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Posted July 30th, 2015 by Ana Krahmer & filed under General, Grants.

The Texas Digital Newspaper Program is excited to announce the availability of The Dallas Voice, comprising over 79,000 pages, and representing the Dallas LGBT community since 1984. Many people have dedicated hard work to creating and digitally preserving the Dallas Voice, and we are very happy to celebrate its addition to TDNP.

Many hands worked together to move this project forward. First of course are the men and women who wrote the newspaper, starting in 1984. The Dallas Voice began as a joint investment of $250 between three people: Don Ritz, Robert Moore, and William Marberry. At that time, Marberry served as the publisher, with Ritz standing in as editor and Moore as advertising director. From this small but dedicated group came a 24-page, first issue on May 11, 1984, with a headline of, “Dallas Gay Community Pulls Together for Election.” In a few short years, by 1988, the Dallas Voice became an important resource about significant issues of the day. The July 8, 1988, issue spotlighted the Dallas County AIDS Planning Commission report, with excerpts from the report, particularly focused on “Community resources, Education, Health care, Hospitals, Insurance, Legal/ethical issues, and Public information” (July 8, 1988, p. 4). True to its name, the newspaper became a steady voice for the LGBT community of Dallas. Astute political commentary, such as the “Gossip” column about “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” from July 30, 1993, plays a significant role in informing and representing an important community in Dallas, in Dallas County, and in Texas on national issues.

In early 2012, Dreanna Belden and Ana Krahmer of the UNT Libraries reached out to Robert Moore to explore the possibility of digitally preserving his newspaper collection and donating the entire physical archive to the UNT Libraries’ Special Collections. Through this work, the UNT Libraries’ Special Collections, headed by Morgan Davis Gieringer, brought the physical newspapers to be added to UNT’s LGBT Collection, and the Digital Newspaper Unit added existing PDF editions of recent issues for digital preservation via the UNT Digital Library and The Portal to Texas History.

The Dallas Voice Collection represents the first run of an LGBT newspaper to be made freely available and digitally preserved in the United States in its entirety. Digitization of this collection was made possible through support from a 2014-2015 TexTreasures grant: “Let It Be Heard!” through the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the Texas State Library and Archives Commission. In addition, funding has been provided by Robert Moore, former publisher and continuing friend of the Dallas Voice. This project represents a true and successful collaboration between many groups in the UNT Libraries, that we are all proud to have worked on.This important collection is a highlight among the many treasures in the UNT Libraries’ LGBT Archive. These materials are significant in documenting the history and culture of LGBT communities in the Dallas/Fort Worth area, and they will serve as a valuable resource for generations to come.

Posted July 23rd, 2015 by Dreanna Belden & filed under General.

July 23, 2015

recently added Collections …

UNT Libraries Digitizes 33 Years of Dallas Voice
The Dallas Voice Newspaper has been continuously published since 1984 and is the first newspaper to represent and serve the Dallas, Texas, LGBT community. New issues are published on Fridays, with a circulation of 20,000 papers per week in Dallas, Tarrant, Collin, and Denton counties. The paper claims a print readership of more than 50,000 weekly readers. Physical issues of the Dallas Voice are…(more)

Friench Simpson Memorial Library
The photograph collection at the Friench Simpson Memorial Library is the largest and most complete collection of historic photographs of Lavaca County. Many of the photographs were taken by Henry Jacob Braunig. Recognized as one of the premier photographers in Texas, Braunig established his permanent studio in Halletsville in 1887 and continued taking photographs until…(more)

Ellis Memorial Library
On April 21, 1981, the Port Aransas library was opened to the public and in September, 1981, became a member of the South Texas Library System.Land adjacent to City Hall was donated for a new library building by Maude Ellis.The name was changed to the William R. “Bill” Ellis Memorial Library, in honor of the former mayor and civic leader. The doors opened in…more

Rescuing Texas History Mini-Grants 2015 Final Days!

