Unpacking America’s Baggage

– contributed by Kristie Zachar, Museums & Archives Studies student and CCHP Student Assistant.

A sneak peek at some Bloomingdale’s bags in the Lee L. Forman Collection of Bags.

We don’t think about them much, but bags play a pretty big role in the lives of Americans everywhere. We use them practically every day, and we use them for a number of different reasons, but you have to admit, they’re not something you would actively think about. While we could surely say plenty about bags, starting with what exactly is a bag and what do we use them for, a different question would be what exactly do they say about us? This year, the Institute for Human Science & Culture will be opening a new exhibit titled “Cultural Carry-On: America’s Literal Baggage” that manages to answer that question for us.

“Cultural Carry-On” student-designed logo

Framed bag with painted portrait of Lee L. Forman.

The exhibit has been put together by students of the Museums and Archives Certificate Program at the University of Akron as their final project for the Foundations of Museums and Archives II course (1900:302) which is held at the Institute. Students chose from the 12,000 bags and other bag-related items in the Lee L. Forman Bag Collection, picking items that they found interesting and later finding that the seemingly unconnected bags they had chosen helped to create a larger, multi-sided view of American culture.

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Students’ selections of bags from 12,000 items.

 The exhibit puts this view on display as it explores the various uses of bags as advertising, merchandise, memorabilia, and more, and how they reflect the different facets of American culture from food industries to music to politics and even to the evolution of bag manufacturing itself. The “Cultural Carry-On” exhibit dives deep to find the weird and fascinating stories behind these bags and their cultural connections in a creative and unique take on American culture that you won’t find anywhere else.

4th floor galleries at the Cummings Center: the space that will soon exhibit the students’ hard work on the Lee L. Forman Collection of Bags.

The students have been working hard in preparation for the exhibit’s opening in Spring 2020, but unfortunately, due to the current COVID-19 pandemic, plans for the exhibit have had to change, and it will no longer be opening May 7, 2020. The exhibit will still be opening at some point in the future when staff are able to return to the site, but as of now, there is no set date. Students are continuing to work and plan the exhibit remotely and are looking forward to sharing their work with the public as soon as they are able.

For additional information about the exhibit, watch for updates on the Cummings Center Facebook page.

For additional information about the Museums and Archives Studies Certificate program, please contact Dr. Jodi Kearns at jkearns@uakron.edu or visit https://uakron.edu/chp/education/museums-and-archivescertificate.dot.

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CCHP Pandemic Projects Vol. I: Asylums and Epidemic Diseases

• contributed by Lizette Royer Barton.

I’d like to revisit what the CCHP can offer to remote users, especially instructors, during these bizarro times in which we are living. I’m being ambitious and making this a series of blog posts. First up, the asylum reports.

A few months ago I wrote an invited column for The General Psychologist, the newsletter for the Society for General Psychology (APA Division 1) titled, “Primary Sources in the Classroom: Project Ideas for Investigating Mental Health Care in the United States Through Digitized Asylum Reports.”

You can read my Division 1 column for numerous project ideas using our Cushing Memorial Library Collection of Asylum Reports. Remember, our asylum reports are digitized and available as full-text, word-searchable PDFs in our online repository. You can take away some ideas from that column or you can work on creating your own projects. Maybe you’re just bored and want to research asylum reports for the heck of it – do it!

All that being said, I’d like to introduce a specific project and provide some resources and ideas for how you can make it work with your students.

Asylums and epidemic diseases

We are living through a global pandemic right now but disease and illness in the enclosed, often overcrowded spaces of asylums was common. I did word searches for keywords like pandemic, epidemic, influenza, small pox, cholera, and a few others. I went through my hits and decided to focus on two specific asylums – Topeka State Hospital in Kansas (1915, 1919, 1923) and the Government Hospital for the Insane, also known as St. Elizabeth’s, in Washington, DC (1914, 1921, 1926). I took the date of the reports in my searching into account and selected reports before and after the 1918 Influenza Pandemic.

Topeka State Hospital, 1919

You can access the reports through the links above. You can also access the reports in a shared OneDrive folder here. Download the PDFs from either location and get to work!

Reports typically provide statistics, including physical illness and death, about the patients in their care so that is a great place to start.

Identify epidemic diseases (influenza, small pox, typhoid, etc.) in the reports. Look for how many patients contracted one of those diseases and how many died from it. Compare the data from one report to the next. What changed during the years in between? Did the population of patients increase or decrease? Did the illnesses within the asylum mirror what was happening outside of the asylum? Did vaccinations increase? Were they vaccinating? Did vaccinations for the disease in question even exist?

If a report specifically mentions the 1918 Influenza Pandemic – what does it say? How widespread was influenza within the asylum? How did it compare to the illness outside the asylum? What steps were taken to mitigate the spread of disease? Were staff affected?

Both Topeka State Hospital and St. Elizabeth’s were designed according to the Kirkbride Plan – an architectural design that included numerous wings for patients and patient activities. This design may have provided less opportunity for distancing as compared to another asylum style known as the Cottage Plan. Have your students do a bit of research on these two design styles in order to determine the pros and cons of each during an epidemic.

If you are digging any of these ideas and would like to work together to create something a bit more concrete for use in your class please reach out to me directly – lizette@uakron.edu. I’m happy to help.

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Décodage de cartes postales françaises centenaires

-contribué par Dr. Jodi Kearns (IHSC Director) et Mme. Lisa Ong (Copley High School AP French Teacher); avec des remerciements particuliers aux University of Akron student Kristie Zachar (French minor) & UA grad Nicole Orchosky (former CHS AP French student).

