Fall/Winter 2021 No. 17

FALL / WINTER 2021 NO. 17

Ahead of the Times Chicago Avant-Garde tells the stories of five women who made Chicago a hub of boundarypushing experimentation in the arts.

An Exhibition at the Newberry Library October 6, 2021 – January 21, 2022 Free and open to all newberry.org/visit

FEATURES

Ahead of the Times

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by Matthew Clarke

Chicago Avant-Garde, on view at the Newberry through December 30, tells the stories of five women who took risks, resisted social conventions, and made Chicago a hub of artistic experimentation in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s.

Exhibit A

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by Frederick E. Hoxie

As courtroom confrontations over Native rights have increased, their advocates have come to rely increasingly on historical materials attesting to the legitimacy of Native claims and to the illegitimacy of actions designed to violate those claims.

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Historical Context

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A Special Kind of Diplomacy

In conversation with Newberry President Daniel Greene, Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III discusses his career, the power of artifacts to humanize history, and the role libraries and museums can and should play in a democratic society.

by Timothy Spears

In the 1940s and 50s, Newberry Director Stanley Pargellis waged a campaign to acquire the personal papers of leading literary figures in the Midwest. Pargellis’s courtship of novelist and critic Floyd Dell illustrates the many variables—human, literary, and logistical—involved in growing archival collections.

DEPARTMENTS 2 3 4 30

Behind the Cover President’s Column Take Note The Recent Past

ANNUAL REPORT 34 Letter from the Chair and the President 36 Public Engagement 38 Research and Education 40 Collection Access and Service to Readers 42 Finances and Fundraising 45 Honor Roll of Donors 58 Board of Trustees 59 Staff

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BEHIND THE COVER

Above: Ruth Page performing in Expanding Universe, 1933. Courtesy of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library. Right: Ruth Page in front of Miss Expanding Universe by Isamu Noguchi, 1950s.

Dancer and choreographer Ruth Page (1899–1991) used movement to push the limitations of the physical world. In her 1932 performance Expanding Universe, she danced in a blue jersey sack costume that exposed only her feet and head to the audience.

Designed by Japanese American artist Isamu Noguchi, the costume stretched and expanded with Page’s movements. In this powerful expression of the nuances of freedom, Page challenged the social constraints imposed on women while shedding light on the creative

potential of those constraints. In tandem with the performance and the sack costume, Noguchi created Miss Expanding Universe, an aluminum sculpture reflecting both the hope embodied in Page’s form as well as the impact she had as an agent of social change. Page is one of five artists featured in Chicago Avant-Garde, an exhibition on display at the Newberry through December 30, 2021.

MAGAZINE STAFF

The Newberry Magazine is published semiannually. Every other issue includes the annual report for the most recently concluded fiscal year. A subscription to The Newberry Magazine is a benefit of membership in the Newberry Associates, President’s Fellows, and Next Chapter.

Editor Designer Photography

Alex Teller Andrea Villasenor Catherine Gass

Unless otherwise credited, all images are from the Newberry collection or from events held at the Newberry.

To become a member, contact Vince Firpo at (312) 255-3599 or firpov@newberry.org.

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PRESIDENT’S COLUMN

From Daniel Greene

“ It would be difficult to describe this fire. The whole thing passed like a dream, like a nightmare, a night of alarm and anxiety, of fright and despair . . .”

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his harrowing firsthand account of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 was probably written by Joseph Dutor, a carpenter, to his parents in France just days after the blaze. The Newberry recently acquired the dramatic letter, a rare find, from a collection of family papers in France.

Dutor’s correspondence enhances our deep collection of primary sources about this infamous urban disaster. It also expresses the famous Chicago boosterism that emerged even as the city still burned. “Scarcely were the flames extinguished when thousands of workers cleared the ruins,” he wrote, “and today we began to rebuild what we had lost yesterday.”

We commemorated the 150th anniversary of the Chicago Fire this fall by gathering on Walton Street for a free public program, with music and dramatic readings of letters and diaries recounting the fire that are housed in our collection. In 1871, the Mahlon D. Ogden mansion occupied the land where the Newberry now sits.

Ogden’s home was one of the only structures in the fire’s path that did not burn; it was protected by soaked carpets that had been applied to the exterior to fend off the flying sparks that surrounded it. During the program at the Newberry, a slideshow projected in front of the library’s façade took visitors back to that terrifying night, entertaining and educating all who attended.

The Newberry is dedicated to exploring the past in ways that will engage you, whether by adding to our constantly growing collection of research materials that are accessible

to all or by staging free public programs. Our collections and community of library users are global, but we also share some of Dutor’s Chicago boosterism, a deep pride in helping you better understand our city in all its complexities.

In this issue, you’ll read about Chicago Avant-Garde, our current exhibition that tells stories of five extraordinary women who shaped the city’s cultural landscape in the mid-twentieth century. Frederick Hoxie’s contribution reveals how the Newberry’s Native American and Indigenous studies collections have been marshalled in recent decades to support Indigenous peoples’ legal claims. My conversation with Smithsonian Institution Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III explores his passion for interpreting museum collections and reaching diverse public audiences. And Timothy Spears explains how former Newberry director Stanley Pargellis launched an effort to collect papers of Chicago and midwestern writers.

Finally, we’re thrilled to announce here a new partnership with The Pattis Family Foundation, establishing an annual book award for works that advance understanding of Chicago, its history, and its people. The first Pattis Family Foundation Book Award will be presented at a Newberry public event in July 2022. We’re curious to see what new stories these authors will uncover, and we’re eager to continue learning with you.

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ANNOUNCEMENT

A New Chicago Book Prize from the Newberry Library and The Pattis Family Foundation

Notable happenings around the Newberry. We are always growing and changing. Grounded in history, engaged with the present, looking to the future.

The Newberry and The Pattis Family Foundation recently announced a new annual book award for published works that transform public understanding of Chicago, its history, and its people.

Beginning in 2022, The Pattis Family Foundation Chicago Book Award at the Newberry Library will celebrate a publication that opens new perspectives for a wide audience of readers. The $25,000 prize will be open to writers working in a variety of genres, including history, biography, social sciences, poetry, drama, graphic novels, and fiction, and will not be limited by discipline or time period.

“Our goal in this partnership with The Pattis Family Foundation is to bring attention to books that reflect the Newberry’s mission of supporting inquiry and learning across the humanities,” said Daniel Greene, President and Librarian of the Newberry. “The Newberry encourages all readers to use our collections and experience our programs and exhibitions.

This book prize will embody the same openness and accessibility by considering a range of publications that help audiences see Chicago in new ways. We’re grateful to The Pattis Family Foundation for their vision and their generosity.”

“The Pattis Family Foundation is delighted to partner with the Newberry to celebrate and honor a book annually that deepens the understanding and appreciation of Chicago, its history, and its people,” said Lisa Pattis, Director of The Pattis Family Foundation and Trustee of the Newberry. “We believe the Newberry, with its commitment to advancing the collective understanding of our city and its role in the world, is ideally situated to highlight exceptional books that help us understand Chicago from unique and different vantage points. We look forward to a long and productive partnership which will draw attention to the great work of the Newberry as well as the authors receiving the awards.”

The inaugural presentation of The Pattis Family Foundation Chicago Book Award will take place in July of 2022. Recipients of the award will be honored at a public event at the Newberry, where they will present a lecture or participate in a conversation focused on their book.

To nominate a book visit: newberry.org/pattis-award-nomination

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NEW ACQUISITION

The Newberry Receives 14 Paintings from the M. Christine Schwartz Collection Christine Schwartz began collecting art associated with Chicago in 2007, when she realized that the city’s artists and their work demanded greater awareness and more widespread appreciation. Since then, Schwartz has expanded the collection and donated a substantial portion of it to museums and other cultural institutions across the country. The Newberry received 14 paintings from Chris Schwartz this year. Ranging from portraits and still lifes to landscapes and urban scenes, the paintings depict Chicago and the surrounding region from a variety of perspectives. They are a welcome addition to the Newberry collection and will soon appear in public spaces throughout the library.

Clockwise from top right: Study for the Bridge by E. Martin Hennings, ca. 1916; Untitled (Landscape) by William A. Harper, 1900s; Untitled (Hall of Science at Night) by Rudolph Ingerle, ca. 1933.

EXHIBITION

The Chicago Reader at 50: A Half-Century of Revolutionary Storytelling The Chicago Reader started small. Four college friends published a free weekly newspaper of eight pages, working out of two apartments—one on Chicago’s South Side, the other on the North Side.

According to a 1972 article, they found “street sellers more interesting than politicians, and musicians more interesting than the Cubs.” Over the next 50 years, the Reader evolved with the city and

adapted in response to tectonic shifts in journalism. Home to the archives of the Chicago Reader, the Newberry has opened an exhibition commemorating the paper’s 50th anniversary through a multimedia display of stories, photographs, cartoons, and more. The Chicago Reader at 50: A Half-Century of Revolutionary Storytelling is on view through January 21, 2022.

The first issue of the Chicago Reader, October 1, 1971.

Take Note

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Ahead of the Left to right: Ruth Page in Variations on Euclid, 1933; Gwendolyn Brooks holding A Street in Bronzeville, 1945 (courtesy of Brooks Permissions); Gertrude Abercrombie painting Self Portrait of My Sister, 1941 (courtesy of the Smithsonian Archives of American Art); The Katharine Kuh Gallery, 1930s (courtesy of the Smithsonian Archives of American Art); Katherine Dunham in L’Ag’Ya, 1938.

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COVER STORY

By Matthew Clarke

Times Chicago Avant-Garde, on view at the Newberry through December 30, tells the story of five women who took risks, resisted social conventions, and made Chicago a hub of artistic experimentation in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s.

Ahead of the Times

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isk—artistic, personal, political—is at the center of Chicago Avant-Garde: Five Women Ahead of Their Time, a new exhibition at the Newberry that explores five women who transformed Chicago into a center of avant-garde experimentation in the mid-twentieth century. Between the 1930s and the 1950s, these women—dancers Katherine Dunham and Ruth Page, curator Katharine Kuh, painter Gertrude Abercrombie, and poet Gwendolyn Brooks—used their art to defy racial barriers, subvert gender norms, and build new institutions while simultaneously pushing the boundaries of artistic expression in radically new directions.

“Each of these women took significant risks in both their lives and their art,” says Liesl Olson, who curated the exhibition and serves as Director of Chicago Studies at the Newberry. “Yet their stories are not widely known. This exhibition illuminates their work as well as the relationship between the avant-garde styles they helped develop and the struggles for racial progress and women’s rights in the twentieth century.”

Drawing on the Newberry’s collections as well as local and national collections, Chicago Avant-Garde features a rich selection of materials from a wide range of artistic disciplines, including dance,

Ruth Page performs in Expanding Universe, 1933. Courtesy of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library.

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literature, and visual art. Alongside first editions, manuscript letters, and photographic portraits, the exhibition showcases paintings, choreography notebooks, and rare video footage. It organizes items around major themes like “Humor as Subversion” and “Art and Social Change” and focuses on recovering lost voices and stories from early- and mid-century Chicago.

“When I think about this period of creativity in Chicago, I think about all the untold stories that are just now beginning to come to the surface,” says Monique Brinkman-Hill, Executive Director of the South Side Community Art Center, the oldest African American arts center in the United States. “Sharing silenced stories of the past gives people a sense of the power of who they are and what they are capable of creating.”

Made possible through support from the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Walter E. Heller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the History Channel, the exhibition is accompanied by a catalog designed by Chicago-based artists Sonnenzimmer and printmaker Ben Blount. Alongside an extensive and deeply researched essay by Olson, it features new poems dedicated to each of the avant-gardists by Chicago-based poet and educator Eve L. Ewing.

The exhibition and catalog illuminate the risks taken by each artist. In an age of strict segregation, white choreographer and ballerina Ruth Page flouted racial norms by appearing on stage with an all-Black dance troupe in 1933. Katherine Dunham channeled the history of slavery and the African diaspora in her revolutionary choreography. Katharine Kuh showed such provocative works in her modern art gallery at 540 North Michigan that members of the city’s conservative Sanity in Art group shattered the gallery’s windows. In strikingly original

“ When I think about this period of creativity in Chicago, I think about all the untold stories that are just now beginning to come to the surface.” works of surrealist painting, Gertrude Abercrombie gave vivid expression to the horrors of racial violence and the injustices of “urban renewal” projects on Chicago’s South Side. And Gwendolyn Brooks decried racism and misogyny in groundbreaking poetry that was so scandalous that friends like Richard Wright urged her not to publish it.

In an era marked by crises like the Great Depression and World War II, as well as ongoing racial segregation and violence, these five women embraced risk at every turn. Nowhere is this more evident than in their work itself.

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n a hot summer evening in June 1933, elite theatergoers at the Auditorium Theatre in Chicago settled into their seats for an evening of Romantic piano music and classical ballet. Little would have prepared them for the last piece of the night: La Guiablesse, a new ballet by Chicago choreographer and ballerina Ruth Page. The story of a Caribbean “she-devil” who lures her lover to his death, the piece pushed artistic boundaries with its minimalist staging and jazz-infused score by Black composer William Grant Still.

Far more provocative, though, were the racial dynamics that

played out on stage. For while the lead role of La Guiablesse was played by Page, a white woman, every other dancer—including her onstage lover—was Black. Spectators were witnessing racial integration in real time on the stage of the most venerable theater in their segregated city.

That such a bold ballet was choreographed by Page should come as no surprise. Born in 1899 and trained as a ballerina, Page spent her early years training with Sergei Diaghilev and mastering the classical ballet repertory with the help of Anna Pavlova. By the 1930s, however, she had veered away from classical dance and toward avant-garde forms. Onstage, she often appeared wrapped in tape, entangled in long elastic bands and sticks, or enmeshed in a blue jersey sack—she later called the 30s and 40s her “sack, mask, and stick period.” Meanwhile, she choreographed pathbreaking new pieces like La Guiablesse.

La Guiablesse exemplifies the way aesthetic and political risks were intertwined in avant-garde art of the period. Page’s choreography notebook—on display in the exhibition and one of the few extant records of the ballet (no video footage or photographs exist)—hints at how artistically revolutionary the work was.

Playbill for La Guiablesse, performed at Chicago’s Auditorium Theatre in 1933. Featuring a racially integrated cast, the ballet exemplifies the intertwining of aesthetic and political risks in the avant-garde art of the period.

Ahead of the Times

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“Examining the notebook, you can see just how innovative La Guiablesse was,” says Olson. “Throughout the piece, Page fused ballet and vernacular styles into an avant-garde pastiche comprising a ‘cakewalk’ (a dance that can be traced to Southern plantations), a ‘shuffle’ with elements of the Charleston, and a ‘jazz dance’ in which dancers stomped and lunged seductively.”

Artistically radical, the dance was also politically provocative. As Olson explains, “It wasn’t just that Page unveiled La Guiablesse—a ballet that drew heavily on Black dance traditions—in the Auditorium Theatre, the city’s grandest institution of high culture, which for most Chicagoans meant white culture. She also danced with an exclusively Black cast, appearing onstage in erotic physical contact with her Black dance partner in an era when interracial marriage was not just scandalous but also illegal in many states.

It almost seems that the ballet was a world of magic that allowed types of expression prohibited by the strict categories of racial segregation that held sway everywhere else in Chicago.”

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or reasons unknown, Page never again appeared in the lead role of La Guiablesse. When the ballet was performed at the Chicago Civic Opera the following year, she gave the role to another member of the original cast, Katherine Dunham. By 1934, the Chicago-born Dunham was an accomplished dancer and choreographer in her own right. But her lead in La Guiablesse marked a turning point in her career. Following a string of successful performances, Dunham set out on her own path, crafting a strikingly original style of dance that critiqued and resisted the constraints imposed by her race and gender.

A student in the University of Chicago’s Anthropology Department, Dunham traveled to the Caribbean in 1935 to conduct fieldwork in Haiti, Jamaica, Martinique, and Trinidad.

There, she studied the religions and rituals of the islands, including ceremonial dances. Inspired by what she witnessed, she decided to leave academia on her return to Chicago and devote herself to dance. “I am cured of the PhD urge,” she explained to her advisor. Over the ensuing years, she drew on her research to create a radically new dance style that synthesized ballet, modern, and Afro-Caribbean elements, pioneering the field of “dance anthropology” in the process.

Visitors to Chicago Avant-Garde can view video clips illustrating how Dunham drew on Caribbean traditions to craft politically subversive works. One features a traditional dance filmed by Dunham in Haiti in 1936 as part of her anthropological fieldwork— an example of the styles she worked into her later choreography.

