Ohio University Libraries News and Events

On February 5, 1958 Dag Hammarskjold (1905-1961), the Swedish diplomat who became the second Secretary-General of the United Nations and who received the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1961, visited Ohio University.

The Robert E. and Jean R. Mahn Center for Archives & Special Collections has opened a virtual exhibit that explores the story of the visit. It explains how OU President John C. Baker was successful in inviting Hammarskjold to Athens, gives details on the speech Hammarskjold made, includes photographs of the visit, and links to a biographical sketch of Hammarskjold available on a web site on Nobel Prize winners. The exhibit is also structured with sets of questions for each section to make it useful for social studies teachers and students.

On the morning of June 11, 2007, Andrew Gibbons and Quinn Westenbarger presented their award-winning skit “The Hocking Valley Coal Strike of 1884” to the employees of Alden Library. Their performance represented the culmination of research that these two middle school scholars had begun during the fall of 2006; research which eventually took them to local libraries, museums, historical societies, former mining sites, and to Alden Library’s Mahn Center for Archives and Special Collections. During the spring of 2007, the presentation won the junior-level first prize at the regional National History Day contest at the University of Rio Grande, and it won third prize at the state competition in Columbus, Ohio, thereby making the skit an alternate for national competition.

The performance, adhering to contest stipulations, condenses into a ten-minute skit the story and dynamics of the often harsh realities of coal mining and family life in Southeastern Ohio during the late 19th Century, and the subsequent formation of the United Mine Workers of America. The following video is the skit the students produced.


For the other parts of the presentation, please visit the Library’s YouTube page