How to Turn Eight Hours into Three Minutes over Nine Months

Last August, as part of their field trip segment, the crew from PBS’s Antiques Roadshow descended on the Hoover Archives to look at a few of the 120,000 posters we have in our Political Poster Collection. We’d spent time prepping the Roadshow’s advance team with descriptions of some of the most vivid and famous posters, their dimensions, and their histories. They narrowed their search to three.

A film crew of a dozen or so, including series host Mark L. Walberg and appraiser Nicholas Lowry, showed up at 8:30 on a Friday morning. The sound techs and camera operators checked out locations throughout the archives, looking for the right combination of lighting, acoustics, and authentic archival aura.

Then the fun began: as Mark and Nico discussed and appraised the three posters, the director repositioned the stars, the posters, and the cameras to achieve just the right camera angle. Simple, right? They shot film until 4:00 in the afternoon! Then we were cautioned not to get our hopes up—that the Hoover portion of the program would be edited down to about three minutes.

Nine months later, on Monday, May 24, 2010, the Antiques Roadshow episode containing the Hoover segment will air on most PBS stations at 8:00 P.M.

Be sure to watch and see this World War I poster (featuring British Lord Kitchener) and more next week on your local PBS station.

Political Poster Collection, UK 473,
Hoover Institution Archives

Six Degrees of Separation

Unless one is an expert on the politics and economics of East Africa, one’s not likely to recognize the name William X. Scheinman.

Unless one followed developments in postcolonial Africa, one’s not likely to recognize the name Tom Mboya.

Every American and most people throughout the world, however, recognize the name Barack Obama.

What’s the connection?

In the late 1950s, Scheinman, an American businessman, and Mboya, a politician, an advocate for democratic development, and a leader of labor and independence movements in Africa, became fast friends. Mboya, knowing education was the key to independence and a vibrant democracy, was looking for a way to get young Africans (mainly Kenyans) a university education in the United States and Canada. With Scheinman’s help, connections, and financial support, Mboya created the African American Students Foundation: the vehicle that helped thousands of Africans to come to America.

One of those young students who came to the United States under the umbrella of the African American Students Foundation was none other than Barack Obama Senior.

Both Scheinman’s and Mboya’s papers are housed in the Hoover Institution Archives. In processing those papers, we ran across thank-you letters from the senior Obama to Mboya. Here are several excerpts from one of those letters:


Barack Obama Sr. to Tom Mboya, May 29, 1962,
Tom Mboya Papers, Box 41, Hoover Institution Archives.

Mboya went on to become a minister in the cabinet of Kenya’s first independent government in 1963, and many believe the history of Kenya would have been very different had Mboya not been assassinated in 1969.

Despite the important role Mboya played in the African independence and labor movements, it is sometimes the other things in collections that catch one’s eye, the Obama letters being a case in point.

Welcome to Hoover Archivists' Musings

Archivists, curators, and librarians from the Hoover Institution Library and Archives have been searching the highways and byways all over the world for interesting material and ephemera for some ninety years. Throughout this period (in which we witnessed two world wars, the ascendancy and decline of communism, and the emergence of international organizations such as the UN, NATO, the Warsaw Pact, the EU), many stories have been told, documents have been uncovered in the Hoover Archives, and—just maybe—some mysteries solved.

As they go about their work, the archivists sometimes uncover the remarkable and the unexpected—whether it be conflicting eyewitness accounts of the same historic event, marginal comments on memos, notes written in invisible ink that are only seen decades after first written, or jazz recordings found in otherwise unremarkable files.

Hundreds of researchers visit the Hoover Institution every year to conduct hands-on research, and thousands more send reference inquiries via e-mail. The results of the research and the answers to questions are often surprising and fascinating.

In the Hoover Institution Library and Archives blog, Hoover Archivists Musings, archivists and librarians from the Hoover Archives will share what makes their work interesting, provide surprising answers to questions from patrons, and fill the readers in on the mysteries of, curiosities in, and treasures from the Hoover Archives.

We welcome your comments and questions about the Hoover Institution Library and Archives. We also invite you to explore our website (www.hoover.org/hila) and our collections in which history is recorded, either in person or online (www.oac.cdlib.org/institutions/Hoover+Institution).