CCEPS – Page 27 – Out of the Box

February 17, 2015February 1, 2025 by cgu-sarac

The IAC Files

So we are still moving along with the IAC and Nag Hammadi expedition files – this past week we’ve really made progress with the administrative stuff and are finding some really cool stuff in the collection. Jason found a picture of Henry Kissinger picking his nose in the file about his visit to the IAC, and while I didn’t find anything quite so tabloid-ready there have been some very interesting finds!

The IAC has extensive photographs from over the years, among these are photos of the various artifacts that came to their museum. There are many examples of antiquarian coinage that makes you want to jazz up U.S. currency some. More snarling lions, mermaids and owls! It looks like we’ll be spending a lot of time with these photographs, putting them in sleeves and getting them organized. We’ve also got maps to measure and newspapers, slides, and audio lectures to itemized, so plenty left to go. Next week I’ll have some photos up of those coins and anything else I find, maybe I’ll come across my nose-pickin’ Kissinger.

Sara

February 16, 2015February 1, 2025 by hmc-tamaras

Ethel’s Diaries, Continued!

This week, I continued flagging all of Ethel’s diaries. Each diary has a flag now, but some still need to be turned sideways, and one box still needs volume numbers. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find any of the missing diaries, so there are a few gaps of a few months each in what is otherwise an impeccable record. Ethel wrote almost daily entries for decades.

The fourth box of diaries was only about one-third full, and I could already see that the diaries were beginning to slump. They have now been moved into a (temporary) new home, pictured below, where they fit much better.

Ethel also had a few ledgers, in which she recorded daily expenses and occasionally her income. There are only three or four ledgers, and they are not as consistent as her diary entries. One of the ledgers is pictured below. Her ledgers could be useful for someone who wanted to study what people bought in the mid-twentieth century or the prices of such things.

February 16, 2015February 1, 2025 by hmc-tamaras

Diving into Ethel’s Diaries

This week, I spent time flagging Ethel’s many diaries. Each diary needs a flag that has the volume number and the date range. There are about 130 of them total, I think. They start in 1893, are written somewhat sporadically until 1907, then very consistently from 1907 until 1968.

I’ve probably flagged about 90 out of the 130, so this task is to be continued next week. You can see my progress in the photos below. I still need to turn all the flags sideways, since having them stick up means the shoebox top doesn’t close all the way. It was convenient to be able to see the previous flag as I was going through this process, though. I also need to fill in the volume numbers in the first box, as I was hoping some of the missing diaries would turn up (there are a few obvious breaks in the chronology where one diary should be), but no such luck so far.

Trying to read Ethel’s handwriting (see photo below) has been a bit of an adventure, even when all I need to find is the date. However, due to Ethel’s diligence in keeping her diaries, I was able to look at the first entry of the next diary in order to find what the last date in the previous diary should be, which made it a bit easier.

She was religious about recording the weather; that’s how she starts each entry. She then writes about what she did that day, which often includes visiting friends and reading. Sometimes there is a list of purchases on the last few pages of a diary.

Below is a sampling of some of the notebooks she used. They are all different shapes and sizes and styles, but she only ever used a pencil to write.

Until next week!

February 16, 2015September 15, 2021 by cgu-jasonh

Time Flies By

Something that we tend to forget about time is that it can slip right by you when not paying attention. Paying attention to time is all I have been doing while processing the IAC Nag Hammadi collection. But not in the same way that people do while sitting in a classroom or at work. I have been paying close attention to the time that has been captured inside of these files and boxes.

This past week I have been processing the IAC’s museum records. The files contained item lists for all things that were once displayed, including the famous Dead Sea Scrolls. It was a featured exhibit here on the Claremont Colleges campus on June 12, 1965. The tremendous amount of work that went into making the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibits a possibility for the public to see. This included the shipment of materials to Claremont and the delicate process of unpacking priceless materials and to present them in a non-objective manner. The entire exhibit was considered an incredible success with over 1,700 people visiting on the first day alone and a total of 51,852 persons for the whole time. A memo was drafted that gave an amazingly detailed report of everything that went on; including the very few complaints and numerous praises from museum goers, a trip to Disneyland for the Curator of the Palestine Archaeological Museum, and praise for the LA County Sheriffs who were able to handle the large crowds in the summer heat with a smile.

