Better Late Than Never

My intellectual buddy, DT, and I agree on most things, but one place where we part company is on libraries. I think libraries are one of our greatest institutions while DT moved to his community because of the library (they don't have one!). I have to admit, however, that I came to the belief fairly late. In fact, I am sad to say that in the past ten years, I have spent far more time in the Alexander Library at Rutgers (pictured above left) than I ever did as an undergraduate in the 1960's.

Some of that time has been spent finding books on the different topics I have been working on, but literally hours have been spent in the microform department reading old newspapers on microfilm. The Alexander library has one of the best collections of newspapers in the state and, I would guess, also in the region. For example, they have full runs of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, the Philadelphia Inquirer, a Chicago newspaper and the Washington Post which greatly facilitated our research on the 1916 baseball book. I have also made extensive use of this collection for every other topic I have researched, ranging from the Civil War to various topics in baseball history. If, and when, I ever stop working there, they should probably retire my copy card.

Today I made a relatively brief visit to the library and worked on the following:

1. Biographical information on Nathan Barnert for the biography project of the NJCW150 committee. Barnert was a Jewish immigrant from Germany who settled in Paterson during the Civil War period, made a fortune supplying uniforms to the Union army and then gave away a lot of that fortune to charities and religious causes in the Paterson area. For example, Barnert Hospital and Barnert Temple were both named after he and his wife.

2. Biographical information on Madaline Williams, the New Jersey state assembly woman who the organizers of a Civil War centennial commission meeting in Charleston, South Carolina tried to bar from the conference hotel because of her race.

3. Researching early base ball games in New Jersey as part of the nationwide Protoball project which has its goal to tabulate all base ball games played in 1860 or earlier. The earliest documented game in New Jersey was played in 1855 so the holy grail, so to speak, would be a game played before that. Today I looked through two months of the Newark Daily Advertiser from 1854, but found only a couple of cricket games.

4. Researching reunions of the 33rd New Jersey, someone gave me pictures of reunion medals for the regiment with dates on them so I looked for newspaper accounts. I didn't find too much, but did learn that they tried to have their initial reunions (1891-92) in early September which was the anniversary of both their troubled departure from Newark in September of 1863 and the fall of Atlanta a year later. Since my basic talk about the regiment focuses on those two events, it was interesting to see that they did much the same thing.

Of course, while there I also made a quick tour of the stacks picking up books on Shakespeare, Marlowe and Andrew Jackson's war against the 2nd Bank of the United States. Will I read all of them? Probably not, but since they are on loan at no cost, there is no real downside. And one thing is for sure, I will be back there often enough that it won't be inconvenient to return them!