WKU Libraries blog

Mark Wetherington
Steamboating on the Western Waters: Bicentennial Reflections

The Executive Director of the Filson Historical Society in Louisville is the opening speaker in WKU Libraries’ eighth annual Kentucky Live Series. A native of Tifton, Georgia Mark grew up in Milan, Georgia where he attended public schools and thought about being an archaeologist or maybe a lawyer. After a stint in the US Navy he enrolled at Georgia Southern College from where he received his BA and MA in history before transferring to the University of Tennessee at Knoxville for his PhD.

He says he was most influenced by the southern sense of place, southern history and southern literature. His love of history came from reading and hearing older people talk about people and the past. His research has focused on people and their lives in the area he grew up in (Piney Woods, Georgia) from about 1850-1910. In his first book The New South Comes to Wiregrass Georgia, 1860-1910 published by the University of Tennessee Press in 1994 he explored the transformation of an area characterized by pine forests, northern tourists and health seekers to one of cotton production and tenancy. It won the American Historical Association’s Herbert Feis Award. His most recent book plain folk’s fight: The Civil War & Reconstruction in Piney Woods Georgia was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2005 and won an Award of Excellence from the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office. In it he examines the effects of the Civil War on the rural Southern home front in the wiregrass region of southern Georgia.

Mark has held a variety of professional positions serving as Director of the East Tennessee Historical Society and the Southern Carolina Historical Society before assuming his present position in Louisville in 1993. In August he announced plans for a $6.4 million expansion of the Filson Society’s property in Old Louisville.

His interest in Steamboating on the Western Waters, goes back to his childhood and a fishing camp he visited on the Ocmulgee River where he heard stories about steamboats. Since moving to Louisville he’s expanded on that interest through the rich collections of Kentucky and Ohio Valley History.

Mark will speak on Thursday, September 9 at 7:00 p.m. at Barnes & Noble Bookstore (1680 Campbell Lane). Please call 745-6121 for more information.

TopSCHOLAR, WKU Libraries’ research and creative activity database, ranks in the top 5% of universities worldwide according to CSIC, a public research body in Spain. Rankings are based on size, visibility and rich files. TopSCHOLAR is ranked 185th out of 3026 among US institutions. According to Library Technical Services Department head, Connie Foster, the ranking indicates the “TopSCHOLAR is not only digitally competitive with other United States universities but with universities from all over the world.

Western Kentucky University Libraries has selected The Last Black King of the Kentucky Derby: The Story of Jimmy Winkfield, written by Crystal Hubbard and illustrated by Robert McGuire, as the winner of the fourth Evelyn Thurman Young Readers Book Award. Hubbard is a sports buff and full-time writer. Her children’s books have received honors such as Bank Street College’s Best Children’s Books of the Year and ALA’s Amelia Bloomer Project. Hubbard lives in St. Louis, Missouri with her husband and their four children. McGuire is a full-time illustrator with a degree in fine arts whose work reflects a love of diverse cultures. He currently lives in New York City. The author and illustrator have been invited to attend an awards luncheon in their honor at the Kentucky Library & Museum in November.

       The Kentucky Library & Museum is currently displaying materials that document the history of Bowling Green theater in an exhibit titled “Enjoy the Show,” which ends February 14, 2011.   Nineteenth century items are rare, but the exhibit does include an March 1833 hand scribed broadside advertising the Bowling Green Thespian Society’s production of the melodrama, “Luke the Labourer; or, The Lost Son.”  Tickets to this amateur production cost twenty-five cents.  Other items from the 1800s include illustrations of Bowling Green’s opera house, programs, an elaborate paper puppet stage, as well as photographs of costumed actors.

       Theater in Bowling Green blossomed in 1932 with the incorporation of the Bowling Green Players Guild. Items on display from this early amateur group include playbills, programs, the organization’s constitution and a membership card, as well as sketches for set designs and costumes.  Items from later theater groups, such as the Alley Theater, Public Theater of Kentucky, Fountain Square Players and Bowling Green Community Players are included.

