024

Today kicks off MLB's "All-Star Week," held in Arlington this year at Globe Life Field. The 94th Midsummer Classic will be played at Globe Life Field on Tuesday, July 16, marking the second All-Star Game to be hosted by the Texas Rangers following the 1995 All-Star Game at The Ballpark in Arlington.

In honor of this, we are sharing a look back at some of our own baseball history from the early 20th century here at The University of Texas at Arlington! These photos from our collections show baseball players from the Carlisle Military Academy (1902-1913), Arlington Training School (1913-1916), and Grubbs Vocational College (1917-1923) baseball teams.

[📸: https://library.uta.edu/digitalgallery/search?search_api_views_fulltext=baseball&sort_by=search_api_relevance&items_per_page=48&f%5B0%5D=field_category%3A1697]

07/10/2024

A memorial service to celebrate the life and legacy of Dr. Allan Saxe will be held tomorrow, July 11, from 6-8PM. Dr. Saxe, local philanthropist and beloved professor, taught political science at The University of Texas at Arlington for 54 years before retiring in 2019. He was honored as Emeritus Associate Professor of Political Science in 2021. The Celebration of Life is open to the public and will be held in the Rosebud Theatre of the University Center on the UTA campus.

More information on the service can be found here: https://www.uta.edu/academics/schools-colleges/liberal-arts/news-events/recent-news/2024/07/08/celebration-of-life-for-dr-allan-saxe

[📸: Shorthorn Photographs Collection, UTA News Service Photograph Collection, Fort Worth Star-Telegram Collection; https://library.uta.edu/digitalgallery/search?mefibs-form-mini-search-search_api_views_fulltext=%22Allan+Saxe%22&mefibs-form-mini-search-mefibs_block_id=mini_search]

07/04/2024

In 1966, Arlington held its first Fourth of July parade in Randol Mill Park when the city's population had just surpassed 50,000 residents. The event was organized by Dottie Lynn and members of Church Women United. The parade was held in the morning, followed by a patriotic address by Brig. Gen. Max J. Volcansek, Jr., and music was provided throughout the day by the Greater Fort Worth Lions Club Band. A fireworks display was held in the evening, concluding the full day of events.

[📸: The Arlington Museum of Art's parade float for the Fourth of July Parade held in Arlington, 1990, Arlington Art Association Records;https://library.uta.edu/digitalgallery/img/10021859]

07/02/2024

On this day, 60 years ago, The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed into law to prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, s*x, or national origin.

[📸: Civil rights demonstrations held in Dallas and Fort Worth, Texas, March 1965, Fort Worth Star-Telegram Collection; https://tinyurl.com/yn6czdz2]

07/01/2024

❗️ UTA Special Collections will be closed from July 4-5, 2024 and will operate on a delayed start on Saturday, July 6, opening at 10AM. We will resume normal business hours on July 9, 2024. We apologize for any inconvenience, please email [email protected] or call 817-272-3393 if you have any questions.

[📸: Photo illustration by Laurie L. Ward for the Fourth of July featuring children and adults posted behind an American flag, 1988; Shorthorn Photographs Collection, https://library.uta.edu/digitalgallery/img/10022641]

06/27/2024

New on The Compass Rose! 🗞

This latest quarterly review blog highlights recent acquisitions, activities, and reproductions of materials from our collections from April-June 2024!

➡️Read more: https://libraries.uta.edu/news-events/blog/special-collections-2024-2nd-quarterly-review

06/20/2024

06/19/2024

🔵⚪️🔴 Happy Juneteenth! 🔴⚪️🔵

On June 19, 1865, Major General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston to issue his General Order No. 3, announcing to the people of Texas that “all slaves are free.” An estimated 250,000 enslaved people were affected by this delayed announcement of the Emancipation Proclamation. The anniversary of this declaration has long been observed in Texas as Juneteenth. What began as a unique Texas festivity has become a widespread celebration of jubilee and freedom.

Texas has been celebrating Juneteenth as a state holiday since 1980. Fort Worth’s own Opal Lee advocated for Juneteenth to become a federal holiday for years, which led to the Senate unanimously passing the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act on June 15, 2021. It subsequently passed through the House of Representatives by a 415-14 vote on June 16, 2021. The Act was signed into law by President Joe Biden, with Opal Lee in attendance, on June 17, 2021, making it the first new federal holiday since Martin Luther King Jr. Day, which was added in 1983.

