What:
Please join the Humanities Department and RTC Graduate program for the Brown Bag event with Professor Andrew Fiss and RTC PhD Student Lindsay Hiltunen who is also the Michigan Tech University Archivist. The event will be held in the Petersen Library in Walker 318 at noon on October 4th. Histories from Ephemeral Documents: Researching the Difficult to Find in University Archives Researchers have a lot to learn from ephemeral documents in university archives. They present different pictures of local life than established histories, and yet as documents, they are often overlooked or misunderstood. This RTC Brown Bag encourages discussion about the value of such ephemera with short examples from RTC professor Andrew Fiss and Michigan Tech university archivist (and RTC PhD student) Lindsay Hiltunen. Fiss will present about a composition notebook from Motta Sims in the archives of Spelman College, a historically Black women’s college in Georgia. Ms. Sims in 1916 traveled to Spelman for a class in cooking. Her notebook’s form and content reflected the framing of cooking as scientific study, which proved important for the broader movement of home economics, yet because it’s contained in the files of a White president of the institution, the notebook could be overlooked. Hiltunen will present about the “Verna Grahek Mize – Save Lake Superior Campaign Collection” in the Michigan Tech Archives and Copper Country Historical Collections. The collection includes advocacy posters and cards from the late 1960s and 1970s, responding to corporate communications that represented Lake Superior and the southern lake basin as unproblematically pristine. Though Verna Mize has become a local legend, the contents of the collection show a history of local environmentalism both broader and more specific than Mize’s legacy. Join these researchers for a discussion of the promises and challenges of studying archival ephemera.
Who:
Presented by Andrew Fiss and lindsay Hiltunen
All are welcome to attend!
When:
Friday, October 4, 2024, 12:00 p.m.
Where:
The Peterson Library, Walker 318