Author: Lindsay Hiltunen

Award winning author Mary Doria Russell will be coming to Houghton for two special events centered around her recent novel The Women of the Copper Country. The Portage Lake District Library (PLDL) and the J. Robert Van Pelt and John and Ruanne Opie Library (Van Pelt and Opie Library) are excited to host her for a two-part presentation series.

A formal lecture will take place on October 8 at 7 pm in the East Reading Room of the Van Pelt and Opie Library on the Michigan Tech campus. A social hour and book signing will follow the presentation. A second event, an informal book talk and book signing, will take place at the PLDL on October 9 from 6-8 pm. Refreshments will be served at both events and all are welcome to attend!

The Women of the Copper Country centers on the life of American labor activist, Annie Clements, as well as paints a broader historical portrait of the lives of local people in the midst of a turbulent labor movement and social landscape. The historical novel is startlingly relevant today and would be of great interest to the campus and local communities. Some of the research for her book was conducted with assistance from the Michigan Technological University Archives and Copper Country Historical Collections. 

For more information about the events please contact Katie Edson (906) 487-1636, Lindsay Hiltunen (906) 487-3209, or Michael Stanitis (906) 482-4570. The author’s visit is made possible by a travel grant from the Friends of the Michigan Tech Library and The Women of the Copper Country Planning Committee.

Please join us for a keynote presentation by guest scholar Krysta Ryzewski at 4:00 pm on Friday, September 22 in the East Reading Room of the Van Pelt and Opie Library on the Michigan Technological University campus. This event is part of A Celebration: 25 Years of Industrial Heritage and Archaeology, an anniversary of the founding of the Industrial Archaeology program, and is made possible through the Visiting Women and Minorities Lecture and Scholar Series at Michigan Tech. This event is free of charge and open to the public. Refreshments will be served.

In this presentation, Ryzewski will discuss Ethnic Layers of Detroit (ELD) and Unearthing Detroit, two interdisciplinary heritage projects in metro Detroit. ELD is an urban-focused digital humanities project engaging faculty and student researchers in creating, documenting, and sharing multimedia narratives of Detroit’s ethnic histories. Unearthing Detroit is a project that involves both academic research and public archaeology in its focus on the urban historical archaeology collections housed in the Grosscup Museum of Anthropology at Wayne State University. The project’s research and outreach team is comprised of archaeology faculty and graduate students from Wayne State’s Department of Anthropology, as well as a number of volunteers from the local community. Ryzewski’s talk will address challenges, successes, and implications of the projects that will be of interest to a diverse audience.

Krysta Ryzewski, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Wayne State University and is the Director of the Digging Detroit project, an investigation of industrial and post-industrial urban communities in the Motor City. She is a leading researcher in historical and contemporary archaeology and the digital humanities.

Ryzewski’s research visit and presentation are supported by a travel grant from the Institutional Equity and Inclusion office’s Visiting Women and Minority Series. Additional arrangements and refreshments are made possible by the Social Sciences Department and the Michigan Technological University Archives and Copper Country Historical Collections.

For more information about this program or the Industrial Archaeology program’s 25th anniversary, feel free to call the Michigan Tech Archives at 906-487-2505, email at copper@mtu.edu, or call the Social Sciences department at 906-487-2113.

Please join us for a presentation by travel grant recipient Gabe Logan at 4:00 pm on Tuesday, November 15 in the East Reading Room of the Van Pelt and Opie Library on the Michigan Technological University campus. This event is free of charge and open to the public. Refreshments will be served.

In this presentation, Logan will discuss the Labor Sport Union and its influence in the iron ranges of Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota. From 1928 through 1935 the United States Communist Party developed the Labor Sport Union. This athletic organization united left wing politics and athletics in an alternative vision of sport and society. The LSU drew much of its membership from the urban cities whose immigrant populations sought recreation beyond the schools and company teams. However, the LSU also found an appreciative audience in the rural iron ore region of Lake Superior. This presentation explains the significance of the LSU in the region and how its members embraced the “red sports” ideology.