For Fort Worth, a revived Juneteenth celebration was held on June 19, 1974 in Sycamore Park. Organized by the Fort Worth Tarrant County Community Development Fund, the celebration was established as the “Cowtown Juneteenth Jamboree” and activities included a downtown parade, a Miss Juneteenth contest, a Sojourner Truth Players performance, and a historical documentary screening. Attendees enjoyed carnival rides, art and cultural exhibit booths, games, live music, and food and refreshments. Planners initially designated Hillside Park as the site for the celebration, but it was decided to move Juneteenth festivities to Sycamore Park as it was larger and “more convenient for the majority of the Black community” as described by Henry Masters, director of the Community Development Fund.

In honor of Juneteenth, we've previously put together a pictorial history of Juneteenth celebrations in Fort Worth over the years using photos from our Fort Worth Star-Telegram collection. ➡️ Read more: https://libraries.uta.edu/news-events/blog/juneteenth-jubilees-fort-worth

➡️ View more Juneteenth photos on our Digital Gallery: https://library.uta.edu/digitalgallery/search?search_api_views_fulltext=Juneteenth

06/12/2024

We are saddened to hear of the passing of legendary basketball coach Robert Hughes, pictured here while coaching the Dunbar High School boys basketball team. Hughes was the United States' all-time winningest high school basketball coach from 2003-2010, and remains the winningest boys high school basketball coach in the United States with 1,333 wins.

View more photos taken throughout his career from our Fort Worth Star-Telegram Collection here: https://library.uta.edu/digitalgallery/search?search_api_views_fulltext=%22Robert%20Hughes%22&f%5B0%5D=field_year%3A%5B1965%20TO%201993%5D

06/10/2024

❗️ UTA Special Collections will be closed from June 18-19, 2024 and will resume normal business hours on June 20, 2024. We apologize for any inconvenience, please email [email protected] or call 817-272-3393 if you have any questions.

Send a message to learn more

06/06/2024

New on The Compass Rose! 🗞

In commemoration of this 80th anniversary of D-Day, we are honoring two of the five Fort Worth Star-Telegram WWII war correspondents to share the stories of these reporters from behind their bylines. Flem Hall and Stanley Gunn were reporting from overseas during the invasion, working towards fulfilling one directive from Star-Telegram publisher Amon G. Carter: bring home stories about Texas soldiers.

Reporting on the war during this time was complicated given that information concerning military operations was censored and only official statements issued by military authorities and supplied to press agencies were disseminated. The objective for Star-Telegram correspondents, however, was to provide readers back home with "a closeup, direct-from-the-scene picture of how their sons and brothers and sweethearts live, what they do, what they think, and how they fight."

➡️ Read the full story here: https://libraries.uta.edu/news-events/blog/star-telegram-wwii-war-correspondents-provide-news-texans-texas

06/03/2024

Happy Pride Month, y'all! 🏳️‍🌈

We are celebrating by highlighting our Tarrant County LGBTQ+ Collection, which was established in April 2022 and is still a growing collection! Organizations represented in the collection include the Tarrant County Gay Pride Week Association and Trinity Pride of Greater Fort Worth. Publications represented in the collection, ranging from 1983-2022, include Alliance News, Lambda Community News, Intrepid, TexStar Roundup News, and Tri State News.

The first Pride events were held to commemorate the Stonewall Uprising in New York City, which took place in June 1969. Stonewall was a watershed moment for the Gay Liberation Movement in the United States. Pride events occurred in the years following Stonewall and are usually celebrated throughout the month of June.

Pictured are some examples of materials from our Tarrant County LGBTQ+ Collection, in addition to various materials from other collections that reflect LGBTQ+ history! Come visit us to learn more!

[View collection details here: https://archives.library.uta.edu/repositories/2/resources/891]

05/31/2024

Have you donated your digital artwork/photos/videos to our Total Solar Eclipse collection yet? 🌙

Be a part of our history and donate your digital files here: https://utaedu.questionpro.com/TotalSolarEclipseCollection

UTA Special Collections is seeking community donations of digital materials documenting the historic Total Solar Eclipse to add to our permanent archival collections!

