#Iowa library

[theusarticles]

Iowa woman restores Univ. of Iowa presidents’ portraits dating back to 1800s

Iowa woman restores Univ. of Iowa presidents’ portraits dating back to 1800s

IOWA CITY, Iowa (KCRG) –The Presidential Portrait Gallery at the University has been on display since the 1990s, but was only just recently completed with all but one of the school’s past presidents. Sara Boesen’s passion for conserving art lead her to help the University of Iowa with their project on history. Several presidential portraits had been damaged over time and needed a steady and…

[dduane]

Oh joy. :/

[wgm-beautiful-world]

Spiral staircase in the State Capitol Law Library in Des Moines, Iowa, UNITED STATES

[upstairsdownstairsandinbetween]

The Law Library at the Iowa State Capitol 

[thistle-and-bee-press]

From the LGBTQ Iowa Archives and Library, a Queer archives, library and community center, located in Iowa!

Help support the work of the LGBTQ Iowa Archives & Library by becoming a Friend of LIAL. With an annual or monthly donation, you will help support our free programming, archival endeavors, and our library full of trans and queer books that cannot be banned by the state legislature. As a trans and queer volunteer-run organization, LIAL depends on community support to continue our mission of preserving and sharing Iowa's LGBTQ history.

If you become a Friend of LIAL before February 15th, you will also receive a handmade notebook by India Johnson!

Learn more about us here:

Join or donate here! https://donorbox.org/friends-of-lial

[uispeccoll]

Black History Spotlight: The original movie poster for The Green-Eyed Monster

Last year, Special Collections and Archives at the University of Iowa Libraries acquired items to form a new collection: the Black Film and Television Collection. In honor of Black History Month, we’re shining a spotlight on a different item from this collection. This week, we’re taking a look at one of the collection’s earliest (and rarest) items: the original poster for the 1919 film The Green-Eyed Monster.

The Library of Congress estimates that 75% of all silent films have been lost, and that number unfortunately includes many of the first films made for Black audiences. The Green-Eyed Monster is one such film. Since we don’t have access to the movie itself, marketing materials like this poster offer a vital glimpse into a formative period of cinematic history and a history that was very nearly lost. Amid a culture of violent racism, systemic inequality, and segregation, Black artists behind and in front of the camera offered their audiences a look at the possibilities ahead.

During the era of segregation, Black audiences were already barred from most movie showings, and there were only a few movie houses open specifically for Black viewers. To see movies like The Green-Eyed Monster, they would have had to attend separate, late-night screenings called “midnight rambles.” But attend they did—there was a demand for what came to be called “race films,” and about 500 movies were released to meet it. During the daytime, theaters might show movies like the notoriously racist Birth of a Nation, but at the stroke of midnight, Black audiences could gather to appreciate Black artistry.

Where does The Green-Eyed Monster fit in?

The Green-Eyed Monster was produced by Norman Studios in Jacksonville, Florida. And while the film featured an all-Black cast, the studio that produced it was owned by a white filmmaker, Richard E. Norman, who sought to cater to an untapped audience. To make his first race film, Norman retooled the script for one of his previous films, The Wrecker, and hired Black actors for the roles. Norman Studios would go on to produce seven more feature-length films with all-Black casts, but the studio died out during the rocky transition to “talkies.”

So what exactly was The Green-Eyed Monster about? While the film itself is lost, the broad strokes of the story remain. As the title indicates, the plot revolves around jealousy, both romantic and professional. Two friends who work for rival rail companies end up falling for the same woman—and competing for the same lucrative contract. To settle both conflicts, these friends stake everything on a race on rails. Given that the poster aims to entice audiences with an “$80,000.00 train wreck,” it’s safe to assume that in this case, the track to true love is a perilous one.

While this poster and the film it advertises represent a form of progress, the most impactful works in the genre of race film were produced by Black filmmakers at Black-owned studios.

Lincoln Studios and Oscar Micheaux

In the early years of cinema, the industry wasn’t centralized in Los Angeles the way it is today, and production companies could be found in cities across the country. One such studio was Lincoln Motion Picture Company, which began in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1916 and lasted until 1921. Its founders were brothers, Noble Johnson and George Perry Johnson, and their 1916 debut was the first-ever race film, The Realization of a Negro’s Ambition. This is widely credited as the first film ever to portray the experience of middle-class Black characters. Its story is as aspirational as its title: a dreamer strikes out to make it in the oil business, excels, and returns to his family a wealthy man.

The same segregation policies that led to the phenomenon of midnight rambles made it especially difficult for a production company aimed at a Black audience to maintain its bottom line. Again, that’s not because these films lacked an interested viewership; their distribution was limited by the racist policies of the time, and so were their profits. While Lincoln was a short-lived venture, its impact can’t be overstated. By the time the studio that originated race films closed down, another Black leader had found his calling in film.

