News - The Portal to Texas History

Posted November 9th, 2016 by Dreanna Belden & filed under General.

November 9, 2016

recently added Collections …

Anthology: A Student Forum for Prose, Poetry, and the Visual ArtsThe Tarleton State University Anthology publishes poems, short stories, creative non-fiction, scripts, musical scores, art, sculpture, and photographs – basically anything creative that can be scanned for publication… (more).

The K.K. Legett Collection
The K.K. Legett collection contains the papers of Kirvin Kade Legett (1857-1926), and his son, Kade Bryan Legett (1889-1946). K.K. Legett came to Taylor County for the first time in 1879, where, he became one of Abilene’s leading men. He was a founder of Simmons College, now Hardin-Simmons University, and… (more).

Denton Chamber of Commerce Collection
The collection contains documents, photographs, letters, newspapers, sound recordings, home movies, and promotional films that document the Chamber’s activities from 1938-1998. The majority of these records concern a campaign… (more).

In the News

New Image of Davy Crockett Discovered in Fort Worth Museum
One afternoon last month, Dreanna Belden, the assistant dean for external relations at the University of North Texas library system, was about to leave work for the day when she noticed a voicemail message on her office telephone. The message was from a woman who claimed to have identified a photograph she had seen on UNT’s Portal to Texas History, a massive online archive of historical resources aggregated from hundreds of museums and historical associations around the state. “You have a picture on the portal that says ‘Face of a man,’” the message said. “I know who that man is, and I think you’re going to want to talk to me.” (more)

From the web

Three Questions with Ben Davis2. How have Unique Collections changed the way you approach your research, teaching or learning?

Using the Portal has made me aware of the various types of material that can augment architectural research, for instance keyword searches have revealed valuable information buried within documents I would not have otherwise thought to search. In developing the stories associated with some of Texas’ earliest structures I was able to learn more about the people for whom they were built and in some cases… (more).

from the UNT Digital Library

[The Leon Breeden Collection]

This collection contains a series of scrapbooks and memorabilia from the collection of Leon Breeden, jazz educator and legendary director of the UNT jazz program. Breeden chaired the division and… (more).

Our mailing address is:
1155 Union Circle #305190
Denton, TX 76203-5017

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Posted October 27th, 2016 by Dreanna Belden & filed under General.

October 27, 2016

recently added Collections …

The Texas HistorianThis picture depicts the Hambrick Plantation, which is considered haunted by residents of the Tyler area. The Texas Historian, one of the few historical journals in the nation dedicated to publishing the work of secondary students, features plenty of stories about local haunts like this that you can’t find anywhere else. (more)

KXAS-NBC 5 News Collection
KXAS was the first television station in Texas and the Southwest when it signed on as WBAP-TV on September 27, 1948. This collection features photographs, video, and over 12,000 scripts from news broadcasts just like this one, covering a news story about four youths spending the night in a supposedly haunted abandoned house in Dallas on a bet, discovering $2,500 in cash and securities in a stack of old newspapers, and being arrested after… (more).

University Photography Collection
Drawn from the UNT Archives, this collection of photographs features images of the changing and growing University of North Texas campus.This picture depicts Bruce Hall, a UNT dorm that is known as one of a few haunted buildings on campus. (more)

From the web

Tarleton, Stephenville libraries partner to digitize historic local newspapersBy digitizing the back issues of the local newspapers, researchers, students and everyday citizens will have quick, easy access to a wealth of historical data, including genealogical records such as marriage, birth and death notices, as well as advertisements, property transactions and editorials.

Once digitized, the 1882-1992 newspapers will be housed online in the Portal to Texas History digital library, maintained by the University of North Texas. The database provides an excellent digital home for researchers, historians and… (more).

from the UNT Digital Library

[The Texas Folklore Society Collection]

You won’t have to look very far in this collection to find ghosts or ghouls.This collection of Texas Folklore Society publications contains a miscellany of Texas and Mexican folklore, including stories about folk… (more).

Our mailing address is:
1155 Union Circle #305190
Denton, TX 76203-5017

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Posted October 12th, 2016 by Dreanna Belden & filed under General.

October 12, 2016

recently added Collections …

The David S. Castle Collection
The David S. Castle Collection contains over 6,500 pages of architectural drawings and blue prints created primarily during the 1st half of the 20th century. Established in Abilene, Texas in 1915, the David S. Castle Company became an extremely successful architecture firm and was responsible for designing many building landmarks in West Texas during the… (more)

Spotlight on North Texas
“Spotlight on North Texas” was a community history project conducted by the University of North Texas Media Library and theTexas Archive of the Moving Image. In April and June of 2016, residents of Denton County were invited to participate in the preservation of North Texas’ motion picture history by bringing materials to the library for free digitization. The digitized materials contained in this collection include home movies, television news footage, and photographs. This project was… (more)

University Photography Collection
Drawn from the UNT Archives, this collection of photographs features University of North Texas football, UNT alumni and alumni events, and images of the changing and growing University of North Texas campus. (more)

From the web

Three Questions with Tyler Thompson, doctoral candidate1. How important are Unique Collections in your teaching, learning or research?

