Ransom Center Magazine

Articles

A childhood gift inspires a lifelong passion for India and map-collecting

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Charting a Path

Sixty maps and other prints of South Asia and the surrounding region have recently arrived at the Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin in honor of former professor Susan G. Hadden. Generously donated by her husband, James Hadden, Jr., the newly acquired Susan G. Hadden Collection of Early Maps of India contains maps dating from 1540 to around 1880, and together they track developments in cartography and the rise of European trade, colonization, and ultimately empire in the region.

The Hadden collection’s earliest map is a two-page woodcut that was printed as part of Sebastian Münster’s Geographia (Basel, 1540), a Latin version of Ptolemy’s widely printed and adapted Geography. It is the first printed map dedicated to illustrating the Asian continent as a whole. In it, only four cities within India have been identified, all on the western coast, all sites of early Portuguese settlement and/or trade.

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A Greek fragment is the first-known New Testament papyrus written on the front side of a scroll

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by GEOFFREY S. SMITH

A Fragment Makes History

A few months ago, I received a much-anticipated email that read, “The courier is scheduled to deliver the Willoughby Papyrus to the Ransom Center tomorrow.” The next morning, I anxiously watched as members of the Center’s conservation staff carefully removed from the oversized shipping package a small black archival box, no more than 8 inches square. They slid off its sleeve, opened the protective cover, and placed the object on the table in front of me for inspection. Mounted between two plates of glass was an ancient papyrus fragment of the Gospel of John, no larger than a credit card.

The manuscript was fragmentary, and some of the Greek letters were not easy to make out, but it had not suffered any damage since I had last seen it in person, nearly seven years earlier. I could finally breathe a sigh of relief. The “Willoughby Papyrus,” as it is known, had made it to The University of Texas safe and sound.

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ABOUT GEOFFREY S. SMITH

Geoffrey S. Smith is Associate Professor, Fellow of the Louise Farmer Boyer Chair in Biblical Studies, and Director of the Institute for the Study of Antiquity and Christian Origins (ISAC) in the Department of Religious Studies at The University of Texas at Austin.

Center Wins Archival Excellence Award

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The Ransom Center’s Radclyffe Hall and Una Vincenzo, Lady Troubridge Papers Project won the 2022 Archival Award for Excellence from the Texas Historical Records Advisory Board (THRAB) “for outstanding contributions to archives and historical records in the State of Texas.”

Through the project, thousands of records were digitized and published online for researchers. Hall and Troubridge are remembered as LGBTQ pioneers, and Hall’s 1928 novel, The Well of Loneliness, made lesbianism more visible in English society, despite the banning of the novel in England.

“The Hall-Troubridge project represents the type of multidisciplinary and technologically advanced archival effort that helps make primary sources more accessible and meaningful,” Texas State Archivist Jelain Chubb said.

More than 60,000 digitized items and a new educational resource based on the Hall-Troubridge papers were added to the Center’s online digital collections last year with support provided by a Digitizing Hidden Collections grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources. The grant program is made possible by funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

project-staff-with-award
Left to right, Alejandra Martinez, Daniel Zmud, Jim Kuhn, and Coyote Shook were part of the project team that launched the Hall-Troubridge online digital collection and educational resource. Other project team members not pictured include Andi Gustavson, Joan Sibley, and Lauren Walker.

Created in 2016, the Archival Award of Excellence recognizes significant achievements in preserving and improving access to historical records in Texas. THRAB serves as an advisory body for historical records planning and supports efforts to preserve and provide access to archival collections throughout the state.

Funding for THRAB is provided by the National Historical Publications Records Commission, the grant-making arm of the National Archives and Records Administration. The state archivist is appointed by the governor to preside over the nine-member board.

The Texas State Library and Archives Commission provides Texans access to the information needed to be informed, productive citizens by preserving the archival record of Texas; enhancing the service capacity of public, academic and school libraries; assisting public agencies in the maintenance of their records; and meeting the reading needs of Texans with disabilities.

My Friend Bill Yellow Robe

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by JACE WEAVER

The Harry Ransom Center is proud to hold the papers of playwright and poet William S. Yellow Robe, Jr. A member of the Assiniboine Tribe, Yellow Robe was a lecturer at the University of Maine and the award-winning author of Grandchildren of the Buffalo Soldiers, Wood Bones, and Better-n-Indins. He died in 2021 at the age of 61. The papers, a recent gift from Yellow Robe’s wife, Jeanne, include drafts, rehearsal scripts, letters, photographs, publicity material, critical reviews, digital files, notebooks and more. We are grateful to Jeanne Domek Yellow Robe and Deborah Murad at DGCM, who is managing the licensing of Yellow Robe’s work.

The following tribute to William Yellow Robe is written by his friend Jace Weaver, founding director of the Institute of Native American Studies at the University of Georgia. Dr. Weaver edited and introduced an anthology of Yellow Robe’s plays, Restless Spirits, with SUNY Press in 2020.

Sometimes you meet someone and you know immediately you’ve met a friend for life. Though I had known Bill Yellow Robe’s work for two decades, we had never met until I went on Facebook about six years ago. I ran across Bill, and we instantly bonded as we improvised a scene in the comments to one of his posts in real time. Bill was trying to bring twenty-four cans of SPAM onto an airliner. I was a TSA agent explaining to him that he couldn’t because the gelatin around the pink meat qualified as liquid.

Shortly after that random encounter, I invited him to come and read from his work at the University of Georgia. He was gentle and genuine, and he was one of the funniest people I’d ever met. Within a day, we hatched the plan for the book that became Restless Spirits, the third anthology of his plays, which I edited.

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Women and the Making of Ulysses: A History in Ten Objects

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by CLARE HUTTON

This article is devoted to objects that tell the story of women who supported James Joyce and the publication of his landmark novel, Ulysses (1922).  They were previously on display in our exhibit, Women and the Making of Ulysses, curated by Dr Clare Hutton, author of Serial Encounters: Ulysses and the Little Review (Oxford University Press, 2019).

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