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Dear IDARM Network member,
We hope you are enjoying this final month of 2024. In October, we had a wonderful three-day, in-person IDARM Network Gathering at the Heinz History Center and University of Pittsburgh. Attendees enjoyed archival encounters, presentations, and community-building workshops that fostered awareness among our professional network partners. Thank you to everyone who participated!
We are processing the data collected throughout the IDARM Network Gathering. We look forward to sharing our insights with you in the New Year. One item we plan to address immediately is our IDARM partners' need for additional support. IDARM plans to offer our first webinar in February with speakers focused on strategies to apply for small collections-related grants.
With gratitude,
Melissa, Lina and Nancy
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Meet the IDARM Network Partners | |
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Meet Leslie Poljak
I am a librarian at the University of Pittsburgh with the University of Pittsburgh Library System. I have been a liaison librarian to Pitt’s Department of French and Italian since 2017. In my role as liaison librarian, I guide faculty and students through library resources to support classroom learning and research.
I have supported Italian American Studies by working with Lina Insana to create and maintain the Italian American Studies @ Pitt LibGuide. This guide highlights resources related to Italian American studies including books, media, archival materials, and special collections held at the university and provides information about conducting library research. In addition to my role as a liaison librarian, I have worked in libraries for 14 years with a focus on student engagement and information literacy.
I look forward to connecting with more IDARM project participants and learning more about the significant history and contributions of Italian Americans in western Pennsylvania and beyond.
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Meet Michael Walter
I am Manager of Education Programs at the Nationality & Heritage Rooms at University of Pittsburgh, where I’ve developed training for many generations of undergraduate Nationality Rooms guides, preparing them to provide interpretive tours for the University and Pittsburgh communities. Over the last twenty years, I’ve created multiple thematic tours of the Nationality Rooms for different audiences, age groups, and special interests. My work has been broadcast through University, local, and national partnerships.
This work involves being a good steward not only of the Nationality Rooms’ legacy, but of its objects. The history of the Italian Nationality Room offers a case in point. The Italians of Pittsburgh were among the very first groups to organize and sign on for the plan to have "period rooms." A December 1927 document written by founding Nationality Rooms Director Ruth Crawford Mitchell asserted that "While modern Italians may be taught in the Italian Room—such flexibility should exist that a mathematics class could also be taught in this room.” Names of prominent Italian thinkers and artists from St. Francis to Marconi appear in the molding above the front and rear paneling. University cities and the year of their chartering are carved into the students’ seatbacks, which subdivide the pews. Ruth Crawford Mitchell remembered that at Vassar College there hung a stained-glass window showing the first woman—an Italian—to earn a university degree in European history: Helena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia, who in 1678 graduated with a degree in Philosophy from the University of Padua.
Nationality Rooms and Intercultural Exchange Programs
The material and documentary archives curated by the Nationality Rooms and Intercultural Exchange Programs tell the rich, complex stories of how the Italian Room (and all of her sister rooms in the Cathedral of Learning) came to be, came to look the way they do, and came to represent their respective ethnic and national communities.
Individuals wishing to know more about these archives may contact Michael Walter at mpw14@pitt.edu for artifact holdings and Daniel Pennell pennell@pitt.edu, the University Library System’s Special Collections liaison to IDARM, for Nationality Room Committee archives.
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Conferences
The National Council on Public History's annual conference is being held from March 26-29, 2025, in Montreal, Canada. On Saturday, March 29, staff from the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum will present "Unearthing History: Community-led Efforts to Commemorate American Labor History with the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum."
Registration for NCPH's annual conference is now open. Registration and a preliminary draft program can be found at here.
Opportunities
Monument Lab is a nonprofit, public art, history, and design studio based in Philadelphia dedicated to advancing justice by reimagining monuments as places for belonging, learning, and healing. They are a leading voice in how monuments live with us in public spaces and critically engage our inherited symbols in order to unearth the next generation of monuments that elevate stories and systems of belonging.
