Topics vary widely, from historical publications, such as Public school buildings of the city of Philadelphia from 1853 to 1867 by Franklin Davenport Edmunds to the practical publications, covering topics such as the “art of lettering“, an 1868 treatise on house painting, and wood fibre carvings for trim and mantels.

For more titles, please visit the University of Maryland, College Park’s Internet Archive collection.

Images from Wood fibre carvings / Decorators Supply Co. (1900)

These media guides follow the Maryland Terrapin Men’s Basketball team from their first days in Cole through the national championship season of 2002 and up to 2009, when paper guides were no longer printed. Packed with pictures, player and coach profiles, and tons of historical information, they are a treasure trove for the true Terrapin fan. Follow the careers of Terp greats Len Elmore, Tom McMillen, Len Bias and Joe Smith, or read the game-by-game summaries and relive past glories.

Digitization staff digitized these papers according to UMD Libraries Best Practices, and then used Adobe Acrobat software to create PDF versions of the papers, which are now full-text searchable and available online via the Internet Archive. The easiest way to browse these papers is by viewing the finding aid to the Phi Mu records.

Local landmarks explored by these students in their initiation papers include places such as Muirkirk Iron Works, the Thomas Viaduct, and the University of Maryland’s Rossborough Inn.

These wonderful research papers provide excellent documentation of some of Maryland’s valuable engineering history and architecture.

The Thomas Viaduct, from The Thomas Viaduct at Relay Maryland, by J. E. Revelle, 1925

Women on the Border: Maryland Perspectives of the Civil War

Maryland Room Gallery, Hornbake Library, University of Maryland, College Park

August 31, 2011 – July 15, 2012
Regular gallery hours: Mon-Fri 10am-5pm
Additional hours during academic semesters: Wed 5pm-8pm & Sun 1pm-6pm.

This gallery exhibition examines women’s experiences, contributions, and perspectives of the sectional conflict in the border state of Maryland. Although the great majority of women did not participate in the battles fought during the war, women, as half of the population of the United States, did experience and make contributions to the war. Women were witnesses, writers, soldiers, spies, nurses, cooks, laundresses, supporters, mourners, and organizers. Maryland’s situation as a border state tested loyalties and sharply divided friends and neighbors, perhaps more than any other state in the conflict. Women in Maryland tried to find a voice for themselves, their state, and their country as everything seemed to be torn apart around them.

The exhibition will feature unique manuscript, photograph, sheet music, and rare book materials from the University Libraries Special Collections. For more information please contact Elizabeth Novara, Curator, Historical Manuscripts: enovara@umd.edu and 301-314-2712; or Lauren Brown, Curator, Archives & Manuscripts, lbrown3@umd.edu and 301-405-9059.

A College Divided: Maryland Agricultural College and the Civil War

Audrey Armistead Ruckert Reception Foyer, Hornbake Library, First Floor,University of Maryland, College Park

August 31, 2011 – July 15, 2012
Regular foyer hours: Mon-Thurs 8am-10pm, Fri 8am-6pm, Sat 12noon-5pm, Sun 1pm-10pm

The American Civil War had a significant impact on the Maryland Agricultural College, as the University of Maryland, College Park, campus was then known. The Maryland General Assembly granted the college its charter on March 6, 1856, and MAC opened its doors to students on October 5, 1859, less than two years before the conflict began. Troops from both sides camped on the grounds of the college in 1864, and many of the MAC’s students, faculty, trustees, stockholders, and presidents, both during the war and following the surrender, were linked to the conflict in some way.

The MAC community produced foot soldiers, officers, spies, and Rebel sympathizers, as well as defendants in major legal actions relating to the war. A College Divided will trace the most significant stories about the participation of members of the Maryland Agricultural College community in the Civil War via a series of individual posters illustrated with images and documents drawn from the University of Maryland Archives and numerous historical repositories across the United States.

For more information please contact Anne Turkos, University Archivist, 301-405-9060 and aturkos@umd.edu; or Malissa Ruffner, Research Assistant, University Archives, mruffner@umd.edu.

