Books and Other Texts
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Louisiana Purchase Exposition: The 1904 St. Louis World's Fair (Collection)
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The Louisiana Purchase Exposition, commonly known as the Saint Louis World's Fair of 1904, was the last great international exposition before the Great War of 1914. The fair, built on a 1,200 acre site, was conceived on a gigantic scale. It included hundreds of thousands of objects, people, animals, displays, and publications from 62 exhibiting countries and 43 of the 45 states. The setting of world's records, such as the largest organ, and working displays of every important technological advance were significant design goals. It was no accident that the 11-volume set, Louisiana and the Fair; an exposition of the world, its people and their achievements (included here) was published by the World's Progress Publishing Co. The Fair itself was a combination of trade show, civic showpiece, monument to cultural self-consciousness and boosterism, along with more than a tinge of American exceptionalism. It betrays the grandiose ambition of the gilded age, forming a kind of collective utterance encompassing the nineteenth century's paean to international understanding in the furtherance of peace, prosperity, and progress. It's a grand snapshot in time of American and foreign societies as they wished to portray themselves.
The documents here are intended to complement existing Internet collections and to further scholarly research and serious inquiry. They are from the collections of the University of Missouri Libraries and University Archives and were selected because they were not yet available on the Internet. Perhaps the most important of these is Mark Bennett's History of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition. The diversity of subjects is huge: veterinary practice, the famous artist Max Klinger, and poverty and relief efforts in Leipzig - and this just from Germany. The Committee on Digitization Initiatives of the MU Libraries hopes that these resources will be useful to the people of the State of Missouri and beyond, and we welcome any comments or questions.
The digitization in 2010 of the resources in this collection was supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by the Missouri State Library, a division of the Office of the Secretary of State.
MU ID: mu:5211.
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Missouriana Digital Text Collection
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This collection was the first to be added to the legacy UM Libraries Digital Library. It is very broad in scope and includes material on Missouri history, geology, literature, and the Civil War. Most of the items were contributed by the University of Missouri libraries, but other Missouri institutions also furnished material. The collection is added to as additional material is found. It is one of the more popular collections we have, especially for genealogists, historians, and geologists.Additional Missouriana resources are available in MOspace, the University of Missouri Institutional Repository. Two collections that may be of interest are:The MU Digital Library map collection includes Missouri maps, including Plat books and Sanborn maps for Missouri. The Works Projects Administration History Records Survey collection includes inventories of county archives for several Missouri counties.
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North American Agroforestry Conference
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Since 1989, the North American Agroforestry Conference series has been co-sponsored by the Association for Temperate Agroforestry and is held every two years. According to AFTA's website, the conference is "a major scientific forum for those involved in agroforestry research, extension and application in the US, Canada and overseas".
AFTA defiens agroforestry as "an intensive land management system that optimizes the benefits from the biological interactions created when trees and/or shrubs are deliberately combined with crops and/or livestock. There are five basic types of agroforestry practices today in the North America":
- Windbreaks
- Alley cropping
- Silvopasture
- Riparian buffers
- Forest farming
In 2009, AFTA celebrated the 20th Anniversary of the conference. The theme was "Agroforestry Comes of Age: Putting Science into Practice" and supported AFTA's mission to "Promote the wider adoption of agroforestry by landowners in temperate regions of North America". Chris and Jen Cunnigham of the Jay Springs Lamb Company gave the first keynote address titled "Sheep, Trees and Direct Marketing in British Columbia". The second keynote was given by Nicola McPherson of Ozark Forest Mushrooms and was titled "From the Hills of the Ozarks to the Bistros of St. Louis".
The 12th North American Agroforestry Conference was held in Athens, Georgia in 2011. The theme was "Agroforestry: A Profitable Land Use". According to the foreward given by Sarah Workman and David Moorhead, "The 2011 biennial conference [highlighted] agroforestry research, implementation, policy, education, and entrepreneurial opportunities across North America". The keynote speakers were:
- Kathleen Merrigan, deputy Secretary of Agriculture, U.S. Department of Agriculture
- Jamshed Mercange, Assistant Deputy Minister Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada
- Dennis Garrity, Director General, World Agroforestry Centre
The 13th North American Agroforestry Conference was in 2013 and was held in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada. According to Chris Pharo and John Kort (co-chairs of the 13th NAAC Committee), the conference "featured over sixty oral presentations as well as over 25 poster presentations covering the range of agroforestry subjects such as riparian buffers, alley cropping and inter-cropping, greenhouse gas mitigation, non-timber forest products and silvopasture". The Poplar Council of Canada also joined the conference and in addition, held their 35th annual general meeting.
In 2015, the 14th North American Agroforestry Conference will be held in Ames, Iowa, USA.
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Savitar - The MU Yearbook
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The Savitar is the University of Missouri yearbook, which began publication in 1894 and continued as a print publication through 2005. As the University yearbook, the Savitar offers photographs of administrators, faculty, and students, arranged by class, organization, and extracurricular activity. Other photographs include important campus events, such as athletic contests, parades, convocations, and commencements.
The name Savitar originates from the Sun-god of Rig-Veda, in Hindu mythology. Its root, su, means to dry or stimulate. Savitar and its alternate, Surya, denotes splendor of the luminary and irresistible energy - he is the god who sees all things and notes all the good and evil deeds of men. Nothing can withstand his will and age cannot touch him. Other definitions of the Sanskrit word Savitar include: (1) the sun, worshipped as the god of life and represented as drawn in a car of gold; (2) sometimes shown as a woman, Savatari, who sacrificed herself to save her husband who was trapped in the underworld; and (3) an important god, the sun in its life-giving aspect; (4) used for the Sun God from Vedic mythology; (5) quickener, impeiler, or enlivener.
As for the choosing of the name Savitar for the University yearbook, research shows that the aesthetic reasons for selection of the name by University students of 1894 were perhaps tempered by more prosaic ones. Among other things, the editors liked the size and sound of the word. The student editors probably got their idea for the title from Professor James Shannon Blackwell, professor of Semitic and modern languages at the University from 1886 to 1897, who was known as a student of Sanskrit.
Note: The collection also contains the Index, the 1891 yearbook produced by the M.S.U. Athletic Association.
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University of Missouri Press (Collection)
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The University of Missouri Press was founded in 1958. It publishes books on a variety of topics including American and world history, African American studies, women's studies, political science, literary criticism, regional studies, and creative nonfiction. Selected out-of-print titles have been digitized and are available in the MU Libraries digital repositories. For additional online titles, see the MOspace Institutional Repository.
