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THIS LED TO THAT

How Film Buff Initiatives Created the New York Film Festival

by Carmen Hendershott (Libraries) on October 1st, 2024 in Media and Film Studies | 0 Comments

This led to that …

In researching through Google and Wikipedia, with their numerous references, I pieced together this picture of how the New York Film Festival came together – how this led to that:

The New York Film Festival is one of the most important cultural events in New York City now, developing from modest beginnings in 1963 to a global red carpet event today. Pioneer initiatives in France and America preceded it.

Initiative 1. In 1930s France, a young Henri Langlois collected reels of silent film – the beginning of a lifelong passion to save film from destruction. In 1938, he co-founded the Cinémathèque Française with Georges Franju and Jean Mitry. By the mid-1950s, after the German occupation of France had ended with the defeat of the Nazis in World War II, Langlois began showing films from his collection to the public. They especially resonated with a younger generation of film buffs who had not been able to see American films, or films from any anti-Nazi country, because of German censorship.

Initiative 2. Some avid attendees of the Cinémathèque Française began writing for a French film journal, the Cahiers du Cinéma, co-founded in 1951 by Andre Bazin, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca, and edited, after 1957, by Éric Rohmer. They included Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, and Claude Chabrol. In 1954, Truffaut penned a now-famous article: “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema,” in which he took issue with traditional French films (excepting those by Jean Renoir and Jean Vigo) as unexciting, and as often uninspired cinematic adaptations of novels. The films they had seen at the Cinémathèque, where they discovered films by Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Orson Welles, Charlie Chaplin, Sam Fuller, Don Siegel, John Ford, and Nicholas Ray in Hollywood, and their distaste for most French film, led to a movement by these young writers (joined by Rohmer) to make their own films.

Initiative 3. The French New Wave was launched in the mid-to-late 1950s by Truffaut, Godard, Rivette, Rohmer, and Chabrol, together with Left Bank Group filmmakers of a similar though more politicized persuasion – Agnes Varda, Chris Marker, and Alain Resnais. It featured non-professional actors and on-location shooting (to save money), ambiguity and inconclusiveness of narrative in preference to the straight narrative of traditional French cinema, and, in many instances, a departure from traditional camera work, with frequent emphasis on tracking shots, long takes, and jump cuts.

Initiative 4. Amos Vogel, an émigré from Vienna to America with his parents in 1939, carried on his life-long love of cinema by founding a club for film-viewing with a paid membership in 1947, since films shown on that basis rather than publicly were free from interference by New York State censors. He started this club, Cinema 16, after seeing the demand for non-Hollywood cinema from attending a program of independent film organized by Maya Deren at the Provincetown Playhouse in Greenwich Village. The enthusiasm was so great that the program was extended for 16 nights, with 2 shows each night, in addition to the initial evening. This, though, was a one-off event. Cinema 16 was ongoing, and was responsible for introducing films by Rivette and Resnais to American audiences, for showing other international but not French filmmakers, such as Roman Polanski and Nagisa Oshima, and for presenting American independent and often avant-garde cinema to them, in films by Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, Kenneth Anger, John Cassavetes, and others. Cinema 16 ended in 1963, when Vogel co-founded the New York Film Festival.

Initiative 5. Richard Roud, an American representative for Cahiers du Cinéma in London and founder of the London Film Festival, later brought to America films he wanted to give Americans an opportunity to see. He co-founded the New York Film Festival in 1963 with Amos Vogel, and gave the French New Wave a major platform for their work. Vogel was program director of the NY Film Festival until 1968. Roud continued as director of the selection committee until October, 1987. Although Roud was a Francophile, and brought 131 French films to the festival during his tenure, he also brought 125 American films, 49 Italian films, 47 German films, 25 UK films, 24 Hungarian films, 23 Polish films, and 19 Japanese films, in addition to lesser numbers from 28 other countries. (my figures) The global reach of the festival has intensified since Roud left, but the seeds for it were planted while he was there. Through Langlois, Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Varda, Roud, Deren, Vogel, and others, This led to That – the New York Film Festival we know today.

