Category: UNCATEGORIZED

This Monday, hundreds of thousands of San Antonians are participating in what has grown to be the nation’s largest Martin Luther King Jr. Day March. I have participated in the march in previous years, and I’m always impressed by the magnitude of it. Marching in solidarity for peace, equality, justice, and the remembrance of Dr. King with a quarter of a million people is a truly awesome experience.

Despite these previous experiences, nothing ever totally prepared me for the “real thing.” Participating in a present-day march is a very different experience from walking around the neighborhood where Dr. King lived and worked. This past August I traveled to Atlanta, GA, and had the opportunity to visit the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change (“the King Center”). The King Center is a National Historic Site that includes a museum, archives, community/exhibition center, the childhood home of Dr…

For our first photography blog in 2017, we look back 100 years through images in our General Photograph Collection. The photos give us an idea of how Texans lived in 1917. With horses and buggies visible on the streets and farms, it shows that the modern era had not completely arrived. Yet significant changes in the lives of many Texans would come that year with the United States entry into World War I on April 6th. Young men who had never ventured out from Texas would go far away to the battlefields in France.

McCulloch County draftees shortly before departing for military service, Brady. (Detail of 078-0438. Courtesy of Wayne Spiller)

Picnic overlooking the Somerset Western No. 1 oil derrick near Lytle. (093-0029. Courtesy of Margaret Trouart)

Washing buggies in the San Antonio River near the Navarro Street Bridge in downtown San Antonio. Photograph by Ellen Schulz Quillin. (074-0142. Courtesy of…

This post covers a recent addition to the Jacinto Quirarte Papers and is written by former archives student assistant, Marissa Del Toro.

Slides of artwork by Tony Ortega, 1989-1990.

Did you ever have that moment when everything you have been working on comes full circle? I had one of those moments earlier in May, when I serendipitously met Mrs. Sara Quirarte. She is the wife of the late Dr. Jacinto Quirarte, who was professor emeritus of Art History. While working in Special Collections this past year, I have helped process additions to the Jacinto Quirarte Papers. As a student who studies Latino and Latin American Art, and after becoming immersed in Quirarte’s collection, I have grown fond of the acclaimed art historian.

Dr. Jacinto Quirarte was a leading expert of pre-Columbian, Latin American, and Chicano art history. Born in 1931 in the small mining town of Jerome, Arizona, Quirarte lived…

By Paul M. Sparrow, FDR Library Director

It was the worst day of his presidency, the worst day of his life – and the worst military defeat in American history. President Franklin Roosevelt’s beloved Navy lay in smoking ruins in Pearl Harbor, as the Japanese Empire launched well-coordinated attacks across a 4,000 mile front. The Nazis controlled Europe and North Africa. Britain and Russia were on the verge of collapse.

But as the smoke cleared from the mangled wreckage, it revealed a truly great leader. Franklin Roosevelt took the weight of the free world on his paralyzed legs and carried America into the future – away from our isolationist past and into the age of the global superpower.

At the worst moment of his life he rose to the occasion, providing desperately needed vision and confidence to a staggered nation. Within hours of the attack he dictated the first draft…

As our team continues to process the SVREP collection, next year our focus will be geared towards completing the finding aid and promoting the collection. Luckily, we have had a head start by working with the communications team here at UTSA to be featured in a video segment that highlights the SVREP Collection. This video will be featured on the USTA website sometime in the near future in order for students, faculty and the community to have an inside look into our process for archiving the collection, and why SVREP and the work of Willie Velasquez are worth preserving.

Working exclusively with UTSA’s Sombrilla Magazine under the direction of Michelle Mondo, senior editor and Vanessa Davila, associate editor and videographer, we collaborated for over 3 months to obtain the necessary footage. Michelle and Vanessa shadowed and interviewed Jennifer, Karina, and myself processing material, completing daily tasks, and documenting our map…

This month we continue “Names and Places of UTSA,” a blog series on university history, with a post co-written by archives student assistant, Kira Sandoval.

UTSA Stonehenge with a 5’5″ Kira for scale. Photo by Kristin Law.

Have you ever wondered what that thing is? That large concrete mass that sits on the east side of main campus, in the undeveloped acres just west of Bauerle Road? It is a strange composite of rectangular segments displaying a mixture of textures, ridges, nooks and crannies, with a large negative space that allows the Texas sky to be seen in between panels of beige concrete. Is it an abstract sculpture, or some kind of fragment of a wall?

There is no name, no plaque, no identifying information attached to it, making this concrete mass an enigma on campus. Here in the University Archives, we have received numerous inquiries, which piqued…

This post was written by Alyssa Franklin, our student employee who is responsible for digitization of this collection.

A pair of intriguing pamphlets are hidden within the depths of the Kathryn Stoner O’Conner Sons of the Republic of Texas Mexican Manuscript Collection. They were created by the same author/illustrator in summer of 1948, and each features a heroic historical figure from nineteenth-century Mexico. These documents have been meticulously assembled with great care and attention to detail. Each includes an endearing hand drawn illustration as its frontispiece. Interestingly, these illustrations seem to be based off of well-circulated source images. The artist was drawing from popular images of famous historical figures, and placed them as cover vignettes for his documents.

Historical photograph and corresponding illustration by Rafael Garcés Velásquez of Juan Antonio de la Fuente

Engraving and corresponding illustration of Ingacio López Rayón

The subjects of these two works are general Ignacio…