      The exhibit emphasizes dramatic productions at Western Kentucky University.  One case features memorabilia from the Western Players and another focuses on longtime WKU theater professor, playwright, and director, Russell H. Miller (1905-1968).  Two costumes from the WKU Department of Theater and Dance highlight the exhibit.  The more elaborate ensemble is a shepherdess costume from “Bastein and Bastienne,” a Mozart opera performed last spring. The other is a simple, but symbolic, green dress used in “The House of Bernarda Alba” in 2009.  The Kentucky Library & Museum thanks Shura Pollatsek, Department of Theater and Dance, for assisting with the costumes.

              

Starting 9/1/10 and ending 10/2/10, WKU Libraries will have a trial subscription to Children’s Literature Comprehensive Database:

CLCD is an ever growing online database with over 400,000 reviews, MARC records and related information about children’s literature. CLCD contains reviews supplied by over 38 quality review media including:

• The ALAN Review
• BookList
• KIRKUS
• National Science Teachers Association
• VOYA

You can access CLCD at their homepage or through their search engine.

On August 25, the faculty from the WKU Libraries’ Department of Library Public Services had their faculty retreat at the Barren River Lake State Resort Park.

More Photos

Three unique pieces from the KYLM collection are featured in the exhibit, The Horse in Decorative and Fine Art, at the Headley-Whitney Museum in Lexington. Consisting of a sculpture of a thoroughbred colt by noted artist Anna Hyatt Huntington, the Chester Dare quilt, and a wood carving by Ed and Pansy Cress, the selections from the Kentucky Museum join paintings, sculpture, folk art, textiles, object d’art, wood carvings, jewelry, historical ephemera and modern depictions of the horse borrowed from public and private collections in Kentucky and New York as well as several Smithsonian institutions. The exhibit runs through December 23, 2010. More information.

A memorandum prepared in 1866 by the law firm of Johnson & Hardin, recently acquired by the Kentucky Library & Museum, provides a glimpse into the post-Civil War legal status of African Americans in Kentucky.  Unlike other border states, Kentucky had not recognized the right of former slaves or free blacks to testify in court against whites.  Such resistance had attracted the attention of the Freedmen’s Bureau, which possessed the authority to operate a court system in which blacks qualified as witnesses.  The passage of a federal Civil Rights Act in April, 1866 only intensified the constitutional tug-of-war over how much justice should be afforded African Americans in Kentucky.  Not until 1872 was the issue resolved with a state law equalizing testimony rights.

That left the Johnson & Hardin firm in June, 1866 to ponder the procedural question of bringing an indictment against three men “for outrages committed on persons of color” in Nelson County.  In the absence of a grand jury, the memo explained, a county judge had no authority to indict the men.  Once in session, the grand jury could consider the matter and, “if they think it their duty to find a true bill on the testimony of colored persons,” hand down an indictment.  Rather than rely upon the Freedmen’s Bureau, however, witnesses had to present themselves in person to the grand jury.  “The papers before the Bureau,” the memo concluded, could not be used as evidence in state court.

A finding aid for the Johnson & Hardin memo can be downloaded here.

WKU Libraries’ faculty and staff kicked off the new academic year in the Kentucky Room on August 24, 2010. Mike Binder, Dean of WKU Libraries, reviewed the past achievements made by the Libraries’ faculty and staff and looked into the projects and programs that they would embark on in the near future. As part of the kick-off event, Mr. Marshall Weems from the Weems Consulting Group gave an interactive presentation on public services. Luncheon was served at the event.

Photos of the Event

WKU Libraries has recently acquired “Garden Poetry” a work on paper by Bowling Green artist John Corry Grismore.  A WKU graduate (but not in art), John began dabbling in abstract oil painting some eight years ago but soon switched to creating sculptures from driftwood collected on the shores of Barren River Lake. This year his sculpture “Versus” won first place in the 2010 US Bank Celebration of the Arts Show at the Kentucky Library and Museum. “Garden Poetry” involved picking, drying, arranging and pasting flower petals from his garden to paper.  He used a technique which he developed himself, after numerous experiments, which allows the flower petals to retain most of their color.  The end result allows us to enjoy the beauty of the flowers long after the plants have died.  When not creating sculptures or other works of art John manages Western’s Postal Services Department.  You can check out this eternal remembrance of a summer garden in Cravens 100.