Use databases and print references in our library to get further information on this history – databases for film studies, such as Communication Source, the MLA [Modern Language Association] Bibliography, and Screen Studies Collection; film viewing databases, such as Silent Film Online; and print books on these initiatives, such as Henri Langlois, First Citizen of Cinema (PN1998 .L38 L3613 1994 Offsite); A Passion for Films: Henri Langlois and the Cinemathèque française (PN1998 .A3 L3549 1983 Offsite); Cinema 16: Documents Toward a History of the Film Society, by Scott MacDonald (online in JStor Books); and studies of the films of New Wave, Left Bank Group, and American avant-garde and independent filmmakers.

 


Beaver Skin Caps

by Paul Abruzzo (Libraries) on September 11th, 2024 in Business and Entrepreneurship, Cultural and Ethnic Studies, Fashion, History | 0 Comments

I recently learned a little about the fur trade in the early and mid 19th Century United States reading Walter Johnson's masterful The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States.

A search using the book's title in our general search box yields a link to the book itself along with full text reviews of it. I find that the general search box is particularly helpful for just this purpose, seeing if a book might be useful to you by looking directly at it, in the case of e-books we own, and/or by scanning reviews.

From reading Johnson, I learned that the fur trade was one of the largest commodity markets in the world at the time, and that it was fueled in large part by a booming demand for beaver caps in Europe. That led European-settlers, in their hunger for profits, to violate limits on trapping set by Native American tribes. By 1840 the western beaver were pushed to the edge of extinction (pgs. 30 - 31).

I had never considered 19th Century Europeans with beaver caps, never mind what that might mean for the environmental history of the North American continent.

Questions naturally came to mind from this implication. For instance: what were the ecological reverberations in the West of this depletion of beaver? How did the affected tribes respond? My curiosity led me to flip to Johnson's endnotes for his sources on the fur trade, and there I found a title that would interest me were I inspired to read further: The Fur Trade of the American West, 1807 - 1840: a geographical synthesis by David Wishart. I found the book in our catalog, available at NYU and easily shipped to one of our libraries in a couple of days by logging in to the catalog, and requesting it. I scrolled down to see the subject headings for the book, which are hyperlinked so that you are able to see everything in the catalog with the same subject heading. One seemed particularly relevant: Fur trade -- West (U.S.) -- History. Clicking on it yielded 10 hits. All looked interesting, and the most recent book, from 2020, we own electronically in our JStor collection: Peter Fidler: from York Factory to the Rocky Mountains. This book tracks the fate of one surveyor for the Hudson's Bay Company, and includes excerpts from his journals. 

I then searched with a broader iteration of the subject heading, substituting North America for West (U.S.) in order to find a book about the trade from the perspective of Native American people. 

All of this is a great example of how reading can lead to interest in topics one never imagined existed. That is why I often recommend to students that they read a good amount before considering a research topic since you might be led down a path that is more fascinating to you than your original topic, and for which there is a better amount of literature. We librarians are available through many avenues for research help. We are here to help! 

 

 


Dirty Laundry

by Paul Abruzzo (Libraries) on May 6th, 2024 in Anthropology, Cultural and Ethnic Studies, Economics and Finance, Fashion, History, Literature | 1 Comment

Recently, Peter Brooks, the Yale literature professor, had a piece in The New York Review of Books* on Proust, focussing on the various English translations of his great multi-part novel In Search of Lost Time. That led me to get excited about trying to read Proust's masterpiece .... again. I'd started the first part, Swann's Way, twice over the years, and was completely entranced, but got distracted both times. That is easy to do since Proust's prose requires sustained concentration, and, by the way, excuse me, I need to check my email, text messages, and Facebook, and...what was I talking about? 

For this new attempt, I got the Lydia Davis translation (Penguin), thinking she has a terrific reputation, and that the prose might be more accessible than older translations. I read her introduction, and realized I had a better an even chance of staying with the novel if I educated myself about Proust's life and the social and historical context in which it was written. Davis recommends, among others, Edmund White's biography, which I remembered as being part of the Penguin Lives series, knowing that meant, also, that it was (mercifully) short. I'd found White's memoir of New York in the 60s and 70s (I love memoirs of postwar New York), highly intelligent and enjoyable, so I picked up his Proust bio.