Oscar Micheaux’s Chicago studio, Micheaux Film Corporation, was one such company. Throughout his decades-long career, Micheaux produced 40 films. His features showed Black audiences a world they recognized: a place of struggle and striving, where racism was a constant reality. He also wrote Black characters they could identify with, fully human in contrast to the caricatures in white films of the time.

There are so many other stories to be found in the Black Film and Television Collection. Next week, we’ll dive deeper into Micheaux, his Midwestern connections, and the continued rise of race films in the first half of the twentieth century.

--Natalee Dawson, Communication Coordinator at UIowa Libraries with assistance from Liz Riordan, Anne Bassett, and Jerome Kirby

[allthedesiredusernamesaretaken]

... endless amount of knowledge ...

The Iowa State Law Library, Des Moines, United States

The decoratively epic wrought-iron spiral staircase, one of only two, inside the State Law Library, Iowa.

📷 christosjpalios

[number1iowan]

Miss Piggy, the classic diva of the Muppets, hails from Keystone, Iowa, where she depended on beauty contest winnings to stay afloat after the death of her father. Miss Piggy is an actress, an author, a feminist icon, a fashion maven, and so much more.

Dewey Readmore Books was the library cat of the public library in Spencer, Iowa. A library cat, much like a ship cat or a station cat, is a cat that lives at a place of business and gets a title because he's so cute and everyone wuvs him so much. He was initially found abandoned in the library's dropbox, and he went on to be featured in radio shows, newspapers, and several books dedicated to him.

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[theknitpotato]

This is in the Law Library, Capitol Building, Des Moines, Iowa.

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[nkp1981]

The State Law Library of Iowa

[nevzatboyraz44]

Art

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Spiral staircase in the State Capital Law Library in Iowa, UNITED STATES

[archivlibrarianist]

They keep coming.

[hurgablurg]

Pinned

* Update Aug. 2023: Damn, existential conflict has hands. Jesus Christ. Search the “right wing degeneracy” tag on this here blog to see more of this shit, if you can stomach it for the sake of education and fuelling your rage. It’s called what it is because right wingers have degenerated so far from the human condition and it’s most basic tenets of empathy and compassion that they barely qualify as human. And that is an objective fact.

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There’s so much shit going on, it can be impossible to focus on and be angry about it all. Hopefully this personal archive/list of previous pinned stuff can help feed fuel to the fire. If you can, take action.

“Actionable” and “Complainable” are within the context of the sphere of influence of an average North American. Awareness is merely step one.

Actionable:

Petition e-4286 - Canadian proposal to give asylum to transgender people threatened by violence in their country of residence. Canada, for all it’s own cruelties, has previously been a comparatively safe-haven for marginalized people, and can be once again. So called “western democracies” fall to the degeneracy of fascism and right-wing politics, and there are vulnerable people to evacuate. The petition is accepting signatures until May 26, 2023, at 9:33 a.m. (EDT). The form won’t accept my email for some ungodly reason, so the best I can do is share and promote it before the deadline.

https://petitions.ourcommons.ca/en/Petition/Details?Petition=e-4268

Oklahoma Antitrans Bills - Oklahoma is putting forward a bill that would force anyone under age 26 to “medically detransition” as well as banning and felonizing the act of providing gender affirming medical care, along with a back-up bill calling for the same, but targettign anyone under the age of 21 . This is not for any observable purpose beyond causing pain and suffering. The people responsible for this bill and others like it have names and home addresses.

https://legiscan.com/OK/bill/SB129/2023 | https://legiscan.com/OK/bill/HB1011/2023

Other US States are also trying this bullshit, Texas is just going full hog on banning care for anyone.

https://legiscan.com/TX/bill/HB1029/2023 

https://19thnews.org/2023/01/trans-health-care-bills-2023-legislative-session-lgbtq/

PLUS the distilled shit in Florida - https://www.tumblr.com/socialistexan/710890023939096576/i-feel-like-us-conservatives-went-from-a-34-to-7?source=share

AND Texas’s proposed Bill to classify anyone with a Y chromosome as “male”, which takes biological existentialism past even it’s own already-insane limits. https://www.tumblr.com/spacelazarwolf/709351697217175552/reminder-that-the-sex-on-your-birth-certificate?source=share

AND Florida is just trying to straight up let the state kidnap your children. I don’t know what they’ll do with them, but considering that a LOT of Floridan politicians were good friends with Epstein...

