ON THE SECOND DAY AFTER IRENE — ALL IS WELL (AND DRY) IN THE RIHS LIBRARY

As we enter Hurricane Season in Providence we count ourselves lucky to have seen Hurricane  IRENE pass by without causing much more damage other than trees down and power outages.  A look back in time to September 21, 1938 and we can begin to understand better what few people remember—the destruction and human suffering that came with the Hurricane on that date.

Front page of the Providence Journal Sept. 22, 1938

Our Library Newspaper Collection helps us understand the story of the Great Hurricane of 1938.  The Library is the repository for the Rhode Island Newspaper Project and houses a microfilm collection of almost every Rhode Island newspaper ever published.  To find out what newspaper titles exist for a particular time and place for Rhode Island and beyond search  Library of Congress Chronicling America  Historic American Newspapers.

A glance at the headlines in the Providence Journal  of Tuesday September 20, 1938, the day before the tragedy, shows how unprepared Rhode Island was for the approach of  the storm that was making its way towards Florida before heading up the East Coast.

 “FLORIDA CLEARS DECKS TO FACE HURRICANE WHICH MAY NOT COME, Weather Bureau Reports Severe Storm Sweeping Toward Coast with 75 Mile-an-Hour Winds Has Changed Its Course” –Providence Journal 20 Sept 1938

The next day, September 21, 1938, the front page of the Providence Journal announced what all the readers in the area already knew – nature can be overpowering and human life fragile in the path of a hurricane.

This extra edition of the Providence Journal was printed on the presses of a rival paper, The Woonsocket Call, because of the flooding and power outage in the City of Providence.

To research other monster storms in Rhode Island’s history, The Great Hurricane of 1815,  CAROL 31 August 1954 and BOB 19 August 1991, visit the RIHS Library to find newspapers, photographs, books, oral histories and film on your topic.  The image below is from a book in the Library’s Print Collection titled  The Complete Historical Record of New England’s Stricken Area September 21, 1938  published by The Woonsocket Call (Providence, RI, 1938).

Images from The Woonsocket Call photo essay of 1938

The 1938 photo caption reads as follows: [left] “EAST PROVIDENCE, R.I. The storm took heavy toll of shipping as it piled up scores of ships like the Standard Oil Tanker shown here which lies battered and broken on the rocky Rhode Island shores – Providence Journal”  [right] “WARREN, RI. The ship “G. H. Church” snuggled between a gas tank and a telegraph poll. Note warning to boil water before using. –Providence Journal.”

NEXT WEEK  the Collections Blog will have details on Hannah Farber’s upcoming talk about Rhode Island’s maritime insurance industry—  COMMERCE, THE NATION AND THE ATLANTIC: American Marine Insurers in the Napoleonic  Era –  at 6:30 pm on 21 Sept 2011 at the RIHS Library, 121 Hope Street., Providence, RI.

– KPC

New Policy! Cameras allowed starting July 1 at the RIHS Library!

Credit: BigTallGuy, from Flickr

New Policy! Cameras allowed starting July 1 at the RIHS Library!

The Rhode Island Historical Society has in its mission a kind of paradox. Our responsibilities are twofold: to PRESERVE the Collection, and to provide ACCESS to said incredible Collection.  These two goals sometimes appear to stand in direct opposition to each other, as with our policy that certain  items cannot be photocopied because of their age, fragility, or binding.

However, in the interest of increasing access and ease of research, we are instituting a new policy at the library.  Starting JULY 1st, 2011, we will allow researchers to bring cameras into the library.  Many materials in our collections are too fragile for a photocopying machine but can be photographed without damage.  Researchers will now be allowed, in certain circumstances, to take photographs of our materials with their own cameras to make research copies.

There are some limits, of course. Researchers wishing to use their personal cameras must be current Members of the Rhode Island Historical Society and must purchase a Camera Pass (good for one day). All materials to be photographed must be pre-approved.  And of course, in accordance with copyright law, just like our photocopy policy, photos taken of historical materials are for study purposes only, and may not be published or exhibited in print or online. For that, we have a Rights & Reproductions division. We welcome you to contact us for more details.

