The Portal to Texas History recently reached two million items online, and we invite you to join us to celebrate this milestone at the Willis Library on UNT Campus!
When: February 15, 2024, 3-4 pm.
Where: Willis Library, Room 250H on the second floor; 1506 Highland Street, Denton TX.
Parking: Several parking options are available, including the nearby Highland Street Parking Garage
The University of North Texas Libraries is excited to invite applications for 2024 Research Fellowships in The Portal to Texas History and UNT Special Collections. The Fellowships are aimed at covering the associated expenses with conducting research and producing scholarship using UNT Libraries’ Digital Collections, including The Portal to Texas History and the UNT Digital Library, as well as collections from UNT Special Collections. Up to $2000 will be awarded to two or more Portal to Texas History Research Fellows and up to $1000 will be awarded to four UNT Special Collections Research Fellows. Applications are due February 15, 2024.
More information can be found here.
We’re excited to announce a new tool you might find useful for working with newspaper titles on The Portal to Texas History!
This tool is a curated title database, which allows you to see how many years, issues, and pages of a serial publication we have available on the Portal.
To access the curated title database, you can go directly to it through the “Explore by” dropdown menu, located beneath the large search box, on the Portal home page. When you choose “Publication Title,” you’ll be taken to a display listing all titles on the Portal.
From the title listing page, if you click on the green “All Curated Titles” box, in the upper, right-hand corner of the screen, you’ll be able to go to the curated title database.
In the example below, you’ll find the listing for the San Antonio Light, a newspaper digitized through the National Digital Newspaper Program, supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
The curated titles database is especially useful when you want to see numbers of years available, title changes by year, for example above when the Light removed “The” from its title. The database is also helpful for investigating other serial items on the Portal.
As we approach the 60th commemoration of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, his life and legacy have not lost their hold on the imagination of the American public. His famous quotes such as “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country,” and “We choose to go to the moon,” remain on the tongues of our citizens, calling us to a higher vision of what it means to be an American.
The University of North Texas Libraries’ Portal to Texas History provides free online access to several archival collections that document the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Below are some collections to explore, learn, and understand more about the JFK assassination, and this dark moment in our nation’s history.
We pulled these resources together to support the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at UNT’s (OLLI) seven-part series for JFK 60| The Assassination 60 Years Later, which was sponsored by both the UNT Libraries and the Cathy Nelson Hartman Portal to Texas History Endowment. A UNT Libraries Advocacy Board member, Dory Wiley, is hosting, planning, and speaking at these events. In addition to his career in finance and investment, Dory is widely considered an expert on the JFK assassination and has organized dozens of seminars for over a decade on the subject, drawing together eyewitnesses and experts to share their perspectives. This year’s sessions are all being recorded, and will soon be hosted in the Portal to Texas History for posterity. Download our JFK Resource Flyer_F23.
Dory Wiley, President and CEO of Commerce Street Capitol
Collection: Dallas Times Herald John F. Kennedy Photos
Partner: The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza
texashistory.unt.edu/explore/collections/DTHJFK
The Dallas Times Herald’s collection contains negatives of approximately 700 black-and white news images taken by photographers over the assassination weekend and beyond. It includes many unique and crucial images, and though only a few of these historic scenes were published by the Times Herald in 1963, they are a powerful visual record of President Kennedy’s last hours in Fort Worth and Dallas, including the motorcade, assassination aftermath, and investigations.
Collection: John F. Kennedy, Dallas Police Department Collection
Partner: Dallas Municipal Archives
texashistory.unt.edu/explore/collections/JFKDP
The John F. Kennedy/Dallas Police Department Collection contains the entirety of
the department’s investigation into the assassination. There are nearly 11,000 pages of affadavits, interviews, and evidence, along with 404 photographs that document the scenes associated with this moment in our nation’s history.
Collection: John F. Kennedy Memorial Collection
Partner: Eleven partners
texashistory.unt.edu/explore/collections/JFKAM
This collection contains newspapers, correspondence, legal documents, police reports, photographs, and video footage documenting the weekend of President Kennedy’s assassination as well as the subsequent investigations into both Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby.
Collection: Jack Ruby Trial Transcripts
Partner: The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza
This group of materials features 39 published transcripts arising from the Jack Ruby trial, where he was convicted of “murder with malice” in the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald.