Two other clips show dances that emerged from this fieldwork. In Batucada—a piece that draws on a Brazilian samba danced between rope weavers and a tribal girl—Dunham twirls back and forth, pulled—and playfully pulling back—on a fishing rope tied around her waist and held by a male dancer. Alluding to the history of slavery, the piece shows Dunham exerting a degree of control over the conditions of her bondage. Another piece, L’Ag’Ya, was inspired by a fighting dance (known as an ag’ya) that Dunham witnessed in Martinique. Melding a range of dance styles from across Latin America—from the Cuban habanera and Brazilian majumba to the mazourka, béguine, and ag’ya of Martinique—the piece again shows

Above: Newspaper clipping (likely the Chicago Defender) reviewing a 1934 performance of La Guiablesse, featuring Katherine Dunham in the lead role.

Left: Program for a Katherine Dunham performance in 1941.

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Dunham in control as she transforms the fighting dance of the title into a courtship dance in which she sheds layer after layer of her clothing.

Accustomed to risk, she pulled no punches when it came to combating racism whenever she encountered it, as one incident makes especially clear. “Many cities would welcome her performances but not let her dancers sleep in its hotels,” said Olson. “Once in 1944, in Louisville, where the audience had loved her, she strung a sign reading ‘For Whites Only’ on her backside. (One of her dancers had stolen it from a train car.) As she exited the stage, she danced a triplet step so that the sign swung back and forth for everybody to see. Then, after final bows, she delivered a speech in which she vowed not return to Louisville until the theater integrated.”

The “Matriarch of Black Dance,” as Dunham would later be known, didn’t fight prejudice through dance alone. After moving to New York City, she resisted racist pressure to open her studio—the Katherine Dunham School of Dance—in Harlem, opting for the Broadway theatre district instead. When she finally returned to the Midwest, moving to East St. Louis, Illinois, in 1967, she founded the Performing Arts Training Center, an organization dedicated to fighting poverty and alleviating social unrest. Her work helped transform the city into a center of the Black Arts Movement.

Katharine Kuh in her office at the Art Institute of Chicago, 1951. Kuh joined the Art Institute shortly after closing her gallery in 1943.

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ike Dunham, Chicago curator Katharine Kuh was no stranger to risk, even if her early life was more privileged than most.

Born in 1904 and raised in Chicago, Kuh attended Vassar College, where she was a student of Museum of Modern Art founder Alfred H. Barr, before continuing her studies in art history at the University of Chicago and New York University. After returning to Chicago, she opened the Katharine Kuh Gallery in the Art Deco Michigan Square Building at 540 North Michigan Avenue. There, she showed works by members of the European avant-garde, like Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Joan Miró, and Pablo Picasso, as well as pieces by American artists including Alexander Calder, Isamu Noguchi, and Harold Weston. At the same time, she distinguished herself as the first Chicago dealer to feature photography and typographical design in her gallery.

Kuh’s gallery quickly became a hub for avant-garde artists in Chicago, but it wasn’t popular with everyone. For one thing, the gallery was an integrated space. Dunham and her partner, the artist and costume designer John Pratt, were frequent attendees. Kuh’s commitment to showing avant-garde work was also controversial.

“Kuh’s gallery was a target of the so-called Sanity in Art group, a conservative organization dedicated to upholding traditional notions about art and artists,” explains Olson. “Foreign-born artists, new modes of painting the female body, interracial couples looking at such artwork—these were all targets of the group, who would periodically storm exhibitions and berate visitors. At one point, one of the windows in Kuh’s gallery was smashed, probably in an effort to put her out of business.”

Postcards promote shows displaying work by Picasso, Kandinsky, and Mondrian at the Katharine Kuh Gallery, located at 540 North Michigan Avenue.

Ahead of the Times

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Visitors to Chicago Avant-Garde will get a taste of the art styles Kuh displayed through a series of stunning postcard announcements. Designed by Chicago printer Frank Barr, the postcards feature minimalist designs that emphasize typographic originality while recalling the modernist styles of the artists Kuh sought to support. Works of art in their own right, the postcards also shed light on the ways avant-garde visual art circulated and was consumed in the 1930s.

“These tiny masterpieces of design were such a revelation,” Olson explains about the postcards. “We know that Kuh didn’t have money to commission and print catalogs for her shows—her gallery was a one-woman operation—so these little ephemeral objects are all that we really have in terms of the gallery’s paper trail.”

Even in the face of occasionally violent opposition, Kuh was unrelenting in her commitment to avant-garde art. Only in 1943 was she forced by World War II to close her gallery.

However, soon she joined the Art Institute of Chicago, where she continued her quest to support avant-garde artists, organizing groundbreaking shows in a formerly overlooked space known as

the “Gallery of Art Interpretation” and mounting exhibitions devoted to artists like Fernand Léger and Mark Rothko, as well as movements like Surrealism, one of whose chief practitioners in Chicago was the painter Gertrude Abercrombie.

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orn to opera singers, Abercrombie spent her early years moving between European capitals and midwestern towns before ending up in Chicago’s Hyde Park in 1916.

After studying Romance languages at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign, she returned to Chicago, where she found a job as a revamp artist for Sears Roebuck and taught herself to paint. Soon, she was showing her work at galleries and fairs in Chicago and at the Art Institute’s annual Chicago & Vicinity exhibitions. Meanwhile, she situated herself at the center of the city’s avant-garde scene, running a salon at her home in Hyde Park frequented by writers, artists, and musicians and becoming known as the “queen of bohemian artists.”

Unlike the Abstract Expressionists shaking up the art world in New York City, Abercrombie was predominantly a Surrealist

Gertrude Abercrombie addressed systemic racism and racial violence in her work, including in Charlie Parker’s Favorite Painting (1945). Courtesy of the Ackland Art Museum.

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Though her introspective paintings tended to feature dream-like spaces and domestic scenes, Abercrombie was closely attuned to racial injustice.

Gertrude Abercrombie, ca. 1943

painter. Over time, she developed a distinctive aesthetic. “There’s an otherworldliness unique to her work,” says Olson. “Her paintings are instantly recognizable for their flattened surfaces and a sort of airlessness that pervades her domestic spaces. She also developed a striking visual lexicon that included shells, pitchers, hats, cats, owls, doors, and dark flatlands.”

Though her introspective paintings tended to feature dream-like spaces and domestic scenes, Abercrombie was closely attuned to racial injustice. Living on the South Side, she saw firsthand how racist housing policies, redlining, and “urban renewal” programs were displacing many of the Black families around her. Once the families had been forced out, developers razed their houses in preparation for new construction. “Hyde Park looks like the bomb hit,” she wrote in a letter to friends in 1957.

In response, Abercrombie undertook a series of paintings titled Demolition Doors. Her only urban landscapes, the paintings depict the detached doors that developers erected around demolition sites. One of these paintings—Doors (3 Demolition)—is on view in Chicago Avant-Garde. In the painting, three doors painted red, white, and blue stand across a path. In the distance, a cement viaduct of the kind used in demolition work can be made out. Incorporating elements of Abercrombie’s surrealist style, the work hints at how, for the racially marginalized, doors are often barriers rather than entryways in America.

“Abercrombie’s most important friendships were with artists and musicians. Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and other jazz musicians would often stay at Abercrombie’s home during gigs in Chicago. She knew firsthand what doors were open to them, and what doors were not,” says Olson.

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bercrombie was not the only Chicago artist of the period to respond to the racist policies of her city through her art. Gwendolyn Brooks, another resident of Chicago’s South Side, also drew on the injustices she witnessed to craft her poetry. Raised in Chicago, Brooks threw herself into writing at an early age, publishing her first poem at 13. She made a name for herself with her debut work, A Street in Bronzeville (1945). Just a few years later, she became the first Black poet to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her collection Annie Allen (1949). Over the course of her long career, she served stints as Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress and Poet Laureate of Illinois, while her poems became fixtures in literary anthologies.

Nowadays, A Street in Bronzeville is so canonical that it can be easy to forget how strikingly original its poems were when they first appeared. On the one hand, the originality was formal: throughout the collection, Brooks adopted and refashioned traditional lyric forms like the sonnet and ballad.

But she also broke ground when it came to subject matter.

Rather than a collection of love poems, Brooks gave direct expression to the marginalized voices of the people in her Bronzeville neighborhood, from preachers, soldiers, and blues singers to mothers, old married couples, and young jilted lovers. At the time, the mere representation of Black voices was a radical gesture, as she knew. Her aim, as she put it, was to present “Negroes as people. I want to prove to others (by implication, not by shouting) and to such among themselves as have yet to discover it, that they are merely human beings, not exotics.”

Ahead of the Times

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The dust jacket for A Street in Bronzeville by Gwendolyn Brooks. In the groundbreaking collection of poems, published in 1945, Brooks found inspiration in her own backyard. “If you wanted a poem, you only had to look out of a window,” she wrote.

Bronzeville was the place to do it. Like today, the neighborhood in the 1930s and 40s was predominantly Black. A “city within a city,” its streets were filled with Black-owned jazz venues, cinemas, and businesses and its institutions managed by Black residents. There was poetry everywhere she looked. “If you wanted a poem, you only had to look out of a window,” she wrote. “There was material always, walking or running, fighting or screaming or singing.”

But her neighborhood was also suffering from the same urban renewal programs disrupting Abercrombie’s part of town. Brooks represented the effects of the demolition in works like “the vacant

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lot,” a twelve-line poem that appears on a large banner in the exhibition. “Mrs. Coley’s three-flat brick / Isn’t here any more,” Brooks writes, “All done with seeing her fat little form / Burst out of the basement door.”

She focused on other racist housing policies in poems like “kitchenette building,” in which she depicts life in the tiny apartments known as kitchenettes where Black residents were forced to live because of racist housing covenants. Even the dustjacket of A Street in Bronzeville called attention to the changes altering the neighborhood.

As visitors will see in examining a rare first-edition copy of the book

on view in the exhibition, the jacket features a solid wall of bricks, recalling the buildings being torn down while also suggesting the figurative walls that divide Chicago neighborhoods.

The poems in A Street in Bronzeville also confronted issues beyond urban renewal. In “a mother,” for example, Brooks wrote from the perspective of a woman who chooses to have an abortion.

Then (as now), “a mother” generates strong reactions, and Brooks was urged by no less a figure than Richard Wright to leave it out of the collection. No stranger to literary and political risk, she chose to include the poem.

Likewise, in “Ballad of Pearl May Lee”—printed on another banner in the exhibition—Brooks turned her attention to the horrors of lynching. “My mother lived her politics, and she wrote her politics. ‘The Ballad of Pearl May Lee’ was how she dealt with lynching,” says Brooks’s daughter, Nora Brooks Blakely. “Poems like ‘Pearl May Lee’, or the work she published in the Chicago Defender, or the people she celebrated in her writing—Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Medgar Evers—all speak to who she was, and the legacy that lives beyond her.”

Ahead of the Times

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Gwendolyn Brooks became the first Black poet to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, for her collection Annie Allen (1949).

Brooks didn’t confine her political activities to her writing.

Beginning in the 1960s, like Dunham, she was active in the Black Arts Movement. Brooks made a transformative decision to publish only with Black-owned presses. In her official positions, she also worked tirelessly on behalf of young people and young poets. And she continued to create poetry that gave voice to the struggles of the Civil Rights movement.

“One of my missions in life is to direct people’s attention to my mother’s work from the 60s and beyond,” says Ms. Blakely. “Anthologies tend to feature earlier poems like ‘We Real Cool,’ but her later poetry often gives a better idea of where her head was at politically and philosophically. When it comes to what she believed, just look at a poem like ‘Paul Robeson,’ where she writes ‘we are each other’s harvest / we are each other’s business / we are each other’s magnitude and bond’. That is who she was fundamentally.”

Matthew Clarke is former Communications Coordinator at the Newberry.

Chicago Avant-Garde: Five Women Ahead of Their Time is supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Walter E. Heller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the History Channel.

“a song in the front yard” from A Street in Bronzeville (1945) is one of several poems by Brooks featured in Chicago Avant-Garde.

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FEATURE

By Frederick E. Hoxie

Exhibit A

The Newberry’s Ayer Collection and the Native American Struggle for Justice

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century ago, Edward S. Curtis solicited Newberry Library trustee Edward Ayer for support for his forty-volume masterwork, The North American Indians. The photographer received a curt reply. While endorsing the project’s ambition—Ayer agreed it would be “a calamity if a vivid and truthful record of the North American Indian were not kept”—he rejected Curtis’s plan to photograph tribal people in posed settings. Ayer had already spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on Native-related books and manuscripts; that, he believed, was a more worthy enterprise. He wrote, “I have only given [you] a description of my library [so] that gentlemen so

vitally interested . . . may know where the real data in regard to the North American Indian is.”

Ayer’s words were prophetic. In the decades following this exchange—even as the prices of Curtis’s romantic images skyrocketed—the “real data” about Native communities housed at the Newberry became an essential resource for Native people and students of their history. Ayer’s “data” also played a crucial role in dozens of American Indian legal struggles. As courtroom confrontations over Native rights have grown more numerous, their advocates have come to rely increasingly on historical materials attesting to the legitimacy of Native claims and to the illegitimacy of settler colonial actions designed to violate those claims.

Stretching from April to November of 1868, the negotiations leading to the Treaty of Fort Laramie involved many sessions in many locations. Here General William Tecumseh Sherman (sixth from right) and other commissioners speak with tribal leaders of the Lakota and Dakota people.

Exhibit A

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As courtroom confrontations over Native rights have grown more numerous, their advocates have come to rely increasingly on historical materials attesting to the legitimacy of Native claims.

Thanks to Ayer’s foresight—and the endowment he left to support the continued growth of his collection—no single institution could claim to provide more data for this effort than our granite home on Walton Street.

N

ative nations have used the courts to challenge government actions for two centuries. The Cherokees famously petitioned the Supreme Court to block their removal to the West in the 1830s, and soon after their own relocation, the Choctaws sued for damages. The Choctaws’ success in the US Court of Claims inspired other tribes to follow suit. The trend grew so popular—with groups filing claims for land seizures, mismanagement, and treaty violations—that Congress decided to establish a special court—the American Indian Claims Commission (ICC) to “hear and determine” all treaty claims. When it was created in 1946, the commission enabled all pending litigation to come before a single tribunal and invited all tribes to come forward with any other complaints. Over the next four decades, Native groups filed more than 700 separate cases, triggering an unprecedented demand for researchers who could help prepare pleas, along with new interest in the “real data” at the Newberry and other libraries.

Because many early cases before the ICC came from the Great Lakes region, the Department of Justice established a “Great Lakes Ethnohistory Project” at Indiana University to assist tribes. Headed by anthropologist Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin, the project attracted

a lively community of young academics, many of whom became Newberry regulars. In 1952, the library’s director, Stanley Pargellis, offered to support their work by hosting a conference on how best to pursue Native-centered history. Wheeler-Voegelin and many of her colleagues attended, as did more senior scholars such as the Smithsonian’s William Fenton, anthropologist Anthony F. C. Wallace from the University of Pennsylvania, and Latin Americanist Charles Gibson from Michigan. Among the younger scholars who soon joined this group were Donald Berthrong, Harold

Left: US government officials and tribal leaders agreed to the Treaty of Fort Laramie in 1868. The treaty included an article stating that any future agreements must be approved by three-fourths of the tribes’ adult males. The United States would ignore this promise in 1877 when it seized the Black Hills. But the treaty remained a focus of protest and litigation on many occasions in the ensuing years.

Above: Brulé Lakota Chief Spotted Tail (third from left) and other Native leaders at Fort Laramie, 1868.

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Hickerson, Nancy O. Lurie, Helen Hornbeck Tanner, and two anthropologists from the University of Chicago: Sol Tax and Fred Eggan.

This web of researchers was drawn closer to the Newberry b y P a r g e l l i s ’s s u c c e s s o r Lawrence (Bill) Towner who, through his encounters with Tax in particular (and his growing association with Tax’s Métis friend D’Arcy Historian Helen Hornbeck Tanner McNickle) began to imagine consistently used the Newberry a research center focused on collection in treaty-based litigation.

Native history. In 1972, with the support of the new National Endowment for the Humanities and the Mellon Foundation, Towner led the effort to create the McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies, with McNickle serving as founding Director. By 1980, the center’s programs were bringing Native and non-Native scholars to the library and providing an intellectual home for many who had first entered the scholarly arena through their legal research for the ICC. As the center’s programs grew, many in its community of activist scholars remained involved in treaty-based litigation. Among the most active was historian Helen Hornbeck Tanner. A frequent presence at the Newberry, Tanner prepared several reports for the ICC and other courts. Tanner’s most notable victories came when she served as an expert witness in US v. Michigan (1979), a federal case that established a treaty-based fishing right for tribes in Michigan, and Minnesota v. Mille Lacs Band of Chippewa Indians

(1999) which produced a Supreme Court decision upholding an 1837 treaty promise to the Ojibwes.