One of the many pleasures of reading history for me is in coming across surprising facts or social phenomena. And so it was that, on page 21 of the bio, while reviewing social mores of Proust's class of fin-de-siècle Paris, White relates that wealthy Parisian men sent their shirts to London to be laundered and pressed. I found this astounding. Why would they send their shirts all the way to London? Was it something the entire class of men practiced, or was White expanding on a tidbit he'd read about a very limited group? Or, was it all strictly untrue, a kind of urban myth that gets repeated without examination? The only thing I could imagine is that the practice, if it was indeed a widespread, was a matter of conspicuous consumption, a social act done in order to demonstrate one was able to afford such a thing. Penguin Lives are meant for casual readers, and so White's claim lacks scholarly attribution (not only are there no foot- or endnotes, there is no formal bibliography, only a few paragraphs at the end of the work that names other Proust biographies). The text itself also offers no guide as to where one might start to look to confirm this fact of social history.

I went to the New School Libraries' resources to look for confirmation. The first thing I did was go to Google Scholar through our homepage (the advantage of doing so is that Google Scholar "knows" you're searching through the New School Libraries' website, and will therefore provide links to full text articles we have in our databases). I tried a number of searches using a variety of keywords [Parisian rich laundry London, e.g.], and finally turned up an article that seemed promising, one we hold with our JStor subscription. Its title, importantly, gave me a phrase that I hadn't considered using in my initial search (laundry trade): "Laundresses and the Laundry Trade in Victorian England." That is precisely the kind of thing one learns along the way in a search that aids in the search itself, and one more reason to always step back and try to think of, or look up, synonyms for search terms. This question of the dirty laundry is still unanswered for me, but the path I recounted is the kind that we go through with all our patrons in helping with your research. You can email, call on the phone, chat, book an appointment in person or via videoconference, here

Comments on this, or anything else, can be directed straight to me: abruzzop@newschool.edu

*If you don't already know, the New School Libraries subscribes to The New York Review of Books through a few platforms. The most convenient way to access is via our direct subscription, the link called New York Review of Books Archive. For a more directed, accurate search of the archive, use the Gale database (although this one only contains the last 2 years of issues, while, through our website subscription you can access the entire archive).  


Histories of Tourism

by Paul Abruzzo (Libraries) on April 15th, 2024 in History, Sociology | 0 Comments

One great benefit of being married to a fiction writer who always does a lot of background research for her stories is that I get to stumble upon topics I might not have ever considered in the books that lay scattered around the house. The other day I picked one up that was on our dining room table called Sacred Places: American Tourist Attractions in the Nineteenth Century by John F. Sears.* 

I almost always look first at a book’s publication date, publisher, and author bio. It’s important to know these things in order to judge the trustworthiness of the information (what we call, in the library world, the information’s authority). 

 

The book came out in 1989, and that may or may not be relevant in our judgment (again, the library world terminology for this is the information’s currency). For instance, it’s possible that certain commonly held assumptions in the history of tourism have changed in the last 30 years. It could be that subsequent scholarship radically altered the field of knowledge.   

 

Oxford University Press published the book, and its author, at the time, was Executive Director of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute. I knew nothing about this institute, except to guess, since it’s in Hyde Park, N.Y., that it’s contained within FDR’s estate, the site of a National Park with a museum and library on its grounds. University presses housed in prestigious institutions, in general, have authority independent of the author since the works they publish go through a process of rigorous peer review. That means, in the case of prestigious publishers, we don’t necessarily have to vet the author’s authority, since the publisher has already done it for us.  

 

In any case, I turned to the opening paragraph of the book’s introduction: 

 

               "Tourism had become well established in Europe, and particularly in England, 

               by the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Stimulated by the popularity of 

               landscape gardening and painting, and by the publication of a series of widely 

               read essays on the sublime, the beautiful, and the picturesque, well-to-do

               English people were seized by a mania for traveling in search of picturesque

               and sublime scenery."

 

I am, by nature perhaps, skeptical, and so I wondered if these claims were verifiable. The historian did not provide a citation. It is of course perfectly acceptable to leave commonly held knowledge uncited (we could easily fall into a satire of pedantic scholarship, for instance, by citing sentences that claim things like “Since the earth orbits the sun…”). Sears’s opening facts may indeed be obviously valid to a reader who knows the social history of Europe during the period. But I decided, in any case, to do a little research into the history of tourism using the New School Libraries’ databases, just to see if I could come up with any corroborating or conflicting information. 

