Bob Woodward's typed notes about his meeting with Deep Throat.

Between 1972 and 1976, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein broke one of the biggest stories in American politics. Beginning with their investigation of a burglary at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate complex, Woodward and Bernstein uncovered a series of crimes that eventually led to the indictments of 40 White House and administration officials and ultimately to the resignation of President Richard Nixon. While reporting on the scandal for The Washington Post and for their subsequent books, Woodward and Bernstein kept all of their notes and drafts. The result is a meticulous record of the Watergate scandal from beginning to end, providing a behind-the-scenes perspective into the nature of investigative…

Each Friday, the Ransom Center shares photos from throughout the week that highlight a range of activities and collection holdings. We hope you enjoy these photos that reveal some of the everyday happenings at the Center.

Please be aware that Photo Friday will be on hiatus during the summer, but will return in September.

Tools of the trade in the conservation lab. Photo by Anthony Maddaloni.

Curator of Photography David Coleman conducts a portfolio review of students' work. Photo by Pete Smith.

A visitor in the atria. Photo by Pete Smith.

Housing for Jim Dine's artist's book and associated prints based on Oscar Wilde's 'The Picture of Dorian Gray.' This edition is bound in leather, with a heart built up on the cover. Photo by…

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Page one of a letter in which Tennessee Williams asks his grandfather to send his application letter to the Rockefeller Foundation from Memphis, rather than St. Louis. Copyright ©2011 by the University of the South. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc. All rights reserved.

Page two of a letter in which Tennessee Williams asks his grandfather to send his application letter to the Rockefeller Foundation from Memphis, rather than St. Louis. Copyright ©2011 by the University of the South. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc. All rights reserved.

In 1938, Tennessee Williams entered Candles to the Sun in a competition sponsored by the Dramatists Guild in New York City. Williams wrote Candles to the Sun, a play about striking coal miners…

Click on the four-way arrow in the bottom right-hand corner of the slideshow to convert into full-screen mode.

On Friday, May 13, the Ransom Center helped to launch Magnum Photos’s road trip Postcards from America project.  The events began with an open bus where photography fans could meet and talk with Magnum photographers Jim Goldberg, Susan Meiselas, Paolo Pellegrin, Alec Soth, Mikhael Subotzky, and writer Ginger Strand at their R.V., which the Postcards group parked right on the plaza.  (As you can see in the slideshow, getting it there was a bit dicey!)

After that was the main event: a public talk by the photographers and writer discussing the origins and plans for the project.  Although their journey had only just begun the day before in San Antonio, each photographer presented some amazing images from just one day’s work.  You can see many of these images on the Postcards From America blog.

The Ransom Center was excited to participate in this new project, an outgrowth of our parnership with Magnum Photos and MSD Capital, LP to house 200,000 press prints from Magnum Photos’s New York bureau.

I encourage you to follow the photographers on their blog and through the Blurb Mobile app.  Do it soon because they are more than halfway through their trip, which ends in Oakland with an exhibition from their journey at the Starline Social Club on May 26.

Magnum photographers host an open bus outside their R.V. before their program 'Postcards From America.' Photo by Pete Smith.

Each Friday, the Ransom Center shares photos from throughout the week that highlight a range of activities and collection holdings. We hope you enjoy these photos that reveal some of the everyday happenings at the Center.

'Uncle Jackson,' the Magnum photographers' 'Postcards From America' R.V., on the Ransom Center plaza. Photo by Pete Smith.

Magnum photographers Susan Meiselas, Jim Goldberg, and Alec Soth talk things over with 'Postcards From America' project manager Carlos Loret de Mola. Photo by Pete Smith.

Magnum photographers meet the public at the 'Postcards From America' open bus on the Ransom Center plaza. Photo by Pete Smith.

Magnum photographer Mikhael Subotzky looking out the window of 'Uncle Jackson,' the 'Postcards From America' R.V. Photo by Pete Smith.

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Tony Kushner chats with students after a public program during a visit in 2006.

In light of the Ransom Center’s current exhibition Becoming Tennessee Williams, Cultural Compass spoke with Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award-winning playwright Tony Kushner about Tennessee Williams’s legacy. Read a transcript of the interview with Kushner, in which he discusses how Williams has influenced him, his first encounter with Williams’s works, Williams’s courageousness, and more.

How has Tennessee Williams influenced you?

Profoundly. Of the three major, post-war American playwrights—Williams, Miller, and O’Neill—I had the easiest time connecting to Tennessee when I was young and starting to think about being a playwright. When I read A Streetcar Named Desire for the first time, I fell in love with Tennessee because he was a…

David Mamet's outline for 'Homicide." Click on image to view full-size version.

David Mamet is one of America’s best-known and most celebrated playwrights and filmmakers. He has received numerous awards and honors for such plays as American Buffalo (1975), Glengarry Glen Ross (1984), Speed-the-Plow (1988), and Oleanna (1991), and films including The Verdict (1982), Homicide (1991), The Spanish Prisoner (1997), Wag the Dog (1997), and State and Main (2000). The Ransom Center acquired Mamet’s archive in 2007. Since then, Mamet has visited the Ransom Center several times to speak at public events, university classes, and student reading groups, and to lead a screenwriting workshop for students.

Materials such as Mamet’s typescripts and journals, as well as materials related to his 1991 film, Homicide, can be found in the Ransom Center’s…

Each Friday, the Ransom Center shares photos from throughout the week that highlight a range of activities and collection holdings. We hope you enjoy these photos that reveal some of the everyday happenings at the Center.

Volunteer Emily Butts, a high school senior at St. Andrew’s Episcopal School, uses the Vagelli board shear to cut paper and board to rehouse single leaves of handwritten documents, many on parchment, in the Center’s Medieval and Early Modern Manuscript Collection. Photo by Pete Smith.

Independent curator Donald Albrecht selects materials for the exhibition “I Have Seen the Future: Norman Bel Geddes Designs America,” which opens at the Ransom Center in fall 2012. Photo by Pete Smith.

The 2010-2011 undergraduate interns were honored for their contributions, ranging…

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Image courtesy of Magnum Photos.

“5 photographers, a writer, 2 weeks, a bus.” Thus begins a unique documentary project comprised of Magnum photographers Jim Goldberg, Susan Meiselas, Paolo Pellegrin, Alec Soth, Mikhael Subotzky, and writer Ginger Strand, who will be traveling from San Antonio to Oakland from May 12 to May 26 on the first of a series of trips across the country.

They’ve been blogging about it since the end of March, so there’s already plenty to see and read. You can follow them on various social media sites, and you can even post your own images at the “Postcards From America” Flickr site. At the end they will be mounting a special exhibition of images from the trip at the Starline in…

Cover of 'Coolie' by Mulk Raj Anand.

Charlotte Nunes is a graduate student in English at The University of Texas at Austin. She used the Ransom Center collections to research her dissertation, “‘This Novel Social Fabric’: Transnational Anti-Imperialism and British Literary Modernity, 1913–1936.” One chapter examines Mulk Raj Anand’s novels Untouchable (1935) and Coolie (1936) in terms of Anand’s involvement in the Indian Progressive Writers’ Association in London during the mid-1930s.

The Harry Ransom Center’s notable holdings in international literature include both handwritten and typed manuscripts of the English-language novel Coolie (1935) by Indian writer Mulk Raj Anand (1905–2004). Today, a Penguin Twentieth Century Classics edition of Coolie is still in print. The novel chronicles the tragically short life of the young laborer Munoo in pre-independence…