Others followed in Tanner’s footsteps. Those included McNickle Center fellows Richard White, who served as an expert in several cases growing out of the recognition of Native fishing rights in the Pacific Northwest related to US v. Washington (1976), and R. David Edmunds, who consulted on a number of cases in Oklahoma and wrote the key historical report for Nebraska v. Parker (2016), in which the US Supreme Court held that land sales within the boundaries of a reservation created in 1882 did not alter the boundaries of that reserve. The most recent addition to this list is Northwestern’s Doug Kiel (Oneida), another former fellow, who provided an expert report in his tribe’s recently-successful petition in Oneida v. Hobart (2020).

M

y own historical work for Native litigants began at the Newberry more than forty years ago. I arrived in 1976 as a predoctoral fellow and returned seven years later to lead the McNickle Center. In 1993 I became Vice President for Research and Education. Though I left the Newberry for Urbana and the University of Illinois in 1998, I’ve returned again and again to conduct research that has been vital for legal causes.

I have been a consultant in more than a dozen cases, serving as an expert witness in eight separate proceedings (six of them now resolved).

The assignment in each case was to prepare a historical narrative of the “circumstances” surrounding the treaty or issue in question and to provide detailed documentation for my conclusions. My reports are not legal briefs, but focused histories (typically coming in at around 100 pages) intended to assist the court in understanding the situation under scrutiny. As part of the process, I have also been asked to give depositions regarding my research

Fred Hoxie at the Newberry, fall 2021.

Exhibit A

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Our legal system is imperfect, to be sure, but its willingness to hear Native voices and re-examine old promises in light of historical fact invites us to continue the struggle to square our national values with the lives of all Americans. projects and to testify in court. I have completed this work for attorneys working for Native groups, tribal governments, or the US Department of Justice (acting on behalf of tribes).

Work on these projects always began at the Newberry for one simple reason: the Ayer Collection has been in place for so long— and has been so carefully maintained—that it contains virtually all the printed resources on every Native American group in North America. In addition, while the library’s holdings are primarily in printed sources, the Newberry staff have buttressed the collection of books with major acquisitions of microfilmed documents, government documents, and important archival collections. (My own papers, including the research materials assembled for all of my reports, are now housed here—as are the papers of Helen Hornbeck Tanner and Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin.)

My only losing effort as an expert came in the challenge to the trademark of the Washington NFL football team, Pro-Football v. Harjo (2005). My deposition in that case included a day in the library’s fifth-floor conference room with an attorney from the NFL who read me benign definitions of the team’s racist name from old dictionaries, listened to me dispute them by discussing historical contexts, and then demanded that my statements be stricken from the record.

In the spring of 1977, I presented some dissertation research at a Newberry fellows seminar. Among the topics I covered was a loophole created by federal officials to take reservation land away from Native people in the early twentieth century. Instead of acquiring land by formal agreement (as they were required), these officials opened the land to homesteaders. Under a hastily passed 1908 law, these “acquisitions” involved only opening a reservation to homesteaders and transferring their filing fees to the tribes.

Unbeknownst to me, at that moment a campaign was underway (in part as a reaction to the rise of American Indian activism in the West) to persuade the courts to use this “homestead law” to reduce the size of reservations. Local white politicians argued that these homestead “openings” canceled existing reservation borders. Helen Hornbeck Tanner, then directing research for the Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History, attended my seminar and knew of the impending litigation. She passed my name to Justice Department lawyers and within a few weeks I was headed to South Dakota to investigate how the homestead laws had been implemented on the ground.

My assignment was to write a history of federal jurisdiction on the Cheyenne River reservation: how had the government asserted its authority, how and when had that authority changed,

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and how had this entire process been affected by the 1908 statute?

The written sources were familiar to me, but from the first I believed oral sources would be critical. I went to South Dakota to interview everyone who had been present when the homestead law had gone into effect in 1908. It was a historian’s dream and a crash course in oral history. Traveling with a translator, I spent weeks interviewing elders who were eager to help the tribe defend its borders. I was captivated by the depth of the community’s commitment to both its past and its future, and determined to have their stories heard in court.

Those stories were heard. My report showed that the tribe had not been consulted during the process and that the Indian Office had not changed its administrative practices in its wake.

Homesteaders had just “shown up,” and little else changed. The case worked its way up the legal system until the Supreme Court upheld our view in a unanimous decision written by Thurgood Marshall in 1983. My report was passed along as the case moved upward. But I never got to testify. At our first hearing in South Dakota, federal judge Andrew Bogue, red-faced and angry, refused to accept me as an expert. No outsider was going to tell this lifelong South Dakotan about his state’s history! “There is no such thing as an expert in Indian history,” he declared. He dismissed my report and the oral histories it contained as a mere “brief.” His vehemence made our ultimate victory all the sweeter.

Edward Ayer could not have known how powerfully the “data” he assembled would affect Native Americans. But as his collection has grown as a resource for Native people and other researchers, it has also become a reminder of how the meaning of that past can evolve in a free and democratic society. Our legal system is imperfect, to be sure, but its willingness to hear Native voices and re-examine old promises in light of historical fact invites us to continue the struggle to square our national values with the lives of all Americans. The Newberry has played a vital role in that struggle, and thanks to the riches here, that role will continue.

Frederick E. Hoxie is Professor Emeritus of History, Law, and American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and is former Vice President for Research and Education and former Director of the D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies at the Newberry.

FEATURE

Historical Context

An Interview with Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III

On May 24, 2021, the Newberry honored Lonnie G. Bunch III, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, with the Newberry Library Award for outstanding contributions to the humanities.

From 2005 to 2019, Bunch served as founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, leading the effort to transform the museum from vision to bold reality. Today, he oversees 19 museums, 21 libraries, the National Zoo, numerous

research centers, and several education units and centers in his role as Secretary of the Smithsonian.

As the centerpiece of the first-ever virtual Newberry Library Award celebration, Secretary Bunch and Newberry President Daniel Greene discussed Secretary Bunch’s path to the Smithsonian and the powerful role libraries and museums can and should play in a democratic society. Below is a transcript of that conversation, edited and condensed for clarity.

Newberry President Daniel Greene (left) interviews Lonnie G. Bunch III, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, as part of the virtual presentation of the 2021 Newberry Library Award.

Historical Context

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Daniel Greene: Thank you for joining us, Secretary Bunch, and congratulations on receiving the Newberry Library Award. Let me start by asking about the role museums played in your early life.

When you were growing up did you see yourself in the museums or historic sites you visited? How did those experiences shape your thinking about the power of history in public places?

Lonnie Bunch: Like every kid, I went on school trips. One time, during a visit to the Cloisters [part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art], I knocked over a suit of armor. That was my first museum experience, and it wasn’t a very positive one! For me, history was really a way that my grandfather and my grandmother helped me understand who I was. I grew up in a town where there were very few African Americans; there were people who treated me horribly and people who treated me wonderfully. I thought that if I understood history—the history of this town, then the history of race, and then later the history of the United States—I could understand myself and then I could help others understand our own history and our past.

Bunch was the founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which opened to the public on September 24, 2016. Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution.

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This notion began to sink in when I was four years old, and my grandfather was reading a book to me. He showed me a picture of school children, and he explained that the kids were probably long gone; the picture was taken 80, 90, 100 years ago. He said, “Isn’t it a shame that people could live their lives, die, and all that’s said about them in the caption is ‘unidentified’?”

I was so taken by that. I thought, “How can that be?”

And so while I couldn’t be aware of it at the time, that’s what would lead me into a career where my goal was to give voice to the anonymous and to make visible those often left out of the narrative.

DG: One of the striking features of the National Museum of African American History and Culture is the combination of artifacts from both well-known people—say, Harriet Tubman, Emmett Till, or the Obamas—and people who are not as well-known. How do you think about the power of objects in these spaces? How can they help visitors interact with history in a different way?

LB: I love the notion of artifacts. People have always said artifacts speak for themselves. They don’t; if anything, they whisper. With good interpretation provided by a museum, an artifact makes the past accessible and meaningful.

One of the challenges for history museums is that we sometimes get so caught up in the grand narratives that we forget to humanize history. Artifacts allow us to humanize history. They are also key to creating informal communities in museums. Suddenly, complete strangers will cry together while looking at Emmett Till’s casket. They’ll find new meaning, new understanding, because of that object.

Another example of the power of artifacts comes from an enslaved man named Joseph Trammell. When he gained his freedom, he received his freedom papers. He knew these papers were the key to his future, and so, to protect them, he created what his family called a handmade tin case. It was an ugly little box, really, but Trammell used it to store his papers and protect them from being destroyed by perspiration. At night, he would come home, take the paper out, put it on the mantle, and he’d talk to his family about the fragility of freedom, the power of freedom, the meaning of freedom.

We’re all familiar with freedom papers. But to tell Trammell’s story through that little box was really meaningful to me. In general, I spend a lot of time thinking about how to tell stories that Americans don’t know and may not be comfortable with.

DG: Could you say more about the role of libraries and museums in the national conversation around race and systemic racism? What should be our ambition at institutions like the Newberry and at the Smithsonian? How can we help?

Artifacts don’t speak for themselves, says Bunch. They whisper. Above right: The personal hymnal of Harriet Tubman. Above: A tin case served as a protective container for the freedom papers of Joseph Trammell. Courtesy of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Historical Context

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While it may be grounded in the past, the work of the institution should always have a contemporary resonance, giving people understanding of . . . everything from climate change to the search for life beyond this planet to the challenge of race in America.

LB: Well, the first thing is to recognize that cultural institutions have a role to play in this moment. That at a time when a nation is in crisis, our institutions need to come together and rise up to help a nation understand itself. The great thing about the Newberry is that your collections really contextualize today. They provide the kind of understanding that the public desperately needs. You’ve heard the conversations. There’s an amazing lack of historical understanding.

On the one hand, we’re often told this is a unique moment. On the other hand, it’s a moment we’ve seen time and time again. And so I think it’s important for institutions like the Newberry and the Smithsonian to use their collections and their expertise to define reality while giving people hope.

DG: I agree. Another responsibility of cultural institutions is to create a community in which people with different viewpoints may talk to each other. I hope that we can provide a model of a place where people can disagree and learn from one another.

LB: You’ve put your finger on something really important. Places like the Newberry, like the Smithsonian—in fact, many museums and libraries—are some of the most trusted places in the United States.

So let us not abuse that trust; let’s use it. These institutions can create a space for people to grapple with difficult questions.

DG: I believe libraries and museums have an important role to play in ensuring the future of a healthy and vibrant democracy. Of course, as [violence at the US Capitol on] January 6 reminded us, our democracy is fragile and cannot be taken for granted. Watching what unfolded on January 6 at the US Capitol, I was struck by the fact that the event was taking place on the doorstep of the Smithsonian. What is your vision for the future of the Smithsonian and its relationship with American democracy?

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LB: As you know, part of our job is to collect today for tomorrow.

I believe we have to collect critical moments as they’re happening: collect around the murder of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter demonstrations around the country. We collect in traditional ways, gathering posters and the banners, while also asking people to give us cellphone videos. We’ve also collected materials documenting January 6. There’s no doubt in my mind that January 6 will always be one of the most important events in American history.

I want to recognize that, as a trusted source, the Smithsonian should be a place that is as much about today and tomorrow as it is about yesterday. While it may be grounded in the past, the work of the institution should always have a contemporary resonance, giving people understanding—whether that’s understanding debates over Confederate monuments or previous moments when our democracy has been under attack.

Basically what I want is for the Smithsonian to be a place that allows people to better understand everything from climate change to the search for life beyond this planet to the challenge of race in America. We have a big portfolio, but the key is, ultimately, to make sure that the Smithsonian is a place that still matters. That it’s a place that gives people tools to live their lives, that gives people the kind of education, the kind of historical context, that is so desperately needed.

Watch the full 2021 Newberry Library Award celebration at newberry.org/award-celebration.

FEATURE

By Timothy Spears

A Special Kind of Diplomacy Newberry Director Stanley Pargellis’s campaign to acquire the personal papers of leading literary figures in the Midwest.

W

hen I came to the Newberry Library in 1994 to do research for a book that became Chicago Dreaming: Midwesterners and the City, 1871–1919 (2005), I knew I would spend a good part of my fellowship year immersed in the Midwest Manuscript Collection, looking for documents that illuminated how hinterland migrants, especially writers, imagined the relationship between Chicago and the homes they left behind.

I also knew that Floyd Dell would play a role in my study because during a fact-finding trip to the Newberry, I read some letters that Dell wrote in 1913 to his friend, poet-lawyer Arthur Davison Ficke, back in Davenport, Iowa, describing the bohemian lifestyle that he was leading on the city’s South Side and playfully inviting Ficke to join him there. As editor of the Friday Literary Review and a prominent figure in the Chicago Renaissance, the twentyfive-year-old Dell was intellectually precocious, provocative, and self-consciously modern.

Twenty-five years later, I returned to the Floyd Dell Papers and was struck this time by Dell’s correspondence with Stanley Pargellis, the director of the Newberry from 1942 to 1962.

As part of an effort to develop the library’s collections and enhance its reputation among scholars, Pargellis established the Midwest Manuscript Collection, now a subset of the Modern Manuscript Collection. Pargellis hoped not just to expand the archives, but also to make the Newberry a center for the study of the region’s literary and cultural history. In 1947, the

Stanley Pargellis, historian and director of the Newberry, ca. 1960.

A Special Kind of Diplomacy

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“ Yes, I can, too, write bad letters, as you will find out if you get hold of enough of mine; you will wonder how a letter can go on and on and on and on, and you will cry for mercy.”

Floyd Dell to Stanley Pargellis, February 9, 1951

Floyd Dell, 1921.

Newberry persuaded Sherwood Anderson’s widow to donate his papers to the library, and that gift formed a cornerstone of the collection. The author of the modernist-leaning Winesburg, Ohio (1919) and other fiction set in the Midwest and Chicago, Anderson enjoyed canonical status, and the Newberry built the collection’s literary holdings around his manuscripts.

Dell’s reputation was more mixed. Although Dell was a mainstay in the Chicago literary scene between 1908 and 1913 and a prolific writer of fiction, poetry, drama, and criticism during the 1910s and 20s, by the 1940s, his career as a best-selling author had ended. In 1947, he was living in Washington, DC, nearly retired from his job with the Work Projects Administration, the New Deal agency responsible for overseeing a wide range of public infrastructure projects. But if Dell was no longer publishing, he was certainly thinking about his legacy.

So in the fall of 1947 when Dell received an invitation from journalist Lloyd Lewis (whom Pargellis enlisted to help build the Midwest Manuscript Collection) to donate his papers to the Newberry, Dell responded by telling “Mr. Lewis” that the library was “welcome” to his “letters and papers,” items that he framed in quotation marks since he was reluctant to vouch for their “value.”

A week later, Pargellis wrote to “Mr. Dell” to say that the Newberry would be “proud to have your letters and papers, all of them that you will let us have, and I shall not follow you in putting them in quotes.” And Pargellis noted that since coming to Chicago he had become “a little appalled at the carelessness with which Midwesterners permit their history to slip away. Fifty years from now no one is going to know much more about most Chicago authors than their books can furnish, and every piece of paper that is saved from the holocaust seems to my historical mind clear gain.”

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In a letter to Sherwood Anderson, Floyd Dell explained his critical stance toward Anderson’s book Winesburg, Ohio. The Newberry built its literary holdings around the acquisition of Anderson’s manuscripts. Pargellis persuaded other writers from the Midwest, including Dell, to give their personal papers to the Newberry.

This letter from Sherwood Anderson to Floyd Dell praises Dell’s latest book Moon-Calf (1920). Anderson states with unqualified warmth, “the book makes me love and understand you as I never have before.”

A

s the Newberry’s director, Pargellis cut a broad swath, in one moment drafting thank you notes to donors for the smallest of gifts, and in the next negotiating the acquisition of the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad records. But persuading writers or their descendants to part with literary manuscripts required a special kind of diplomacy, and Pargellis had high ambitions. During the 1940s and 50s, he angled for the papers of Theodore Dreiser, Edward Eggleston, James Farrell, Edna Ferber, Susan Glaspell, and Ernest Hemingway (among others), creatively modifying his appeals as needed. When he asked Hemingway for his manuscripts, he did so in the spirit of “nothing risked, nothing gained,” stressing that the Newberry was particularly interested in writers whose work “shows signs of achieving permanent importance.”

He added: “I hope all this doesn’t give you the impression that you are regarded as a ‘dead’ author who (as Gertrude Stein is supposed to have said) ‘smells of the museums’ for all that you ‘look so modern.’

I merely proceed on the double-assumption: that all men are mortal, and that it is better to ask gifts of the living than to attempt, later on, to rob graves.”