Originally called Rescuing Texas History through the Digitization of At-risk Photographs and Maps, RTH has enabled the Portal to be populated with a rich variety of unique materials for public access. This mini-grant program is open to institutions and individuals who own historic Texas-related materials. Grant winners, called partners, enjoy the benefits of having their materials digitized, described, and hosted on The Portal to Texas History. After digitization, the original materials are returned to partners along with digital copies for their own use.
Call for Submissions

from the UNT Digital Library

Mightier Than the Sword

This film considers the power and appeal of magazines both as sources of entertainment and as educational materials…watch

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Posted May 6th, 2015 by Ana Krahmer & filed under General, Texas Digital Newspaper Program.

Burleson Ledger, Planry Home Ad, May 16, 1919.

This week, we have an invited guest blogger, Tim Gieringer. Here on the Digital Newspaper Team, Tim creates all the metadata for the newspapers we upload. He’s been doing a lot of research for this guest post, so I hope you enjoy!

Thank you for inviting me to do this post! I’ve always had an interest in history, research, and architecture. Since moving to Denton, I have been involved in providing research for historical markers for the county’s Historic Iron Bridges project and researching dozens of homes for City of Denton Historic Landmark designation applications (including my own). This research often involves using historic newspapers on The Portal to Texas History.

Some of the more fascinating and popular items found in historic newspaper collections are the advertisements. Whether for unfamiliar products of the past or for early versions of products that remain household names today, the ads seem to still catch your eye. Of course, that’s what they were designed to do. I have long had an interest in historic homes, so my eyes are naturally drawn to advertisements for houses. When looking through these old house advertisements, some of you may be surprised to learn that buying a house in the early part of the 20^th-century often meant first picking up a newspaper. From there, you may have been swayed to send off for a mail-order house catalog or visit a local business to see their house plan catalogs and displays. Indeed, unless you were wealthy enough to hire an architect to design your home, chances are you were building your new home entirely through mail-order or hiring someone to build it based off a set of plans you had purchased.

Mail-Order Homes

	At one point in time, you could pick a house out of a catalog and literally have it shipped in its entirety to you with instructions on how to build it. By “entirety,” I mean from the wood, right down to the sinks and door hinges on the inside. The houses usually came by railroad and could be constructed by a contractor or sometimes even by a handy homeowner. Sears is by far the most famous company to widely offer these mail-order homes. (It’s a fun trivia fact that people like to throw around, and there are a lot of people devoted to identifying Sears homes.) However, Sears had several competitors, one of the largest being a Michigan-based company called Aladdin. As you can see from this 1919 San Antonio Express Aladdin ad, two of their main selling points were the many designs available and monetary savings from cutting lumber and labor cost, with the idea being that the lumber came to you already cut to specifications and thus requiring less time to prepare.

Plan Book Homes

Another popular method for new home owners was picking out a house plan from a catalog and hiring a local company or contractor to build your home based on those plans. These plans could be ordered through the mail, or you could visit a local company, usually a lumber company, that would also sell you the materials and help you consult their catalogs and displays.

As with mail-order homes, there were several companies of varying sizes offering plans. Perhaps the best-known of these plan book companies was Ye Planry which was founded in California but eventually moved to Dallas, and was a company known for its bungalow plans.

This 1920 Brownwood Bulletin ad shows a typical ad from a lumber company.

As I was putting images together for this article, I was surprised to find that there may have been some contempt between the mail-order and plan book home companies. The 1919 ad from the Burleson County Ledger, the title image for this post, states, “Our lumber worked by Ye Planry plans will build a home with an air of individuality and not have that ready-cut look.” I am still watching my mailbox for a reply from the mail-order companies.

This is just a quick look at a couple ways many of the older homes in our communities may have been built. I hope this encourages you to look closer next time you see an old home and try to figure out if it was mail-order, plan book based, or custom built. The fascinating thing about old homes is they all have a story to tell. There’s a chance that you might walk past a Ye Planry Home every day without even knowing it! For the next time Ana asks me to be a guest blogger, we’ll take some Google Map trips and tour the past as it exists in the present!