Gabe Logan, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of History and the Director for the Center of Upper Peninsula Studies at Northern Michigan University. Logan’s research visit and presentation are supported by a travel grant from the Friends of the Michigan Tech Library. Since 1988, the Michigan Tech Archives has partnered with the FMTL to help scholars advance their research by supporting travel to the manuscript collections at the archives.

For more information, feel free to call the Michigan Tech Archives at (906) 487-2505, email at copper@mtu.edu, or visit on the web at http://www.lib.mtu.edu/mtuarchives/.

Please join us for a presentation by travel grant recipient Gordon Andrews at 4:00 pm on Thursday, November 3 in the East Reading Room of the Van Pelt and Opie Library on the Michigan Technological University campus. This event is free of charge and open to the public. Refreshments will be served.

In this presentation, Andrews will discuss unionization efforts at the Ford Motor Company’s Rouge plant in Dearborn, Michigan. Ford Motor Company was the last of the “Big Three” automakers to unionize. There were serious attempts to organize beginning in the 1930s, but it was not until the workers at the Rouge plant organized a sit-down strike in 1941 that they were successful. The “Industrial Colossus on the Rouge” employed over 100,000 workers, and once organized, it became the largest local in the nation. The presentation will address the parameters of UAW Local 600’s history, from its leadership role in organizing the successful unionization of Ford Motor Company, to the myriad ways in which Local 600 impacted the quality of life, and also the politics of its membership over a half-century. An integral part of that story is understanding the relationships among labor and resources from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and the way those affiliations inform what we know about the organization of Ford, especially as employees confronted a brutally oppressive system in the hopes of establishing democracy in the workplace.

Gordon P. Andrews is an associate professor in the Department of History at Grand Valley State University, Allendale, Michigan. He has taught at the secondary and post-secondary levels since 1986, and his research fields include history education, modern United States history, and 20th-century labor history. His recent publications include, Undoing Plessy: Charles Hamilton Houston, Race, Labor and the Law, 1895-1950 (Newcastle upon Tyne, London: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2014), Collaboration and the Future of Education: Preserving the Right to Teach and Think Historically, New York: Routledge, 2015, co-authored with Wilson Warren, and James Cousins.

Andrews’ research visit and presentation are supported by a travel grant from the Friends of the Michigan Tech Library. Since 1988, the Michigan Tech Archives has partnered with the FMTL to help scholars advance their research by supporting travel to the manuscript collections at the archives.

For more information, feel free to call the Michigan Tech Archives at 906-487-2505, email at copper@mtu.edu, or visit on the web at http://www.lib.mtu.edu/mtuarchives/.

The Michigan Technological University Archives and Copper Country Historical Collections is currently accepting applications for its annual Travel Grant Program, which brings in scholars and researchers external to Michigan Technological University to work with the Archives’ collections. Financial support for the Travel Grant Program is provided by the Friends of the Michigan Tech Library, a support organization for the library and archives of Michigan Tech. Grants are awarded for up to $750 to defray the costs of travel to visit and conduct research in Houghton, Michigan.

The Michigan Tech Archives houses a wide variety of historical print, graphic and manuscript resources related to the Copper Country and Michigan Technological University. Subject coverage includes university and campus life, regional towns and cities, local industries and businesses, as well as social organizations, events and personalities of the Copper Country and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Primary topical research areas include the western Upper Peninsula, industrial history, particularly copper mining and its ancillary industries, social history, community development along the Keweenaw Peninsula, transportation and the environment. Finding aids for some of the collections can be found here: http://www.mtu.edu/library/archives/collections/.

To apply for funding through the Travel Grant Program please visit the program website: http://www.mtu.edu/library/archives/programs-and-services/travel-grants/

Applications are due on February 29, 2016. Award recipients will be notified by March 31. The successful candidate must complete their travel by December 9, 2016. Electronic submission is preferred.

For further information, please contact:

Lindsay Hiltunen, Senior Archivist
Michigan Technological University Archives and Copper Country Historical Collections
J. Robert Van Pelt and John and Ruanne Opie Library
1400 Townsend Drive
Houghton, MI  49931
Phone: (906) 487-2505
E-mail: copper@mtu.edu

Please join us for visiting scholar David Brown at 4:00 pm on Monday, November 16 in the East Reading Room of the Van Pelt and Opie Library on the Michigan Technological University campus. This event is free of charge and open to the public. Refreshments will be served.