In 1949, when he wrote Edna Ferber, he told her that Anderson’s papers were meant to be a “magnet” for other writers and suggested that “with fire so constant a hazard” she could take comfort knowing her manuscripts would be safe at the

Newberry. Ferber complimented Pargellis on his reference to fire—she had “never before heard that euphemism” and seemed to view it as an allusion to mortality—but rebuffed his invitation, saying her manuscripts were not worth saving. Pargellis persisted, explaining that the Newberry wanted to preserve “all that will remain of Edna Ferber outside her books.” This time Ferber was more explicit. No, she did not want to donate her papers to the Newberry. Moreover, she told Pargellis, your correspondence “really has the mortuary touch.”

Dell, on the other hand, warmed to the mortuary touch.

Two years into their correspondence, Dell and Pargellis were familiar enough with one another that Dell wrote to the Newberry director as “Stanley.” Listing the manuscripts he was sending, Dell joked that this “junk” would cost “over one million dollars” to mail.

Over the next three years, Dell transported the majority of his papers to the Newberry. In 1950, he also shipped Bror Nordfeldt’s modernist-style portrait of him, which the artist painted in 1913.

The portrait had been sitting in a friend’s garage, and Dell thought it was “horrid,” telling Pargellis that “it made me wish not to be the person there pictured.” Though Dell had praised the liberating effects of the Armory Show, which came to the Art Institute of Chicago in 1913, he now distanced himself from modernism and his earlier role as an iconoclast.

A Special Kind of Diplomacy

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In the Newberry’s archival collections, you’ll find handwritten letters, poems, and prose from some of the most loved and admired writers in the English language:

Along with his manuscripts, Dell sent notes explaining their significance. “The reason why these notes are so extensive,” he confessed to Pargellis in 1951, “is that I am defending and trying to justify my action in preserving deliberately or accidentally a collection of ‘scraps.’ And I feel especially Nelson Algren silly about sending the first Willa Cather drafts of poems of mine. It Eve L. Ewing may be that the numerical Katherine Mansfield magnitude of the Eunice Sherwood Anderson Tietjens collection has aroused Edgar Lee Masters in me a competitive spirit; Carl Sandburg maybe I could find 3,000 Ben Hecht items if I shut my eyes and forked over the stuff.” Dell Ernest Hemingway won this battle as his archive Ken Kesey grew to 30 b oxes, while Jack Kerouac Tietjens’s collection—which Sarah Paretsky is also housed at the Newberry Gwendolyn Brooks and includes papers relating Arthur Conan Doyle to her work as a World War I Langston Hughes correspondent for the Chicago Herman Melville Daily News as well as her literary career—is one third that size.

Richard Wright Dell understood that by depositing his papers at the Newberry, the assessment of his literary reputation would now take place within the corridors of academe. “Your problem,” he told Pargellis, “is to decide whether future PhD’s are entitled” to read his papers and explanatory notes. But Dell was not ready to surrender the field. Indeed, his letters to Pargellis and other scholars are filled with comparative assessments of his literary work. He claimed that his “attitude” as a midwesterner was nothing like the “expatriate scorn” that characterized some of the 1920s writers from the region. He was “a much better novelist” than F. Scott Fitzgerald or Sherwood Anderson, who could not distinguish “facts from fancies.” And so on. Dell’s crankiness increased as he grew older, though the observation he made to scholar John E. Hart in 1961 about prevailing critical opinion—“The Emperor’s New Clothes is an instructive fable”—also resonates with some of his earlier commentary.

However contrary Dell could be, he was an eloquent critic with an unmatched view of literary and cultural history, which reinforced the Newberry’s commitment to soliciting his reflections.

In an internal memo that archivist Amy Nyholm wrote in 1960, she highlighted Dell’s “spitefulness” but told Pargellis that the “depth and sweetness that the good Lord gave you quiets Mr. Dell.” Pargellis was seeking advice about how to manage Dell, and Nyholm encouraged him to stay the course: “I still think all will work out nicely if we handle it smoothly.”

E

leven years younger than Dell, Stanley Pargellis was in many ways the perfect interlocuter for Dell. In a 1959 profile entitled “Chicago Bookman,” the New Yorker tracked his remarkable intellectual drive. Born in Toledo, Ohio, and raised

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in towns throughout the Midwest and West, Pargellis attended University of Nevada and Harvard Law School (he thought he wanted to be a corporate lawyer), which he left for Oxford University when he won a Rhodes Scholarship. After Oxford, Pargellis went on to earn a PhD in British history at Yale, where he taught for thirteen years before taking the job at the Newberry. Although Dell had only a high school degree, he, too, was a bookman, well read in British literature and history and naturally drawn to cultural and political discourse. After a youthful engagement with socialism, he had tacked toward middle-class respectability. He was proud of having raised a family during the Great Depression and critical of male writers who placed literary ambition above their responsibilities as husbands and fathers. Whether or not Pargellis agreed with Dell’s assessments, he forged a connection with him based on their shared intellectual interests and midwestern backgrounds.

In the spring of 1952, soon after Dell deposited the bulk of his papers with the library, Pargellis sponsored the Second Newberry Conference on American Studies, organizing the meeting around Bernard Duffey’s essay “Two Literary Movements: Chicago, 1890–1925.” A faculty member at Michigan State, Duffey was three years away from publishing the first monograph on the Chicago Literary Renaissance. No doubt Pargellis believed the conference was a good way to promote the Newberry’s holdings in Chicago literature and history. Attendance was by invitation, and twenty-four scholars traveled from universities across the Midwest to discuss Duffey’s paper. Pargellis also invited Floyd Dell. As conference participant John T. Flanagan recalled, Dell’s “surprise”

Portrait of Floyd Dell by Bror Norfeldt, 1913.

The Floyd Dell Papers include a range of materials created and accumulated by the writer. Clockwise from left: A poem by Dell praising students of the dancer Isadora Duncan; a short note to the literary critic Fanny Butcher regarding the work of Willa Cather; a note by Dell commenting on the consequences of his anti-war positions during and after World War I.

appearance brought a sense of authenticity to the proceedings.

After all, though Dell lived in Chicago for only five years (he moved to New York City in 1913) he had “actually been at the center of a literary movement.”

Dell figured prominently in Duffey’s thesis. In describing how the young radical helped lead a literary rebellion from his 57th Street studio, Duffey quoted from one of the letters that Dell sent to Arthur Davison Ficke. Duffy had discovered the letter at the Newberry, but if his use of it was supposed to draw attention to the Floyd Dell Papers, Dell was ambivalent about the results. Writing to Flanagan after the conference, he wondered why the discussions had not focused more on aesthetic issues. He questioned what it meant for Duffey to argue that his novels were part of a “stream of literary development” and how he could have been a “formative influence in a Chicago literature movement.”

Duffey, he complained, “needed some figure, some name, as center of his construct,” so he put Dell there. Resisting the theory that his work had been guided by some overarching movement, Dell wanted to be understood as a man of letters and a novelist, not a representative historical figure.

In 1952 Dell sent the Newberry two handwritten notebooks, totaling almost three hundred pages: “Daughters of Dreams and of Stories: Letters to Stanley Pargellis from Floyd Dell, 1952” and “Now That Our Youth Begins to Fade: A Letter to Stanley Pargellis,

1952,” the titles highlighting the librarian’s role as muse to Dell’s critical reminiscences.

Yet as successful as Pargellis was in his cultivation efforts, the relationship took an awkward turn in the late 1950s, when he had to mediate a quarrel between Dell and a young scholar, who wrote a dissertation—a critical biography—that sought to explain, in parts, why Dell was not a fiction writer of the first order. Because the study was based on research conducted at the Newberry (research that Pargellis encouraged), the director found himself caught in the middle, with Dell joining the fight by escalating his letter writing and insisting that his life and work had been misrepresented.

When Pargellis wrote Dell in 1962 to say he was retiring from the Newberry, Dell thanked him for his friendship and apologized for handling the dispute so badly. Twenty years earlier, Pargellis had told Dell that “every piece of paper” the Newberry saved would be “clear gain.” In ways he could not have imagined, history proved more complicated.

Timothy Spears is a literary scholar and professor at Middlebury College. He is the author of Chicago Dreaming: Midwesterners and the City, 1871–1919.

A Special Kind of Diplomacy

29

The Recent Past Revolutionary Ride On Saturday, September 18, more than 60 cyclists joined us for a slow-roll historical bike tour of public art murals in the Humboldt Park and Pilsen neighborhoods of Chicago. Bike marshals with Biketropolis and West Town Bikes shepherded everyone along the route, and tour guides Eduardo Arocho, Rebeca Fernández, and Luis Tubens taught us about the history behind the murals, many of which deal with themes stemming from political revolutions across Latin America. The free event was held as part of ¡Viva la Libertad!, an NEH-funded series of public programs exploring independence struggles of the Americas and reflecting on their legacies today. Visit newberry.org for upcoming events in the series.

Clockwise from left: “Mexican Heroes” mural by Rahmaan Statik; tour guide Eduardo Arocho leads cyclists through Humboldt Park; “The Legend of the Volcanoes” by KOZMO.

30

The Newberry Magazine | Fall / Winter 2021

The Newberry Welcomes President Gitanas Nausėda of Lithuania While in the country for the United Nations General Assembly session in September, President Gitanas Nausėda of Lithuania visited the Newberry for a special viewing of materials from or related to Lithuania. The president, who is an avid rare-book collector, relished the opportunity to see the Newberry collection and draw connections between the texts preserved here and the treasures in his own personal collection. At one point, President Nausėda read aloud from a sixteenth-century history of the world, adding oratorical flourishes as a reader might have done for their audience centuries ago. It was one more reminder of how our collections come to life when people engage with them.

Left: First Lady Diane Nausėdienė, President Gitanas Nausėda, Newberry President Daniel Greene, and Newberry curator of printing history Jill Gage. Above: President Nausėda and Gage examine an early modern book from the Newberry collection.

Colonial Legacies in the Luso-Brazilian World In partnership with the Consulate General of Brazil in Chicago, the Newberry hosted “Colonial Legacies in the Luso-Brazilian World” on September 10. This symposium, held virtually with a live audience at the Newberry, featured international scholars of Brazilian history: Drs. Kenneth Maxwell, Gabriel Paquette, João Paulo Pimenta, and Heloisa Starling, and was moderated by Dr. Elisa Frühauf Garcia.

The event was held in honor of next year’s bicentennial of Brazilian independence and the Newberry Library’s role as a premier research center for the study of Luso-Brazilian history.

In 1969, the Newberry hosted a meeting on Brazilian colonial history, which resulted in the publication of Colonial Roots of Modern Brazil: Papers of the Newberry Library Conference, a classic in the field that propelled the work of a new generation of scholars. A published volume of the papers presented at this year’s symposium is forthcoming.

Rugendas, Johann Moritz. “Jogar Capoera, ou Danse de la Guerre,” in Voyage Pittoresque dans le Brésil, 1835.

The Recent Past

31

Through the Flames and Beyond After roaring out of Mrs. O’Leary’s barn and consuming everything in its path, the Great Chicago Fire surged toward the home of Mahlon D. Ogden, brother of the city’s first mayor. Standing on the site of what is now the Newberry, Ogden’s home, made of wood, seemed destined for oblivion. Yet against all odds, the home proved an immovable object in the face of the fire’s unstoppable force.

It emerged relatively unscathed after the greatest disaster in the history of Chicago.

A stream of illustrations, projected onto a screen in front of the Newberry, brought the unlikely story of survival to life for a crowd that gathered to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Chicago Fire on October 8. As the nineteenth-century-style magic lantern

show unfolded, Chicago historians took to the Newberry’s steps to narrate the scenes of destruction and resurrection and highlight the voices of those who experienced it. Drawing from eyewitness accounts preserved in the Newberry collection, they spotlighted women, immigrants, and those who took in refugees from the fire.

More than 400 people in attendance listened with rapturous interest. By the end, they knew what saved Ogden’s mansion from annihilation: an army of servants covered the home in a protective layer of cider-soaked carpets. (Ogden was out of town at the time.)

It is safe to say that one and all were edified, entertained, and riveted by the dramatic tales of how Chicagoans made it through the flames and beyond.

Clockwise from top left: Kathleen Rooney narrates the story of the Great Chicago Fire; Ann Durkin Keating and Shermann Dilla Thomas reflect on the experiences of the people affected by the fire; a crowd in front of the Newberry watches a series of “magic lantern” slides illustrating stories of destruction and resurrection.

32

The Newberry Magazine | Fall / Winter 2021

The Newberry Annual Report 2020–21

The Newberry Annual Report 2021

33

Letter from the Chair and the President

Dear Friends and Supporters of the Newberry, Although the past 20 months have been unlike any in the Newberry’s 134 year history, we have done much more than just weather the pandemic. Our staff and Trustees together have advanced many projects and established a solid foundation for the library’s future. We are especially proud that, despite all the necessary energy required to respond to rapidly changing public health conditions, the Newberry is thriving.

COVID-19 presented many challenges in 2020–21, but our doors on Walton Street remained open to the public for the majority of the year. Newberry staff creatively and effectively executed the library’s mission and found innovative ways to remain engaged with you. We prioritized safely accommodating individual researchers, fellows, and exhibition visitors on site, while all library programming, classes, and seminars were held virtually, attracting audiences from across the United States as well as many foreign countries. In the following pages, you’ll read stories that demonstrate how each area of the library found ways to flourish in these unusual times.

Burton X. Rosenberg, Chair, Board of Trustees, and Daniel Greene, President and Librarian

Time and time again, we were reminded of the strength and dedication of the Newberry’s community.

Whether in our building or on our computer screens, Newberrians like you gathered to share discoveries made in our collection, exchange insights on a wide range of topics, and deepen each other’s understanding of our past and present. We were heartened by the enthusiasm with which long-standing and new audiences embraced the Newberry’s virtual offerings. We enjoyed seeing how eagerly people returned to our building as soon as they were able. And we are grateful that our community rallied around the Newberry to provide significant philanthropic support, leading to one of our best fundraising years on record.

As we look forward to the year ahead, we remain eager to see both familiar and new faces at the library.

Growing our audience remains a priority, as does ensuring that the Newberry becomes an even more inclusive and welcoming environment for all who wish to engage with us. In 2021, we took multiple steps to address diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), implementing both a new staff working group and Trustee committee to lead our efforts. As a foundation for this work, the staff and Board together wrote an institutional statement, adopted by our Board in June 2021, that articulates the Newberry’s commitment to advancing inclusivity and equity.

34

The Newberry Annual Report 2021

Staff DEI work has been based on collaboration at the Newberry and prioritizes projects that will transform the library. We adopted a new Statement on Potentially Offensive Materials and Descriptions in the library’s collection. We revised both our policy on Access to Culturally Sensitive Indigenous Materials and, in partnership with the Chicago American Indian Center, our institutional Land Acknowledgment statement. With funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, we continued our work with three tribal partners to expand access to the Newberry’s Indigenous collections. And we made our exhibitions more accessible through bilingual labels and tours. We also remain committed to facing our own institutional past, as evidenced by our public exploration of the Newberry’s practice of signing racially restrictive covenants on properties it owned during the first half of the twentieth century.

These ongoing efforts to make the Newberry a more diverse and equitable institution are just one of many priorities we will address in the coming years. We also are committed to welcoming more people back into our building while continuing to engage the far-reaching communities we have built online. We are implementing a new digital asset management system that will vastly improve users’ ability to search and engage with our growing collection of digital resources, investing in technology to support virtual and onsite programming, and developing a new website that will help the library reach broader audiences and make it easier for you to navigate our collections and programs. Of course, we will continue activities core to our mission: acquiring items for our collection, providing enlightening programs and exhibitions, and serving each member of our community to the best of our ability.

These ambitious goals for the year ahead will depend on your generous support, which makes our work possible. For that, we are deeply grateful. We hope you will be inspired by the Newberry in the year ahead. And we hope to spend much more time in person—with you and our entire community of library users—on Walton Street.

Sincerely,

Burton X. Rosenberg, Chair, Board of Trustees

Daniel Greene, President and Librarian

Letter from the Chair and the President

35

Public Engagement

E

xhibitions, public programs, and adult education seminars are a first point of contact for many people who become lifelong members of our community. In 2020–21, we continued to present engaging programming and grow our audiences as we shifted programs to Zoom, YouTube, and Facebook.

The popular adult education seminars program successfully hosted a virtual year of classes for lifelong learners, attracting participants from 41 states and six foreign countries. We also saw impressive geographic diversity among the audiences of our 36 virtual public programs. These programs—ranging from discussions on immigration policy and presidential scandals to the study of race in early American filmmaking and the historical context of the Netflix hit Bridgerton—brought diverse perspectives to bear on contemporary issues.

