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Basketball, which began as a game invented to occupy young, energetic boys within the confines of a gymnasium on rainy days, has come to be one of the most popular sports in American culture.

Basketball: Power in Play, a display of sports photographs from the Harry Ransom Center’s New York Journal-American collection, captures some of the key components of the game from the 1940s through the 1960s.

From September 18 through December 9, 2012, visitors will be able to view images depicting various perspectives on the game such as training and technique, women in basketball, wheelchair basketball, the Harlem Globetrotters, and images of incredible shots and blunders.

The 32 black-and-white photographs in the exhibition come from the New York Journal-American, which was published from 1937 to 1968. Soon after the newspaper’s demise, the Ransom Center gained ownership of the paper’s approximately two million prints and one million negatives. Many of the photographs in the display show original crop and edit marks used in the course of publication.

Geared toward sports enthusiasts, the rich history and engaging narratives embodied in the photo captions will be sure to entertain and amuse.

The display is one of several exhibitions and events across The University of Texas at Austin campus this fall capturing the spirit and history of basketball from its beginnings in a Massachusetts YMCA to the modern NBA.

Courtesy of Suzanne Deal Booth and David G. Booth, the University’s Blanton Museum of Art will be presenting James Naismith’s “Original Rules of Basket Ball,” the 1891 document that outlines the 13 original rules of the game. The rules will be exhibited alongside the works of contemporary artist Paul Pfeiffer in The Rules of Basketball: Works by Paul Pfeiffer and James Naismith’s Original Rules of Basket Ball, running through January 13, 2013.

The H. J. Lutcher Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports will host a symposium during the fall 2012 semester about the history and cultural significance of basketball.

Former undergraduate intern Rachel Platis selected the content for the Ransom Center’s display.

The materials are on view in the Ransom Center’s lobby during exhibition gallery hours and in the third-floor Director’s Gallery, Monday through Friday, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Obstacle Course (Shimer College basketball team practice). Unidentified photographer, "New York Journal-American," January 26, 1964.

The exhibition I Have Seen the Future: Norman Bel Geddes Designs America opens today at the Harry Ransom Center. Running through January 6, 2013, the exhibition explores the life and career of American stage and industrial designer, futurist, and urban planner Norman Bel Geddes (1893–1958).

Read what T Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, and Metropolis magazine have to say about the exhibition and Bel Geddes.

More than 300 items in the exhibition reflect the broad range of Bel Geddes’s interests and work and demonstrate how he shaped and continues to influence American culture and lifestyle. A polymath who had little academic or professional training in the areas he mastered, Bel Geddes had the ability to look at trends and the contemporary environment and envision…

In February 2013, the Harry Ransom Center will host the first U.S. showing of the exhibition Arnold Newman: Masterclass, a posthumous retrospective of photographer Arnold Newman (1918–2006).

The exhibition was organized by the American nonprofit organization Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography (FEP) in collaboration with the Ransom Center. The show, curated by FEP’s William Ewing, highlights 200 framed vintage prints spanning Newman’s career, selected from the privately held Arnold Newman Archive and the collections of major American museums and private collectors. Twenty-eight photographs from the Ransom Center’s Newman archive are featured in the exhibition.

Newman’s subjects included world leaders, authors, artists, musicians, and scientists—Pablo Picasso in his studio; Igor Stravinsky sitting at the piano; Truman Capote lounging on his sofa; and…

James H. 'Jimmy' Hare crossing the Piave river, 1918, lantern slide; Gordon Conway, 'Red Cross Girl' illustration for Vanity Fair, 1918; Bob Landry, film still from 'A Farewell to Arms,' 1957; Erich Maria Remarque, 'All Quiet on the Western Front,' 1930; Lucile Patterson, National League for Woman's Service World War I military recruiting poster.

The Harry Ransom Center is now receiving applications for its 2013–2014 research fellowships in the humanities.

The application deadline is February 1, 2013. Information about the fellowships and the application process is available online.