Au printemps 2020, l’Institute for Human Science & Culture a demandé à la classe de Français AP de Copley High School de l’aide à traduire des cartes postales francophones qui appartiennent à la David P. Campbell Postcard Collection.

During Spring 2020, the Institute for Human Science & Culture asked the AP French class at Copley High School for some help translating French-language postcards from the David P. Campbell Postcard Collection.

Certaines cartes postales ont une légende.

Some postcards have French captions printed on them that the students translated.

an example of a postcard with a French poem printed on the card

Et certaines possèdent un message écrit à la main par l’expéditeur.

And some postcards have hand-written messages from the sender.

an example of a hand-written French-language message on a postcard

Les étudiants passaient du temps à récrire ce qu’ils voyaient dans l’écriture ancienne de cent ans et puis à traduire ce qui a été écrit.

The AP French students found it useful to rewrite what they were seeing in the 100-year-old handwriting before translating what was written.

An AP French student’s notes. First, the message on the postcard is rewritten in her own hand; then, the message is translated.

C’était une vraie épreuve de leurs connaissances de la langue française de trouver un sens aux traductions littérales

This exercise was a true test of their French-language knowledge to find meaning in literal translations.

Allez au blog de l’institut pour lire des traductions et des réactions personnelles.

Hop on over to the Institute’s blog to read some of the translations and personal reactions.

• Je n’ai plus entendu parler de vous. by Molly Bagatto
• En attendant cette heureuse époque. by David Britton
• Beaucoup de pommes tu as croquées. by Macy Emich
• Échangions mutuellement nos photographs. by Mark Itibrout
• Il est bête et chancelant. by Hannah Parker

The students’ work will be integrated into the Cummings Center digital repository of postcards. Merci Mme. Ong!

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Finding the Finding Aids

contributed by Lizette Royer Barton.

Our online repository recently got a face lift. Did you notice?

And since many of us are cooped up at home due to COVID-19 we might as well do some searching together in our pj’s. Feel free to grab a cold beer and some cheez-itz (yes, I am very high brow) and join me for some archival search strategies!

Here is the new homepage.

This is much too tiny for you to see. Just go to collections.uakron.edu and see for yourself.

A couple things right off the bat. Some “housekeeping items” if you will.

The platform we use for our repository is shared by other units on campus. You’ll notice a list of UA departments across the top – UA DigColl Home, Cummings Center (Hey! That’s us!), Archival Services (The University Archives. NOT us!), and University Libraries.

And since that is the case, an ADVANCED SEARCH is your friend. Go ahead. Click on your new friend, Advanced Search.

Advanced searching. Woohoo! Treat yourself to handful of cheez-itz.

In the image below you can see that each collection in the repository is “clicked” and here is where you want to start unclicking the collections you do NOT want to search. The collections inside the red square are all CCHP collections, aka collections housed in the Archives of the History of American Psychology.

The collections inside this red box are housed within the Institute for Human Science and Culture (IHSC). The IHSC is the “educational arm” of the Cummings Center and is housed on the third and fourth floors of the Center. The Campbell Postcards and the Forman Collection of Bags are both used onsite by students in our Museums & Archives Certificate Program for real hands on experience in museum exhibition. Very cool.

The “What Makes Us Human” database is fun. The final exhibit of the National Museum of Psychology asks visitors to answer the question, “What makes us human?” Visitors write down their answers and leave them for others to enjoy. Then we scan them and upload them here for everyone to enjoy. My very favorite answer of all time is “pants.”

And finally, PsycCRITIQUES. We host PsycCRITIQUES (virtually) and you can access over 43,000 articles and reviews published in PsycCRITIQUES. Word to the wise though: ALWAYS unclick this unless you want to search there specifically because no matter what search term you use it’s likely you’ll get hits in PsycCRITIQUES.

PsycCRITIQUES – my friend and enemy when it comes to research

The bread and butter of the CCHP is the manuscript collections aka the personal papers of psychologists and the organizational records of Psychological Organizations. The Finding Aids database is what you want if you’re interested in manuscript collections.

Be sure only the finding aids collection is clicked and then hit save.

Then at the bottom of the page you can further narrow your search. I just did a blog about Anne Anastasi. You could search across “all fields” for Anastasi which will provide results for any time her name pops up in any manuscript collection. Or, if you’re interested in her manuscript papers specifically click “title” since the name of the psychologist is in the title, and type in “Anastasi.”

Searching across all the manuscript collections for “Anastasi” bring back 16 hits. And check out some new cool information that comes up with your search in this new interface.

All the collections pop up alphabetically on the right and you can scroll through them. And on the left you can see the titles and creators of collections. Sometimes the creator and title of a collection are the same but not always. Anyway, you can see right away what collections are included in the search and you can click now or scroll through the finding aids on the right.

One last thing about finding aids. Say you’ve decided to scroll through the Anne Anastasi finding aid so you click her name from the list.

In the old contentDM interface you could immeditaly start scrolling through the finding aid but now you have to click that icon with the arrows up on the right hand side. That will open the finding aid in a new window and make it searchable.

You can either enter something specific in that search bar or you can scroll through the finding aid waiting for something to pop out at you.

Start browsing. Have some fun. Take the first steps of a new research project. Take notes (collection name, box number, folder number) and get back to us once the Archives opens up again.

In the meantime, back to my beer and cheez-itz.

Monitor and keyboard unearthed from the depths of the Barton attic. This ol’ lady just can’t search properly on a laptop.

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