The Newberry mounted five exhibitions that inspired visitors to learn about Renaissance prints, Latin American revolutions, Indigenous artists, and presidential politics. Two exhibitions—

Renaissance Invention: Stradanus’s Nova Reperta and Sweet Bitter Love: An Initiative of Toward Common Cause—involved cooperation with peer organizations like the Art Institute of Chicago and partnerships with the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago. All gallery labels for our spring exhibition, ¡Viva la Libertad!: Latin America and the Age of Revolutions, were presented in Spanish and English to great success; we will continue this bilingual approach as we attempt to reach wider audiences. Decision 1920: A Return to “Normalcy” took visitors back to a critically important presidential election that occurred in a deeply divided nation emerging from a devastating pandemic. All of our exhibitions demonstrated how our collection continues to be deeply relevant to understanding our contemporary world.

As we look forward, we will find exciting ways to make our collection and staff expertise accessible to you in our exhibition galleries, classrooms, programming spaces, and online.

“ Being able to stay connected to the library thanks to the tireless work of the staff has been a true blessing in these unsettling times.”

Virtual Public Program Attendee

¡Viva la Libertad!: Latin America and the Age of Revolutions 36

The Newberry Annual Report 2021

1,816 participants attended 101

virtual adult education seminars across 372 Zoom meetings.

9,548 viewers attended 36 virtual public programs.

Sweet Bitter Love: An Initiaitve of Toward Common Cause

6,557 visitors enjoyed 5 exhibitions.

8,740 people watched our new “NewbTube” live video series.

71,652 people followed the

Newberry on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Renaissance Invention: Stradanus’s Nova Reperta

“ It’s really heartening to see how the Newberry has stepped up during this pandemic by providing wonderful virtual programs and seminars. The staff are an inspiration!”

Virtual Public Program Attendee

Public Engagement

37

Research and Education

T

he Newberry Institute for Research and Education builds and sustains lively communities of learning among fellows, scholars-in-residence, schoolteachers, and undergraduate students. Our scholarly community and educational opportunities have long been a point of pride at the Newberry.

We welcomed nine long-term and 12 short-term fellows in 2020–21, some working in the building and others remotely. We also incorporated the Newberry’s DEI goals into our review of applications for long-term fellowships, making this year’s incoming class one of our most diverse.

The Newberry Library Undergraduate Seminar, which serves four Chicago colleges, held class meetings virtually, while students came to the library to conduct their individual research in person on the topic “Chicago: City of Art, Industry, and Labor.” In the winter of 2021, we hosted our first entirely virtual undergraduate seminar for a class of history majors from Colorado College.

We organized 53 virtual Newberry Teacher Consortium professional development seminars, serving more than 450 primary and secondary schoolteachers. We also added seven new collections of primary source materials for students and educators

38

The Newberry Annual Report 2021

to our Digital Collections for the Classroom site, which remains the most visited of the Newberry’s digital resources, with more than 134,000 individual users in 2020–21.

Our four research centers offered an ambitious roster of programs and opportunities. The Center for Renaissance Studies held two virtual conferences, one exploring “Food and the Book” and the other delving into censorship, speech, and dissent in pre-modern life—both drew record attendance. The D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies expanded its outreach to tribal partners through an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded project to increase access to Indigenous studies collections at the Newberry. Staff in the Smith Center for the History of Cartography and the Program in Chicago Studies planned for exhibitions that will fill the Newberry’s galleries and help guide public programming in 2021–22.

The Newberry continues to take pride in our ongoing service to scholars, teachers, and students at all levels. We believe that guided exploration can lead to new knowledge and important connections between our collection, our scholars, and the public.

“ Although we could not be together every day in our research carrels at the library, I think I can speak for my cohort when I say we all feel part of the Newberry’s wonderful community now.”

Kelly Fleming, long-term fellow

138,347 individual users visited the Digital Collections for the Classroom site.

459 educators attended 53

66 months of support

professional development seminars.

were provided for 9 long-term fellows and 12 short-term fellows.

1,353 people attended 60 scholarly seminars.

“ This is the first time in my undergraduate career where I have felt uplifted and recognized as a knowledgeable, worthy scholar.

What is really incredible is that I got to feel that way while using my own voice and thoughts. This has been the most enriching and exciting class I have ever taken and I genuinely wish I could take different versions of it forever.”

Liz Becker, class of 2021, DePaul University, and a student in the 2021 Newberry Library Undergraduate Seminar Research and Education

39

Collection Access and Service to Readers

O

ur dedicated librarians, curators, catalogers, and conservators remained tireless in their work to serve readers, grow and care for the collection, and expand access to digital tools. Implementing a system to handle more than 1,500 requests for research appointments, quarantining books that had been paged, cleaning tables and computers after each use, and communicating the latest public health policies were immensely time-consuming aspects of Newberry work in 2020–21. Nonetheless, they made it possible to inspire research and learning while providing access, both onsite and virtually, to our remarkable collection.

Our Digital Initiatives and Services department embarked on major infrastructure improvements, beginning migration to a new digital asset management system. When fully implemented, this system will vastly improve our ability to manage our large collection of digitized materials and make it easier for the public to search, download, and interact with our collection materials

Readers in the James M. Wells Reading Rooms, October 2021

40

The Newberry Annual Report 2021

from a distance. We also continue to add new materials to our digital collections, including approximately 250,000 manuscript pages from the papers of 13 prominent social reformers of twentieth-century Chicago, thanks to a grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Services.

The migration of our catalog to the library system Alma/ Primo VE was completed as scheduled in June 2020. Library users responded enthusiastically to the new catalog interface, which provides more flexibility, functionality, and productivity as a search tool and technical service. Several long-hidden collections are now fully described in the catalog.

In 2020–21, staff in collections and library services proved that closed doors are but a small hindrance to accessing the Newberry’s collection. We look forward to continued investment in digitization and online tools that make remote collection access easier while we welcome back our readers and researchers to our reading rooms.

5,489 titles were cataloged.

18 Modern Manuscript and

Archival collections were processed.

514 items were treated by conservation.

522 individuals registered as new Growing the Collection The Newberry added 3,380 items to our collection in 2020–21. Highlights include: ◆ Multiple collections relating to Chicago-area African American history, including a rare Black Baptist church history and a complete run of a newsletter focused on desegregating North Shore suburban real estate markets ◆ Original artwork and published maps by the Chicago illustrator Frederic J. Dornseif, acquired with funds from the Society of Collectors, offering insights into commercial map design in Chicago in the 1930s and 40s ◆ Fourteen paintings created by Chicago artists between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth century, donated by M. Christine Schwartz ◆ The archive of the Chicago nightclub Mister Kelly’s, donated by David Marienthal, including more than 100 oral histories with singers, musicians, and comedians, as well as books, periodicals, posters, live recordings, photographs, and artifacts

Newberry readers.

5,312 items were requested for use in reading rooms.

524 unique readers made 1,832

visits to our reading rooms.

1,620 reference requests were filled in person.

3,640 reference requests were

answered via correspondence.

Collection Access and Service to Readers

41

Finances and Fundraising

T

hanks to our dedicated community of donors, 2020–21 was a remarkable year for fundraising. We are profoundly grateful for your commitment to the Newberry, our staff, and our work.

We raised more than $7.4 million in 2020–21, outperforming expectations in almost all areas. We exceeded our vital Annual Fund goal by roughly 20 percent, bringing in total contributions of nearly $2.1 million, a record high. We are also gratified by a continued increase in new donors each year, as well as by our impressive donor retention rates, which remain well above national averages. Corporate giving, gifts from foundations, and support from government agencies also increased.

A new initiative, spearheaded by a group of former fellows and launched in November 2020, focused on securing contributions from former Newberry fellows to support future fellowships at the library. Our network of alumni fellows responded positively, committing more than $100,000, nearly enough to endow two short-term fellowships annually.

Though we could not be together in person for events at the Newberry, including the much beloved annual Book Fair, we gathered virtually in May 2021 to present Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution Lonnie G. Bunch III with the Newberry Library Award. You can read a transcript of the conversation with Secretary Bunch in this issue of The Newberry Magazine.

Operating revenues for the fiscal year totaled $28.6 million, with expenses of $10.9 million. On June 30, 2021, the Newberry’s investment portfolio balance stood at $93.9 million, a $17.6 million increase from the prior year. More details on our financial position may be found on the following pages.

We are fortunate to enjoy this strong financial position in trying times and thank our Newberry friends for their generous philanthropic support.

1,808 donors made gifts to the Annual Fund.

411 Annual Fund donors were first-time supporters of the library.

57 former fellows made gifts or

commitments to the Fellows Fellowship Fund.

50 donors enjoyed curator-led tours of our exhibitions.

162 attendees logged in to our new virtual event series for donors.

Will Hansen, Curator of Americana and Director of Reader Services, offers a sneak peak of ¡Viva la Libertad! to donors at a virtual donor event.

42

The Newberry Annual Report 2021

Summary of Financial Position For the year ended June 30, 2021, and for the year ended June 30, 2020 (000s omitted).

2021

Assets

Cash and receivables $ 6,657 Investments 93,879 Land, buildings, equipment 16,832 Other assets 884

2020

$ 118,252

$ 4,872 76,322 17,918 780

$ 99,892

Accounts payable and accrued expenses $ 856 Gift annuity liability 147 Contract liabilities 490 Paycheck Protection Program Loan 1,157 Bonds payable 1,960 Line of credit 4,400

$ 1,050 236 585 1,269 2,254 4,400

Total liabilities 9,010

9,794

Net assets

90,098

$ 99,892

Total assets

Liabilities and net assets

Total liabilities and net assets

109,242 $ 118,252

Finances and Fundraising

43

Finances and Fundraising Summary of Activities For the year ended June 30, 2021, and for the year ended June 30, 2020 (000s omitted).

2021

Revenues

29,993

$ 6,561 1,163 3,058 – 1,681

12,463

Library and collection services 5,126 Research and academic programs 1,949 Management and general 2,980 Development 794

5,200 3,066 3,137

967

Gifts and grants for operations $ 5,996 Gifts to endowment 347 Investment gain (loss) 21,042 Paycheck Protection Loan Forgiveness 1,269 Other revenues 1,339

Total revenues and other gains

Expenditures

44

2020

Total expenditures

10,849

12,370

Change in net assets

$ 19,144

$ 93

The Newberry Annual Report 2021

Honor Roll of Donors THE ANNUAL FUND The following donors generously made gifts to the Annual Fund and are recognized as members of the President’s Fellows or Newberry Associates.

Ms. Celine Fitzgerald

Daniel Greene and Lisa Meyerowitz

Julius N. Frankel Foundation

Mr. and Mrs. Michael Keiser Donor Advised Fund

James J. and Louise R. Glasser Madeleine and Joe Glossberg

Laura Baskes Litwin and Stuart Litwin

John R. Halligan Charitable Fund

Ms. Sonya Malunda and Dr. E. Charles Lampley

Helen M. Harrison Foundation

Ms. Carlette McMullan

Roger and Julie Baskes

Robert A. Holland

Ken* and Jossy Nebenzahl

Joan and William Brodsky

ITW

Professor Jean M. O’Brien

Jan and Frank Cicero, Jr.

Kirkland & Ellis LLP

Professor and Mrs. Larrance M. O’Flaherty

The Crown Family

Professor Lawrence Lipking

Dr. Diana Robin

Alice and Richard Godfrey

Barry MacLean

Martha Roth and Bryon Rosner

Dr. Hanna H. Gray

Mr. Stephen A. MacLean

Mr. and Mrs. Thomas C. Sheffield, Jr.

Mrs. Mary L. Gray

Professor James H. Marrow and Dr. Emily Rose

Adele Simmons

PRESIDENT’S CABINET ($25,000 AND ABOVE)

Mark and Meg Hausberg Victoria J. Herget and Robert K. Parsons Celia and David Hilliard Dr. Elizabeth Amy Liebman The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

Mr. Andrew R. McGaan Andrew and Jeanine McNally David E. McNeel

Gail and John Ward Ms. Diane A. Wittenstein Mr. Robert J. Zarse

David and Anita Meyer The Pattis Family Foundation

PRESIDENT’S SUSTAINING FELLOWS ($2,500–$4,999)

Cindy and Stephen Mitchell

Jean E. Perkins and Leland E. Hutchinson

Janis W. and John K. Notz, Jr.

Mr. John P. Rompon and Ms. Marian E. Casey

Dr. Gail Kern Paster

John W. and Jeanne M. Rowe

Christine and Michael Pope

Mr. and Mrs. Richard D. Siragusa

Dr. William H. Cannon, Jr. and Mr. David Narwich

Roy and Irene Rettinger Foundation

Nancy and Richard Spain

Holly and Bill Charles

Sheli Z. Rosenberg and Burton X. Rosenberg

Carl W. Stern and Holly Hayes

Nancy Raymond Corral

Mr. and Mrs. Rudy L. Ruggles, Jr.

Liz Stiffel

Mrs. Ariane Dannasch

Karla Scherer

Yellow-crowned Foundation

The Smart Family Foundation of Illinois, Inc.

Anonymous (2)

Ms. Shawn M. Donnelley and Dr. Christopher M. Kelly

Mr. David B. Smith, Jr. and Ms. Ilene T. Weinreich

Robert Beasecker and Erika King Mr. and Mrs. Philip C. Calian

Dr. William E. Engel Professors Stephen and Verna Foster

Harold B. Smith

PRESIDENT’S SENIOR FELLOWS ($5,000–$9,999)

Ms. Carol Warshawsky

Tom and Melanie Berg

Ms. Margarete K. Gross

Mr. and Mrs. Edward M. Blair, Jr.

Ted Haffner

PRESIDENT’S CIRCLE ($10,000–$24,999)

Charles H. and Bertha L. Boothroyd Foundation

Hjordis Halvorson and John Halvorson

Edith Rasmussen Ahern and Patrick Ahern

Rob Carlson and Paul Gehl

Hindman Auctions – Silvia and Jay Krehbiel

Mr. Gregory L. Barton

Dr. and Mrs. Tapas K. Das Gupta

Janet and Art Holzheimer

Buchanan Family Foundation

Mr. and Mrs. Richard J. Franke

Mrs. Loretta N. Julian

Mr. Lewis Collens

Mr. and Mrs. Christopher B. Galvin

*Deceased

Alan and Carol Greene

Adele* and Malcolm H. Hast

Honor Roll of Donors

45

Honor Roll of Donors Ann C. Bates Kittle

Edward C. Hirschland

Mr. and Mrs. Dean L. Buntrock

Mrs. Chase C. Levey

Mrs. Patricia Jahn

The Chicago Literary Club

Ms. Helen Marlborough and Mr. Harry J. Roper

Ivan and Kathy Kane

Barbara and George Clark

Professor and Mrs. Stanley N. Katz

Ms. Sharon P. Cole

Dr. Javier Laguna

Ronald Corthell and Laura Bartolo

Ms. Lou Levine

Ms. Jaime L. Danehey and Mr. William M. Hansen

Neal, Gerber & Eisenberg LLP Ms. Audrey A. Niffenegger and Mr. Eddie Campbell Ms. Lynne R. Ostfeld

Jackie and Tom Morsch

Mr. Michael Payette

Mr. Charles H. Mottier and Mr. Philip J. Vidal

Father Peter J. Powell

Dr. Karole Schafer Mourek and Mr. Anthony J. Mourek*

Leonard and Arlene Rosenberg Sahara Enterprises, Inc. Mr. Brian Silbernagel and Ms. Teresa Snider Mrs. Anne D. Slade Tom and Nancy Swanstrom Mr. and Mrs. Robert Wedgeworth, Jr. Thomas K. Yoder Helen Zell Anonymous (4)

The Charles W. Palmer Family Foundation Ms. Sara N. Paretsky Joe and Jo Ann Paszczyk Ms. Laurette Petersen Meredith Petrov Nancy and Alan Petrov The Queenan Foundation Ben and Nancy Randall Mr. Charles R. Rizzo Dr. James Engel Rocks

PRESIDENT’S SUPPORTING FELLOWS ($1,500–$2,499) Mr. Alan G. Artner Dr. Ellen T. Baird Ms. Catharine D. Bell Joan and John Blew Mr. and Mrs. Andrew Block Mrs. Debi Butler

Ms. Alice Schreyer Junie L. and Dorothy L. Sinson Ms. Grace K. Stanek Ms. Elizabeth Teich Jacqueline Vossler Diane and Richard Weinberg Anonymous (3)

Mr. Charles T. Cullen Ms. Lynne Fisher Dr. Michael P. Fitzsimmons Ms. Diana Fowee The Franklin Philanthropic Foundation Mr. Bernard Friedman Mr. Martin A. M. Gneuhs Donald and Jane Gralen Cheryl and Hill Hammock Pati Heestand Ms. Kay D. Hinn

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The Newberry Annual Report 2021

SCHOLARS ($1,000–$1,499) Mr. James R. Akerman and Ms. Luann Hamilton

The Dick Family Foundation Mr. David Dolan and Mrs. Catherine A. Dolan Nancie and Bruce Dunn Mr. Henry Eggers Mr. Michael L. Ellingsworth Mrs. Connie J. Fairbanks and Mr. Kirk Twiss Elizabeth Fama and John Cochrane Mimi Frankel Ms. Carla J. Funk Mr. Paul C. Gearen Mr. John W. Geary and Mrs. Medora B. Geary Mr. and Mrs. Paul Richard Gessinger Robert and Terese Gilford Professor Elliott J. Gorn Dr. Christopher J. Hagenah Neil Harris and Teri J. Edelstein Mr. Thomas B. Harris Mr. D. Bradford Hunt Jane and Don Hunt Mr. and Mrs. Daniel P. Kearney Jonathan and Nancy Lee Kemper Professor Robert C. Ketterer Kovler Family Foundation

AMSTED Industries Foundation

The Lawlor Foundation

Mr. and Mrs. Warren L. Batts

Cara and Michael Levinson

Mrs. Helen Bell

Constance and William Markey

Mr. and Mrs. John R. Berschied, Jr.

