We hope your new school year is off to a great start! Since our last update, we’ve welcomed five new collections to MWDL and wanted to share more about them. We also have a couple other items of note.

New collections

All five collections join MWDL via J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah.

First up: the Reverend France A. Davis papers (1915-2020) consist primarily of sermons delivered by Reverend Davis at the Calvary Missionary Baptist Church in Salt Lake City, Utah. Reverend Davis is a pastor emeritus and civil rights activist. This collection is the beginning of the France Davis Utah Black Archive.

The Charles James Nabors papers (1954-1986) contain correspondence, articles and reprints of articles, clippings, grant applications, and other miscellaneous personal and professional papers from his tenure in University of Utah College of Medicine and as a minority counselor for the University of Utah. Charles Nabors was an associate professor of anatomy at the University of Utah College of Medicine who served as assistant dean for minority affairs. He was also a civil rights activist.

Impact Magazine is a Utah-based African American women’s lifestyle magazine. Magazines in this collection range from 2011-2023.

The Enslavement in Territorial Utah Documents Collection represents the most comprehensive primary source compilation of the legislative debates surrounding African American and Indigenous slavery in Utah Territory as well as what African American “servitude” and Native American “indentures” looked like in practice. Pitman shorthand expert LaJean Purcell Carruth transcribed the speeches in the collection into longhand and historians W. Paul Reeve and Christopher Rich gathered the documents together. The collection served as the backbone to Reeve, Rich, and Carruth’s forthcoming book, This Abominable Slavery: Race, Religion, and the Battle over Human Bondage in Antebellum Utah (Oxford University Press, 2024) a narrative history of human bondage in nineteenth-century Utah Territory.

Finally, Tallie Casucci, Librarian at the J. Willard Marriott Library and avid rock climber, collected oral histories with notable rock climbers in the Utah area during 2022 to 2023. The Rock Climbers Oral History Project contains both audio and text transcriptions of these oral histories, many of which are featured in the Ascent Archive podcast.

DPLA

Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) celebrates its 10th anniversary this year! DPLA also recently announced a strategic visioning process that will kick off in September with a review of digital aggregation work. Join the October 16 Open Board + Community meeting to hear more!

MWDL’s August DPLA update concluded Friday, September 1 and you can view our content here.

Upcoming Events

Be sure to check our Events calendar for upcoming events! Many of them are free to register and open to the public.

Office Hours

Want to check in with MWDL? Visit Calendly to view availability and book a 30-minute meeting for Fall 2023 office hours. Times are:

• Mondays, Wednesday from 10AM-12PM Mountain
• Tuesdays, Thursdays from 1-3PM Mountain