Another interesting find within the Museum records was a piece of cloth. Now this is no ordinary piece of cloth that we would wear. It was a piece of cloth that wrapped the Nag Hammadi codices, meaning it is nearly two thousand years old. The small piece (now pieces) was placed in an Egyptian newspaper with Arabic writing on it. Now there is quite a bit of cloth dust as much of it has disintegrated due to the long passage of time that the lack of preservation efforts. My part is to now find what to do with this random material from a time I have only read about in books. I am excited to see where this all goes!

Thanks for reading!

Jason

February 9, 2015September 15, 2021 by cgu-jasonh

First Insight

My first
week as a CCEPS fellow has ended as quickly as my second week begins and what a
week it has been so far! The enthusiasm I have for this work is a benchmark by
how I will be continuing through the weeks until my time here is up. What I
have learned so far and what I still have to learn excite me beyond the words
necessary to write a short blog. Lessons learned in my Archives 310 class last
year are now being applied, tested, and refined through the incredible
opportunity of processing a collection first hand. This collection in
particular, the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity Records, have been
fascinating so far, especially the level of details and records that came with
the Nag Hammadi collection. It is an amazing collection of correspondence,
pictures, maps, and lectures that all describe in remarkable detail the efforts
of many to make these ancient texts come to life for dignitaries and normal people
alike to enjoy. In one of the dozens of picture folders that I went through, I
found an impressive set of photographs showing the visit of one dignitary to
the small world of Claremont. That individual was Henry Kissinger, captured in a
candid moment that made it seem as though he were picking his nose. This
contrast of this imposing world figure and the candid nature of a man looking
at a museum exhibit is exactly what makes me extremely happy and thankful to be
a CCEPS fellow and for the ability to find the extraordinary hidden in the
files of archival collections.

February 4, 2015September 15, 2021 by hmc-tamaras

My First CCEPS Blog Post!

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Hello there! I’m Tamara Savage, a senior at Harvey Mudd and
a CCEPS Fellow. I’m double majoring in engineering and literature, and I’m excited
for the opportunities this fellowship will offer me to exercise my more bookish
muscles. I’m a total newbie–I spend a lot of time at the library and I’ve been
to Special Collections before, but I’ve never done any archival work. So I have
a lot to learn, and I’m looking forward to it!

I’m processing the library’s Ethel M. Reed papers, a
collection of materials from a local Claremont woman, Ethel M. Reed, and her
daughter, Nancy Reed. From my preliminary survey, their family documents
stretch as far back as a property deed from 1811 and contain material from as recently
as the 1970s. A large portion of Ethel’s writing is in the form of diaries–boxes
and boxes of them, and she wrote in them remarkably consistently.

There are also letters, postcards, school materials,
artwork, and scrapbook pages. While I haven’t looked at everything very closely
yet, there are a lot of pictures of cats in the scrapbooks (look out for a
future blog post all about this–I love cats).

As exciting as cat pictures are, what I’m looking forward to
the most is perusing Ethel’s unpublished manuscript, A California Childhood. It’s her account of her childhood spent
here in Claremont and environs, and I think it contains a look into what she did,
the people she knew, and the city of Claremont itself.

After completing my preliminary survey, I’m now ready to
start actually processing the collection. I think I’m going to start with the
diaries first. They need to be flagged with acid-free paper (always acid-free!)
with a volume number and a date range (which Ethel kept very carefully, so no
worries there). I’m looking forward to it!

December 19, 2014July 29, 2022 by chasew

CCEPS Finale!

Hello everyone! It’s officially my last shift as a CCEPS Fellow, and I can’t believe how fast the time has gone. I really feel like my first day was just a few weeks ago! Regardless, I’m excited to report that the Nag Hammadi collection has come so far from where it was when I first started processing it. It’s extremely close to being available for researchers!

In fact, my fellowship has reminded me just how extraordinary it is that I can even say the collection is nearly ready for study! Since this is my last blog post, I thought it would be useful to explain how the Nag Hammadi library came to be….it’s a story almost too incredible to be believed.

