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African Holdings of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 April 2022

Bernth Lindfors
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Extract

Last year the University of Texas at Austin celebrated the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of what was to become the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, an archive named after a former English professor who had risen rapidly up the university's administrative ranks, using his considerable budgetary authority as Dean, Vice President, Provost, President, and finally Chancellor of the entire fifteen-campus University of Texas system to fulfill his vision of establishing in Austin “a center of cultural compass, a research center to be the Bibliotheque Nationale of the only state that started out as an independent nation”. To get things started, on September 11,1957, in his position as Director of the university's Rare Book Collection, he wrote a formal letter to himself authorising the expenditure of $25,000 from Special Research Collections in Humanities “to purchase books and materials for the use of the humanities faculty in furthering their research”.

Type
Research Article
Information
African Research and Documentation , Volume 133: Papers from SCOLMA Conference 2018: Things come together? Literary archives from, in and for Africa, University of Birmingham, 10 September, 2018 , 2018 , pp. 14 - 19
Copyright
Copyright © International African Institute 2018

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References

Notes

1 Harry Hunt Ransom, The conscience of the university and other essays, ed. Hazel H. Ransom (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982), 72

2 Harry Ransom Center administrative files.

3 Max, D.T., “Letter from Austin: Final Destination,” New Yorker, June 11,2007: 54.Google Scholar

4 For a list of these, see Richard Priebe, Letters and manuscripts from Southern Africa: a survey of the holdings of the Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin (Austin: African and Afro-American Research Institute, The University of Texas at Austin, 1972).

5 Oxford: James Currey

6 http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/