Direct to Uncovering New Chicago Archives Web Site/Online Searchable Database
From a Chicago Sun-Times Article:
The unpublished sketches of famed African-American editorial cartoonist Chester Commodore as he struggled to get President Richard Nixon’s nose and President George W. Bush’s ears just right.
A letter from President Harry S. Truman thanking Chicago Defender Publisher John Sengstacke for his advice about desegregating the United States Army.
These and thousands of other fascinating scraps of Chicago black history from the mid-20th Century had lingered in boxes in attics, basements and storage lockers for years. Now, thanks to a just-completed University of Chicago-led project, many of these cultural treasures are available for public viewing. On Friday at the University of Chicago’s Joseph Regenstein Library, researchers unveiled a new website intended to make it easy for the public and scholars alike to locate these African-American artifacts as well as a host of others in the city from the same period in history. Many of the documents and other historical material have since been donated to the project and are now available for review in locations throughout the city.
From the Uncovering New Chicago Archives Web Site:
Important and previously unprocessed historical collections in the city of Chicago are being made available to researchers through UNCAP, the Uncovering New Chicago Archives Project. This project improves access to important archival collections at the University of Chicago, while providing access to a wide range of archives at the DuSable Museum of African-American History, the Chicago Defender, the Vivan G. Harsh Collection of Afro-American History & Literature located in the Woodson Regional Library, and the South Side Community Art Center. At the University of Chicago, the project includes contemporary poetry collections and the Chicago Jazz Archive, both located in the Special Collections Research Center of the University of Chicago Library.
UNCAP builds and expands upon Mapping the Stacks, an archival project created and directed by Jacqueline Goldsby since 2005, when she was Associate Professor in English Language & Literature and the College of the University of Chicago. (Jacqueline Goldsby is now Associate Professor in the Department of English at New York University.) Goldsby and a group of University of Chicago students began working with manuscripts in the Harsh Collection and with the DuSable Museum’s manuscript and moving image archives. In January 2007, Mapping the Stacks became part of UNCAP, which was funded through September 2010 by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Direct to Uncovering New Chicago Archives Web Site/Online Searchable Database
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