 

From our library homepage, I decided to use the federated search box. From here, we’re able to search the library catalog, which includes our partner libraries, along with many of our databases. I like to use one or two-word searches in the very beginning of a search on a given topic, particularly because I thought it would retrieve a reference book article: they can be highly useful in the first stage of research through informing broadly, while also providing commonly held authoritative sources. I typed “tourism” in the box. In the left-hand column, under Resource Type, I click on Reference Entries in order to narrow my results. That gave me exactly what I thought I could find. I chose an entry from the Encyclopedia Britannica to start (the version in our databases is richer than the free, online version since it has a section with Additional Reading, and also has the benefit of avoiding advertisements ). The article basically affirmed a portion of the information in Sears’ introduction, adding that: “....tourism is a product of modern social arrangements, beginning in western Europe in the 17th century, although it has antecedents in Classical antiquity.” I scrolled down to the sources for the article and found this: “John Towner, An Historical Geography of Recreation and Tourism in the Western World, 1540–1940 (1996), is rather descriptive and becoming dated but is still the best overall introduction to the subject….”

 

That led me to check the catalog, and I discovered that one of our partner libraries has it. I could request it be sent to one of the New School’s libraries in order to dig deeper into the questions I had about the origin of tourism, and whether or not any of Sears’ claims were at all controversial.

 

The process I just outlined is exactly the kind of thing any of our librarians can help with if you’re confused about how or where to start. We can answer questions via email, chat, the phone, in person at one of the service desks in our libraries, or through the setting up of a one-to-one consultation, in-person or via video.    

 

*A day later, I searched our catalog. The New School Libraries owns a print copy it, offsite. Our offsite material can be easily retrieved by logging into the catalog with your New School email username and password in order to request it be sent to one of our libraries: when it arrives you’ll get an email that it’s ready to be picked up. 


Native American Heritage Month: Indigenous Voices

by Brita Servaes (Libraries) on October 31st, 2023 in Cultural and Ethnic Studies | 0 Comments

In American mainstream scholarship and media, the cultures and histories of Native American peoples are most often presented and “explained” through the mediation of non-Native authors and other creators, such as for example in the recent Hollywood movie “Killers of the Flower Moon,” about the murders of Osage people in the 1920s.

These depictions continue, to varying extent, the stereotyping and erasure that are rooted in a long colonial history which to this day includes talking at, about and over Indigenous peoples and their knowledge and experiences. The result is an often distorted view and very “limited knowledge and perspective” on Indigenous histories and cultures that Lakota scholar, writer and activist Vine Deloria Jr. criticized in his1970 book We Talk You Listen+. 

So, I would like to foreground some ways we can start to seek out and listen to Native Voices*. 

(Note: Where you see an * please log in with your New School credentials for full access. A + indicates a catalog record - please refresh your browser if the page is blank at first.)

To begin, here is the Pulitzer finalist historical novel Mean Spirit+ by Chickasaw author Linda Hogan telling the Osage story from an Indigenous point of view. 

Finding Native voices in the telling of history is not a straightforward task! Looking for works written by Native authors in any  library catalog is overshadowed by the persistent colonial legacy that still haunts most cultural institutions, including libraries. Without getting too technical, the Subject tags (formally called Subject Headings) that identify contributions by Native American authors are also used for books about Native American histories and cultures. And these subject headings often continue using outdated and confusing terminology such as Indians of North America, and often the catalog entries fail to tag Native authors’ contributions to the historical record with the subject keyword History.  

One good strategy is to use an Advanced Search and combine Subject (Is exact) Indians of North America with Subject Contains subject keywords such as Autobiography* or with just a keyword in Any Field Contains (such as legal status*). And then patiently look through the results to identify contributions by Native authors and to find additional keywords to use in subsequent searches. 

With a little patience I found such Indigenous historical records as winter counts (The Years the Stars Fell: Lakota Winter Counts at the Smithonian+), calendars (One Hundred Summers: a Kiowa Calendar Record*) and maps (Another America: Native American Maps and the History of Our Land+). 