Donations are limited to digital or digitized materials, which can include anything relating to the eclipse and surrounding community gatherings or events. Some examples of requested donations include, but are not limited to: photographs of your eclipse-watching group, videos from watch parties, community-created digital artwork, or photographs/videos of people enjoying the eclipse. Please note that the primary focus of this collection will be the community response to the eclipse, rather than photographs of the sun and moon themselves. These materials will be preserved and made accessible through the UTA Libraries Digital Archive: https://uta.access.preservica.com

Community members are invited to make digital donations through the Total Solar Eclipse Collection donation form: https://utaedu.questionpro.com/TotalSolarEclipseCollection

City of Arlington, TX - City Hall
Visit Arlington, Texas
The University of Texas at Arlington
UTA Libraries

05/20/2024

❗️ UTA Special Collections will be closed from May 24-27, 2024 in observance of Memorial Day. We will resume normal business hours on May 28. We apologize for any inconvenience, please email [email protected] or call 817-272-3393 if you have any questions.

05/15/2024

The longstanding Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been well documented in our photograph collections through coverage of demonstrations on the UTA campus throughout the decades. In 1982, when this series of photos were taken, members of UTA's General Union of Palestine Students were marching in support of the Palestine Liberation Organization, denouncing the sale of U.S. arms to Israel, and protesting Israel's alleged role in the massacre of hundreds of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. Anti-Palestine protestors were also in attendance to counter-demonstrate. While the circumstances and demands have changed over time, this a prime example of the importance of preserving this history so future generations can study and reflect on its impact in perpetuity!

[📸: Fort Worth Star-Telegram collection, Shorthorn Photographs Collection, 1982; https://library.uta.edu/digitalgallery/img/20158791, https://library.uta.edu/digitalgallery/img/20158792]

05/13/2024

❗️ UTA Special Collections will be closed from May 17-18, 2024 and will resume normal business hours on May 21. We apologize for any inconvenience, please email [email protected] or call 817-272-3393 if you have any questions.

Send a message to learn more

05/10/2024

Congratulations to all of the Spring 2024 The University of Texas at Arlington graduates! 🎓🎉 Looking back 100 years to the class of 1924, when UTA was known as The North Texas Agricultural College and the graduating class was just 33 students...so much has changed since then!

[Article from The Shorthorn Newspaper collection, published April 29, 1924; Diploma cover from the L. G. Meier Papers; Photos from the North Texas Agricultural College Photograph Album and Clarence Denman Papers; See more here: https://library.uta.edu/digitalgallery/search?search_api_views_fulltext=%22North%20Texas%20Agricultural%20College%22&f%5B0%5D=field_coverage%3A373]

04/24/2024

New on The Compass Rose! 🗞

In 2023, UTA Special Collections launched "Retro Remix: Archives-Inspired Student Art," an exhibition featuring original documents, photographs, maps, sheet music, and more, displayed alongside student "remixes" of those original archival materials.

With each "original" we displayed from our collection, we also displayed a QR-code that would allow students to download and create their own artworks and enter those as submissions in a contest. We received over 100 entries in the contest and this blog announces the six winners, which highlights the artwork created and the original materials that inspired it!

➡️ Read more: https://libraries.uta.edu/news-events/blog/what-did-they-create-student-art-contest-winners

04/22/2024

Happy Earth Day! 🌎

54 years ago today, Earth Day was celebrated at The University of Texas at Arlington with an event organized by a student group called Start Thinking of Pollution (STOP), which hosted speakers that included U.S. Representative Jim Wright and Senator Ralph Yarborough. Members of Alpha Rho Chi, the CAPPA at UT Arlington architecture fraternity, led a "funeral service" for an internal combustion engine, symbolic of automobile pollution. Pledges wore surgical and gas masks as the engine was lowered into its grave; a live oak tree was planted on top. Art installations were put up around campus to raise awareness of environmental issues: an "Aluminum Man" sculpture was hung from a tree outside of the Student Center, and a pile of trash encased in wire was seen with a sign reading "Pollution is here!"

[📸: Fort Worth Star-Telegram Collection, 1970; https://library.uta.edu/digitalgallery/search?search_api_views_fulltext=%22earth+day+uta%22]

04/16/2024

Our latest mini-exhibit, "Data Through the Decades," shows just how rapidly technology is changing. Materials on display include media types that were once widely used and are now obsolete, and this exhibit aims to show that the data stored on these different media formats can be extremely important to the historical record. On view now until April 25 on the sixth floor of UTA's Central Library!

