Boundless: Artists in the Archives is a newly launched program from the University of Tennessee Libraries. To highlight the unique materials available in UT’s Special Collections and Betsey B. Creekmore Archives, the Libraries will periodically commission a work of art or music inspired by an item or collection in the archives. The Libraries’ first partners in the … Continued
US Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee gained national attention in the early 1950s when he chaired congressional investigations into organized crime in America. Kefauver’s records of those inquiries form the basis of Crime Documents from the Estes Kefauver Collection, one of the newest digital collections of the University Libraries at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. … Continued
A new exhibition opening May 26 at UT’s McClung Museum of Natural History and Culture depicts consumer culture in the American Gilded Age. The exhibition includes a number of objects on loan from UT Libraries’ Special Collections. Fish Forks and Fine Furnishings: Consumer Culture in the Gilded Age explores the personal and household objects that … Continued
The Special Collections Reading Room at the John C. Hodges Library has a sleek new look. And the Elaine Altman Evans Exhibit Area in the first-floor galleria is allowing a new audience to discover our special collections. You are invited to an event celebrating these exciting enhancements to Special Collections on Thursday, April 27. A … Continued
Robert Morgan, the acclaimed author of Gap Creek and The Road from Gap Creek, will speak about the impact of Willma Dykeman’s fiction and non-fiction in his own work at the beginning of a two-day tribute to Dykeman on April 7 and 8. The events are sponsored by the Library Society of the University of … Continued
Special Collections continually seeks new areas on which to focus acquisitions. We look for topics with regional significance that have potential for broad impact. One such area is the ancient art of moonshining. Bootlegging has long been the subject of storytelling in the hills of the Appalachian Mountains. The illegal distillation of spirits was a … Continued
The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Libraries has created an online digital collection of photos and home movies of the Smokies taken in the 1940s,’50s, and ’60s by a Townsend businessman. Folksongs performed by local musicians have been added to the originally silent film clips. Watch and listen: Views of Gatlinburg in 1941. [Music recorded by … Continued
From the 1940s through the 1960s, William Derris, owner of the Derris Motel in Townsend, traveled by automobile around the accessible parts of the Smokies recording the people and scenery in both slides and silent film. He used the images and films to entertain and inform the guests at his hotel. His collection was donated … Continued
William Blount and John Sevier are early American politicians that you would expect to be represented in the University of Tennessee Special Collections manuscript collection. But other members of our founding generation represented in UT’s Special Collections might surprise you. For example we have three items from George Washington, the Commander in Chief of the … Continued
Two historically important books, acquired by the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, have been added to the library’s special collections. Phillis Wheatley was an enslaved person in the household of a prosperous Boston family. Her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (published 1773) was the first published book by an African-American woman. Life of Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak, … Continued