https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2023/254

Stop Cop City - Pigs and a bunch of corporate allies are trying to build a city-sized training facility for cops with the explicit intention of teaching them how to wage urban warfare against protesters and, I predict, “undesirables”, destroying an entire forest to do so, like some kind of cartoon villain. They’ve already killed someone, a forest defender named Tortuguita, claiming he shot one of the officers despite evidence contradicting that narrative, showing that it was friendly fire, and the buddyfuckers have refused to publish secondary body cam footage of what happened (not that it’s ever led to consequences for them before), let alone punish themselves. While the best and most effective action is to paint the streets with their blood until they acquiesce and turn tail, one not far behind that more people would be comfortable with is too scare their corporate cocksuckers enough that they pull out of the project, inflicting financial damage. Cowardly maybe, but I’d like activists be alive rather than not, though we all might not have any choice soon.

https://www.tumblr.com/effectiveresistance/709715348803452928

Update: Scratch the peaceful part - brick a cop, save lives.

https://www.tumblr.com/effectiveresistance/711200228209049600?source=share

And if you can, and if they try to bulldoze it, make some noise.

Don’t Say Gay Bill and Successor Attempts - You know it, you hate it, it’s the right wing trying to erase even the VERBIAGE of non-cishet people existing, this time in Indiana!

https://www.tumblr.com/pinelo/709805436447129600/reblog-if-you-see-this?source=share | https://action.aclu.org/send-message/in-dont-say-gay

If you can’t sign the petition, look for one more local! Or throw a brick into the back of the head of a rightoid. Every little bit helps.

Arizona Hotline Counterattack - Arizona has recently set up a hotline and email where “concerned parents” can report “critical race theory” and “gender expression” in the classroom. Makes them suffer! It’s free and easy to do!

Libraries at risk! Digital archivism is in danger. The Internet Archive is being sued by digital publishers to set a standard for digital rights and the avilability of knowledge. Digital publishers are baby-rage levels of mad at local, physical libraries for digitizing their already-paid-for collections and bypassing rental fees from said digital publishers, but know that suing a public library would be a PR nightmare, so they have instead joined together to sue an “acceptable” target - the Internet Archive in this case - intending to use the case to establish laws that affect all libraries and public institutions of the archival sort. The courts have decided, but the internet Archive has submitted an appeal to a higher court, and with support and enough noise, can have that ruling overturned in favour of the public. Give the petition a sign!

Jackson Mississippi is being held hostage. The city MUST be liberated, water restored, and the state’s control of them usurped.

Iowa and Mississippi Propose Bills to Ban Gay Marriage. It’s painful to remember that some leftists really thought the conservatives would only stop at “one kind” of “degenerate”, and that they were somehow safe from further persecution, as if the Maginot Line could ever fail once it was built, as if battle lines could only ever move forward or stay still.

Iowa and Mississippi (<- links to the individual bills and their authors) have both had republican politicians cosign and propose bills that would take human rights in their states back by years, citing “nature’s god” and other tin-foil-wearing hokery as their justification. Protest them, bombard them, threaten them, beat them, end them, whatever needs to be done to keep these rightoid, regressive degenerates from doing more harm.

Mi’kmaq Land Claim - The Mi’kmaq people of the east coast have put forth a land claim to a large chunk of New Brunswick, not to assert dominion or supplant current residents or governments (no change like that can even happen these days) but to secure the sanctity and security of both their unceded land (which currently sits in the hands of the government as crown land) and the ways in which that land is to be used. Show them some support!

Texas Is No Longer Trying to Hide the Swastikas - https://legiscan.com/TX/bill/HB20/2023 . Texas republicans are aligning to make it legal for “citizen militias” to police the border for “immigrants”, with the secret inclusion of also allowing them to police POLLING STATIONS. They aren’t even being subtle about it, they are just having armed brownshirt degenerates waving guns in peoples faces to keep them from voting. Americans, if you can, either bomb these senator’s phones, or bomb their houses. They have names and addresses.

Do Not Let The Evangelicals Win. Do Not Give Them An Inch

29/04/23 The fucking Earn It Act is back, and once again we need to beat this hydra’s head with a burning club.

Complainable:

Iran Protests - Human rights and freedom of expression are at risk in Iran, and people are sick of it! The people rise up and protest, first back in September, and intermittently since, most recently from writing, this February 19th weekend. As heroes clash with fascist and theocrats, the “government” still holds tens of thousands captive, suffering rape and torture, and at threat of execution. There are 227 politicians to “hold accountable” for this abuse.

https://www.tumblr.com/hurgablurg/700422628522049536/what-does-it-fucking-matter-if-my-finances-are-a?source=share

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The war on humanity is one of attrition, a war upon the soul, seeking to break spirit and inspire hopelessly, waged against us by ghoulish old men and sycophantic hypocrites. Only through action can we break their stranglehold and put an end to their abuse. Showing these fiends mercy is tolerating intolerance itself.

Rip Tortuguita.

RIP Brianna Ghey

RIP Ajike Owens

Health to Ralph Yarl.

RIP Nahel