Remembering JFK Sixty Years Later

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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

bit.ly/ptth-jfk-jack-ruby

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.

UNT @the 2023 National Digital Newspaper Program Meeting

Jefferson Building, September 21, 2023

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

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 Tim Gieringer presents to the 2023 National Digital Newspaper Program annual meetingpresentation 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. 

The Portal to Texas History at the GLO’s Save Texas History Symposium

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The Cathy Nelson Hartman Portal to Texas History Endowment was happy to sponsor and host a booth at the Save Texas History Symposium, From San Fernando de Bexar to “The Alamo City:” San Antonio and its History. The symposium was presented by the Texas General Land Office at the Historic Menger Hotel in San Antonio on September 22nd and 23rd and covered history of the San Antonio area from the 18th century to the early 20th century. We got to see many friends of the Portal and had the opportunity to make many more friends. 

National Endowment for the Humanities Awards UNT Libraries for a Seventh Round of the National Digital Newspaper Program

2023 NEH Award Icon

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

Awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities to UNT Libraries, a seventh grant round, awarded on 9/1/2023 in the amount of $203,140, will span two years and support addition of 100,000 more Texas newspaper pages to Chronicling America, the Library of Congress’ national repository for U.S. newspapers.  Texas will add titles from south- and border-Texas cities, including San Antonio, Laredo, and El Paso, with the goal of expanding more titles and years of newspapers that tell the stories of underrepresented Texans, supportive of bridging the communities in ways indicated by NEH Chair Shelly Lowe’s statements from the 2022 National Digital Newspaper Program Annual Meeting, as we endeavor to “balance difference of viewpoint, heritage, and include parallel and unknown histories in our narrative” (Lowe 2022).  

In addition to adding the newspapers to Chronicling America, where Texas identity can be preserved in the context of other state newspapers, we will also add these newspapers to  the Texas Digital Newspaper Program (TDNP), on The Portal to Texas History. All of the newspapers available in Chronicling America and TDNP are freely accessible and can be used broadly for activities including research and education. As a result, we try continually to inform teachers and students about the importance of newspapers as windows into history.

Chronicling America is a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress in an effort to build a nationwide, open-access repository of digitized historic newspapers.

To learn more about Chronicling America, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress, visit their additional resources! 

 

 

University of North Texas Libraries Receives FY24 TexTreasures Award!

Posted by & filed under General, Grants, Texas Digital Newspaper Program, TexTreasures.

The TexTreasures Competitive Grant Program is awarded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services through funds received from the Library Services and Technology Act. Drs. Ana Krahmer and Mark Phillips have received an FY24 TexTreasures grant of $39,998, to fill in newspaper gaps relating to the history of underrepresented Houston communities, including: 

  • The Houston Informer, the city’s African American paper, advocating for advancing the civil rights of both the Houston and wider southern African American community.  Currently, The Portal to Texas History hosts 100 issues from 1919 to 1924, and this grant will extend coverage up to 1931. 
  • The Jewish Herald-Voice, a Houston-based newspaper published for and by the Jewish community in Houston and the Texas Gulf Coast, currently is available up to 1979 on the Portal, and this grant will fund completion of the next 30 years, up to 2009. 
  • The South Belt-Ellington Leader, a newspaper published by women, self-described as “housewives,” (“Leader History”) living and working in the South Belt area. The Leader has served the community as a watchdog newspaper to protect citizen safety and health since 1976.  

TexTreasures is an annual competitive grant program designed to help member libraries make their special collections more accessible to researchers across Texas and beyond. For further information about this award and recipients, visit the TexTreasures Recipients page.

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