It’s no secret that Christian history has some less than stellar periods, and one of those occurred around the time that the Roman emperor Constantine converted to Christianity during the fourth century CE. This had some enormous benefits – namely, that the Roman Empire stopped persecuting Christians. Well, most Christians. It just so happens that Emperor Constantine’s conversion coincided with the Christian Church’s efforts to determine and enforce standards about who and what could be considered “Christian.” Thus, the categories of “orthodox,” and “heterodox” came to play a much bigger role in the life of the faith than they previously had.

What does this have to do with the Nag Hammadi library? Quite a bit, as it turns out. As you may recall from my previous blog posts, the Nag Hammadi texts are heavily influenced by a set of beliefs generally identified as being under the umbrella of gnosticism. Gnosticism meant many different things to many different people at this time. As a general rule, though, most gnostics were concerned with finding enlightenment via a path of inner knowledge. Unfortunately, their mystical beliefs eventually came to be considered “heterodox” by the official Roman Church, and gnostics were in turn labeled “heretics.” And because gnostic texts were also heretical, the Church proceeded to destroy many of them.

Scholars of Christianity knew that this period of ideological purging had taken place. However, until the Nag Hammadi texts were discovered, they thought that the Church’s persecution of gnostic Christians had resulted in the complete destruction of all gnostic writings. So how did the Nag Hammadi library survive? It’s not quite clear, but according to scholar Elaine Pagels, “in Upper Egypt, someone; possibly a monk from a nearby monastery of St. Pachomius, took the banned books and hid them from destruction – in the jar where they remained buried for almost 1,600 years” (you can read the entire excerpt from Pagel’s book, The Gnostic Gospels, here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/religion/story/pagels.html). After being hidden by this determined desert soul, the codices remained untouched until a lucky Arab peasant stumbled upon them in December 1945. Their (re-)discovery in turn allowed scholars to begin the slow process of re-constructing and analyzing the texts…which is how Dr. James Robinson of Claremont Graduate School became involved…which is how Dr. Robinson’s Nag Hammadi Codices project papers ended up, upon his retirement, in Claremont’s Special Collections…which is how I ended up helping archive the Nag Hammadi photographs!

It’s an amazing story, isn’t it? I have been so privileged as a CCEPS Fellow to have a small part in the the incredible journey taken by the Nag Hammadi codices – and to help preserve their story for future generations of souls curious to learn more about the fascinating and mysterious history of gnosticism.

Many thanks for following our blog over the last semester. I hope you learned a few things about the history we help protect in Honnold/Mudd Special Collections, and have maybe even begun thinking about pursuing archiving yourself! In fact, if you’d like to learn more about becoming an archivist, I’ll leave you with a couple of great articles filled with tips and advice on how to do that: see here (http://www2.archivists.org/profession) and here (http://www.archivesnext.com/?p=2849)! Again, thank you – and happy reading!

December 2, 2014July 29, 2022 by phoebeh

The Final Weeks

Hi Everyone!

It is the beginning of the end. I am just finishing up my time as a CCEPS Fellow. So far, I have had a fantastic time learning about archival work. I have worked on 7 different collections, each with a variety of materials. I have learned many ways to preserve items and use the most out of the resources at hand. Most importantly, I’ve had a great time working here. Before I depart at the end of the semester, I wanted to share a little bit about what I learned when arranging a collection.

1) Keep in mind the researcher. The researcher will be using these collections, so arrange it in such a way that it presents the important information upfront.

2) Keep it simple. Again, researchers will be using the collection. Make it easy to follow and arrange it in a way that is logical.

3) Try to conserve your resources. If two photographs can fit in one sleeve of mylar comfortably, just cut the mylar in half! But don’t cut the photographs…

4) Pay attention to the details. There are A LOT of little details, but if you are consistently double checking your work, it’ll save quite a bit of time in the future.

5) Learn about the materials. The collections are all very interesting! When arranging collections, it becomes so much more interesting if you know more about it. There is so much information to learn!

6) Take care of yourself! Make sure you either eat before or plan a lunch break because you’re not allowed to bring food into the archives. The food may ruin documents. In addition, bring a sweater just in case! The archives are kept a little bit cooler to help preserve materials.

