This latest issue of the Connecticut State Library’s newsletter includes the following:

• Surprises at the State Library by Ken Wiggin
• After Thirty Years: Visual Surprises from the State Archives by Mark Jones
• Publication of Volume XX, The Public Records of the State of CT, 1819-1820 by Douglas Arnold
• Cryptographic Curiosity from the Connecticut State Library by Bonnie Linck
• Across the Cataloger’s Desk by Bill Anderson
• 10 Myths about CT Public Libraries by Tom Newman
• Gems by Jenny Groome
• Adoption of the Regulation concerning Real Property Electronic Recording by LeAnn R. Power
• Third Thursdays at the Connecticut State Library

Professor Jon Purmont will discuss his new book Ella Grasso: Connecticut’s Pioneering Governor at the Connecticut State Library on Thursday, May 16, 2013 from Noon to 12:45. Purmont, who served as Grasso’s executive assistant when she was governor, draws on his diary from that time, research in Grasso’s archives, and interviews with Grasso’s family and friends, to give us a rich and intimate portrait of this political pioneer. When Grasso ran for governor of Connecticut in 1974, she had not lost an election since she was first voted into the state’s General Assembly in 1952. She was the nation’s first woman to be elected governor in her own right capping a long and successful career dedicated to public service, effective government, and the democratic process. During her tenure as governor, Grasso’s leadership was tested in the face of fiscal problems, state layoffs, and budget shortfalls. The daughter of Italian immigrants, she endeared herself to her constituents during the great Blizzard of 1978, when she stayed at the State Armory around the clock to direct emergency operations and make frequent television appearances.

Thursday, May 16, 2013
12:00 - 12:45 p.m.
Connecticut State Library ~ Memorial Hall

Purmont’s talk is part of the State Library and Museum of Connecticut History’s Third Thursday BrownBag Lunchtime speaker series which features a variety of speakers on various aspects of Connecticut history. All programs are free and open to the public.

About the Speaker: Jon E. Purmont is a lifelong resident of Connecticut. He received a B.S. degree from Georgetown University, a Masters Degree in Education from Southern Connecticut State University, and a Doctorate in the Teaching of History from Teachers College, Columbia University. In 1979, he became Executive Assistant to Governor Ella Grasso and also served on the staff of Governor William O’Neill. In 1992, he joined the History Faculty at Southern Connecticut State University and taught courses in Connecticut History, Colonial U.S. History, and served as the Department Coordinator of the Teacher Certification program. He retired from the University in 2009. Wesleyan University published his recent biography of Ella Grasso entitled Ella Grasso Connecticut’s Pioneering Governor.

About the State Library: The Connecticut State Library is an Executive Branch agency of the State of Connecticut. The State Library provides a variety of library, information, archival, public records, museum, and administrative services to citizens of Connecticut, as well as the employees and officials of all three branches of State government. The Connecticut State Archives and the Museum of Connecticut History are components of the State Library.

State Archivist Mark Jones will deliver a talk at the Connecticut State Library on Thursday, April 18, 2013 from Noon to 12:45 on Frederic Collin Walcott and his career as a conservationist. Walcott’s political career began as a member of the Connecticut State Senate representing Norfolk from 1925-29, serving as president pro tempore from 1927-1929. Governor Trumbull appointed Walcott to the Board of Fish and Game Commission as its President and as the first President of the new State Water Commission, 1927-1929. In 1928, he was elected to the United States Senate and served as the first chairman of the Special Committee for the Protection of Wildlife Resources. On this committee, Walcott passed on to the Senate a favorable report on a bill creating a duck stamp, required of all persons with hunting licenses, the proceeds of which went to wetlands reclamation for wildfowl migrating in the spring and fall. Today the Duck Stamp funds many programs of the Federal Wildlife Service.

