Connecticut State Library News

The State Library recently had this new volume printed and sent copies to all public libraries, libraries of institutions of Higher Education, and the State Documents Repository System. A limited number are available for purchase until the supply runs out. Each volume costs $25.00 plus state sales tax and postage. If you wish to have a copy, please contact the State Archivist via e-mail (mark.h.jones@ct.gov) or by letter sent to Connecticut State Library/231 Capitol Ave./Hartford, CT 06106. Provide your name, mailing address and the number of copies that you want. Do not send cash, money orders, or checks. A bill will come with the order. The Historical Documents Preservation Fund made this volume possible.

CONNECTICUT STATE LIBRARY “3rd THURSDAY OF THE MONTH”BROWN BAG LUNCH SERIES

State Archivist Mark Jones will deliver a talk at the Connecticut State Library on Thursday, April 18, 2013 from Noon to 12:45 on Frederic Collin Walcott and his career as a conservationist. Walcott’s political career began as a member of the Connecticut State Senate representing Norfolk from 1925-29, serving as president pro tempore from 1927-1929. Governor Trumbull appointed Walcott to the Board of Fish and Game Commission as its President and as the first President of the new State Water Commission, 1927-1929. In 1928, he was elected to the United States Senate and served as the first chairman of the Special Committee for the Protection of Wildlife Resources. On this committee, Walcott passed on to the Senate a favorable report on a bill creating a duck stamp, required of all persons with hunting licenses, the proceeds of which went to wetlands reclamation for wildfowl migrating in the spring and fall. Today the Duck Stamp funds many programs of the Federal Wildlife Service.

Walcott was defeated for reelection in 1934 and served as head of the Department of Public Welfare from 1935-1939. Although Walcott never left memoirs, his letters and later speeches made in 1941 and 1942 to wildlife conservationists show his take on the conservation movement in the first half of the twentieth century.

Thursday, April 18, 2013
12:0o p.m. – 12:45 p.m.
Connecticut State Library ~ Memorial Hall

About the Speaker:  Mark Jones has been working on Frederic Collin Walcott for several years. On May 31st of this year, he shall retire after thirty years as the State Archivist, and one of his activities will be writing the biography. He has used resources here in the State Library, the large Walcott Collection at Yale University, other smaller collections at Stanford University and at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library in West Branch, Iowa. He has also received assistance and encouragement from Walcott’s surviving granddaughter, Alexandra (Sandy) Walcott, who annually comes up from New York City and opens up the house which her grandfather built in 1909 for the spring, summer and fall. She has graciously invited Jones to visit the house, exchanged stories about her grandfather and lent him photographs and manuscripts that are not in the collection at Yale.

About the State Library: The Connecticut State Library is an Executive Branch agency of the State of Connecticut. The State Library provides a variety of library, information, archival, public records, museum, and administrative services to citizens of Connecticut, as well as the employees and officials of all three branches of State government. The Connecticut State Archives and the Museum of Connecticut History are components of the State Library.

All State Library facilities will be closed on Friday, March 29th & Saturday, March 30th for the Good Friday holiday.

CONNECTICUT STATE LIBRARY “3rd THURSDAY OF THE MONTH”BROWN BAG LUNCH SERIES

 Dr. Linford Fisher, Assistant Professor of History at Brown University, will be at the Connecticut State Library, on Thursday, March 21, 2013 from Noon to 12:45 to discuss his new book, The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America. Using a variety of court documents, land deeds, letters, material culture, and church records, he traces the selective adoption of Christian ideas and practices by Native individuals prior to and during the Great Awakening, and the subsequent emergence, post-awakening, of a distinct Indian separatism and partial rejection of Anglo-American religious institutions in response to growing proto-racism. Dr. Fisher provides a new framework for understanding religious conversion and he brings together Native history that is not often considered together: religion, land, use of court system, and local intra-tribal politics. He argues that the Great Awakening was not as formative in the lives of Natives (or as widely embraced) as previously assumed. Dr. Fisher did considerable research at the State Library. Fisher’s talk is part of the State Library and Museum of Connecticut History’s Third Thursday Brownbag Lunchtime speaker series which features a variety of speakers on various aspects of Connecticut history. All programs are free and open tot he public.

Thursday, March 21, 2013
Noon – 12:45 p.m.
Connecticut State Library ~ Memorial Hall

About the Speaker:  Linford D. Fisher is Assistant Professor of History at Brown University.  Dr. Fisher received his doctorate from Harvard University in 2008. His first book, was an in-depth study of long term cultural and religious change among American Indians in eighteenth-century Rhode Island, and Long Island, N.Y. Dr. Fisher has published essays in Ethnohistory, the New England Quarterly, and Harvard Theological Review, and has received fellowships from Harvard University, the American Antiquarian Soceity, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, the American Philosophical Society, Brown University, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Dr. Fisher’s current book project is a study of indentured servitude and slavery among the African and Indian populations of colonial New England and the Atlantic world.

About the State Library:  The Connecticut State Library is an Executive Branch agency of the State of Connecticut. The State Library provides a variety of  library, information, archival, public records, museum and administrative services to the citizens of Connecticut, as well as employees and officials of all three branches of government. Visit the State Library at http://www.ctstatelibrary.org