More than 50 fellowships in the humanities are awarded annually by the Ransom Center to support research projects in all areas of the humanities, including literature, photography, film, art, the performing arts, music, and cultural…

In conjunction with the exhibition I Have Seen the Future: Norman Bel Geddes Designs America, the Harry Ransom Center hosts “Visions of the Future,” the tenth biennial Flair Symposium. The Flair Symposium honors the ideals set forth by Fleur Cowles and her landmark Flair magazine.

From November 1-3, the Ransom Center will bring together historians, architects, industrial designers, and visionaries in the fields of science fiction, film, theater, and future studies to explore the ways the future has been imagined over time.
Author and curator Phil Patton will moderate one of the symposium panels, “Motorways in the Twentieth Century and Today.”

Patton is the author of Open Road: A Celebration of the American Highway, Autodesign International, and Made in USA: The Secret Histories of…

In 1973, visiting authors and authors began signing one of the Harry Ransom Center’s doors between two manuscript stack rooms on the fifth floor. At the suggestion of a staffer, the authors’ door was inspired by the signed Greenwich Village Bookshop door in the Center’s collection. When one side of the Ransom Center’s door filled up a few years ago, the other side was sanded down so that it could be used as well. To date, more than 150 visitors have signed the door, from American writer Alice Adams to Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko.

ESPN’s Longhorn Network recently explored the history of the door with the Ransom Center’s Danielle Brune Sigler, assistant director and curator for academic programs.

The "new" side (left)…

Continue Reading Authors’ door reflects breadth of collections

Page 1 of corrected proof of David Foster Wallace's 1996 essay on the U.S. Open for Tennis magazine.

In 1995, Jay Jennings, a former editor of Tennis magazine, commissioned David Foster Wallace to write an article about the U.S. Open, which was published as “Democracy and Commerce at the U.S. Open” one year later. In 2010, Jennings contributed a file of corrected proofs and correspondence to the Ransom Center relating to the essay and revealing Wallace’s close involvement in the editorial process. Wallace had warned Jennings that he would be a difficult editee, but the papers demonstrate the contrary. Though Wallace’s comments on the proof pages are often assertive, they are equally good-natured, dotted throughout with smiley faces, and oftentimes showing his humor. Jennings…

In April, Helen Moore, Fellow and Tutor in English at Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford, spoke about the history of the King James translation at the Harry Ransom Center. The talk is now online on YouTube.

Moore was lead curator of Manifold Greatness: Oxford and the Making of the King James Bible, an exhibition held at the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford in 2011. Her illustrated talk addressed the role played by Oxford in the translation of the King James Bible, the methods used by the translators, and some of the items displayed at the Oxford exhibition.

The event was co-sponsored by Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford and The Wall Street Journal.

The Ransom Center’s related exhibition The King…

Writer Jim Crace, author of Continent (1986), Arcadia (1992), Quarantine (1997), Being Dead (1999), and The Pesthouse (2007), speaks about ephermera in archives and the narratives and stories they provide.

Crace elaborates about a piece of driftwood found in his archive that contains a note that was later incorporated into his novel Signals of Distress (1996).

Enter by July 13 for a chance to win a signed copy of Crace’s Continent by visiting the Ransom Center’s Facebook page.

Crace will be in residence this fall at the Michener Center for Writers at The University of Texas at Austin. He will give a public reading on December 6.

Piece of driftwood in Jim Crace’s archive. Photo by Anthony Maddaloni.

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Jessica S. McDonald. © Caren Alpert Photography.

The Ransom Center has appointed Jessica S. McDonald, a curator of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, as its new chief curator of photography. McDonald begins her position at the Ransom Center in September.

As the Nancy Inman and Marlene Nathan Meyerson Curator of Photography, McDonald will oversee a collection that spans from the world’s earliest-known photograph to prints from some of the great masters of the twenty-first century. The Center’s photography holdings include the Helmut and Alison Gernsheim collection, a seminal collection of the history of photography and one of the world’s premier sources for the study and appreciation of photography.

In addition to the history of photography, the Ransom Center’s photography…