Norman Bel Geddes. Punch and Judy, clowns, airplane float for a Macy’s parade, October 12, 1926. 41 x 91 ½ inches. Pencil, ink, gouache, and watercolor on paper.

For Macy’s third annual parade in 1926, Norman Bel Geddes produced seven posters that now reside in the Ransom Center’s archive. Learn about the efforts of Ransom Center conservators to repair and frame one of the posters for the exhibition I Have Seen the Future: Norman Bel Geddes Designs America. The project was funded by a Tru Vue Optium® Conservation Grant from The Foundation of the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works.

A case of materials from the Commentary magazine archive is on display in the lobby for the Morris Dickstein lecture. Photo by Alicia Dietrich.

In conjunction with tonight’s lecture by author Morris Dickstein, an accompanying display case in the Ransom Center’s lobby features items from the Center’s Commentary magazine archive. Dickstein’s lecture, titled “America’s Best Magazine?: Commentary in the 1960s,” takes place tonight at 7 p.m. in the Prothro Theater. The Commentary magazine archive was donated to the Center in 2011.

Materials on display include a 1961 subscriber survey, a 1986 exchange of letters between Allen Ginsberg and Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz, and the May 1952 issue of the magazine, which contains the first American publication of “Diary of Anne Frank.”

This program is co-sponsored by…

Cover of "Arnold Newman: At Work" by Roy Flukinger.

In conjunction with the exhibition Arnold Newman: Masterclass, University of Texas Press and the Ransom Center have published Arnold Newman: At Work by Ransom Center Senior Research Curator of Photography Roy Flukinger. Featuring an introductory essay by photo historian Marianne Fulton, the illustrated volume includes Newman’s iconic images alongside his contact sheets, Polaroids, and work prints complete with handwritten notes and marginalia. Providing a contextual overview of the Ransom Center’s Newman archive, the book reveals insights into Newman’s process. The book also includes Newman’s lesser known collages, commercial work, and cityscapes.

Drawing extensively from the Ransom Center’s Newman archive, the book is a rich collection of materials ranging from personal documents—such as Augusta and…

Cover of Sanora Babb's "An Owl on Every Post."

Known for her evocative depictions of life in the Dust Bowl during the Great Depression, author Sanora Babb shares her family’s perpetual bouts with struggles against crop-failure, starvation, mortgage foreclosures, and loneliness in her memoir An Owl on Every Post. Experiencing pioneer life in a one-room dugout shelter, Babb viewed the land—which both tormented and beguiled her—from an up-close, eye-level perspective.

When her family relocated from the security of a small town to an isolated 320-acre farm on the western plains, the young Babb sought to find beauty and joy in her vast and desolate surroundings. The result of her introspection is a body of work that includes essays, short stories, poems, and five…

Dr. Sherre L. Paris—lecturer at The University of Texas School of Journalism—teaches her undergraduate class “A Cultural History of Photography” at the Ransom Center. During the three-hour-long-seminar, which meets every Tuesday in a classroom adjacent to the Ransom Center’s Reading Room, undergraduates work with primary source materials from the Center’s photography collections. “Cultural Compass” spoke with Dr. Paris about her experience teaching at the Ransom Center.

Norman Mailer's notes for the Liston-Patterson re-match in Las Vegas on July 22, 1963. © Norman Mailer Estate.

In Chicago in the fall of 1962, heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson squared up to face Sonny Liston, also known as “The Bear,” in a monumental fight. Liston, a former convict with ties to organized crime, seemed the opposite of the ambivalent and introspective Patterson, who was known to help an opponent mid-round to find a misplaced mouthpiece. Against the advice of his famed trainer, Constantine “Cus” D’Amato, Patterson agreed to confront Liston in the ring, only to be defeated in less than three minutes. Liston knocked out Patterson again the following July in Las Vegas.

The 1962 title bout against Liston in Chicago, a milestone…

Cover of The Getty Conservation Institute newsletter Conservation Perspectives.

