Posted by & filed under General.

Written by Max Rhodes, Lead Metadata Student for the Kempner Collection and a journalism major and history minor.

Kempner family photo

The Digital Projects Lab has recently completed the process of digitizing and describing over 50,000 letters from the Harris and Eliza Kempner Collection. Starting back in March of 2017 and enlisting the help of approximately 30 student employees, completing the letters of the Kempner Collection has been a massive undertaking.  

The total collection consists of over 66,000 items, including the letters and a myriad of legal documents, newspaper clippings, pamphlets and other text items. Most were originally created between the 1940s and 1960s, but some date back to the late 1800s. The collection was donated by the Kempner Family to the Rosenberg Library in Galveston. In 2016, these items were lent to the UNT Digital Library to be digitized and uploaded to the Portal to Texas History with funding for digitization provided by the Harris and Eliza Kempner Fund.  

The scanning process began the following year after all the letters and other items were shipped to Denton and took a team of students nearly six years to get everything digitized by October of 2022. Since each piece of paper was scanned front and back and some of the letters and other items were several pages long, over 180,000 total scans were made. However, the work was far from complete.  

Next, metadata had to be written for each letter. Metadata makes specific items easier to search for and can allow researchers to find very niche topics. The information in the metadata for each letter would include the date it was written, the name of the person or business who wrote it, the name of the person or business it was addressed to, a summary of the content of the letter, the location where the letter was sent from and addressed to as well as a list of searchable key words or phrases. Despite the sheer number of letters, giving each one its own set of unique information in the metadata makes it possible to keep track of them and find references made to very specific topics. 

Einstein telegram to Kempner Kempner cotton gift to grandson

 

Who are the Kempners? 

Harris Kempner was born in a small village in Poland in 1837. He immigrated to New York at the age of 17, and to the newly formed state of Texas in 1856. He joined the Confederate army at the outbreak of the Civil War and served as quartermaster sergeant after being injured in battle. Following the war, he briefly operated a general store in Coldspring before moving to Galveston in 1870. Working with his business partner Mark Marx, Kempner established himself as an important figure in the growing city. He worked to expand the railroads, improve the port to allow for larger ships, and started a powerful banking and cotton empire.  Letter from H. Kempner in Yiddish

Kempner married Eliza Seinsheimer of Cincinnati Ohio in March of 1872, and they would have eleven children together, eight of whom survived past childhood. We see correspondence from them all in the collection. Some of the most prominent are Isaac H. Kempner (1873-1967), Daniel W. Kempner (1877-1956) and Isaac’s son, Harris L. Kempner (1903-1987). These three men, along with several other family members ran the company known as H. Kempner for several decades spanning the early and mid-20th century. Some of the enterprises overseen by the H. Kempner Cotton Company include the Imperial Sugar Company, the United States National Bank, the Texas Prudential Insurance Company and several others. The Kempner family had an enormous impact on the city of Galveston, and on the state as a whole. They kept very detailed accounts of their business practices and saved nearly all business and personal paperwork spanning from the creation of Harris Kempner’s business in the 1880s nearly 100 years to the 1970s. Kempner remarks

 

 

Sources:

Laredo, Texas--The Future Great Railroad Centre and Grand Gateway of International Commerce.

Posted by & filed under Featured, General, Grants, National Digital Newspaper Program.

As part of UNT Libraries’ seventh round of National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP) grant funding awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Library of Congress has begun uploading more Texas newspaper issues to Chronicling America, the digital repository for historic U. S. newspapers. This seventh round of funding, focused on building content from south- and border-Texas cities, includes new titles from Laredo and McAllen and additional issues to the previously digitized San Antonio Light. After being uploaded to Chronicling America, these newspapers will also go into the Texas Digital Newspaper Program (TDNP) on the Portal to Texas History.

Laredo Daily NewsThe first titles to go online for this round include Laredo Daily News, showcasing a small number of issues from the late nineteenth century. We then have issues of the Laredo Weekly Times, from several years spanning the early twentieth century.  This first batch of digitized newspapers also includes some 1935 issues of The Laredo Times, a title that featured news in both English and Spanish. More issues from the Laredo Weekly Times and The Laredo Times will be added Chronicling America in the coming months.

Chronicling America currently provides over 20 million pages of digitized historic newspapers in 30 different languages from all 50 states as well as Puerto Rico and the United States Virgin Islands. You can find a list of previously digitized Texas newspapers on Chronicling America, as well as see when new titles and issues are added to Chronicling America here.

 

Posted by & filed under General.

This post was written by Madelin Villanueva, a UNT Emerald Eagle Scholar and biomedical engineering major, who is completing an internship in Digital Libraries this semester.

Did you know that many Texans invented early versions of the same medical devices we use today?

Bandage

Leah M. Kirwan patented the bandage pictured below on August 9, 1921, from Houston, Texas.

Early bandage patented in the 19th century, invented by a Texan.

 

Johnson and Johnson Consumer, Inc., patented the below version of the bandage on August 2, 2022.

 

Johnson & Johnson bandage patent from 2022.

 

USD959680S1 – Adhesive bandage with decorated pad – Google Patents

 

Inhaler

George W. White from San Antonio, Texas patented this version of the inhaler on August 27, 1912.

Inhaler patent from Portal to Texas History

Respiri, Ltd., patented this new version of the inhaler on August 19, 2014.

Inhaler patent from 2014

US8807131B1 – Compliance monitoring for asthma inhalers – Google Patents

 

Syringe

James H. Glasscock from Sherman, Texas patented an early version of the syringe on April 9, 1889. 

James Glasscock syringe patent from Portal to Texas History.

Schott AG patented a new version of the syringe on May 31, 2011.

Syringe patent from 2011

Syringe patent from 2011

US7951120B2 – Method for manufacturing a syringe – Google Patents

There are countless patents that reach far beyond medical devices, if you are interested in discovering what else fellow Texans have created just go to The Portal to Texas History where you can find the Texas Patents – The Portal to Texas History.

 

Posted by & filed under Events, General, Resources for Educators.

The 2024 Texas Conference on Introductory History Courses, an American Historical Association regional conference, took place October 4th and 5th at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas. The focus of the conference centered around issues, challenges, and opportunities associated with introductory courses in US and world history that students may encounter in their education. The Portal to Texas History had the opportunity to share information on the ever growing number of resources made available online for scholars of all kinds.

Posted by & filed under General.

This September, The Portal to Texas History was happy to sponsor and attend the Texas General Land Office’s Save Texas History Symposium in Austin, Texas. The symposium provides attendees the opportunity to learn from scholars discussing the rich history of Texas. This year’s theme, Cartographic Frontiers: Putting Texas on the Map, focused on how the map and map making influenced the social, political, and economic history of Texas.