In this presentation, Brown will discuss his dissertation research which focuses on historical accounts of student life and the ways in which those accounts can inform scholarship and teaching in the modern era. He is especially interested in collective experiences and instances where student life has taken on distinctive character and expression, such as in the case of Michigan Tech’s Winter Carnival. In addition to meaning, methodology will also be an important component of the talk. Brown will show how archival research is a valuable tool for studying college student life and provide an example of an exercise that challenges students to consider campus history and their place in it.

David Brown is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Educational Policy Studies and Evaluation at the University of Kentucky. Under the guidance of noted historian of higher education Dr. John Thelin, Brown’s research focuses on historical and contemporary accounts of college student life and students’ meaning-making activities during their college years. In addition to his research, he also teaches at the University of Kentucky; last year he was a recipient of one of UK’s Outstanding Teaching Awards.

Brown’s research visit and presentation are supported by a travel grant from the Friends of the Van Pelt Library. Since 1988, the Michigan Technological University Archives Travel Grant program has helped scholars advance their research by supporting travel to the manuscript collections at the Archives.

For more information, feel free to call the Michigan Tech Archives at 906-487-2505, email at copper@mtu.edu, or visit on the web athttp://www.lib.mtu.edu/mtuarchives/.

The talk that was to take place on Tuesday, October 27 at 4 pm has been postponed. We are trying to reschedule the talk for later this semester. Please check back or call the Michigan Tech Archives at (906) 487-2505 for more information.

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As part of the “Black Voices in the Copper Country” project, the Michigan Technological University Archives and Copper Country Historical Collections will be hosting a talk by Dr. Michelle S. Johnson, a Community Historian with the Michigan Historical Center in Lansing. The talk, “Exhibits for  New Century: Researching the African American Experience in Michigan from the Copper Country to the Capital,” will explore the historical center’s Exhibits for a New Century project, which is an interpretive exhibit documenting the African American experience across the state. Johnson will also discuss the methods and meaning behind the exhibit as well as a statewide research initiative to uncover and share African American narratives in Michigan history, such as the grant-funded project taking place at the Michigan Tech Archives.  This event is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served.

Johnson has executed extensive work on securing and promoting spaces where socially marginalized people express their autonomous and authentic selves. As co-founder and executive director of Fire Historical and Cultural Arts Collaborative, she collected and oversaw the collection of numerous oral histories around issues of place, community, race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality and history. Johnson served as the Freedom Trail coordinator for the State of Michigan from 2000-2008 and consults on 19th century history projects in the state and the mid-west region, especially the Underground Railroad. She researches, writes and lectures for academic and public settings on aspects of African American culture in Michigan. Her scholarship includes a community project in Loughman, Florida researching, interpreting and performing the work of Zora Neale Hurston. Named WIDR’s “most beloved DJ,” Johnson has appeared as a weekly host for Slip Back Soul for 9 years as DJ Disobedience.
This talk is made possible in part by a grant from the Michigan Humanities Council, an affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Please join us for visiting scholar Kera Lovell at 4:00 pm on Thursday, August 13 in the East Reading Room of the Van Pelt and Opie Library on the Michigan Technological University campus. This event is free of charge and open to the public. Refreshments will be served.

In this presentation, Lovell will present a portion of her dissertation which examines the devices and material construction of activism after World War II. In particular, Ms. Lovell will trace the history of the “People’s Park” movement. These coalitions of activists and students spread across the United States from Berkeley, California to Houghton, Michigan, and in places abroad, including South Africa. These spaces protested environmental and socioeconomic injustices. Ultimately, the protests took form through the creation of public parks in vacant lots, signifying a permanent occupancy that was visible to the public.

This talk will examine the visual and rhetorical strategies these activists used to equate their peaceful occupancies with territorial reclamation, and frame their creations as public memorials to colonized peoples. By examining some essential case studies of People’s Parks and situating Michigan Tech’s own People’s Park within this global movement, the talk will shed light on how activists saw space not as property, but as a symbolic representation of power.