7) It may sound cheesy, but have fun! This is a great learning experience and opportunity!

I am so grateful for being a part of the CCEPS program. I have been able to learn so much in such a short period of time. I have never had the opportunity to work this closely with so many primary sources. It truly is a fantastic opportunity and I would recommend it to anyone!

Phoebe

November 20, 2014February 7, 2025 by phoebeh

When Life Gives You Lemons…

Hi Everyone!

This week I started a new collection filled with over 80 citrus labels. Many of these labels are quite rare and were generously donated by Alice Oglesby. The most interesting aspect of these labels from citrus boxes is that the majority of them are from Claremont and Pomona. I am currently a senior at one of the Claremont Colleges, so I have spent quite a bit of time in the area, but I never fully realized its rich history until now. Exactly where one of my favorite restaurants is today used to be a packing house that would ship local lemons, tangerines, navel oranges, ruby red grapefruits, and other citruses across the country. The citrus labels in the collection range from as early as the 1890s to the 1940s. After learning about this history, I decided to dig a little bit deeper.

The California Fruit Growers Association was established in 1893, only six years after the city of Claremont was founded. It wasn’t until 1909 when the Packing House was built. The Packing House became more than just a place for shipping of fruit. It became somewhat of a town center, selling other items useful for the citrus growers. The height of business in Claremont was between the 1920s and the 1950s. By 1972, the production halted and the building was sold.

The Claremont Packing House today

I have loved working on this collection. Through looking through the citrus labels, I have been able to see beautiful artistic renditions of what Claremont used to look like about 100 years ago. I feel as though I have gotten to know the city I have been living in for the past 3 years so much better.

Phoebe

November 19, 2014June 26, 2025 by chasew

The Secret Life of the Nag Hammadi Texts

Hello everyone! Because I’ve devoted so much time to processing the Nag Hammadi Codices Project, I have – as you might imagine – had ample opportunity to consider the scholarly potential of this collection. Recently, though, I decided that it would be fun/enlightening to take a break from the academic side of things and learn a little more about the popular religious culture that has sprung up around the texts since they were re-discovered in 1945.

Once I started looking for information, I discovered there was a lot to find! One of the most entertaining aspects of what you might call “Nag Hammadi Pop Culture” is the connection some people have argued exists between these gnostic texts and…global alien invasion. The basic gist of these conspiracy theories is that gnostic/Nag Hammadi writings about beings called Archons prove that aliens visited earth. And the alien activity didn’t stop back then, they argue. Even today people are being “invaded by Archons,” and that is why we have so much suffering in the world.

But if you’re finding yourself shaking your head in skepticism, know you’re not alone. Scholars certainly don’t view the Nag Hammadi texts as histories of extraterrestrial activity. Although it is true that the Archons loomed large in the gnostic imagination, it’s not because they had recently landed near the Nile in a spaceship. Rather, they were discussed with frequency because they were important mythological figures in gnostic theology. Different gnostic groups propagated different interpretations of Archon theology, but the general themes were usually the same. Namely, gnostics believed that the Archons were powerful, non-human beings. They had less authority than God/the Ultimate Creator, but they had vastly greater power than human beings. As such, they were often presented in ancient writings as hostile or threatening figures that divided humans from their God.

With this in mind, you can imagine how interesting I find contemporary arguments that the Nag Hammadi library is “factual evidence” that the Archons were alien invaders! While I don’t get on board with this theory, I do think it is a fascinating example of how a group of people very far removed from the culture in which the Nag Hammadi texts were created can come up with a very creative interpretation of them…based on contemporary cultural anxieties and concerns. In scriptural studies, there is a term for this: eisegesis. Specifically, eisegesis means, “the interpretation of a text (as of the Bible) by reading into it one’s own ideas.” The goal for scholars, of course, is to avoid eisegesis and understand how the original record creator’s culture and background shaped his or her perspective and – in turn – the text.

What do you think about this? Had you heard that the Nag Hammadi library was being used by some as “evidence” for supposed extraterrestrial life? Maybe you should come look at our Nag Hammadi collection when we’re done processing it and examine the evidence for yourself!