In “Technology: No Place For Wimps,” Ransom Center Senior Research Curator of Photography Roy Flukinger joins Carol Henry, fine-art photographer, and James M. Reilly, founder and director of the Image Performance Institute at the Rochester Institute of Technology, in a discussion about photography in the digital age. The discussion, which appears in The Getty Conservation Institute newsletter Conservation Perspectives, features a question and answer session with the three experts and highlights the ways in which photographers, conservators, and curators respond to the challenges posed by a rapidly changing medium. Flukinger, Henry, and Reilly spoke with Dusan Stulik, a Getty Conservation Institute senior scientist, and Jeffrey Levin, editor of the Institute’s newsletter.

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“John Lockland. One thousand one hundred and ninety nine, John his brother to him succeeds: Magna Carta he’s forced to sign: that in truth was the best of his deeds.” This stylized anecdote is but one example of the 399 handwritten verse cards—penned by the English translator, editor, and writer Sara Coleridge—housed at the Harry Ransom Center. The undated cards, written on scrap paper, calling cards, playing cards, advertisements, and invitations, form the foundation of what became Coleridge’s Pretty Lessons in Verse for Good Children; with Some Lessons in Latin, in Easy Rhyme, which was published anonymously in 1834.

The daughter of British poet and author Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sara Coleridge spent most of her life separated from her father. Despite distance from her father during the poet’s life, Sara became an advocate of her father’s work after his death in 1834. Sara spent much of her adult life editing and protecting the late Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s work, thus, helping to secure his place as a central figure of romantic British poetry.

Yet the legacy Sara ensured for her father’s work often eclipses that of her own work. Indeed, at the crossroads of Victorian womanhood and nineteenth-century intellectualism, Sara Coleridge produced many works that remain largely unpublished.

A child of a prominent English family, Sara Coleridge studied informally alongside her brothers but was excluded from formal schooling. From an early age, she displayed broad intellectual capacity and was a talented linguist. Her education, however, was hindered by the expectations that Victorian women should remain in the domestic domain. Even with her proficiency in several languages, including French, Spanish, Italian, and Latin, Sara Coleridge struggled to overcome nineteenth-century societal constrains.

Despite failing health, by July 1826 Sara Coleridge had published two translations of French and Spanish texts. Acutely aware of the Victorian social pressures imposed on women, Coleridge wrote about the conflated meaning of beauty and the limited role of women in British society. Because of her opium abuse and her extended and clandestine engagement to her first cousin Henry Nelson, anxiety plagued Sara in the late 1820s, and she published little writing.

The verse cards provided an avenue for Sara Coleridge to exercise her intellect. Because the public intellectual character of nineteenth-century Britain was inhospitable to women, Coleridge’s audience was limited to the private sphere. Coleridge delineates her son, Herbert, as the exclusive audience for her verse cards, and she frequently writes his name affectionately in the beginning lines.

The cards reveal not only the breadth and scope of Sara Coleridge’s knowledge but also her style as a writer.  Coleridge does not simply list facts to be memorized but presents material about British history, animals, Latin, and geography in stylized verse.

Facing societal obstacles and bouts with poor health and addiction, Sara Coleridge published over ten works, including poems and translations. The verse cards shown here, along with unpublished letters, poems, and manuscripts are available for research at the Ransom Center.

Undated children's verse cards from Sara Coleridge collection. These verses—on such topics as English history, Latin vocabulary, and animals—formed the foundation for Coleridge's “Pretty Lessons in Verse for Good Children and Lessons in Latin, in Easy Rhyme,” published in 1834.

By the time Norman Bel Geddes began work on a contentious adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet in 1931, he was considered an established theatrical designer and a pioneer of the New Stagecraft movement in America. Collaborating with literary advisor Clayton Hamilton, Bel Geddes abridged the play in order to communicate Shakespeare’s text through the characters’ actions, rather than rely on realistic backdrops or extended soliloquies. In addition to marking Raymond Massey’s American theater debut, the production of Hamlet served as the subject of Bel Geddes’s own amateur documentary film.

Throughout his career, Norman Bel Geddes filmed the genesis of his design projects to record each stage of the creative process. Bel Geddes also used film to produce amateur motion pictures on subjects such…

Donald Albrecht, exhibition organizer and curator of architecture and design at the Museum of the City of New York, discusses industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes’s influence on the American landscape. Albrecht—editor of Norman Bel Geddes Designs America (Abrams)—emphasizes the breadth of the Bel Geddes collection at the Ransom Center, which includes Bel Geddes’s plans and sketches of his futurist visions.