A Sample of Visual Materials from the Collection

Good afternoon, everyone -- long time no blog. My student assistants and I have been sweating it out this summer at off-site storage locations, separating the wheat from the chaff, as it were. Hence I have not been posting -- it's hard to do when I don't come to the office. Recently, though, we have been taking a vacation from the dust and doing some things that needed to get done around campus.

The Collection has recently acquired a fancy-schmancy large-scale scanner, so I figured I'd take it for a test run on a few of the larger format materials recently unearthed. It's my hope that this post will be a little lighter on the commentary and a little heaver on the finer (visual) details. So here we go....

A few weeks back our search turned up an interesting item: a scrapbook from World War One that appears to have belonged to and was compiled by an Associated Press reporter named Phil M. Powers. It's a magnificent piece and as soon as I saw the cover I realized it would be impressive.

The cloth cover is imprinted with the entitling "Weltkrieg 1914/15." Weltkrieg is German for "world war."

When I first began looking through this scrapbook I was somewhat mystified. Not being a German-speaker I felt I had immediately run into a brick wall -- many of the items, such as personal notes and business cards, hotel stationary, newspaper clippings, are in German. Upon further examination, though, I found that a couple of items were in English, which was a relief but somewhat confusing -- would an average German or Austrian have knowledge of, interest in, and access to English-language materials? Would and could a native English-speaker be hanging out in World War One-era Austria or Germany?

It turns out that the answer to the latter question is 'Yes.' Phil M. Powers, the owner and author of the scrapbook was apparently an A.P. war correspondent in Austria. It seems he had almost unfettered access there, too, given the subject matter and number of original photographs. This makes sense of course, as the U.S. was nominally neutral in the war until 1917, when it joined the Allied forces against Germany and Austria-Hungary. Notably, the entries in the scrapbook trail off in relevance as time appears to progress into 1916 -- there are a number of pages filled with rather banal cartoons and drawings cut from English-language newspapers and magazines. Perhaps the typed note in German, dated January 25, 1917 (Berlin) could shed some light on what happened to our scrap-booker? (It was around this time that tensions began to rise between the U.S.and Germany.)

Here (below, left) are a few remarkable images from just one page of the scrapbook.
And to the right is the page that faced it, with a friendly letter from an English-speaking friend (an Irishman, perhaps? -- I detect a slight lilt.)

Speaking of Irishmen, Powers clipped an article from a newspaper about the Irish patriot/British traitor (Sir) Roger Casement. Casement was an Irishman who had served in the British armed forces as an officer before the war. During the war, after his conversion into an Irish Republican,  he traveled Germany to acquire arms and to recruit Irish POWs from the British forces. His plan was to have Germany assist in fomenting a rebellion in then British-controlled Ireland, thus opening up a western front on Great Britain. He met with limited success in Germany, and upon his return to Ireland (via German U-boat) the plot and Casement's role in it were discovered by the British and the rebellion was quashed. Casement was subsequently tried, convicted and executed. In reading the article Powers clipped (see image below, left), one cannot help but consider the question of whether or not Powers knew Casement.

Phil M. Powers remains a mystery to me. When I first looked at this scrapbook, I spent a few hours digging for information on him and found, well, nothing. Perhaps an enterprising researcher will take up the challenge?

Stay tuned in the coming days for a post with some local flavor....