Tulane University's
Louisiana Research Collection

Tulane University is pleased to host the Society of American Archivists workshop, “Real World Reference: Moving Beyond Theory,” June 20 in Howard-Tilton Memorial Library. We especially wanted to host this particular workshop because it will focus on practical, day-to-day aspects of providing archival reference, managing an archival reading room, overseeing reading room security, and advocating for better user services. Those are all basic archival practices we each have to perform every single day. This workshop will therefore offer techniques, ideas, and recommendations that should directly benefit our work in a useful, practical manner. The workshop will be taught by Kathy Marquis, Head of Public Services at the Albany County Public Library in Laramie, Wyoming. She was previously the Head of Reference and Access Services at the Bentley Historical Library, a reference archivist at the Minnesota Historical Society, and Head of Reference at MIT’s Institute Archives and Special Collectio...

Collections of personal papers of all eras may be keenly sentimental. The items which have been preserved by individuals and their descendants provide hints to the values, social styles and sensibilities of their time. John Valentine Veazie, nicknamed Johnny Veazie, was a baseball player from New Orleans, who played on various minor league teams across Louisiana, Mississippi, and Georgia during the early twentieth century. The keepsakes in the John V. Veazie papers (Manuscripts Collection 113) are revealing not only of the personal and professional life of one man, but also describe the leisure and entertainment activities of the day, such as dances, movies, vaudeville and horse races and other sporting events. Included are numerous letters concerning Veazie’s baseball career, and many others from family, friends, and sweethearts, while he was on the road. Included are holiday greeting cards, a photograph, telegrams, and printed portraits. To learn more about social sta...

Judah Benjamin’s Paris accident Judah P. Benjamin, the former Confederate Secretary of State, fell from a moving tramcar in Paris in May, 1880. While it is known that his injuries were severe, the extent of these injuries and their immediate impact upon Benjamin are made clear in a letter of Benjamin’s to Jefferson Davis. The letter, dated December 16, 1880, is within the Louisiana Research Collection at Tulane University. Responding to the former President’s request for information about Civil War interviews with General Johnston, Benjamin apologised for the lateness of his response. The delay, he explained, was caused by his severe accident which caused ‘pains so acute that for months I could not get an hour’s sleep without the aid of powerful narcotics’. It had been, he wrote, a great effort to undertake only a part of his legal work in England, an effort undertaken only to prevent the entire break down of his professional connection. written by Catharine MacMillan Reader in Legal...

Today marks the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War, when Confederate forces began bombardment of Fort Sumter, South Carolina. What ensued was a five year long war that forever changed American history, and shaped every facet of life as we know it today, from music, to baseball, to medicine, civil rights, women's rights, international relations and military strategy. The Louisiana Research Collection (LaRC) contains many major Civil War archival and print holdings. Some of our American Civil War archival holdings include the papers of Jefferson Davis, the Gettysburg letters of Robert E. Lee, the papers of Albert Sidney Johnston, a strong set of Stonewall Jackson's papers, and numerous collections of papers, photographs, memoirs and diaries from individual soldiers. Recently, LaRC has made a special effort to acquire materials documenting the experience of Union soldiers serving in the Gulf region. These letters and diaries provide eyewitness accounts of what lif...

The Spring 2011 issue of the Louisiana Research Collection e-newsletter has been distributed and is also available here , through our website, along with the earlier issues. Among several other topics, the new LaRC facebook page is announced.

Soldiers’ letters contain unintentional, first-hand accounts of military history, and they have great power and authenticity even when the authors are not in any way famous. They may range in style from the conversational to the formal, and may be clearly handwritten or composed in a nearly illegible, ornate fashion. Here are a few of the archival collections among LaRC’s holdings which contain original letters of the Civil War era. • USA: Alfred A. Parmenter papers, 1861-1862, 1962-1963. Manuscripts Collection 690. This collection consists of the Civil War correspondence of Union soldier, Alfred A. Parmenter. Twentieth-century typed transcriptions accompany most of the letters. Also included are biographical research notes, printed material, and copies of official certificates produced in the 1960s, concerning Parmenter and his regiment. Alfred A. Parmenter (1836-1880) was a musician in the 26th Regiment, Massachusetts Voluntary Infantry. His parents were Horace and Betsey Parmenter o...