Monument Lab has been recognized for producing groundbreaking public art exhibitions, participatory research initiatives, media projects, civic and municipal partnerships, and site-specific commissions and workshops. They work with artists, students, educators, activists, municipal agencies, and cultural institutions on participatory approaches to public engagement and collective memory.
There are numerous ways Monument Lab connects to public archivists, historians, and museum personnel. They have internships and fellows programs. Monument Lab has team members and collaborators located across the United States, its territories, and beyond.
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Mahoning Valley Historical Society
Youngstown, Ohio
Mahoning Valley Historical Society collects, preserves and teaches the history of the people of the Mahoning Valley. Founded in 1875 and incorporated in 1909, MVHS programs reach over 24,000 people annually both in-person and virtually.
MVHS operates Arms Family Museum, the Arts-and-Crafts style former home of Olive and Wilford Arms; MVHS Archives Research Center, which offers the Society’s extensive archives collection for public research; Stewart Media Archives Center, a repository for local broadcast media history collections and production facilities; and Tyler History Center, which features exhibit galleries, an education center, and a restored ballroom/event space. MVHS recently added to its facilities a three-story, 1980 office building located in downtown Youngstown’s east end. There, MVHS will create a new museum/cultural center and storage facility to fulfill current needs and future growth.
MVHS has a collection of over half a million objects and documents, which tell stories of human experiences in this region of Ohio from the present to the earliest people to inhabit the Mahoning River watershed more than 12,000 years ago. Included are household furnishings and textiles such as quilts and coverlets, food processing equipment, tools and equipment for business and industry, clothing and accessories, sports and recreation objects, framed artwork, and decorative arts objects. The archival collection holds diaries, photographs, manuscripts, maps, ledgers, county and local government records, published works and more associated with local families, churches, organizations, businesses, and industries with connections to the Mahoning Valley.
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Mr. and Mrs. Raffaele Cacciavilian with their nine children in 1916, photographed by the Christ Mission Settlement Association.
MVHS Collections Manager Jessica Trickett says, “For our community, these objects and the people who left them behind represent the fabric that has made the Mahoning Valley what it is today. With a diversity of ethnicities, religions, and socioeconomic backgrounds, the people of the Mahoning Valley connect through a shared heritage reflected in the MVHS collection. Italian Americans represent a large part of the immigrant communities who made their way here in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and our collection celebrates their lives and experiences.”
The MVHS Archives Research Center holds individual collections from local Italian American families, neighborhoods, churches, businesses, and social and cultural organizations. Additionally, there are photographs and documents from community-based organizations that interacted with the immigrants who came here in the early 20th century to find work in the booming iron and steel industry.
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The Franklin Italian Women’s Club in 1931, from the International Institute collection.
MVHS Executive Director Bill Lawson says, “We are excited to be a part of the IDARM Network and share our collections resources with a broader audience. We have records from organizations like the International Institute of the Mahoning Valley and Christ Mission Settlement Association, who helped immigrants to obtain citizenship documentation, offered language classes, helped find housing, and more. These documents are invaluable in understanding the Italian American experience in the Mahoning Valley.”
The Mahoning Valley benefits in a myriad of ways from the traditions brought by Italian immigrants. Many of these are reflected in local foodways. The Brier Hill Pizza, featuring red sauce, green peppers, and grated Romano cheese, is named after a predominantly Italian American neighborhood in Youngstown. The Cookie Table is another carryover from the immigrant tradition of coming together as a community to bake cookies for wedding celebrations. Jessica Trickett notes, “As the Mahoning Valley has been shaped by its Italian American population, it is important to continue to celebrate and share these stories. We’re grateful to have found a common goal among the IDARM Network.”
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Contact Information
The MVHS Archives Research Center is located inside Tyler History Center at 325 W. Federal Street, Youngstown, Oh.
Open Tuesday through Saturday, noon – 4:00pm. Phone (330) 743-258
The Stewart Media Archives Center is located at 648 Wick Avenue,
Youngstown, Oh.
Open by appointment only. Phone (330) 743-2589.
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Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this newsletter, do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities. | | | | |