Chronicles of Brunonia

A fascinating collection of student-produced historical narratives (a number of them using materials from the Rhode Island Historical Society’s collections) are available at Brown University’s Chronicles of Brunonia website. The narratives are the final product of work done by students in Beth Taylor’s creative nonfiction writing workshops, and they draw their inspiration from primary-source materials at institutions like the Historical Society and Brown’s John Hay Library. The following is a list of stories that make use of RIHS materials (with précis provided by the authors):

• “Charlotte Perkins Gilman; letters to Martha” (Abigail Rabinowitz)
  Starting in 1878, teenage friends on the East Side of Providence
  become inseparable, then go their separate ways when Martha weds. But even as Charlotte gains fame as the writer of The Yellow Wallpaper and as an activist for women’s rights, she never forgets Martha.
• “Little Caesar(historical narrative)” (Austin Kennedy)
  The Diary of Giuseppe Zambarano offers a glimpse into the life of a
  young immigrant from Italy in the late 1800s, who builds a business
  and family on Federal Hill in Providence.
• “Lucy and the Chinese bandits” (Meryl Rothstein)
  Lucy Truman Aldrich, born in 1869 to a prominent Rhode Island family, travels to China in 1923 and is kidnapped by bandits.
• “Miss Edna Krouner at Vassar in 1908″ (Elizabeth Loeb)
  Miss Edna Krouner, of Wakefield, Rhode Island, embarks on her first
  year at Vassar College and learns about everything from crushes to
  Marxism and the Vote for Women.
• “Mutiny! A high seas misadventure” (John Sheehy)
  A tale of piracy aboard the Vineyard, a brig, that set sail from New
  Orleans to Philadelphia on November 9, 1830.
• “Providence’s Black Chinese; a love story” (Luke Tsai)
  In 1901, Chung Yik, one of the city’s “best-known Chinese
  restauranteurs” and his wife, Cynthia Monki, survived the burning of
  their Charles Street apartment.
• “Searching for home; accounts of a sea captain’s wife” (Stephanie Bernhard)
  Cynthia Sprague Congdon’s tales of being aboard ship then recording
  her life in East Greenwich, R.I. when she received word that her
  husband was lost at sea during a storm
• “States of mind; the founding of Rhode Island’s first hospital“
  (Alex Eichler)
  The story of the founding of Butler Hospital in Providence, R.I. or,
  as it was originally called, Butler Hospital for the Insane.
• “Stories from the Good Doctor’s farm; colonial southern Rhode Island“
  (Alison Klayman)
  For a short period in the mid-18th century, the MacSparren farm
  flourished at the hands of an assortment of free, enslaved and
  indentured workers. In such a small-scale plantation, typical of
  colonial southern Rhode Island, the social hierarchy was constantly
  repositioning itself to accommodate emerging colonial ideas about
  race, sex, and religion. This story, based on the diary of Reverend
  MacSparren and other historical documents, imagines the personal
  relationships between those who worked and lived in such close quarters.
• “The things they planted” (Molly Jacobson)
  Almost four hundred years ago, Roger Williams and his companions
  paddled down the Seekonk River and landed on the Rhode Island shore. Surrounded by wilderness, with no outside aid and scarce resources, these first settlers slowly raised their farms and homesteads, scavenged for food, and drafted laws for their community.
• “The vampire disease” (Victoria Chao)
  At the turn of the century, a deadly disease swept Europe and the
  Eastern United States. In the span of four years, George Brown, a
  farmer in rural Rhode Island, lost his wife and two daughters to the
  disease. Faced with the prospect of losing his only son, George is
  convinced to seek and destroy the alleged vampire responsible for
  these deaths…
• “Waiting, 1938″ (Alice Lovejoy)
  The story of the famous hurricane of 1938 as revealed by the
  meticulous notes of David Patten, managing editor of the Providence
  Evening Bulletin at the time.
• “The wreck of the Bark Montgomery; an East Greenwich family at home and at sea” (Margo Irvin)
  The story of a storm at sea from both the point of view of the
  captain, John Congdon, and his wife on shore, Cynthia.