The wide range of contemporary Native experiences is reflected in novels, short stories and poetry,  as 10 Books by Native Authors that left their Mark on Me* by Upper Skagit and Nooksack writer Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe attests to. You can look for more articles like this one, as well as reviews and author interviews in our general Proquest* database. I did a search on “Native American authors.”

And like in all contemporary culture, there is satire (Bury My Heart at Chuck E Cheese’s), and there are irreverent modern classics in-the-making (the FX series Reservation Dogs).

Poetry read out loud is a beautiful and immediate way to give voice to the shared range of human experience. In the Living Nations, Living Words project, 23rd Library of Congress poet laureate Joy Harjo created an interactive map of some contemporary Native poets, each reading and discussing a poem.

I remember many years ago hearing Joseph Bruchac in a radio interview talking about how it is important for the land and the beings around to hear the Indigenous languages they have gotten used to hearing over centuries. Keeping Indigenous languages alive and thriving is essential cultural work. And hearing these languages spoken is good for all of us.

In this spirit, and closing the circle where I began this post, with the Osage Nation, here is a story, Coyote and Bear, recounted in its original language.

Of course I am barely touching the surface of the rich legacy and current output of Indigenous contributions to scholarship, arts and culture - and I do hope you are inspired to explore further. As always, you can AskUs if you would like some guidance on your search, or if you would like to share your knowledge and insights with us.

 

MLA Citation: Servaes, Brita. "Native American Heritage Month: Indigenous Voices." This Led to That, The New School Libraries, 31 Oct. 2023, https://guides.library.newschool.edu/blog/Native-American-Heritage-Month.


Indigenous Peoples' Day or Columbus Day? 

by Paul Abruzzo (Libraries) on October 6th, 2023 | 0 Comments

I am always curious about the origin of holidays. This holiday has a particularly complicated and controversial history because it was initially designed to celebrate a figure who is either, depending on your political perspective, a subject to be honored for greatness, or reviled as morally repugnant. 

Within a few seconds, a standard internet search led me to this article (recently updated, but initially published 10 years ago). It’s from the Pew Research Center and conveys the complications of how this day is celebrated, and what it's named. For instance: 

“... only 16 states and the territory of American Samoa still observe the second Monday in October as an official public holiday exclusively called Columbus Day. (“Official public holiday” typically means government offices are closed and state workers, except those in essential positions, have a paid day off.) In four states, two territories and Washington, D.C., the day is an official public holiday but goes by a different name. Four other states and the U.S. Virgin Islands mark the day as both Columbus Day and something else. And in 26 states and the territory of Guam, the second Monday in October is pretty much like any other workday.”

Further down in the article, I read the claim that Colorado was the first state to celebrate Columbus Day over 100 years ago, and that it was initiated by the Knights of Columbus, an Italian-American culture organization. 

I wanted to learn more and find sources with, perhaps, more scholarly authority, and so I went right to The New School Libraries’ general search box on the homepage and simply typed in: Columbus Day and history. That yielded rich results. I scanned down to find what looked like a treasure: an article by Michel-Rolph Trouillot that appeared in 1990 in a journal Public Culture entitled, “Good Day Columbus: Silences, Power and Public History (1492-1892)” which I knew would be an intellectually dense treatment of the subject since his later book Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History is considered a classic of historiography. 

I scanned the article and realized that the Pew piece I mentioned makes claims about the origin of the holiday that are probably not completely accurate, that the story is much more complicated and variegated (yet another lesson about the danger of culling information from internet searches without consulting scholarly sources). 

I first learned about Trouillot’s book watching Raoul Peck’s film series that aired on HBO called Exterminate All the Brutes. It is an unflinching interrogation of the history of colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, and racism. I found this four-part film amazing, a great spur for conversation about history and who tells it, etc., and if you haven’t seen it, you can watch it through one of our databases! It would be a great way to pass some time over this holiday weekend. 

 

MLA Citation: Abruzzo, Paul. "Indigenous Peoples' Day or Columbus Day?" This Led to That, The New School Libraries, 6 Oct. 2023, https://guides.library.newschool.edu/blog/Indigenous-Peoples-Day-or-Columbus-Day.


It’s National Latinx Heritage Month

by Paul Abruzzo (Libraries) on September 15th, 2023 in Cultural and Ethnic Studies | 0 Comments

It’s National Latinx (Hispanic) Heritage Month!

