ABSTRACT: Eric Gonzaba, Associate Professor of American Studies at Cal State Fullerton, interviews Cleve Jones, human rights advocate and leader in the gay liberation movement. The two discuss Jones's childhood in the state of Indiana, his move to San Francisco and that city's post-war migration, his collaboration with Harvey Milk, his involvement in the gay liberation movement, and the representation of Jones in film and television. Jones, most well known for founding the AIDS Foundation and the AIDS Memorial Quilt, reflects on the gay liberation movement as a lifesaving and life-giving force and challenges us to remember the lessons and people that made it possible, while informing contemporary struggles for civil and human rights.
ABSTRACT: Monica Tetzlaff relates the history of Odie Mae and Bernard Streets, a middle-class African American couple, providing a look at the long civil rights movement in South Bend, Indiana. Bernard, a dentist, and Odie Mae, a homemaker and later a Head Start teacher, were part of the middle-class leadership group of the NAACP and other organizations from the 1930s, through World War II, and into the turbulent 1960s, when their adult children became leaders. The intergenerational story of the Streets family, which moves from the upper South to northern Indiana, reveals only a portion of the Black struggle for equality, but their stories shed light on important themes for Black Hoosiers: the right to recreate, the freedom to own a home of one’s choice, and the right to be free of police brutality. The intersectionality that Odie Mae found with Latina women’s rights and Head Start’s empowerment for low-income parents and children of all races is part of the Streetses’ message that we are all brothers and sisters “under the skin.”
ABSTRACT: In 1858, Absalom C. Jennings, a prosperous farmer and breeder of thoroughbred race horses, commissioned a circular barn at Nutwood Farm in Champaign County, Ohio. The barn was designed by architect Charles T. Rathbun, who had grown up less than ten miles from the circular barn built by the Shakers at Hancock, Massachusetts. The Shaker barn, the first true round barn built in the U.S., likely inspired Rathbun’s design of the round barn in Ohio. The Nutwood round barn, the second oldest in the country, was built by William Stover, who expended $11,000 in its construction. When Jennings refused to pay the full amount due, Stover sued and, after several years of legal wrangling, won his case but at a considerable financial loss. Author Cornelis J. van der Veen recounts the story of Nutwood Farm and its round barn, the extended legal disputes between the barn’s builder and owner, and the history of the farm and barn in the twentieth century.
ABSTRACT: Arthur Middleton Reeves (1856–1891) is a forgotten figure in Indiana literary history. Hailing from Richmond, Indiana, Reeves left an important impact in the niche corner of medieval Icelandic studies. Author Zachary Melton outlines how, during the nineteenth century, the scholarship and popular writing about Vinland and the Vinland sagas were steeped in ideals of white and Protestant superiority, intertwined with conspiracy theories, and used to bolster claims of Anglo-American power in the United States. In his landmark book, The Finding of Wineland the Good (1890), however, Reeves not only refused to engage with these ideals but argued against them, attempting to present the medieval Icelandic sagas that take place in North America as incredible pieces of historical literature, free from ideology. By tracing Reeves's beginnings in Indiana to his travels in Iceland to the hardships faced before his untimely death, a picture emerges of a fascinating, nineteenth-century Hoosier who made important strides to try and divorce medieval Icelandic sagas from ideals associated with white supremacy—an issue that has come to the forefront in the twenty-first century in the wake of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
ABSTRACT: The Indiana State Library was established in 1825 to serve the research needs of the Indiana General Assembly and other members of state government. Two hundred years later, the library has grown to serve all Hoosiers through collections in Indiana history, state and federal government, family history, Indiana literature, and more. Author and librarian Jamie Dunn, using many of the library's own publications and reports, traces the development of the Indiana State Library from small governmental library to a premier research institution.