Collection: Jim Marrs Collection
Partner: UNT Libraries Special Collections Department
texashistory.unt.edu/explore/collections/MARRS
Personal notes, writings and correspondence, articles, publications, photographs, slides, videos, audio recordings, books and posters resulting from journalist and author (Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy) Jim Marrs’ career and research. Marrs specialized in reporting on conspiracy theories and government cover-ups.
Collection: Charles Reagan Papers
Partner: UNT Libraries Special Collections Department
texashistory.unt.edu/explore/collections/CERP
The physical collection contains the research of Charles E. Reagan, Jr., who was working on a book about John F. Kennedy and the era surrounding his presidency. Items include his hand-written notes and manuscript on notepads, printed articles, magazines and newspapers featuring Kennedy, and typed manuscript pages.
WFAA John F. Kennedy Assassination Audio Tapes Collection
Partner: UNT Libraries Special Collections Department
https://texashistory.unt.edu/explore/collections/WFAAJFK
This collection comprises 32 reel-to-reel tapes in individual cases that document the events and people surrounding the Kennedy Assassination. The tapes cover the events and commentary related to the Kennedy Assassination. News outlet commentary, President Johnson’s speech, interviews with Lee Harvey Oswald and his family members, coverage of the Ruby hearing, trial, and interviews are all included in this collection.
Collection: Judge Sarah T. Hughes Collection
Partner: UNT Libraries Special Collections Department
texashistory.unt.edu/explore/collections/SARAH
Sarah Tilghman Hughes (1896-1985) practiced law in Dallas, and was the first woman to serve as a federal district judge in Texas (1961-1975; senior status until 1982), and championed various human and women’s rights causes. Notably, as a federal district judge, Hughes administered the presidential oath of office to Lyndon B. Johnson aboard Air Force One following the assassination of John F. Kennedy in November 1963.
During the week of September 18, 2023, Ana Krahmer and Tim Gieringer from UNT Libraries’ Digital Newspaper Unt represented UNT in the 2023 National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP) annual meeting, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). This annual meeting is an opportunity for NEH awardees to discuss strategies for preserving newspapers on a national level and to compare their processes at the state level. This meeting also represents one of only a handful of annual gatherings where people from across the U.S. who work in newspaper preservation can meet to chat about what they do. In September 2023, UNT was awarded for a seventh cycle to participate in NDNP, placing Texas alongside Florida, Minnesota, and Virginia, as the only states chosen for seven awards thus far.
Tim Gieringer presented about taking over project management midway through the two-year grant cycle. Tim’s 
presentation focused on his experiences over the last several months as he has learned about NDNP processes, and it offered tips for any participants who may need to prepare to hand over a project in the future. In particular, Tim focused on creating and maintaining project documentation, sharing what he and Sarah Lynn Fisher, the former NDNP-Texas project manager, have created. Other conference attendees offered several good suggestions and comments that we will explore implementing into our workflow in the UNT Newspaper Unit. Also during this annual meeting, Tim was also able to meet with and receive additional training for new and re-starting project members from Library of Congress and NEH staff.
Ana Krahmer presented about her committee work this past year in developing the Race & Ethnicity Keyword Thesaurus for Chronicling America, freely available through the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Edsitement education site. This thesaurus, published last year by the committee, is intended to help scholars contextualize their language in researching civil rights and communities, using historic terms to locate more relevant information. This past year, the committee worked on framing the terms according to how internal group members used them in comparison to how external people, unaffiliated with the given group, used those terms. This resulted in an “Insider/Outsider Usage” section added to all keywords in the thesaurus, with examples from newspapers in Chronicling America serving as primary source evidence for this usage.
As one of only four state institutions awarded seven times by the NEH, UNT has enjoyed a long history working with the National Digital Newspaper Program, and the opportunity to learn what other states do in newspaper preservation is something we look forward to every year. NDNP, “a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Library of Congress (LC), is a long-term effort to provide permanent access to a national digital resource of newspaper bibliographic information and historic newspapers, selected and digitized by NEH-funded institutions (awardees) from all U.S.” The collection NDNP has built on Chronicling America represents all 50 United States, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Comprising over 20 million pages of news content, ChronAm is a rich, free resource for anyone interested in historical and genealogical research.