These state documents, which span the 1930s through the 1980s, contain valuable historical data about projects and resources in Maryland. The Maryland General Assembly created the first state planning commission in 1933, to coordinate Depression-era public works programs of the National Resources Planning Board and the Works Projects Administration.  During its first ten years, the Commission developed one of the first Capital Improvements Programs in the country, a mapping system covering the state, and a program to provide medical care for the indigent.  The first report issued by the Commission was entitled Certain financial aspects of local governments in Maryland (1934), and contains an explanation of the Commission’s purpose. Other interesting titles include Report on men’s clothing industry (1936) and Report on the fertilizer industry (1938).
In 1959, the Commission became State Planning Department, and broadened its  area of concern to include the state’s water resources and the protection, development, and maintenance of Assateague Island.  Reports from this era include Maryland’s Nursing Home Plan (1959) and a Report on emotionally disturbed children and adolescents (1963). For more information on the history of state planning in Maryland, please see the Maryland Department of Planning website.

These items are all available at the Internet Archive.

Images and captions from the Well-Dressed Book exhibit are now available via the Digital Collections Flickr account, digitalcollectionsum.

View Slideshow
From the description: Books as physical objects are significant reminders of popular tastes in the material culture of the 19th Century. An evolution in these tastes and the emergence of new styles over time are hallmarks of the cloth bindings on display.

Lizzie Claire, or, The Last Penny, Philadelphia: American Sunday School Union. Binding Description: rust cloth binding with black and gold stamping Binding Decoration Description: rust linen pattern cloth stamped in black on front cover with daffodils and top and bottom runner, spine gold stamped with title Endpaper Description: brown, linen paper

“The Well-Dressed Book” pays particular attention to the binding industry in 19th-Century Baltimore, an important secondary center of book production that has not received the attention it deserves.

Report of the State Librarian Llewellyn Boyle, 1860 (http://www.archive.org/details/reportofstatelib1860boyl). Note that library funding was an issue 150 years ago, and the Internet was not to blame! “The office is sadly deficient in all the standard books of Science, Art, Literature, History, and in fact, in all the more important publications since 1851. Few or no miscellaneous books have been added to the Library since that date, the chief cause being, the Library augmentation fund not being adequate for the purchase of such books.”

The Report of the Board of Police of the City of Baltimore, 1861 (http://www.archive.org/details/reportofboardofp1861boar). In this volume, Charles Howard, president of the Baltimore Board of Police, reports on the famous Baltimore Riots of April 1861, when Union troops from Massachusetts and Pennsylvania arrived in Baltimore and attempted to change trains. Pro-South civilians in Baltimore attempted to stop the troops from reaching Washington: “obstructions were placed on the track in the City, which stopped the progress of the remainder… Missiles were nothwithstanding thrown at the troops, and some of them were injured, their assailants were fired upon, and in some instances, with fatal effect.”

There is increasing interest in the life and work of Freytag-Loringhoven, commonly known as the Baroness. Described by The Little Review editor Margaret Anderson as “perhaps the only figure of our generation who deserves the epithet extraordinary,” (Anderson, My Thirty Years War 177) Freytag-Loringhoven published, between 1918 and 1929, approximately forty of her poems in little magazines such as Broom, Liberator, The Little Review, transatlantic review, transition, and the single issue of New York Dada. Born Else Hildegard Ploetz on July 12, 1874, in Swinemunde on the Baltic Sea, she ran away to Berlin in 1892, where she became involved in the Bohemian theatre circles. In 1910, she came to the United States to join Felix Paul Greve, then known as Frederick Phillip Grove, whom she had married in 1907. Subsequently abandoned by Grove, by 1913 she had moved to New York City, where she met and married the penniless Baron Leo von Freytag-Loringhoven. It was in New York, after the Baron had returned to Germany during the war and subsequently committed suicide, that Freytag-Loringhoven became entrenched in the Greenwich Village artist movement and began her brief and successful writing career as “the Baroness.”

The Libraries’ Digital Collections also feature two additional Freytag-Loringhoven resources, “Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven Digital Library” and “In Transition: Selected Poems by the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven.” The first of these was the work of University of Maryland graduate students in English and Library and Information Studies. The second began as part of Tanya Clement’s dissertation entitled The Makings of Digital Modernism, completed at the University of Maryland in 2009.

