All Posts

The Delzell Education Center sits where a small lake once existed? According to the Dedication for the School of Education Building (1963), Due to the type of soil it was necessary to drive 271 wooden pilings to a depth of about 35 feet. These wooden pilings, which are creosoted and approximately the size of large […]

Today we got a lesson in photography. Sarah, the digitization and photographs associate at USD, taught us how to use the Archives’ Pentax digital camera to take high-resolution photographs for our student projects. She introduced us to the camera and helped us figure out everything from changing the lens cover to setting the light manually. We struggled at first but, […]

This article, published in Volume 7 of The Volante (Issue 3, December 1893, pp. 41-42), poetically describes the personal and philosophical significance of photography. The author E. Frank Peterson explains that as “we gaze upon that faded picture we forget our present environments, we live again in the blissful past, and again we pluck the […]

The Well-Tempered String Quartet was published in Germany in 1936 and in the United States in 1938. The book’s title may remind the thoughtful reader of the title of Johann Sebastian Bach’s eighteenth-century collection of preludes and fugues, The Well-Tempered Clavier. The reader would be correct in drawing such comparisons, as stated in the Translator’s Note: “The ‘Well-tempered’ of the […]

The Black Hills flood of June 9, 1972 is of particular interest to the author of this post, being a native of Rapid City. The unusually heavy rainfall that caused the flood and the death and destruction it left behind make it one of the state’s worst-ever natural disasters. While exploring the Black Hills books that are […]

Cecil Forsyth (b. 1870 – d. 1941) was an English composer and violist. He wrote mostly choral works, but he also composed a concerto for viola. Additionally, he published a famous book on orchestration that can be found in the Mahoney collection, titled Orchestration. According to the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, it […]

Short poem printed in the May 1892 issue of The Volante.

The Schell Collection also contains several pins and buttons relating to South Dakota.