Mr. Arthur M. Martin

The Robert Thomas Bobins Foundation

Mr. and Mrs. Robert E. McCamant

Miss Kathleen Boege

Laura McGrady

Professor Terri Bourus

Ann and Christopher McKee

Mr. Lloyd Morgan Professor Edward W. Muir, Jr. Ms. Susan Nagarkatti Ms. Linda Neal and Mr. John Elson Chris and Virginia Orndorff Dr. Mary S. Pedley Ms. Anne E. Rea and Mr. Kenneth A. Bigg Mrs. Madeline Rich Ms. Penelope Rosemont and Mr. Paul Sievert Mr. and Mrs. Thomas D. Rutherford Ms. Libby Savner Mr. and Mrs. Eric Schaal Stephen A. and Marilyn Scott Seyfarth Shaw LLP Mr. Daniel W. Shelley Ms. Barbara Smith Ms. Stephanie Smith

Professor Michael Conzen and Professor Kathleen N. Conzen

Dr. Ruth F. MacKay

Ms. Nancy Dehmlow

Mrs. Amalia Mahoney and Mr. William F. Mahoney

Mr. Gordon R. DenBoer

Mr. and Mrs. Philip R. May

Mr. and Mrs. Julian C. D’Esposito, Jr.

Abby McCormick O’Neil and Daniel Carroll Joynes

Ms. Suzette Dewey Mr. Andrew K. Dolan Mr. and Mrs. Timothy K. Earle David and Susan Eblen Ms. Anne E. Egger Dr. Marilyn Ezri Mr. and Mrs. Charles Fanning Mr. Peter V. Fazio III Jon W. Finson Vince Firpo Fuller and Moskovits Family Ms. Mary Go and Mr. Lionel Go

Dr. Ailsie B. McEnteggart Mr. and Mrs. Don H. McLucas, Jr. Mr. Robert C. Michaelson Dr. Jeffrey Mueller and Ms. Eileen Klein Marjorie and Christopher Newman Dr. Brian W. Ogilvie Mr. Joseph A. Parisi Mary and Joe Plauche Mr. Wesley Protsman Professor Patricia L. Richards Mr. Chauncey Robinson Maija and Jay* Rothenberg

Carol S. Sonnenschein

Mrs. Ethel C. Gofen and Mr. William H. Gofen

Jan and Bruce Tranen

Ms. Ann Wilson Green

Mr. Joseph O. Rubinelli, Jr.

Mr. and Mrs. Gerald A. Weiner

Mr. Robert Guritz

Ed and Diana Ruthman

Mr. Michael Winkelman

The William M. Hales Foundation

Mr. Francis D. Wolfe, Jr.

Ms. Lee R. Hamilton

Dr. Suzanne Karr Schmidt and Mr. Keith Schmidt

Nora L. Zorich and Thomas W. Filardo

Mr. and Mrs. Charles Harper

Anonymous (4)

Dr. Randolph C. Head Professor and Mrs. Richard H. Helmholz

HUMANISTS ($500–$999)

Mr. Allan G. Hins

Mr. T. Marshall Rousseau

Ms. Frances Shaw Ilene and Michael Shaw Charitable Trust Alyce K. Sigler Ms. Rebecca Sive and Mr. C. Steven Tomashefsky

Altman Family Foundation

Clark and Carolyn Hulse

Mr. and Mrs. Gilberto Arias, Jr.

Mr. Eric Hunnicutt

Professor Susan Sleeper-Smith and Dr. Robert C. Smith

Rick and Marcia Ashton

Ms. Tiffany Jones

Michael and Cindy Smith

Mr. Christopher Barer

Mr. Paul R. Judy

Mr. Gerald R. Southern

Professor Karen-edis Barzman

Mr. and Mrs. Norman O. Jung

Dick and Judith Spurgin

Mr. and Mrs. James P. Baughman

Professor and Mrs. Christopher Kleinhenz

Ms. Penelope R. Steiner

Mrs. Patty Becker

John and Barbara Kowalczyk

Dr. Heather E. Blair

Tony Krueger

Mr. Lawrence E. Strickling and Dr. Sydney L. Hans

William and Sheila Bosron

Ms. Karen Langer

Dea Brennan

Mr. and Mrs. Henry L. Latkin

Pat and David Buisseret

Dr. Ira D. Lawrence and Dr. Sona Kalousdian Professor Carole B. Levin

*Deceased

Mr. Scott Turow and Ms. Adriane Glazier Christian Vinyard Larry Viskochil Professor Edward Wheatley and Ms. Mary Mackay Honor Roll of Donors

47

Honor Roll of Donors Professor Kelly Wisecup

Judge Elaine Bucklo

Dr. Mary Witt

Ms. Moira B. Buhse and Mr. Howard E. Buhse, Jr.

James and Mary Wyly Ms. Elizabeth B. Yntema and Mr. Mark E. Ferguson

Mr. David Burnham Professor Sarah L. Burns

Mr. Mark E. Zajackowski

Ms. Martha M. Butler

Dr. Angela J. Zito

Mr. Dennis Carlin

Anonymous (5)

Mr. Douglas R. Carlson and Mrs. Susan F. Carlson

LITERATI ($250–$499) Mr. and Mrs. Paul H. Adler Mr. Endre Agocs Mrs. Bari Amadio and Dr. Peter Amadio Mr. and Mrs. Paul F. Anderson Ms. Rosanne C. Arnold Ms. Carolyn Arnolds Mr. Frederic J. Artwick William O. Autry and Sarah E. Leach Dr. Donna M. Avery and Dr. James Andrews

Mr. D. Cameron Findlay and Ms. Amy Findlay Mrs. Marsha M. Fischl and Mr. Kenneth P. Fischl Ms. Marcia L. Flick Ms. Eloise C. Foster Mr. Brendan Fox Arthur L. Frank, M.D. Dr. and Mrs. James L. Franklin

Mr. and Mrs. Walter S. Carr

Mr. and Mrs. Paul Freehling

Dr. Maria K. Carrig

Professor Lisa A. Freeman and Ms. Heather Schmucker

Mr. and Mrs. Robert E. Carroll Mr. Glenn Carter and Mrs. Barbara Carter Caxton Club LaVerne and Waitung Chan Mr. Donald R. Chauncey Karen Ann Christianson and Robert Bionaz

Mr. and Mrs. John E. Freund Ms. Gwyn Friend Mr. and Mrs. Robin E. Gadsby Professor Martha Garcia Ms. Leigh L. Gates

Mr. and Mrs. Charles Claar

Ms. Michelle Geoga and Mr. Douglas G. Geoga

Mr. Mitchell Cobey and Ms. Janet L. Reali

Mr. Glenn Gerber

Mr. and Mrs. Charles M. Colburn

Ms. Marsha W. Ginsberg and Mr. Gordon M. Sayre

The Baila Foundation

Dr. David Collins and Ms. Cynthia Collins

Mr. Mark L. Barbour

Professor Edward M. Cook, Jr. and Mrs. Elizabeth P. Cook

MaryAnn Gleason

Mr. John T. Cullinan and Dr. Ewa Radwanska

Professor Suzanne Gossett

Mr. and Mrs. Daniel Cummings

Mr. Marc B. Grayson

Ms. Margaret Bjerklie

Dr. William Davison and Ms. Alexandra Davison

Dr. Daniel M. Green, M.D.

Peter Blatchford

Ms. Laura S. de Frise and Mr. Steven Rugo

Ms. Jacqueline Blevins-Johnson

Ms. Jil Levin Deheeger

Mr. and Mrs. Richard D. Bliss

Ms. Sally Dilgart

Mr. Robert W. Blythe and Ms. Madeline Baum

Professor Michelle M. Dowd

Mr. and Mrs. Francis Beidler Ms. Laura A. Bentley Ms. Brenda Berkman

Mr. David Bohan and Ms. Kathryn Kemp Mrs. Susan Bowey Mrs. Rule Brand Dr. Jay Brigham Ms. Janice Brinati Mr. and Mrs. Thomas H. Brown Mr. Todd Brueshoff Dr. Elizabeth J. Buckley-Geer and Mr. Stephen Geer 48

The Newberry Annual Report 2021

Dr. and Mrs. James L. Downey Mr. Robert P. Doyle Mrs. Tessa Dratt Jon and Susanne Dutcher Mrs. Susan S. Ettelson Mr. James R. Fancher Mrs. William Faulman Ms. Sharon Feigon and Mr. Steven Bialer Ms. Megan I. Fellman

Mr. Matthew J. Glover and Mr. Perry Sartori

Tom Greensfelder and Olivia Petrides Ms. Helen W. Gunnarsson Mr. and Mrs. John C. Gurley Mr. Roberto Gutierrez Mr. John Haley and Mrs. Barbara Haley Professor Evelyn H. Haller Mr. Arthur R. Hansen Mr. James R. Hanson Toni and Ken Harkness Ms. Arlene E. Hausman Elaine and Roger Haydock Mr. and Mrs. William W. Heine Mr. and Mrs. William Herzog

Mr. Roger C. Hinman

Susan and Donald Levy

Mr. Mark Prager

HISTORY/A+E Networks

Mr. Michael Litt and Ms. Marilyn Knapp Litt

Ms. Laura Prail and Mr. John L. Cella

Ms. Karen Hoelscher

Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln B. Lockhart

Ms. Sarah M. Pritchard

Mr. Edward L. Hoffman

Ms. Jacqueline Mitchell Loeff ler

Ms. Dorothy M. Rasmussen

Ms. Suzanne L. Hoffman and Ms. Rachael K. Smith

Mr. Craig Long

Rick and Judy Rayborn

Mrs. Dianne C. Luhmann

Ms. Leslie Recht

Mr. and Mrs. Thomas C. Madden

Ms. Alicia Reyes

Mrs. Sandra Mallory

Professor James Rice

Mr. Robert Horowitz and Ms. Amy B. Levin

Mr. and Mrs. Jerry Manne

The Rigney Family

Mr. David L. Howlett

Dr. Laura Matthew

Mr. and Mrs. George Ritzlin

Professor and Mrs. Frederick E. Hoxie

Mr. Timothy McCutcheon

Ms. Susan E. Robertson

Mr. Dennis M. Hughes and Ms. Rose Kelly

Dr. Jean M. McEnery

Mr. William Robinson

Mr. Paul A. Hughes

Mr. David Mehlman and Ms. Arlene Alpert Mehlman

Ms. Patricia M. Ronan

Drs. Donald and Ernestine Hopkins Mr. Mark Hoppe and Ms. Darlene Reynolds-Hoppe

Dr. Regina M. Janes Ms. Emily Troxell Jaycox Nadine N. Jennings

Mr. Daniel Meyer Ms. Kathleen Miles Mr. David Moes and Ms. Jani Lesko

Ms. Gloria Rosemarin Ms. Elaine G. Rosen Ms. Doris D. Roskin

Mrs. Beverly J. Moody

Ms. Pamela Hutul Ross and Mr. William D. Ross

Mr. and Ms. Todd L. Morning

Professor Sarah Gwyneth Ross

Mrs. Susan T. Murphy

Ms. Teri Rudich

Mrs. Karen S. Juvinall

Mr. Brandon Musler and Ms. Surita Sandosham

Ms. Virginia M. Russell

Ms. Annette Kabbes

Mr. Brandon Neese

Ms. Joanna Karatzas and Mr. Philip J. Enquist

Mrs. Barbara Joan Newcomb

Mr. James F. Karela

Mr. Richard F. Nielsen and Mrs. Barbara Nielsen

Dr. Barbara Jillson Ms. Darlene Johnson Mr. Mark Johnson Dorothy V. Jones

Mr. Jeremy Kazan and Ms. Kendra Thulin

Dr. James J. Sack Mr. Michael J. Saxton Dr. Rima M. Lunin Schultz and Dr. Richard Schultz Susan and Charles P. Schwartz

Ms. Karen Kitover

Dr. Dorothy Noyes and Mr. Michael Krippendorf

Mr. James V. Klies

Ms. Susan O’Brien

Brad and Melissa Seiler

Ms. Laura Kosmerl

Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence A. Osterberg

Mr. Joseph Seliga and Ms. Vanessa Vergara

Mr. William Koss

Mr. David Oxtoby

Ms. Linda L. Kristensen

Mr. Kyle Palazzolo

Mr. John C. Seville and Ms. C. R. Scott-Seville

Ms. Mary Kristmann

Dr. Pat and Lara Pappas

Professor and Mrs. Donald W. Krummel

Mr. Frederic C. Pearson

Ms. Barbara Lanctot

Ms. Kathleen M. Perkins

Mr. John D. Lawrence

Professor David S. Peterson

Dr. Della Leavitt and Mr. Roy Bossen

Mr. Michael Piracci

George Leonard and Susan Hanes-Leonard

Mr. and Mrs. Thomas W. Poehls

Professors Susan Levine and Leon Fink

Dr. Charles Pounian

*Deceased

Mr. Barry A. Sears and Ms. Kathy Rice

Ms. Debra F. Siegel Ms. Catherine Sinegal Susan P. Sloan and Arthur D. Clarke Ms. Beth A. Smetana Carl and Jane Smith Mr. and Mrs. O. J. Sopranos Mr. David Soules Dr. Scott Sowerby

Honor Roll of Donors

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Honor Roll of Donors Dr. Susan Stall Ms. Mary Strahota Marv Strasburg

RESTRICTED GIFTS The following donors made restricted gifts to the Newberry endowment, book funds, fellowship programs, and other projects.

Mary and Harvey Struthers Ms. Maureen Talbot

Jean E. Perkins and Leland E. Hutchinson Dr. Scholl Foundation Nadia Sophie Seiler Memorial Fund The Siragusa Family Foundation

$25,000 AND ABOVE

Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation

Ms. Susan Thomas

Roger and Julie Baskes

Mr. Michael Todd

Mr. T. Kimball Brooker

Ms. Elizabeth Turley

Magdalene and Gerald Danzer

Mr. and Mrs. David Turpin

Fuller and Moskovits Family

Episcopal Diocese of Southern Ohio

UNSW Sydney

Glasser and Rosenthal Family

Samuel H. Kress Foundation

Dr. Thomas E. Veeser

Dr. Hanna H. Gray

Mr. Stephen A. MacLean

Ms. Susan L. Walker

Walter E. Heller Foundation

Mr. and Mrs. Robert E. McCamant

Mr. Robert F. Ward

Victoria J. Herget and Robert K. Parsons

Morrison-Shearer Foundation

Mr. and Mrs. Melville Washburn

Celia and David Hilliard

Mr. and Mrs. Robert J. Washlow

Illinois Department of Commerce & Economic Opportunity

Mr. John P. Rompon and Ms. Marian E. Casey

Professor Elissa B. Weaver Ms. Aviva Weiner Ms. Linda S. Wheatley-Irving Mr. Howard S. White Joyce C. White Mr. Amos Tappan Wilder Janet and Jeffrey Wilson The Winnetka Fortnightly Dr. Virginia Witucke Ms. Christina Woelke and Mr. John Coats Mr. Stephen G. Wolfe

Susan Schaalman Youdovin and Charlie Shulkin Ms. Mary B. Young Ms. Mary Zeltmann Mr. Gerald A. Zimmerman Ms. Sheri Zuckerman Mr. Mark Zumbach and Ms. Lisa Zumbach Anonymous (4)

Institute of Museum and Library Services Monticello College Foundation

Dr. Christine M. Sperling

National Endowment for the Arts

Diane and Richard Weinberg

National Endowment for the Humanities

Robert Williams

Ken* and Jossy Nebenzahl Jerome and Elaine Nerenberg Foundation

The Newberry Annual Report 2021

$1,500–$4,999

Roy and Irene Rettinger Foundation

Mr. Garrett A. Boge

Harold B. Smith Foundation

Ms. Marcy Carlin

Terra Foundation for American Art

Caxton Club

Anonymous (1)

The City of Chicago General Society of Colonial Wars

$10,000–$24,999 Paul M. Angell Family Foundation Chicago Free For All Fund at The Chicago Community Trust Jan and Frank Cicero, Jr. Ms. Jeanne Colette Collester Consulate General of Brazil

Ms. Mary C. Gregory and Mr. Daniel S. Gregory Hoellen Family Foundation National Society Daughters of the American Revolution - Chicago Chapter Jack L. Ringer Family Foundation Leonard and Arlene Rosenberg

Helen M. Harrison Foundation

Society of Colonial Wars in the State of Illinois

HISTORY/A+E Networks

Sulzer Family Foundation

Mazza Foundation

Jacqueline Vossler

Andrew and Jeanine McNally

50

$5,000–$9,999

Society of Mayf lower Descendants in the State of Illinois

Mrs. Sharon Woodry Ms. Evonne M. Yonover

Richard C. von Hess Foundation

$250–$1,499

Madeleine and Joe Glossberg

Liz Stiffel

Rob Carlson and Paul Gehl

Alice and Richard Godfrey

TAWANI Foundation

Ms. Margaret K. Carton and Mr. Harlan Stanley

Dr. Hanna H. Gray

Jacqueline Vossler

Sue and Melvin Gray

Diane and Richard Weinberg

Alan and Carol Greene

Mr. Francis D. Wolfe, Jr.

