Our apologies to anybody who attempted to contact us over the weekend and could not get through. You can always telephone any Reference Desk for immediate assistance:

Lincoln Park 773-325-7863
Loop  312-362-8432
Law 312-362-6894
Naperville  312-476-4554
O'Hare 312-476-3611
Oak Forest  708-633-9096
Rolling Meadows 847-476-4846

Our instant message (IM) service is also available on the library home page (lower right corner) if you would like to reach us that way or send us a text message at 773-809-4DPU [that's 773-809-4378]

 

Memorial Day is much more than a three-day weekend that marks the beginning of summer. To many people – especially the nation's thousands of combat veterans – this is a day to honor the memory of those who died in service to their country. To read more about this national holiday and its history stretching back to the Civil War, click here.

All DePaul Libraries will maintain normal hours on Saturday and Sunday; Only the Lincoln Park Campus Library will be open on Monday from 10:00 a.m. until 6:00 p.m.  

May 1st or May Day is a recognized workers' holiday or "Labor Day" in many countries around the world, but not in the United States. Few Americans realize that the origins of this international holiday lie in the events that occurred in Chicago in May, 1886.

On May 3, 1886, "...Chicago police fired into a crowd of striking workers at the McCormick Reaper Works, killing and wounding several men. The following evening, anarchist and socialist labor leaders organized a meeting of workingmen near Chicago's Haymarket Square. Speakers at the meeting denounced the police attack of the previous afternoon and urged workers to intensify their struggle for an eight-hour workday and other improvements in labor conditions." Chicago History Museum

"...Then someone hurled a bomb at the police, killing one officer instantly. Police drew guns, firing wildly. Sixty officers were injured, and eight died; an undetermined number of the crowd were killed or wounded. [In the aftermath], police arrested hundreds of people, but never determined the identity of the bomb thrower." Encyclopedia of Chicago

"...Amidst public clamor for revenge, however, eight anarchists, including prominent speakers and writers, were tried for murder. Lacking credible evidence that the defendants threw the bomb or organized the bomb throwing, prosecutors focused on their writings and speeches. The jury, instructed to adopt a conspiracy theory without legal precedent, convicted all eight." Four men were hanged.  Famous American Trials

In the years that followed, international labor leaders used the Haymarket Affair as a rallying cry to achieve the eventual adoption of the eight-hour workday. May 1st became a day to remember the Haymarket "martyrs" and to celebrate the subsequent achievements of organized labor.

Selected books available to borrow from the Lincoln Park Campus Library include:

• The First Mayday : the Haymarket Speeches, 1895-1910
• Beyond the Martyrs : a Social History of Chicago’s anarchists, 1870-1900
• Haymarket Revisited : a Tour Guide of Labor History Sites and Ethnic Neighborhoods Connected with the Haymarket Affair
• Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief : the Great Chicago Fire, the Haymarket Bomb, and the Model Town of Pullman
• Death in the Haymarket : a story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement, and the Bombing that Divided Gilded Age America

The term ides (idus in Latin) comes from the earliest Roman calendar and simply means the middle of the month.

For the Roman ruler Julius Caesar, the ides of any month would have been just another day. Only because of Shakespeare's tragedy, Julius Caesar, have the Ides of March in particular become inextricably linked with a sense of doom. In Act I, Scene 2, a fortune teller warns the dictator to beware the approaching ides. Too proud and arrogant, he fails to heed the warning. (Click to view a one minute video clip from the play.)

History records that Caesar was assassinated on March 15th (the Ides of March) in the year 44 BC as depicted in this painting by Vincenzo Camuccini:

 

Sources:

Brunner, Borgna. "The Ides of March". Infoplease. Retrieved March 10, 2009, from http://www.infoplease.com/spot/ides1.html.

Bunson, Matthew. Encyclopedia of the Roman Empire. Facts on File: New York, 2002. Available in print at Lincoln Park Library Reference

Theatre in Video is a database containing more than 250 definitive performances of the world's leading plays, including the BBC's Shakespeare series, in streaming video.

Several patrons reported problems trying to authenticate this afternoon. Information Services was notified and staff members were able to resolve the issue. We apologize for the temporary inconvenience.

The day after Thanksgiving has become recognized by retailers and shoppers alike as the official start of the Christmas shopping season, but why is it referred to as "Black Friday"?

One explanation offered frequently is that the expression refers to the day many retailers finally move out of the red, indicating losses, and into the black, representing profits. However, according to researchers at the American Dialect Society, the expression originated in Philadelphia and was first seen in print in the mid-1960s to describe the crush of pedestrians and bumper-to-bumper traffic that would descend on downtown to shop the day after Thanksgiving. This follows a long tradition of labeling any day of infamy or crisis as "black". It's only in the past few decades that a more positive, business-oriented connotation has been implied.

Often billed as the biggest shopping day of the year, in fact, Black Friday is not necessarily the day American retailers see the most dollars spent. According to the International Council on Shopping Centers, that title is usually claimed by the Saturday before Christmas.

 

Sources:  http://holiday.icsc.org
 http://www.americandialect.org

A common requirement for assignments is to use primary sources. Recent requests for assistance received via email have included:

• I need to find letters written by German aristocrats in the late nineteenth century.

• Where would I find a primary source related to the conquest of Mexico?

• Are there any original pamphlets or posters I can look at from the Civil Rights Movement?

What are primary sources exactly? Well, it really is open to interpretation and your instructor should set the parameters of what is and is not acceptable. Generally, primary sources enable the researcher to get as close as possible to what actually happened during an historical event or time period. They are original documents, such as a treaty, legislation or artifacts, instead of articles or books that provide secondary analysis.

Primary sources can also reflect the individual viewpoint of a participant or observer. Undergraduate students are sometimes allowed to use a broader definition of primary sources, which might include diaries, speeches, interviews, letters, memos, manuscripts and other papers in which individuals describe events in which they were participants or observers.

It's a question of content rather than format--primary sources might be republished, digitized or preserved on microfilm.

DePaul's Special Collections and Archives can be a wonderful resource for primary sources, especially those pertaining to the University, the Lincoln Park neighborhood and Vincentian Heritage. Other repositories in the immediate area worth exploring include the Chicago History Museum and the Newberry Library; additionally the National Archives in Washington, DC has an extensive selection of digitized documents. For more advice on how to identify and locate primary sources, click here.

http://www.archives.gov/historical-docs/todays-doc/index.html?dod-date=714

On June 10, 1943  Hungarian journalist Laszlo Biro (1899-1985) patented the ballpoint pen. The inspiration came one day during a visit to the print shop of the magazine for which he wrote. Noticing how quickly the ink dried, he saw the advantages in a pocket-sized writing implement with that property and set to work on a prototype in 1938. To escape the Nazis, Biro fled to Argentina in 1940 and began selling his pens in Buenos Aires in 1945. His name became a household word--biro is a global synonym for the ballpoint pen.     

Source: This Day in Business History by Raymond L. Francis available at the Loop Campus Library, R.330.900202 F819d2006