Kera Lovell is a PhD candidate and Instructor in American Studies at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. She received her Master’s degree in American Studies from Purdue in 2011, and her Bachelor’s in History and Spanish from Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia. She has received several awards from institutions to conduct and present her research, including Purdue University, Boston University, the Wisconsin Historical Society, and Michigan Tech. Her dissertation, titled “Radical Manifest Destiny: Urban Renewal, Colonialism, and Transnational American Identity in the Urban Spatial Politics of the Postwar Left” traces the global popularity of a particular post-World War II protest tactic in which activists permanently occupied vacant lots by converting them into politicized urban green spaces they called “People’s Parks.”

Lovell’s research visit and presentation are supported by a travel grant from the Friends of the Van Pelt Library. Since 1988, the Michigan Technological University Archives Travel Grant program has helped scholars advance their research by supporting travel to the manuscript collections at the Archives.

For more information, feel free to call the Michigan Tech Archives at 906-487-2505, email at copper@mtu.edu, or visit on the web athttp://www.lib.mtu.edu/mtuarchives/.

Please join us for a talk by local author John Haeussler at 5:00 pm on Thursday, March 12 in the East Reading Room of the Van Pelt and Opie Library on the Michigan Technological University campus. This event is free of charge and open to the public. Refreshments will be served.

Haeussler’s presentation will begin with a brief overview of his recent work, Images of America, Hancock, from Arcadia Publishing, and progress to outline the importance of the Michigan Tech Archives’ role as a historic image repository for projects such as this one. After exploring his research process, the remainder of the presentation will be a discussion of pre-1940 images of Hancock from the Michigan Tech Archives. This exploration will include readings from contemporary newspaper accounts that pertain to some of the historic photos. There will be allotted  time for questions, answers and discussion following the presentation, though audience participation is encouraged throughout the talk.

Along with his authorship of Hancock, a part of Arcadia Publishing’s Images of America series, Haeussler co-authored and co-edited Hancock’s sesquicentennial publication, Hidden Gems and Towering Tales: A Hancock, Michigan Anthology. This earlier text was published by the City of Hancock in 2013.  John, his wife Megan and their children Maggie and Jack have resided in Hancock since 2007.

For more information, feel free to call the Michigan Tech Archives at 906-487-2505, email at copper@mtu.edu, or visit on the web athttp://www.lib.mtu.edu/mtuarchives/.

The Michigan Technological University Archives and Copper Country Historical Collections is currently accepting applications for its annual Travel Grant Program, which brings outside scholars and researchers to Michigan Technological University to work with the Archives’ collections. Financial support for the Travel Grant Program is provided by the Friends of the Van Pelt Library, a support organization for the Library and Archives of Michigan Tech. Grants are awarded for up to $750 to defray the costs of travel to visit and research in Houghton, Michigan.

The Michigan Tech Archives houses a wide variety of historical print, graphic and manuscript resources related to the Copper Country and Michigan Technological University. Subject coverage includes university and campus life, regional towns and cities, local industries and businesses, as well as social organizations, events and personalities of the Copper Country and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Primary topical research areas include the western Upper Peninsula, industrial history, particularly copper mining and its ancillary industries, social history, community development along the Keweenaw Peninsula, transportation and the environment. Finding aids for some of the collections can be found here: http://www.mtu.edu/library/archives/collections/.

To apply for funding through the Travel Grant Program please visit the program website: http://www.mtu.edu/library/archives/programs-and-services/travel-grants/

Applications are due on March 15, 2015. Award recipients will be notified by March 31. The successful candidate must complete their travel by December 11, 2015. Electronic submission is preferred.

For further information, please contact:
Lindsay Hiltunen, Senior Archivist
Michigan Technological University Archives and Copper Country Historical Collections
J. Robert Van Pelt and John and Ruanne Opie Library
1400 Townsend Drive
Houghton, MI  49931
Phone: (906) 487-2505
E-mail: copper@mtu.edu