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The Special Collections Department has several series within their Pamphlet Collection. The most interesting is the noteworthy
collection of the socialist, which includes the corresponding
anti-socialist pamphlets, that was among the opening collections of the FAU Library in 1964.
Another series in the collection are the Zionist pamphlets donated by Dr. Samuel Portnoy, the first history professor hired at FAU.
The pamphlet collection also contains a series dealing of
anti-Nazi and anti-fascism pamphlets that detail the years
before the America's involvement in World War II.
For information about
the pamphlet collection, contact Zita Cael, Department Head, or
Leslie Siegel, University Archivist.
The inventorying of the pamphlet collection is a part of the
ongoing effort of Special Collections to bring to light
collections that have been known only be word of mouth. Since
putting the socialist pamphlets on the web in 2007, the
FAU
Libraries' Digital Library has worked with the Digital Library
of University of Central Florida Libraries to digitize the
collection under a joint grant.
Outside of the general pamphlet collection, are pamphlets in
The Marvin & Sybil Weiner Spirit of America Collection. The Weiner collection contains thousands of pamphlets from the 17th to the 19th century.
For information about the Weiner pamphlets, please contact
Ellen Randolph, Rare Books Librarian.
An Unusual Research
Collection
William Miller, Ph.D., Dean of Libraries
When Edmund Wilson wrote
Patriotic Gore, a study of the Civil War, he purposely bypassed
official newspaper accounts in favor of letters from soldiers and
politicians. This primary material, he felt, gave him a much better
sense of the war that he could have gained from more official sources.
For anyone wishing to do research into labor history or social history,
the FAU library offers a similar opportunity in its Socialist Labor
Pamphlets collection, a group of 1,700 late nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century pamphlets published by a wide variety of socialist
groups and their critics, both here and abroad.
Documentary
History of the Communist Party of the United States, a set of which
he has donated to our library. Dr. Johnpoll, who also used the Socialist
Party records at Duke, the Tamiment Collection at New York University,
and a wide variety of other libraries and archives from Boston to
California, spent 40 years laboring on this massive, definitive
compilation. He found the FAU socialist pamphlets to be among the most
useful materials he encountered, providing him with direct evidence of
how various groups propagandized, how they perceived themselves, and how
they wished to represent themselves to others.
As we begin to enter the computer age, Dr. Johnpoll says, “It is important
to remember that even now, with so much starting to be computerized,
there is no alternative to the research libraries and archives which
preserve the original documents from which the information on the
Internet is derived. We all owe the research libraries a debt which we
should repay by supporting these repositories of the world’s knowledge.”
Special Collections | The Collections
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