Mark and Meg Hausberg

Mr. and Mrs. Peter S. Willmott

Elaine and Roger Haydock

Anonymous (2)

Chicago Genealogical Society The Contemporary Club of Chicago Dr. Marilyn Ezri The Friday Club Ms. Marcia Slater Johnston Mr. Bruce Kirkpatrick Constance and William Markey The National Society of Sons of the American Colonists Mr. James R. Powell

THE 2021 NEWBERRY LIBRARY AWARD CELEBRATION The following donors made gifts of $250 or more to the 2021 Newberry Library Award Celebration, which was held on May 24, 2021 in honor of Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution Lonnie G. Bunch III.

Victoria J. Herget and Robert K. Parsons Celia and David Hilliard Robert A. Holland ITW Kathryn Gibbons Johnson and Bruce Johnson Professor Lawrence Lipking

Professor Albert R. Ascoli

Professor James H. Marrow and Dr. Emily Rose

Professor Linda P. Austern

Mr. and Mrs. Philip R. May Mr. and Mrs. John W. McCarter, Jr. Mr. Andrew R. McGaan Andrew and Jeanine McNally Erica C. Meyer Mr. Ronald S. Miller*

PRESENTING SPONSOR

FELLOWS FELLOWSHIP FUND The following donors made gifts to establish the Fellows Fellowship at the Newberry.

Cindy and Stephen Mitchell

Professor Karen-edis Barzman Professor Deborah A. Cohen Professor James K. Diedrick Professor Frances Dolan Laura F. Edwards and John P. McAllister Professor Giuseppe Gerbino Dr. James Grossman and Ms. Ann Billingsley

Ms. Susan Nagarkatti

Professor Tobias Higbie and Ms. Loretta M. Gaffney

Mr. Robert Nauert and Ms. Heidi Kiesler

Dr. Abner Holton

Edith Rasmussen Ahern and Patrick Ahern

Janis W. and John K. Notz, Jr.

Professor Elizabeth A. Horodowich

Mr. Gregory L. Barton

Abby McCormick O’Neil and Daniel Carroll Joynes

Dr. Ann Little

Kirkland & Ellis LLP

Roger and Julie Baskes Joan and William Brodsky Mrs. Judith C. Bross Bulley & Andrews LLC Nancy Raymond Corral John and Michele Donley Mr. George E. Engdahl Fitzgerald Family Foundation Mr. Paul C. Gearen and Barbara Koren Ms. Carol Gelber and Mr. Larry Gelber Professor Timothy J. Gilfoyle and Ms. Mary Rose Alexander

*Deceased

Dr. Gail Kern Paster The Pattis Family Foundation Jean E. Perkins and Leland E. Hutchinson Nancy and Alan Petrov Christine and Michael Pope Ben and Nancy Randall Sheli Z. Rosenberg and Burton X. Rosenberg Martha Roth and Bryon Rosner Karla Scherer Alyce K. Sigler

Dr. Peggy S. McCracken Dr. Monique E. O’Connell Mr. and Mrs. Richard J. Ross Carl and Jane Smith Professor David S. Tanenhaus Dr. Kimberly M. Welch Professor Richard White Professor Kelly Wisecup Professor Elizabeth R. Wright Anonymous (1)

Nancy and Richard Spain

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Honor Roll of Donors PARGELLIS SOCIETY The following corporations contributed $2,500 or more to the Newberry and are recognized as members of the Pargellis Society.

Bulley & Andrews LLC HISTORY/A+E Networks ITW Kirkland & Ellis LLP Neal, Gerber & Eisenberg LLP Sahara Enterprises, Inc. Anonymous (1)

HERITAGE AND GENEALOGICAL SOCIETY The following lineage and genealogical organizations made gifts to help the Newberry preserve our cultural heritage for future generations.

Ms. Carla J. Funk Susan and Vincent Furman Louise R. Glasser Mr. Donald J. Gralen Margarete Gross

General Society of Colonial Wars

Dr. Gary G. Gunderson

National Society Daughters of the American Revolution – Chicago Chapter

Hjordis Halvorson and John Halvorson

Society of Colonial Wars in the State of Illinois Society of Mayf lower Descendants in the State of Illinois

Professor Neil Harris and Ms. Teri J. Edelstein Mark and Meg Hausberg Trudy and Paul Hawley Celia and David Hilliard Robert A. Holland

CORPORATE AND FOUNDATION MATCHING GIFTS Through their matching gift programs, the following corporations and foundations generously augmented gifts from individuals.

BLATCHFORD SOCIETY The following individuals have included the Newberry in their estate plans or life-income arrangements. The Newberry recognizes them for their continued legacy to the humanities.

Bank of America Foundation

Ms. Elizabeth Agard

Best Buy Employee Giving Program

Mrs. L. W. Alberts

Caterpillar Foundation

Mr. Adrian Alexander

CNA Insurance

Rick and Marcia Ashton

IBM Corporation

Dr. David M. and Mrs. Susan Lindenmeyer Barron

Mrs. Judith H. Hollander Janet and Art Holzheimer Louise D. Howe Mary P. Hughes Kathryn Gibbons Johnson

Oracle Sargent & Lundy

Roger Baskes Peter Blatchford John C. Blew

SOCIETY OF COLLECTORS The following donors contributed $5,000 or more for the acquisition of materials for the Newberry’s collection.

Roger and Julie Baskes Rob Carlson and Paul Gehl Celia and David Hilliard Robert A. Holland Janet and Art Holzheimer Professor James H. Marrow and Dr. Emily Rose

Michelle Miller Burns and Gary W. Burns Dr. William H. Cannon Rob Carlson Reverend Dr. Robert B. Clarke Mrs. David L. Conlan Mr. Charles T. Cullen Magdalene and Gerald Danzer Mr. Gordon R. DenBoer Mr. Andrew K. Dolan Susan and Otto D’Olivo

David and Anita Meyer

Laura F. Edwards

Ken* and Jossy Nebenzahl

Mr. George E. Engdahl

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The Newberry Annual Report 2021

Ms. Marcia Slater Johnston Dr. Victoria Kirkham Ann C. Bates Kittle Karen Krishack George Leonard and Susan Hanes-Leonard Larry Lesperance Professor Carole B. Levin Joseph A. Like Professor Lawrence Lipking Mr.* and Mrs. William Locke Nancy J. Lynn Mr. Stephen A. MacLean Carmelita Melissa Madison Ms. Suzette Mahneke Dr. Debra N. Mancoff Dr. Guy A. Marco Heidi Massa Ms. Valerie S. Mathes Mary Morony Mrs. Susan T. Murphy

Mrs. Milo M. Naeve Ms. Shanti Nagarkatti Jossy Nebenzahl Ms. Audrey A. Niffenegger and Mr. Eddie Campbell

IN MEMORIAM With gratitude, the Newberry remembers the following deceased members of the Blatchford Society for their gifts to the Newberry.

Marion S. Miller Ken Nebenzahl Piri Korngold Nesselrod Bruce P. Olson

Janis W. Notz

Constance Barbantini and Liduina Barbantini

Joan L. Pantsios

Mr. W. Lloyd Barber

Joe and Jo Ann Paszczyk

Ann Barzel

Jean E. Perkins

Mr. George W. Blossom III

Ken Perlow

Dr. Edith Borroff

Christine and Michael Pope

Professor Howard Mayer Brown

Dominick S. Renga, M.D.

Dr. Richard H. Brown

Mr. T. Marshall Rousseau

Joan Campbell

Helen M. Schultz

Robert P. Coale

Stephen A. and Marilyn Scott

Natalie H. Dabovich

Alyce K. Sigler

David W. Dangler

Dr. Ira Singer

John Brooks Davis

Mr. and Mrs. Richard D. Siragusa

Mrs. Edison Dick

Susan Sleeper-Smith

Donna Margaret Eaton

Harold B. Smith

Professor Carolyn A. Edie

Rebecca Gray Smith

Ms. Rita T. Fitzgerald

Zella Kay Soich

Dr. and Mrs. Waldo C. Friedland

Carolyn and David Spadafora

Dr. Muriel S. Friedman

Dr. Richard H. Brown

Mr. Angelo L. and Mrs. Virginia A. Spoto

Esther LaBerge Ganz

Mr. John C. Colman

Joyce L. Steffel

Lyle Gillman

Professor Carolyn A. Edie

Tom and Nancy Swanstrom

Mr. Wallace H. Griffith

Ms. Gloria J. Frank

Don and Marianne Tadish

Mrs. Anne C. Haffner

Dr. Muriel S. Friedman

Mrs. Sara D. Taylor

Mr. Chalkley J. Hambleton, Sr.

Adele Hast

Tracey Tomashpol and Farron Brougher

Adele Hast

David L. Hooker

Jim Tomes

Mrs. Harold James

Mrs. Herbert A. Vance

Professor Sue Sheridan Walker

Corinne E. Johnson

Diane Weinberg

Mr. Stuart Kane

Willard E. White

Arthur B. Logan

Robert Williams

Mr. Walter C. Lueneburg

Mr. and Mrs. Peter S. Willmott

Ms. Louise Lutz

Drs. Richard and Mary Woods

Ms. Lorraine Madsen

Mrs. Erika Wright

Mrs. Agnes M. McElroy

James and Mary Wyly

Andrew W. McGhee

Anonymous (11)

Mr. and Mrs. William W. McKittrick

*Deceased

Charles W. Olson Rosemary J. Schnell Marian W. Shaw G. Shiman Mr. Morrell M. Shoemaker Professor Robert W. Shoemaker Lillian R. and Dwight D. Slater Peggy Sullivan Cecelia Handleman Wade Lila Weinberg James M. Wells Anonymous (8)

ESTATE GIFTS The Newberry acknowledges gifts received from the estates of the following individuals in fiscal year 2021.

Honor Roll of Donors

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Honor Roll of Donors TRIBUTE GIFTS The Newberry recognizes the following gifts made in tribute.

HONOR GIFTS

In honor of Chris Fletcher

In honor of Mr. Paul A. Kobasa

Stephanie Fletcher

Rob Carlson and Paul Gehl

In honor of Paul Gehl

In honor of Barbara Koren

Mr. Rick Cusick

Mr. Paul C. Gearen

Jon W. Finson

In honor of Mrs. L. W. Alberts

In honor of Mary Marshall

Professor Cynthia Wall

Ms. Carol Marshall

Nicholas Adams and Laurie Nussdorfer

In honor of Daniel Greene

In honor of James Barrett

In honor of Ms. Autumn L. Mather

Mr. Joseph Doyle

Stephanie Fletcher

Mr. Bernard Friedman

Dr. Heidi Rothenberg

Mr. Robert F. Ward

In honor of Rebecca McDuff

Dr. Michael Witmore

Mr. Stephen Hanchey

In honor of Graham Greer

In honor of Henry P. Miller, Sr.

Mr. Richard Endress

Mr. and Mrs. Ralph Jacob

In honor of Professor Guido Guarino

In honor of Cindy and Stephen Mitchell

Professor Patricia L. Richards

Ms. Julie Stagliano

In honor of Dr. Ellen T. Harris

In honor of Ruth Mostek

Professor Robert C. Ketterer

Ms. Sheri Loomis

In honor of Henry Harris

In honor of Harland Nelson

Ms. Emily Troxell Jaycox

Michael and Cindy Smith

Dr. Sarah Nelson

In honor of Lonnie G. Bunch III

In honor of Rebecca Haynes

In honor of Janis W. and John K. Notz, Jr.

Mr. Paul C. Gearen

Ms. Sally Narey

Mrs. Judith C. Bross

Neal, Gerber & Eisenberg LLP

In honor of Celia and David Hilliard

Kathryn Gibbons Johnson and Bruce Johnson

Ms. Louise K. Smith

Susan P. Sloan and Arthur D. Clarke

In honor of Linda Chan

Ms. Louise K. Smith

Ms. Donna C. Meyer and Mr. Anthony Meyer

Anthony and Nancy Amodeo

In honor of Alison Hinderliter

Erica C. Meyer

In honor of Jackie Clevenger

Mr. Garrett A. Boge

In honor of Janis W. Notz

Mr. Matthew LaMaster

Professor and Mrs. Frederick E. Hoxie

Liz Stiffel

In honor of Dan Crawford

Ms. Linda S. Wheatley-Irving

In honor of Katie Laun Olsen

The Winnetka Fortnightly

Ms. Gerit Quealy

In honor of Elaine Jakes

In honor of Lisa Pattis

Professor Riggs A. Smith

Mrs. Eden D. Juron

Ms. Nancy Mattei and Mr. Michael Rabiger

In honor of Daniel Carroll Joynes

In honor of Katy Darr

Ms. Nancy C. Lighthill

In honor of Jean E. Perkins and Leland E. Hutchinson

Mr. Phil W. Fixico

In honor of Dr. Suzanne Karr Schmidt

In honor of Steven Diedrich

Mr. Charles H. Mottier and Mr. Philip J. Vidal

Ms. Catharine D. Bell

In honor of Barbara Kerr

In honor of Kristin Emery

Dr. Elizabeth Poklinkowski

Ms. Marian Emery

In honor of Professor Douglas A. Kibbee

In honor of Vince Firpo

Professor James R. Barrett

Mr. Matthew J. Glover and

Mr. Perry Sartori

In honor of Clare Kobasa

Professor Douglas A. Kibbee and Professor Josephine Z. Kibbee In honor of Susan Barrick Ms. Susan Zabriskie In honor of Mr. and Mrs. Edward M. Blair, Jr. Mr. and Mrs. Steven Rugo In honor of Holy Rob Bloom Ben Axelrad and Christy Bloom In honor of Martha Briggs Ms. Suzette Dewey

Dr. Ekkehard-Teja P. Wilke In honor of the Dance Collection at the Newberry

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The Newberry Annual Report 2021

Rob Carlson and Paul Gehl

Mr. and Mrs. Gilberto Arias, Jr. Kathryn Gibbons Johnson and Bruce Johnson Ms. Linda Neal and Mr. John Elson In honor of Mark and Anna Perlberg Ms. Maureen C. Ewing In honor of Christine and Michael Pope Ms. Denise Macey Ms. Penelope R. Steiner

In honor of Edward Rabe, Jr.

In memory of Stella Beermann

In memory of Bud Frankel

Dr. Susan M. Rabe

Rob Carlson and Paul Gehl

Mimi Frankel

In honor of Celeste Raspanti

In memory of Betty Blevins

In memory of Jack Fuller

Mrs. Deborah Zanger and Mr. Ray Zanger

Ms. Jacqueline Blevins-Johnson

Fuller and Moskovits Family

In honor of Karen Risinger

In memory of Mary S. Blust, Ph.D.

