The year 2006 marked the centenary of Jewish French military officer Alfred Dreyfus’s acquittal. The Harry Ransom Center has an extraordinary collection of postcards related to the affair. The postcards (about 100) were collected by a Parisian woman of that time who asked all her friends and relatives to send her any postcard concerning Dreyfus and his trials. This material now belongs to the large Carlton Lake collection of French manuscripts held by the Center. These postcards reveal the pervasiveness of the Dreyfus Affair in the popular culture of the time, in particular showcasing the range of anti-Dreyfus propaganda circulating throughout Paris. [Read more…] about Dreyfus Affair: Ideology in postcards
Archives for April 2007
Selected items from the American Twenties
Letter from Grace Hall Hemingway to Ernest Hemingway, July 24, 1920, “handed to him on 27 July 1920.”
Hemingway (1899-1961) was 21 years old when his mother wrote him this letter (one page of her hand-written copy is shown) telling him that he was overdrawn in the bank account of his mother’s love. He had returned the year before from the war in Europe after having been wounded and decorated for valor by Italy. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1954. [Read more…] about Selected items from the American Twenties