[More: https://events.uta.edu/event/data-through-the-decades-mini-exhibit]

04/15/2024

UTA Special Collections is seeking community donations of digital materials documenting the historic Total Solar Eclipse to add to our permanent archival collections!

Donations are limited to digital or digitized materials, which can include anything relating to the eclipse and surrounding community gatherings or events. Some examples of requested donations include, but are not limited to: photographs of your eclipse-watching group, videos from watch parties, community-created digital artwork, or photographs/videos of people enjoying the eclipse. Please note that the primary focus of this collection will be the community response to the eclipse, rather than photographs of the sun and moon themselves. These materials will be preserved and made accessible through the UTA Libraries Digital Archive: https://uta.access.preservica.com

Community members are invited to make digital donations through the Total Solar Eclipse Collection donation form: https://utaedu.questionpro.com/TotalSolarEclipseCollection

City of Arlington, TX - City Hall
Visit Arlington, Texas
The University of Texas at Arlington
UTA Libraries

04/09/2024

It's National Student Employee Recognition Week and we want to take a moment to recognize all seven of our phenomenal student employees for all of their hard work! Thank you Darryl, Emily, Janeen, Juno, Piper, Sophia, and Zachary - we appreciate you so much!

🌟 UTA Career Development Center

04/08/2024

Sam Houston is ready for the ! 🌙😎☀️

04/05/2024

We were thrilled to host CBS News Texas this morning for a deeper dive into the history of solar eclipses! This diagram from 1742 is currently on display in our exhibit "Theoria Eclipsium: Curiosity, Captivation, Connection" and we invite the public to visit us to learn more!

More information on the exhibit can be found here: https://events.uta.edu/event/theoria_eclipsium_curiosity_captivation_connection

Brittany takes us through the history of the solar eclipse at UT Arlington.

04/04/2024

04/03/2024

𝗪𝗲'𝗿𝗲 𝗵𝗼𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗮 𝗴𝗶𝘃𝗲𝗮𝘄𝗮𝘆! 🎉

As part of the upcoming "Solar-Bration" activities on campus, Special Collections has partnered with the UTA FabLab to give away one of these woodcut devices that are designed to tell time at night! These devices are based on the original paper volvelle from Peter Apian's "Cosmographia" and can tell time at night by combining astrological time (the "lunar hour") with the shape of the moon. This piece was designed by the FabLab's Student Assistant Lead Alex Patrón!

𝗛𝗢𝗪 𝗧𝗢 𝗘𝗡𝗧𝗘𝗥: Comment below and like this post for an entry into this giveaway! Entries will close at 12PM on April 8 and we will announce the winner that afternoon.

04/02/2024

UTA Special Collections is hosting “Theoria Eclipsium: Curiosity, Captivation, Connection,” an exhibit showcasing over 500 years of eclipse history, through August in the Central Library’s Sixth Floor Atrium.
https://ow.ly/fHBh50R6ciw

03/29/2024

New on The Compass Rose! 🗞

This latest quarterly review blog highlights recent acquisitions, activities, and reproductions of materials from our collections from January-March 2024!

➡️ Read more: https://libraries.uta.edu/news-events/blog/special-collections-2024-1st-quarterly-review

01/05/2024

Have you seen The Iron Claw yet? Be sure to visit this mini-exhibit on the Von Erichs before its last day, January 8, 2024! The mini-exhibit can be viewed on the 6th floor of UTA's Central Library during regular library hours.

12/22/2023

Still looking for that perfect gift for the holiday season? Perhaps something homemade will work, like these adorable gifts made for Dwight D. Eisenhower's grandchildren in 1952!

🎁 Happy holidays from UTA Special Collections! 🎁

[📸: Tom McCann, chairman of arrangements for General Eisenhower's visit to Fort Worth, inspects the giftwrapped cowboy boots and toys gifted by the Tarrant County Republicans to the general's grandchildren, David, Ann, and Susan; Fort Worth Star-Telegram collection, 10/15/1952, https://library.uta.edu/digitalgallery/img/20130075]