(September 15 - October 15)

I thought I’d look into the origin of this holiday. An internet search led me right to the government sites hosted by the Library of Congress that present a history, but also link to resources relating to the topic. The information page on the history of the celebratory month answered my first question. 

The origin of the law, making the 31 day period an official celebration, lies in the establishment, in 1968 under Lyndon Johnson, of National Hispanic Heritage Week. That was expanded under the Reagan Administration in 1988, to celebrate “the histories, cultures, and contributions of American citizens whose ancestors came from Spain, Mexico, the Caribbean and Central and South America.” 

A good research question might be: what factors went into the establishment of the holiday, its expansion, under Reagan? One theory I had was that it was connected to diverting criticism of its policies in Central America. That could be way off. The one thing that strikes me, again and again, about research is that learning about something generates enormous amounts of new questions, and often disrupts initial theories as incorrect. 

It was fun to poke around those Library of Congress pages and discover intriguing collections and celebrations pertaining to the month. For instance the page on Exhibits and Collections has links to material in the National Archives, National Gallery of Art, National Park Service, Congressional Records, and more. 

Government sources can be rich, but distorted by the need to maintain mythologies. For instance, a section on the Exhibits and Collections page I pointed out earlier is called “The Era of Exploration,” a phrase that had me wincing since it would serve us to leave behind notions that elide, or try to bury, the brutal nature of European conquest. 

Turning to the resources at The New School Libraries, I ran a search using our general search box on our homepage simply using the word Hispanic, while keeping in mind I could use the term Latinx in another search (I chose Hispanic to ensure I got hits for items that were produced preceding the use of Latinx). Often, particularly at the first stage of research, it’s most helpful to begin a search on any given topic using the broadest, simplest keyword or words, narrowing the results, if necessary, by using the “refine” options in the left hand column.

This yielded interesting hits. If I were beginning my research into Hispanic (Latinx) culture, for instance, I might go right to a reference book we have in one of our electronic book databases (we have MANY) called The Companion to Hispanic Studies. This is in our Credo Reference collection. The publisher of this particular book is Routledge, a reputable producer of academic journals and books. 

(One should always keep an eye on the origin of the material one is looking at in order to assess its authority. Does the publisher subject their articles and books through a peer review process? Who is the author of the particular item I’m looking at? Do they have scholarly credentials?)

Reference books can be wonderful starting points in research. Outside of giving overviews, their articles could inspire great leads for a research topic one wasn’t even considering. Also, they often point to authoritative sources in bibliographies. 

This particular book is a collection of essays from different scholars. 

The first, by the book’s editor, Catherine Davies, is an attempt to define the field of Hispanic Studies itself, and begins right off with an interrogation of the meanings of the word Hispanic. Obviously, to be thorough and historically relevant, she must discuss the Spanish Empire—its conquests of those parts of the world outside of Spain whose people now speak Spanish. But the story of who is part of Hispanic culture is more complicated than simply Spanish-speaking peoples in the Americas and elsewhere. As Davies writes: 

“In Paraguay Guaraní is recognised as a co-official language; Aymara and Quechua are widely spoken in the Andean zones, Nahuatl in Mexico and Mapuche in Chile. Hispanic Studies therefore may include the study of indigenous Amerindian languages and civilisations (inevitably the Aztecs and Mayas in Mexico and the Incas in Bolivia and Peru), though these are more often included in Latin American studies programmes.”

And it gets even more complicated:

“The development of Spanish (and of Galician, Portuguese and Catalan) from Latin, and the lasting influence of Arabic and Islamic culture (notably art and architecture), especially in Andalusia, also form a part of Hispanic Studies.” 

I went back to my original search hit list, and decided to refine the results to see what videos in our collection came up. I was drawn to a film that looked cool called Untold: Ellen Ochoa, the first female Hispanic astronaut. How awesome! I watched it! It’s only a few minutes long, but a highly informative little bio of this intriguing, gutsy woman. 

My exploration of our resources is precisely the kind of thing we New School librarians do when we act as guides to getting our patrons started on researching a topic, or delving deeper into research that is already on a certain track. Contact us through the Research Support section of our Research webpage to schedule an in person or Zoom consultation, an email exchange, a chat, a phone call, whatever you prefer! We’re eager to help!  

