Archival Fever

In this episode, we consider the close relationship between art museums and the practice of commissioning artwork for commercial Christmas cards.

Today, we’re back with more letters! Except instead of last letters, we thought we’d cheer things up with—rejection letters. We’re reporting from the Harry Ransom Center as we dive into a massive collection of business papers—namely, the records of the Alfred A. Knopf, Inc publishing company.We dug through boxes and boxes of Knopf business records to find letters explaining why the firm rejected the work of two famous authors, Langston Hughes and Ray Bradbury.

This season, we’re diving deep in letters in archives near and far. Today, our topic is suitably spooky and morbid in anticipation of the holiday at the end of the month. We’re looking at last letters by two queens—one Scottish, one French—written upon anticipation of their death by execution.

To kickstart this episode, we visited Baylor University’s Texas Collection, an archive which houses over 1,500 Texas cookbooks. Many of these are family volumes. We hope through diving through a mountain of cookbooks to give you a taste of a rich American food tradition, complicated by relationships to the family unit and economic reality.

Today, we’re looking at objects at the Harry Ransom Center we’re calling “Frankenbooks.”’ Join us for an interview with Aaron Pratt, the Pforzheimer Curator of Early Books and Manuscripts at the Harry Ransom Center. https://archivalfever.com/2019/02/15/episode-4-frankenbooks/

On today’s episode we’re going to talk about a piece of technology your grandparents may remember — the dictabelt recorder.

Interested in what happens to artwork from protests? Listen to our interview with Dr. Alessandra Renzi and Dr. Dietmar Offenhuber to see what’s been happening with posters from the Boston Women’s March (January 21, 2017) in this digital archive.

Today, a 50 year-old image that begs the question: how soon is too soon? We’re diving into icons of revolution and protest. To end 2018, we’re revisiting one of the most tumultuous years of the last century: 1968.

Today we’re at the Blanton Museum on the University of Texas at Austin Campus, telling the story of a monumental figure in American history, Madam C.J. Walker, and her pursuit of the American dream.

Interview with Meredith Lehman, Educator at the Blanton Museum.

In each episode, your intrepid hosts take you into the archive in search of the wild, crazy, and bizarre.