Walcott was defeated for reelection in 1934 and served as head of the Department of Public Welfare from 1935-1939. Although Walcott never left memoirs, his letters and later speeches made in 1941 and 1942 to wildlife conservationists show his take on the conservation movement in the first half of the twentieth century.

Thursday, April 18, 2013
12:0o p.m. – 12:45 p.m.
Connecticut State Library ~ Memorial Hall

About the Speaker:  Mark Jones has been working on Frederic Collin Walcott for several years. On May 31st of this year, he shall retire after thirty years as the State Archivist, and one of his activities will be writing the biography. He has used resources here in the State Library, the large Walcott Collection at Yale University, other smaller collections at Stanford University and at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library in West Branch, Iowa. He has also received assistance and encouragement from Walcott’s surviving granddaughter, Alexandra (Sandy) Walcott, who annually comes up from New York City and opens up the house which her grandfather built in 1909 for the spring, summer and fall. She has graciously invited Jones to visit the house, exchanged stories about her grandfather and lent him photographs and manuscripts that are not in the collection at Yale.

About the State Library: The Connecticut State Library is an Executive Branch agency of the State of Connecticut. The State Library provides a variety of library, information, archival, public records, museum, and administrative services to citizens of Connecticut, as well as the employees and officials of all three branches of State government. The Connecticut State Archives and the Museum of Connecticut History are components of the State Library.

 Dr. Linford Fisher, Assistant Professor of History at Brown University, will be at the Connecticut State Library, on Thursday, March 21, 2013 from Noon to 12:45 to discuss his new book, The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America. Using a variety of court documents, land deeds, letters, material culture, and church records, he traces the selective adoption of Christian ideas and practices by Native individuals prior to and during the Great Awakening, and the subsequent emergence, post-awakening, of a distinct Indian separatism and partial rejection of Anglo-American religious institutions in response to growing proto-racism. Dr. Fisher provides a new framework for understanding religious conversion and he brings together Native history that is not often considered together: religion, land, use of court system, and local intra-tribal politics. He argues that the Great Awakening was not as formative in the lives of Natives (or as widely embraced) as previously assumed. Dr. Fisher did considerable research at the State Library. Fisher’s talk is part of the State Library and Museum of Connecticut History’s Third Thursday Brownbag Lunchtime speaker series which features a variety of speakers on various aspects of Connecticut history. All programs are free and open tot he public.

Thursday, March 21, 2013
Noon – 12:45 p.m.
Connecticut State Library ~ Memorial Hall

About the Speaker:  Linford D. Fisher is Assistant Professor of History at Brown University.  Dr. Fisher received his doctorate from Harvard University in 2008. His first book, was an in-depth study of long term cultural and religious change among American Indians in eighteenth-century Rhode Island, and Long Island, N.Y. Dr. Fisher has published essays in Ethnohistory, the New England Quarterly, and Harvard Theological Review, and has received fellowships from Harvard University, the American Antiquarian Soceity, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, the American Philosophical Society, Brown University, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Dr. Fisher’s current book project is a study of indentured servitude and slavery among the African and Indian populations of colonial New England and the Atlantic world.

About the State Library:  The Connecticut State Library is an Executive Branch agency of the State of Connecticut. The State Library provides a variety of  library, information, archival, public records, museum and administrative services to the citizens of Connecticut, as well as employees and officials of all three branches of government. Visit the State Library at http://www.ctstatelibrary.org

Connecticut Senate Session of 1925

The Connecticut State Library has recently completed the digitization of a portion of the photographs from the Connecticut General Assembly Portraits (PG 540) which is now available in the Portraits collection in its digital collections.  The collection consists of 192 historical portraits of Connecticut state officials including governors (circa 1862, 1865, 1901-1905, 1925, 1957), constitutionally elected officers (circa 1844-1866, 1901-1912, 1919-1924), executive branch officials (1889-1957), General Assembly members (circa 1844-1957), and General Assembly committees (1889-1935).  From time to time the Connecticut State Library hopes to add to this collection.