 

MLA Citation: Abruzzo, Paul. "It’s National Hispanic Heritage Month." This Led to That, The New School Libraries, 15 Sep. 2023, guides.library.newschool.edu/blog/Its-National-Hispanic-Heritage-Month.


International Day Against Nuclear Tests

by Kira Appel (Libraries) on September 15th, 2023 in Health Sciences and Medicine, History, International Affairs, Political Science | 0 Comments

Nuclear bomb explosion

Licorne test, 1971, French Polynesia. PHOTO: The Official CTBTO Photostream

 

August 29th is the INTERNATIONAL DAY AGAINST NUCLEAR TESTS

A quick internet search for the holiday’s origins led me to the United Nations web page that provides background for the establishment of the day. It was declared on December 2, 2009 when the United Nations General Assembly passed a unanimous resolution that had been initiated by Kazakhstan. 

“Why Kazakhstan?” I thought, passingly. (I’ll come back to that.) 

First, though, some facts gleaned from the UN page:

  • Since the very first test on July 16, 1945, there have been, worldwide, over 2,000 nuclear tests.

  • The declaration of the day also led, through a snowball of activism, to the General Assembly declaring September 26th as The International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons, observed for the first time in 2014. 

There is a formal, yet not in force, mechanism for the eradication of all testing. The Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty was adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1996. Thus far, 185 countries have signed on, with 170 having ratified. Through a link to the web page for the treaty, I learned that the U.S. signed but never ratified (according to Article VI of the U.S. Constitution, ratified treaties become “the supreme law of the land.”) 

I found, using our ProQuest Historical Newspapers database, a New York Times article reporting on Bill Clinton’s signing of the treaty in September of 1996 (you’ll need your NS log-in credentials if you’d like to see any of the sources I mention).

I then poked around other New School Libraries’ resources to see what I could find regarding, more broadly, the history of nuclear weapons testing. 

To explore multiple databases with one search I typed into the homepage box: history nuclear weapons testing

That immediately yielded an interesting-looking book we own in our ProQuest database for books, Ebook CentralDisarming Doomsday: the human impact of nuclear weapons testing since Hiroshima 

I looked at the record in another source and saw that one of its Library of Congress Subject Headings was nuclear weapons —- testing

Using our Advanced Search feature, I searched using that heading and found a film called The Polygon. We have access to it through another database called Academic Video Online (AVON), from Alexander Street Press. I clicked to read the film’s description (in full below), and discovered immediately, through an assumption, why it was that Kazakhstan initiated the resolution for today’s holiday! 

(My brief research journey, by the way, imitates exactly the kind of help we provide for anyone in our community who reaches out to us! We’re available on chat, through an email, a phone call, a visit to one of our service desks, or through scheduling a one-on-one research session, either in-person or on Zoom.) 

“The Polygon reveals the untold legacy of the Soviet Union's extensive Cold War nuclear testing program at the Semipalatinsk Test Site in Kazakhstan. Over 600 nuclear bombs were detonated at the formerly secret site, known as The Polygon, from 1949 to 1991, including 116 above ground explosions. The massive mushroom clouds were witnessed by hundreds of thousands of nearby unprotected Kazakh villagers, unaware that nuclear fallout was raining down on them, their land and water. More than 18,000 square kilometers remain heavily contaminated. Theradiation silently devastated three generations who have suffered serious health problems, including thyroid disease, cancer, birth defects, and more. Life expectancy in the region is seven years less than the national average in Kazakhstan. The full impact of radiation exposure was hidden by Soviet authorities, and only came to light after the test site was closed in 1991 after major protests. The tragic story is told in part by the villagers themselves, including Bolat Baltabek, a teacher and town leader, who lost his sister, brother, son, and countless neighbors to radiation-related diseases. Shot over 3 years, The Polygon revisits the history of these tragic Cold War experiments, and profiles the unfortunate victims that remain today, still suffering with little or no compensation, or global recognition of their plight.”

 

MLA Citation: Abruzzo, Paul. "International Day Against Nuclear Tests." This Led to That, The New School Libraries, 29 Aug. 2023, guides.library.newschool.edu/blog/International-Day-Against-Nuclear-Tests.
 


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