Hello Again!
I promised last week that, as I continue to process the Joseph Clokey Papers, I would share any treasures I discovered along the way. Well, it just so happens that I’ve already found something that I consider to be a pretty neat little piece of American history. And in a music collection no less!
Part of the joy of working with archival materials is that you really never know what you’re going to find. I encounter this all the time, both as an end-user researcher who works with archival materials and as an archival fellow getting hands-on experience at CCEPS. The thrill of discovery came no later for me than in the initial phase of digging into a collection: the survey. During an archival survey, archivists sort through the entirety of the collection to get a sense of its scope, content, and condition, making notes to themselves as they go and, in general, just sort of “feeling out” the materials. When a repository acquires a collection, the archivists have a general sense of what it contains, but the specific items can sometimes be unexpected, and often in very delightful ways.
Jospeh Clokey worked as a music educator at a time when our country was at war. The repercussions of World War II on American students and teachers is reflected even in their classroom materials and something as innocuous as a notebook shows us the extent of the war effort. This page was included in the back of a string-bound notebook that contained a portion of Clokey’s lecture notes:
Something that we take for granted today, metal-ringed binders, were untenable during World War II, as the metal was essential to the manufacturing of military weapons, artillery, war machines, and supplies. I didn’t expect to learn about the effects of war on American education in a collection dominated by sacred choral music and opera scores, but there you have it! This is the stuff of history, people!
I also took a scan of the notebook’s inside cover . . . notice anything missing from the Pledge of Allegiance? (Here’s a clue: The missing phrase was not added to the pledge until June 14, 1954.)
Until next time!
Mikael