The American Play Company collection includes approximately two thousand and five hundred (2,500) play scripts from the American Play Company of New York City. The files include published and unpublished plays from the nineteenth century through the 1950s. The collection is a donation of Sheldon Abend, President of the American Play Company. Playwrights represented in this gift include sir James M. Barrie, David Belasco, Clare Boothe, George M. Cohan, John Colton, Clyde Fitch, John Galsworthy, Ruth Gordon, Oscar Hammerstein, Moss Hart, Ben Hecht, George S. Kaufman and many others.
The play scripts include original typescripts, carbon copies of typescripts, and printed texts of plays. Many scripts contain handwritten annotations such as dialogue insertions, corrections, and deletions. The play scripts includes productions of all genre and type, for a period of approximately one hundred and fifty years. Scripts contain production annotations for stage, lighting, sound, and casting purposes. The collection offers scholars and students the opportunity to examine play scripts with the personal annotations of production personnel, facts that provide unique information on the original production of plays. Notations for costumes, sets, and stage props offer insights to production styles and techniques, information not generally available in many published versions of plays.
Natale Bongiovanni was a Field Captain with the U.S. Army. The Natale Bongiovanni Papers contains six notebooks in which Bongiovanni defines and provides context and etymology for every word of President Harry Truman's State of the Union Address to Congress on January 4, 1950.
The R. A. Cushman Papers contain the following items: (1) a U.S. flag, and letters from Arthur R. De Reyes, from the American Expeditionary Forces, to his mother written in 1917 and 1918; (2) three photographic prints from the U.S. Signal Corps; (3) 46 folders of reports, essays, transcripts, bibliographies, and pamphlets largely concerned with American foreign policy, touching on topics such as foreign trade, foreign concessions, foreign aid, U.S. exports, foreign banking, and immigration.
This collection contains a sound reel of the Dante Festival program celebrating the 7th centenary of writer Dante Alighieri. The program was held in Brockway Hall of the Otto G. Richter Library.
Edward C. Dougherty was a Government Administrator and United Nations Expert in taxation for Latin America, as well as a private practitioner of law in the Miami area, specializing in Latin American matters. His papers consists predominantly of materials concerning real estate in Brazil, in the form of letters, maps, notes, photocopies, clippings, photographs, pamphlets, and reports.
The John Allen collection contains three rolls of tape documenting events celebrating the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's Birth. The first roll covers a Joint Session of Congress on February 12, 1959. The second and third roll cover events at the Lincoln Museum.
The David Ewen Collection consists of materials which pertain to several aspects of music, ranging from composers to opera houses and festivals, as well as his personal life and work. The papers follow the original order established by David Ewen.
The bulk of the collection contains information and some correspondence pertaining to American and foreign composers and serious and popular performers such as George Gershwin, Charles Ives, Igor Stravinsky, Gustav Mahler, Maria Callas, Bing Crosby, and other notable 20th century composers and performers.
Dr. José Agustín Balseiro (1900-1991) was an award-winning author, poet, and scholar of Latin American Studies and Hispanic literature. He was also a professor of Hispanic Literature at the University of Miami from 1946 to 1967.
Throughout his career, Dr. Balseiro exhibited a strong interest in Latin American and Hispanic-American studies, Latin American and Spanish literature, and Puerto Rican history and literature. His papers, donated to the University of Miami, reflect all of these interests and range in date from his earliest activities as a writer in Spain to his final days working as a consultant to the University of Miami Libraries starting in 1974. Much of the content consists of correspondence, clippings, typescripts, and periodicals in which Balseiro’s writings were featured. Also included is sheet music belonging to his father, Rafael Balseiro, who was a Puerto Rican composer.
Of special note are three bronze medallions: (1) from the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriquena, commemorating el primer Centenario del Natalicio de Luiz Muñoz Rivera (the centennial of the birth of Luiz Muñoz Rivera); (2) from the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriquena, commemorating el Centenario de la Abolición de la Esclavidud in Puerto Rico (the centennial of the abolition of slavery in Puerto Rico); and (3) from the University of Panama commemorating the first 25 years of the University’s existence.
Jerome Greene was a commissioner and later vice-chairman of the board of the Urban Renewal Agency for Dade County, Florida, as well as the chairman of the Save Urban Renewal Committee of 1964. His papers concern his involvement with the above.
Dr. I. A. Richards (1893-1979) was an influential English literary critic and rhetorician. His books on literary criticism, especially The Meaning of Meaning, Principles of Literary Criticism, Practical Criticism, and The Philosophy of Rhetoric, are taken to be founding influences for the New Criticism. Richards is also considered one of the founders of the contemporary study of literature in English.
The I. A. Richards Collection at the Special Collections department contains a large selection of Richards' work in language learning and literacy, in the form of textbooks, workbooks, brochures, audio-visual materials, index cards, phonograph records, and slides.
The Abraham Schwaczkin collection consists primarily of Jewish cantorial sheet music and lyrics.
Also included are a birth certificate and marriage certificates of Schwaczkin, a 1953 copy of the B'nai B'rith messenger newspaper, a catalog, several yearbooks from Jewish congregations, a photograph, and a series of letters between Schwaczkin and a Mrs. Morrison from 1940.
Charleton W. Tebeau was an American writer and historian whose life work focused on Florida. Born in Springfield Georgia, he later moved to Miami and worked at the University of Miami for 37 years. He then helped found the Historical Museum of Southern Florida and served as editor of its paper, Tequesta. He is also known for his most famous book, A History of Florida, a comprehensive compilation of Florida's eclectic history, which he published in 1971.
His collection consists of correspondence, Tequesta writings, diaries, audio-visual materials, research files, and other documents compiled by Charleton Tebeau.
The Irving A. Leonard collection contains materials related to Kirk Munroe (1850-1930), a writer of children's stories and a journalist who lived for approximately forty years in Coconut Grove. Much of the collection consists of typed copies or photocopies of letters, diary entries, bibliographies, essays, and newspaper articles, but some unique photographs and correspondence with family members of Munroe is included as well.
Lewis was professor of English at the University of Miami from March 1934 to August 1941. This collection consists of manuscript poems by authors Edward Davidson, Eunice Tietjins, and Genevieve Taggard, as well as lecture notes by Jesse Stuart for his February 21, 1941 speech to the Winter Institute of Literature at the University of Miami.
Dr. William F. Lee was Dean of the School of Music at the University of Miami. The William F. Lee papers consists manuscripts of sheet music by Dean Lee.