The UNT Portal to Texas History has been a crucial aspect of research throughout my academic career. I am incredibly grateful for its wealth of resources including historical newspapers, almanacs, and photographs. The website is simple to navigate and easily accessible for researchers. As an undergraduate student, I utilized the Portal… (more)

from the UNT Digital Library

[Music Library 75th Anniversary Symposium Collection]

This stimulating array of papers and presentations was delivered at a 2016 symposium celebrating the 75th anniversary of the University of North Texas Music Library, as well as… (more)

Our mailing address is:
1155 Union Circle #305190
Denton, TX 76203-5017

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Posted September 2nd, 2016 by Ana Krahmer & filed under Grants, Texas Digital Newspaper Program, TexTreasures.

The UNT Libraries’ Digital Newspaper Unit has another very exciting announcement about a new grant award to add more titles to the Texas Digital Newspaper Program. The “Texas Borderland Newspaper Digitization Project” is funded through a September 2016-August 2017 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and the Texas State Library and Archives Commission (TSLAC), as part of TSLAC’s TexTreasures competitive grants program. Through this $25,000 award, the Newspaper Unit will digitize newspapers from eighteen counties near the Texas border, comprising at least 23,000 pages and beginning in 1887. At present, these counties either have few or no newspapers freely available on The Portal to Texas History or elsewhere. These counties stretch along southeastern Texas, near the Mexican border, and include the counties of Jim Hogg, Zapata, and Brooks, and span through border counties, including Maverick and Terrell, up to Reeves County in western Texas. At present, the materials representing these counties on the Portal are primarily maps, with a small scattering of other, non-newspaper items. This project will allow voices to be heard from these areas that have otherwise not been represented in the context of the Portal or other freely available online newspaper resources.

It is difficult to overestimate the role a newspaper plays in representing a community’s identity. The newspapers digitized through this project span urban and rural populations who originated from many different cultural backgrounds in Mexico and Europe. Many of these newspapers will highlight the Mexican Revolution, which so many of the border communities saw first-hand and discussed within their newspapers. New inventions for settling the frontier are highlighted in the German newspapers, foreshadowing for their descendants a long-term agrarian existence in the Texas Hill Country. All of these newspapers educated early Texas settlers about how to survive in the new frontier, how the political system worked, and how the society functioned and survived. The theme within this project is to open digital access to new voices from early Texas history, and we look forward to what we may learn from them.

TexTreasures is an annual competitive grant program designed to help member libraries make their special collections more accessible to researchers across Texas and beyond.

Posted August 23rd, 2016 by Dreanna Belden & filed under General.

August 23, 2016

recently added Collections …

Refugio County Newspaper Collection
Situated on the coast of Texas and on the north bank of the Mission River, Refugio, Texas, has been home to multiple newspaper titles since 1895. The Dennis M. O’Connor Public Library has made a selection of these newspapers available on The Portal to Texas History. Situated near Corpus Christi, the Refugio area has sheltered many groups of settlers, and in 1836 it was the site of the Battle of Refugio during the Texas Revolution. The population of Refugio County today is around … (more)

Niles-Graham-Pease Papers
The Pease, Graham, and Niles Families Papers consist of materials related to multiple generations of the families of Elisha Marshall Pease, who was governor of Texas from 1853 to 1857 and from 1867 to 1869, and his wife, Lucadia Christiana (Niles) Pease. The collection is composed of five different acquisitions and includes personal, professional, and political documents from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. E. M. Pease and his family were… (more)

Battleship Texas State Historic Site Photograph Collection
The Battleship TEXAS State Historic Site photograph collection documents the history of Battleship TEXAS when she was active in the U.S. Navy, and when she became the first permanent battleship memorial museum in the U.S. The body of photographs deals primarily with the ship’s interior and exterior appearance, guns, aviation on board the ship, and her commissioning and launching. The images help us tell our visitors about the evolution of… (more)

From the web

Three Questions with Mylynka Kilgore Cardona, Map Curator
1. How important are Unique Collections in your teaching, learning or research?

I first learned of the Portal while working on my PhD at UT-Arlington and several maps from our Special Collections were in the process of digitization at UNT. While an adjunct professor at UTA, I used the Portal to help round out my lecture notes and directed students to … (more)