Mr. Robert Christiansen

Mr. Wesley Protsman

In memory of Gunter and Irmgard Goldschmidt

In honor of Burton X. Rosenberg

Jacqueline Vossler

Professor Jona Goldschmidt

Ms. Marcy Carlin

In memory of Lee Braude

In memory of George Hanc

Cara and Michael Levinson

Mrs. Norma M. Braude

Mr. Joseph R. Hanc and Ms. Elisa Addlesperger

Leonard and Arlene Rosenberg

In memory of John Bross

In memory of Helen Hanson

In honor of Sheli Z. Rosenberg and Burton X. Rosenberg

Dr. Christopher M. Straus

Anonymous (1)

In memory of Dr. Richard H. Brown

In memory of Lee Harrer

Mr. Stephen Blum

Caxton Club

Vince Firpo

In memory of Adele Hast

Mr. Peter V. Fazio III Mr. Lloyd Morgan Ben and Nancy Randall In honor of Donald and Sandy Rubovits Anonymous (1) In honor of Linda Schnetzer Ms. Susan Zabriskie In honor of Ms. Alice Schreyer Mrs. Iris S. Witkowsky In honor of Lilah Shapiro Mrs. Heather Patay In honor of Andrea Villasenor Rob Carlson and Paul Gehl In honor of Robert Williams Rob Carlson and Paul Gehl In honor of Mary Wynn Professor Terri Bourus

Dr. and Mrs. Eric G. Whatley In memory of Lynnette Burnette Mrs. Judy E. Knoblock In memory of Walter Camryn Ms. Patricia Pippert and Mr. Steven Redfield In memory of Lester Jesse Cappon Mr. Brian E. Hill In memory of Betty Chambers Mr. Matthew J. Kelleher In memory of Eric W. and Lydia G. Cochrane Elizabeth Fama and John Cochrane In memory of Carmela Corthell Rob Carlson and Paul Gehl In memory of Paul W. Cox Ms. Debra Cox In memory of Dr. Charles Crupi

MEMORIAL GIFTS

Dr. Angela J. Zito

Dr. Rima M. Lunin Schultz and Dr. Richard Schultz Ms. Frances Stillman In memory of Lorraine Holland Vince Firpo In memory of Ellen V. Howe Mrs. Carolyn M. Short In memory of Roger B. Johnston Ms. Marcia Slater Johnston In memory of Mr. Richard A. Juvinall Mrs. Karen S. Juvinall In memory of Dr. C. Frederick Kittle Mr. Jon L. Lellenberg In memory of Evelyn and Edwin Kuzdale Dr. Ann E. Kuzdale In memory of Joseph R. Lentino, M.D., Ph.D Dr. Allen V. Lentino In memory of John Loeschen

In memory of Donald Allen

In memory of Steven Diedrich

Caxton Club

Ms. Catharine D. Bell

In memory of Robert Ball

In memory of Renee Agatha Roll Dispensa

Mrs. Catherine Ball

Anonymous (1)

In memory of Paul N. Banks

In memory of Dr. Katya Fedorchuk

Dr. Ellen Cunningham-Kruppa

Paul and June Schlueter

Mr. Daniel N. Leininger and Ms. Donna Leininger

In memory of Jenny Barrett

In memory of Raymond D. Fogelson

In memory of John Marino

Professor James R. Barrett

William O. Autry and Sarah E. Leach

Ms. Carla Zecher

In memory of Ann Barzel

In memory of John E. Fox

In memory of Edna McRae

Mr. Henry Eggers

Mrs. Judy E. Knoblock

Mr. James J. Dybas

*Deceased

Mr. Brian Higgins In memory of Sharon McLaughlin Lux Anonymous (1) In memory of Hermon Atkins MacNeil

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Honor Roll of Donors GIFTS OF LIBRARY MATERIALS The Newberry appreciates the generosity of the following donors who contributed books, manuscripts, and other materials to enhance the library’s collection.

In memory of Marion S. Miller

In memory of Bonnie Southwind

Vince Firpo

Ms. Glory Southwind

In memory of Mr. Milo M. Naeve

In memory of Harry Stern

Mrs. Milo M. Naeve

Caxton Club

In memory of Kenneth Nebenzahl

In memory of Leon Benjamin Stern

Dr. Mary S. Pedley

Dr. Myron B. Stern

William C. Ade

In memory of John Norcross

In memory of James Stieglitz

American Writers Museum

Mr. and Mrs. Larry E. Shiff

Mr. Eric Hunnicutt

Brian Anderson

In memory of John Nygro

In memory of Theodore Stone

Gail Anderson

Mr. Robert A. Rubenstein

Miss Bethanne J. Stone

Arlington Heights Memorial Library

In memory of Michael Perman

In memory of Art and Evelyn Sutton

Katie Bank

Rob Carlson and Paul Gehl

Dr. Ann S. Updike

Mr. Scott Allen Barber

In memory of Carol Koepke Primas

In memory of Helen Hornbeck Tanner

Roger and Julie Baskes

Chicago Genealogical Society

Mary Janzen Quinn

In memory of Verna Reddington

In memory of Ralph Teich

Catherine C. Baumann

Dr. Anita Barry

Ms. Elizabeth Teich

Dr. Donna Bergen and Dr. Thomas A. Madden

Stephen A. and Marilyn Scott

In memory of Nancy Thomas

Richard Bessette

In memory of James and Mary Rice

Chicago Genealogical Society

Mr. LeRoy Blommaert

Ms. Deirdre M. Rice

In memory of Dorothy Tollifson

In memory of Norma B. Rubovits

Mr. Garrett A. Boge

Linda Grossman In memory of Rita Pastron Turow

Mr. John B. Bokum, Jr.

Randi Rubovits-Seitz In memory of Rosemary J. Schnell

Mr. Scott Turow and Ms. Adriane Glazier

Vince Firpo

In memory of Frank Weinstein

In memory of Charles and Christine Scruggs

Ms. Diane A. Wittenstein

Dr. Virginia Scruggs In memory of Mette Shayne Mr. David Shayne

In memory of Joseph and Susan Welland Ms. Betty A. Welland In memory of Mary Kay Wilder

Ms. Arlyn Booth Joette Brown Ms. Mary O. Brugliera Alice Burch Joe Cappo Renee Blanche Cargerman-Dolezal

Mark and Maureen Greenwood

Rob Carlson and Paul Gehl

In memory of Jeffrey Williams

Mr. Dwight M. Cleveland

Mrs. Darlene Williams

Consulate General of Brazil

In memory of Joseph Paul Williman

Contemporary Club of Chicago

Ms. Virginia M. Russell

Professor Bradin Cormack

Ms. Catherine Flaa

In memory of Eugene and Marion Zajackowski

Ms. Kim L. Coventry

Ms. Louise D. Howe

Mr. Mark E. Zajackowski

Jacqueline Vossler

In memory of Dr. Martin Zander

In memory of Allison Sherman Professor Karen-edis Barzman In memory of Mr. Morrell M. Shoemaker Rob Carlson and Paul Gehl Caxton Club

In memory of Michael Silverstein

Mr. Sheldon P. Zeidman

Barbara Daniels Magdalene and Gerald Danzer Kirsten Davis

His wife and children

Rey E. de la Cruz

In memory of Mr. Gerard C. Smetana

Mr. Lucas A. Dietrich

Ms. Beth A. Smetana

Grace Dumelle

Liz Stiffel

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The Newberry Magazine | Fall / Winter 2021

Michael Ehrmann

George Leonard and Susan Hanes-Leonard

Bradley A. Scott

Dr. Robert K. Elder

Tom Limon

Dr. Suzanne Karr Schmidt

Andrew Erickson

Ted Linhart

Lee F. Shedroff

Karen Frederickson

Francesco Lucioli

Jacob Sherman

Ginger Frere

Patricia Lydon

Kenneth and Peggy Sinko

Michael D. Frost

David Marienthal

Jaquelyne Smith

Fuller and Moskovits Family

Mary L. Martin

Mary Smith

Susan and Vincent Furman

Mr. and Mrs. R. Eden Martin

Stanford University Libraries

Jill Gage

Heidi Massa

Mr. Francis Stanton

Linda Gartz

Valerie Mathes

Darby Stapp

Betsy Glass

Nancy Mattei

Gary L. Stiles

Jona Goldschmidt

Linda Matthews

Tavern Club

Ron Gordon

Lucia Mauro

Robert Teska

Mr. William A. Gordon

Mr. and Mrs. Robert E. McCamant

Mary Ann Thompson

Lawrence Green

Sharon McKee

Bill Travis

Mary C. Gregory

Andrew and Jeanine McNally

Jacqueline Vossler

Ginny Greninger

David and Anita Meyer

Nancy Wagner

John Hallman

Patrice Michaels

Diane and Richard Weinberg

Arlene Hausman

Milicka Milakovich

Jack Weiss

Jan Hertzberg

Stuart Miller

Reinhard C. Wilde

H. Nancy Holder

Jen Minkin

John Willis

Janet and Art Holzheimer

John Monroe

T. Bradford Willis

Karen Rae Horwitz

Patricia Murphy

Drs. Richard and Mary Woods

Joseph Houseal

Kimberly Nagy

Professor and Mrs. Frederick E. Hoxie

David F. New

Mr. D. Bradford Hunt

Margaret Noodin

Scott Jacobs

William O’Connell

John F. and Carol Jansson

Janet Palmer

Barbara Johnson

Walter J. Podrazik

Susan Lee Johnson

Jim Poole

Ms. Marcia Slater Johnston

R.J. Taylor, Jr. Foundation

Patricia Kassanits

Xuefei Ren

Chris Keeley

Rogers Park/West Ridge Historical Society

Barbara Keller

Jerry and Karen Ross

Mr. Bruce Kirkpatrick

Nina Rowe

Richard and Patricia Kosmerl

Howard Rubin

Linda Lewis Kramer

Thomas R. Schiff

Thomas R. Leavens

Wayne Schulz

*Deceased

The Newberry makes every effort to insure the accuracy of our honor roll of donors and we apologize if we have made any errors. Please notify the Development office at (312) 255-3581 or contributions@newberry.org regarding any changes, corrections, or omissions. Thank you.

Honor Roll of Donors / Board of Trustees

57

Board of Trustees BOARD OF TRUSTEES Burton X. Rosenberg, Chair

LIFE TRUSTEES Roger Baskes

Robert A. Holland, Vice Chair

T. Kimball Brooker

Gail Kern Paster, Vice Chair

Anthony Dean

Michael A. Pope, Vice Chair

Hanna Gray

Gregory L. Barton, Secretary

Neil Harris

David B. Smith, Jr., Treasurer

Victoria J. Herget

Edith Rasmussen Ahern

Stanley N. Katz

Joan Brodsky

Barry MacLean

Frank Cicero, Jr.

David E. McNeel

Lewis Collens

Alyce Sigler

Celine Fitzgerald

Richard D. Siragusa

Louise R. Glasser

Carol Warshawsky

Richard Godfrey

Robert Wedgeworth, Jr.

Madeleine Condit Glossberg Mark Hausberg David C. Hilliard Javier Laguna Lawrence Lipking Sonya Malunda James H. Marrow Andrew McNally IV Mary Minow Cynthia E. Mitchell Janis W. Notz Jean O’Brien Lisa J. Pattis Jean E. Perkins John P. Rompon Martha T. Roth Rudy L. Ruggles, Jr. Karla Scherer Harold B. Smith Nancy Spain Carl W. Stern

58

The Newberry Annual Report 2021

Staff OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT AND LIBRARIAN

Cataloging Projects Section

General Collections Services Section

• Daniel Greene, President and Librarian

• Megan Kelly, Cataloging Projects Manager

• Kristin Emery, Manager of Governance and Assistant to the President

• Lindsey O’Brien, Cataloging Project Librarian

• Margaret Cusick, General Collections Services Librarian

Communications and Marketing

• Alex Teller, Director of Communications and Editorial Services • Matthew Clarke, Communications Coordinator • Mary Kennedy, Graphic Designer • Andrea Villasenor, Senior Graphic Designer

• Tina Saenz, Project Cataloging Assistant

• Stuart Fraser, General Collections Library Assistant

Conservation Services Department

• Jane Kanter, General Collections Library Assistant

• Lesa Dowd, Director • Leith Calcote, Collections Conservator • Henry Harris, Conservation Services Assistant • Natalia Maliga, Conservator • Virginia Meredith, Conservation Technician

COLLECTIONS. LIBRARY SERVICES, AND EXHIBITIONS

• Alice D. Schreyer, Roger and Julie Baskes Vice President for Collections and Library Services

• Emma Lipkin, General Collections Library Assistant • Andy Risley, General Collections Library Assistant Reference and Genealogy Services Section

Digital Initiatives and Services Department

• Katy Darr, Reference Librarian

• Jennifer Thom Dalzin, Director

• Jo Ellen McKillop Dickie, Reference Services Librarian

• Nicolas White, Digital Initiatives Web Developer and Librarian

• Claire Dapkiewicz, Senior Program Assistant

• Grace Dumelle, Genealogy and Local History Library Assistant

Digital Imaging Services Section

• Graham Greer, Reference Librarian

Collection Development

• John Powell, Digital Services Manager

• Analú López, Ayer Librarian

• James R. Akerman, Curator of Maps

• Catherine Gass, Photographer and Digitization Specialist

• Becky Lowery, Reference Librarian

• Jo Ellen McKillop Dickie, Selector for Reference

• Alexandra McGee, Digitization Technician

• Jill Gage, Custodian of the John M. Wing Foundation on the History of Printing and Bibliographer for British Literature and History

• Juan Molina Hernández, Digitization Technician

• Will Hansen, Curator of Americana

Digital Initiatives Services Section

• Alison Hinderliter, Lloyd Lewis Curator of Modern Manuscripts and Selector for Modern Music

• Jennifer Wolfe, Digital Initiatives Manager • Claire Marshall, Digital Asset Management Librarian

• Suzanne Karr Schmidt, George Amos Poole III Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts

Exhibitions

• Alan Leopold, Selector for Library Science

• Paul Durica, Director

• Matthew Rutherford, Curator of Genealogy and Local History

Maps

• Matthew Rutherford, Curator of Genealogy and Local History Roger and Julie Baskes Department of Special Collections Services

• Lisa Schoblasky, Special Collections Services Librarian • Chris Cialdella, Stacks Coordinator • Allison DeArcangelis, Special Collections Library Assistant • Allison Huff, Special Collections Library Assistant • John Martino, Special Collections Library Assistant

• James R. Akerman, Curator of Maps Collection Services Department

• Alan Leopold, Director

• Patrick A. Morris, Map Cataloging and Reference Librarian

Acquisitions Section

Modern Manuscripts and Archives Department

• Emma Morris, Acquisitions Manager

• Alison Hinderliter, Lloyd Lewis Curator of Modern Manuscripts and Archives

Cataloging Section

• Catherine Grandgeorge, Manuscripts and Archives Librarian

• Jessica Grzegorski, Principal Cataloging Librarian • Patrick A. Morris, Map Cataloging Librarian • Cheryl Wegner, Cataloging Librarian • Ashley Wolfe, Collection Services Assistant

NEWBERRY INSTITUTE FOR RESEARCH AND EDUCATION

• Keelin Burke, Director of Fellowships and Academic Programs • Mary Hale, Assistant Director of Scholarly and Undergraduate Programs • Madeline Crispell, Program Coordinator

• Emily Richardson, Digital Archivist Center for Renaissance Studies Reader Services Department

• Lia Markey, Director

• Will Hansen, Director

• Rebecca Fall, Program Manager • Christopher Fletcher, Assistant Director of the Renaissance Center Staff

59

Staff Hermon Dunlap Smith Center for the History of Cartography

• James R. Akerman, Director

FINANCE AND ADMINISTRATION

• Laura McGrady, Vice President for Finance and Administration

• Madeline Crispell, Program Coordinator Bookshop The D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies

• Jennifer Fastwolf, Manager

• Rose Miron, Director

Business Office

• Sarah Jimenez, Program Coordinator

• Toni Matthews, Controller • Cheryl L. Tunstill, Staff Accountant

Chicago Studies Program

• Liesl Olson, Director

Facilities Management

Department of Public Engagement

• Michael Mitchell, Facilities Manager and Chief Security Officer

• Karen Christianson, Director

• Verkista Burruss-Walker, Facilities Coordinator

Adult Seminars

• Chris Cermak, Sr. Building Maintenance Worker

• Sarah Wilson, Program Coordinator Teacher and Student Programs

• Kara Johnson, Manager • Sophia Croll, Teacher and Student Programs Intern • Cate Harriman, Program Coordinator Public Programs

• Elizabeth Cummings, Public Programs Manager

• Pete Diernberger, Building Maintenance Worker Human Resources

• Brandon Brooks, Director • Nancy Claar, Payroll Manager Information Technology

• Kamila Farshchi, Director • Erik Esquivel, IT Support Technician • John Tallon, Systems Administrator

• Sarah Wilson, Program Coordinator Internal Services

• Jason Ulane, Internal Services Coordinator DEVELOPMENT

• Meredith Petrov, Vice President for Development

Office of Events

• Caroline Carter, Donor Relations and Communications Coordinator

• Martina Schenone, Assistant Director

• Adele Dillon, Development Operations Manager • Natalie Edwards, Director of Major and Planned Giving • Vince Firpo, Director of Individual Giving • Rebecca Haynes, Manager of Volunteers • Rebecca Martinson, Development Events Manager

60

The Newberry Annual Report 2021

• Chayla Bevers Ellison, Director

Open More Than Books at the Newberry Exhibitions Tuesday–Saturday 10am–4pm

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Reading Rooms Tuesday–Saturday 10am–4pm

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