LOCAL ARCHIVES, GLOBAL HISTORY: POST 8 BY EMMA WIMBERG While Dr. Helen Hewitt was on her Guggenheim Fellowship in Paris, Hewitt’s mother, worried about Hewitt and how her time was going, wrote to her from the states to ask if she had found a women’s group with which to engage. Hewitt replied: “I asked [a… Read more »
Local Archives, Global History: Post 6 By Matt Darnold This two-part series will first demonstrate Dr. Helen Hewitt’s commanding place as a woman in musicology, taking a special interest in her time in Paris, which was an integral part of the shaping of the UNT Music Library as it is known today. The second post… Read more »
Local Archives, Global History: Post 5 by Anna Wodny Today the University of North Texas Music Library is nationally recognized for its scholarly resources and special collections, but just over eighty years ago the entirety of UNT’s music collection fit inside a single storage closet. The music library’s rapid development may be largely attributed to… Read more »
Local Archives, Global History: Post 4 by Chandler Hall Many famed musicians have passed through the music program at the University of North Texas (UNT), but has anyone ever heard of UNT’s accountant-to-organist pipeline? One alumnus who came down it was Robert R. Miller, who graduated from what was then the North Texas State College (NTSC) in 1950 with a bachelor’s degree in business administration. Boxes in UNT Library’s small Robert… Read more »
Local Archives, Global History: Post 3 by Robbie Segars By the early 1960s, the Country Music Association decided to shed its negative “hillbilly” image and market country music to a sophisticated blue-collared audience (Pecknold 2007, 135). This initiative caused a cultural shift in the genre aimed at promoting a clean-cut image. By the early 1970s, however, a… Read more »
Local Archives, Global History: Post 2 by Camila Zimmerman Music boxes are charming devices that play some of our favorite tunes. Perhaps they remind us of an event in our past or recall the person who gave it to us. But music boxes are more than just entertainment or… Read more »
Local Archives, Global History: Post 1 by Dr. Rebecca Geoffroy-Schwinden As pandemic lockdowns settled into place during the spring of 2020 many scholars felt profound disappointment as their summer research plans disintegrated amidst the stressors of illness, upended family life, and disrupted work routines. Historians in particular grieved the personal loss of a favorite job-related activity, archival research, and faced the anxiety that came along with a year-long archival exile, which threatened to set back publications and possibly even hiring and promotion opportunities for years to come. Sitting in my backyard… Read more »
