clair094

Back in the day, when the differences between Topps, Fleer, and Donruss baseball cards were crucial distinctions for some of us in the P&PC Office, and when were happy to do nothing more than spend hours and hours ordering, reordering, and moving our card collections from one government cheese box to another, a prize of any collection was the tobacco card—the slightly-bigger-than-a-9-volt-battery-sized card, usually from 1909 or 1910, usually with corners rounded from age and handling if not stints in between the spokes of some boy's bike, and originally given away for free with tobacco products. We all held such cards with reverence, storing them—if we could somehow get our hands on them—between heavy, inflexible pieces of transparent plastic. Not only were they old, but each one tangibly linked us to the story of the T-206 Honus Wagner (pictured here): how the Hall of Fame Pittsburgh Pirate shortstop refused to lend his visage to the tobacco industry, how he righteously dem...

Folks in the P&PC Office have spent a good portion of the last two weeks revving up for the school year: we've been buying new magic markers, trying on the latest hip jeans and gym shoes, putting together our Trapper Keepers, designing syllabi for two classes focusing on the poetry of Walt Whitman, and wistfully reflecting on Thomas Moore's " last rose of summer / left blooming alone." School starts next week, and we're excited—don't get us wrong. But we also don't want to leave summer, because leaving summer means leaving our LARC summer research team—a grant-funded group of three Willamette faculty and four Willamette students who have been working independently and collaboratively on projects related to "The Age of Projection: Remediation, Reformation, and Revolution." Every summer for three or four years now, Willamette University's Mellon-funded LARC ( Liberal Arts Research Collaborative ) program has been making it possible for fa...