(Submitted by Dr. Ruth M. Alvarez, August 2010)

Draft from “Matter Level Perspective,” circa 1923-1927.  See other drafts in the folder (Series III, Box 1, Folder 40): http://hdl.handle.net/1903.1/6623, or a textual interpretation by Tanya Clement here: http://www.lib.umd.edu/digital/transition/poem.jsp?pid=umd:55442)

The University of Maryland Libraries have digitized the images, which are now available via Digital Collections@UM.

	Stone building with four large windows on the side in the snow-covered field, before or after the explosion(?), circa 1945
	The same building after explosion, with the roof collapsed and the windows broken, mountains in the background, August 1945

Several rare books from the University of Maryland’s holdings, documenting architectural history and theory, have been digitized and are now available in their entirety at the Internet Archive. Italian, English, French and German architectural standard texts of the 16th-, 18th- and 19th-Century have been selected to enhance the architectural holdings available free on the web.

This group, from the holdings of the Architecture Library include works by Wilkins, Durand, Pugin, Viollet-le-Duc, Gurlitt, and a hand-pressed 16th-Century variant to Vetruvius’ Ten Books with original woodcuts. Giovanni Antonio Rusconi (1520-1587) was an Italian architect, author, engineer, painter, architectural theorist and theoretican. His I dieci libri d’architettvra includes his own woodcut illustrations and summarizes the precepts of Marcus Pollio Vitruvius. William Wilkins (1778–1839), architect, classical scholar and archaeologist, published his research on both Classical and Gothic architecture, and became one of the leading figures in the English Greek Revival of the early 1800s. Augustus Welby North Pugin (1812-1852), an English architectural theorist, is best known for the Gothic Revival. The volumes in this collection were standard references for Gothic architecture until the mid-20th-Century. The French architect, Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand (1760-1834), was an important figure in Neoclassicism and taught at the famous École Royale Polytechnique. Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814-1879), also a Gothic Revivalist, managed the major 19th-Century restorations of medieval churches in France. His theories of rational architectural design linked the revivalism of the Romantic period to 20th-century Functionalism and influenced the architects of the Chicago School. Cornelius Gurlitt (1850-1938) was a German architect, art historian, educator, rector of the Dresden University of Technology, and founder of the Bund Deutscher Architekten (”Association of German Architects”). He is noted as the father of art historical research of the Baroque period, including conservation of monuments, thus his Palladio is considered a seminal text.

• Précis des leçons d’architecture données à l’École polytechnique
• Partie graphique des cours d’architecture faits à l’École royale polytechnique depuis sa réorganisation; précédée d’un sommaire des leçons relatives à ce nouveau travail
• Ornaments of the XVth and XVIth centuries. Ancient timber houses at Rouen, Caen, Bauvais, &c., Gothic furniture of the XVth century. Designs for gold & silver ornaments, and designs for iron & brass-work in the style of the XVth & XVIth centuries
• Photographs from sketches by Augustus Welby N. Pugin, Volume 1
  
• Photographs from sketches by Augustus Welby N. Pugin, Volume 2
  
• Types d’architecture gothique, empruntés aux édifices les plus remarquables construits en Angleterre pendant les XII, XIII, XIV, XV, et XVI siècles, Volume 1
  
• Types d’architecture gothique, empruntés aux édifices les plus remarquables construits en Angleterre pendant les XII, XIII, XIV, XV, et XVI siècles, Volume 2
  
• Types d’architecture gothique, empruntés aux édifices les plus remarquables construits en Angleterre pendant les XII, XIII, XIV, XV, et XVI siècles, Volume 3
  
• I dieci libri d’architettvra
• Histoire d’un hôtel de ville et d’une cathédrale;
• The city of Carcassonne
• Histoire d’un dessinateur, comment on apprend à dessiner;
• Histoire d’une forteresse; texte et dessins
• Andrea Palladio
• The civil architecture of Vitruvius. Comprising those books of the author which relate to the public and private edifices of the ancients