Posted April 20th, 2015 by Dreanna Belden & filed under General.

April 20, 2015

recently added Collections …

Larry Jene Fisher Collection
The Larry Jene Fisher Collection reflects the diverse interests and tireless curiosity of the Renaissance man of Southeast Texas. Fisher’s work as a photographer, filmmaker, environmental activist, musician, pilot, and traveler are all reflected in his images. The collection, chiefly composed of photographic negatives taken in the late 1930s-early 1950s, document a wealth of Texas experiences including rugged… (more)

Concordia University Texas Records
The Concordia University Texas Library presents images of the original campus in central Austin, which was then a boys’ high school called Lutheran Concordia College. These photographs feature early faculty and students as well as buildings including Kilian Hall, Texas Hall, Hirschi Library, Birkman Chapel, Behnker Hall, Studtmann Hall, Woltman Activities Center, and Kramer Hall. Also included in the University Records series is correspondence between… (more)

Bellaire Area Newspapers
Presented by the Bellaire Historical Society, these weekly newspapers from Houston, Texas include news and information of interest to residents of West University Place, Bellaire, Southside Place, Braeswood, Southampton, Southgate and adjacent areas along with… (more)

For those that are looking to digitize

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has recently announced a new grant funding opportunity, Common Heritage. Specifically, it is designed to aid communities in coming together to share and preserve their personal heritage through community days of digitization. We at the Portal are excited to see how this helps to change the landscape of digital cultural heritage and would love to be a part of your digitization plan.

from the UNT Digital Library

Texas Fashion Collection

The UNT Texas Fashion Collection is dedicated to the preservation and documentation of historically significant fashion, and serves as an educational and inspirational resource for students, researchers, and the general public. This vital resource is part of the UNT College of Visual Arts + Design. (more)

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Posted March 31st, 2015 by Ana Krahmer & filed under General.

Let’s throw a ball for Texas Independence Day, and let’s also do a barbecue, just like the citizens of Rusk County did in 1845, on the ninth anniversary of the celebration. Samuel Monroe Hyde gave the address, and he also gave permission for the address to be printed in The Texas National Register, where it arrived for publication a month after it had been spoken. Hyde proclaimed that the Texians of ’36, “a Milam, a Bowie, a Crocket, a Travis, and a Fannin” made Texas “free, sovereign, and independent.”

Hyde served as an agent for another early Texas newspaper, The Red-Lander, published in San Augustine. The Red-Lander first began publication in 1838 as a Whig party vehicle, showcasing national and international gossip in its first few pages with local news appearing in the last 1-2 pages of the paper (See “San Augustine Red-Lander” at http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/ees24). Interestingly, the roots of later 19th-century Reconstruction and state politics dominated Whig Party ideology, which relates to why the Red-Lander newspaper covered so much “international” news of the day–with “international” referring to what was then the U.S. according to the Republic of Texas. The Whig Party itself divided over the issue of slavery and eventually died off, but its ideas remained influential in politics for another half century.

Samuel Monroe Hyde was an early Dallas settler and among the first owners of what is now the northern side of White Rock Lake in Dallas, which adjoined land owned by his father, John H. Hyde. This land was parceled out to the Hydes in the 1840s by the Texas president Anson Jones, whom S. Monroe Hyde toasts in the independence day speech as, “An accomplished gentleman, an able politician and independent citizen; our foreign relations are safe in his hands, even at this present critical juncture.”

In short, it’s time for some good barbecue and a nice ball. Just make sure to wear a napkin around your neck to keep your ball gowns and tuxes tidy!

The Portal to Texas History

All Hands on Deck to Digitize a Huge Newspaper Run: The Dallas Voice

Mightier Than the Sword

Shopping for Houses in Newspapers

Mail-Order Homes

Plan Book Homes

Texas Fashion Collection

It’s Time for Barbecue–and a Ball!

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