Hargrett Rare Book & Manuscript Library

A scholar of southern culture and two poets will come together Nov.  5 to discuss their craft and more at the Author Discussion Series, a moderated panel discussion and  prelude to the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame induction ceremony Nov. 6.

Moderated by Hugh Ruppersburg, University Professor Emeritus, of the UGA English department, the discussion will take place at 5 p.m.  in the auditorium of the Richard B. Russell Building Special Collections Libraries. A reception will follow.

Participating will be honorees James Cobb,  the B. Phinizy Spalding Professor of History Emeritus at UGA;  and poets Alfred Corn and Kevin Young, who also directs of the  Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Also honored at the Monday ceremony will be the late Eugenia Price, an historical novelist many credit with helping to preserve the history of coastal Georgia.

Amateur films and filmmaking will be the stars of the day Oct. 21 when National Home Movie Day 2017 will be observed  in Athens at the UGA Special Collections Libraries.

National Home Movie Day is a worldwide celebration of amateur films and filmmaking, held annually in October.  The event provides an opportunity for attendees to bring in their home movies, learn more about their own family films, how to care for films and videotapes, and how home movies have helped capture personal history.

The event will be 2-4 p.m. at the Richard b. Russell Building Special Collections Libraries, 300 S. Hull Street, on the University of Georgia campus.  Free parking is available in the Hull Street parking deck. This year’s event is being sponsored by the University of Georgia Libraries’ Brown Media Archives and Peabody Awards Collection.

  The Odum School of Ecology kicks off a celebration of its tenth anniversary—and the fiftieth of its precursor, the Institute of Ecology—with a lecture, discussion and pair of exhibitions at the Richard B. Russell Special Collections Library on Sept. 14 at 4:30 p.m. Featured speakers include Betty Jean Craige, University Professor of Comparative Literature Emerita and Director Emerita of the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts; David C. Coleman, Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus of Ecology; and James W. Porter, Meigs Professor of Ecology Emeritus. The talks will be followed by a reception and book signing, and two related exhibitions will be on view in the library galleries. The event is free and open to the public. 

 The formative years of UGA’s football program is the focus of a new exhibit, “Covered With Glory: Football at UGA, 1892-1917” this fall at the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Rarely seen artifacts and photographs from UGA’s earliest gridiron heroes are featured. Visitors will learn about: coaching legend Glenn ‘Pop’ Warner, the first UGA football coach to coach for more than one year; ‘War Eagle’ Ketron, who overcame parental objections to become one of Georgia’s greatest players of the 1900s; and Herty Field, the campus site of so many early battles.  The tragic story of Von Gammon, a UGA football player whose death during a game against the University of Virginia in 1897 nearly ended the UGA football program, is highlighted.

The Firebrand and the First Lady, a portrait of the friendship between the human rights activist Pauli Murray and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and Vagrant Nation, an examination of constitutional changes and their effect on the social reform movements of the 1960s, are winners of the 2017 Lillian Smith Book Awards.

Part of the AJC Decatur Book Festival, the Lillian Smith Book Awards will be presented Sept. 3 at 2:30 p.m. in the auditorium of Decatur Public Library.

An extraordinary educator who took over operations of the family farm after his father 's death, Andrew Avery helped create the Decatur County Peanutorama, highlighting the crop and the surrounding county's contribution to its marketing.

Avery’s family has donated his papers to the University of Georgia Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, including correspondence, photographs, printed material, notes, legal documents, plats, and various ephemera.  Of note is the scrapbook documenting farm improvements he made for the Atlanta Constitution's Plant-to-Prosper contest of 1938, which he won, as well as many photographs of schools he was involved with in southwest Georgia.

Celebrating its 10th anniversary—and the 50th of its precursor, the Institute of Ecology—UGA’s Odum School of Ecology, the world’s first school devoted to the study of ecology, is the focus of an exhibit at the UGA Special Collections Libraries.

The history of the school actually can be traced back to 1940 when Eugene P. Odum came to UGA as a lecturer in zoology.  Often called the “father of modern ecology,” Odum is widely credited with making “ecosystem” a household word. At UGA he led the way in establishing ecology as an academic discipline and was instrumental in founding two off-campus research groups in the 1950s – the Savannah River Ecology Laboratory and the marine Biological Institute (now the UGA Marine Institute) on Sapelo Island. 

Following the first Earth Day in 1970, Odum became a major voice in the growing environmental movement.

Gold nuggets, historic maps, photographs, postcards and other artifacts help tell the story of Georgia’s antebellum gold rush – which preceded the frenzy in California by two decades – in an exhibit at the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Opening June 5, the exhibit features a complete set of Dahlonega Mint coins and illustrates how this  early development of southern industrialization, while profitable, was also destructive as it remade local economies, societies, and environments. In pursuit of wealth, miners ripped apart stream beds and hillsides, cut down forests, and erected miles of wooden flumes and towns of wooden shacks. Public and private mints sprang up to transform precious metal into currency and, with the help of the state and federal governments, speculators obsessed with the prospect of riches drove the Cherokee from Georgia.

The Hargrett Library and the ITA Men’s Tennis Hall of Fame will be co-hosting a panel discussion on the history of the NCAA Tennis Championships in Athens on Wednesday, May 3, at the University of Georgia’s Richard B. Russell Special Collection Libraries. The discussion is free and open to the public, and will run from 5:30-6:30 p.m.

When the NCAAs return to Athens for the 29th time beginning May 18, it will mark the 45th anniversary of the championships’ first appearance at Georgia’s tennis facility, now called the Dan Magill Tennis Complex. Georgia men’s tennis coach Manuel Diaz was a Bulldog freshman playing for Magill when the NCAAs first arrived in 1972; he’s now in his 29th season as the Bulldogs’ head coach and has won three of his four national championships on the Dogs’ home courts.

The Richard B. Russell Building Special Collections Libraries at the University of Georgia will host its bi-annual reception celebrating new exhibitions April 13 at
5:30 p.m. The event will include live music, spotlight tours, light refreshments and gallery games. The reception is free and open to the public.

Exhibitions highlighted are: “Necessary Words & Images: 70 Years of the Georgia Review,” “Slavery at the University of Georgia,” “Equality Under the Law: History of the Equal Rights Amendment,” “A Championship Tradition: The NCAA Tennis Tournament in Athens,” "The Art of the Press Kit," and “On the Stump: What Does it Take to Get Elected in Georgia?” and “Olympic Lens: Exploring the 1996 Atlanta Games”