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Local History
description
Some photos from our fun celebration on March 22!
party pics
Photo by Sarah Kostelecky
Photo by Roland Penttila
Upcoming Events
Everything old is new at Special Collections in March!
Visit us for one of our upcoming events!
423 Central NE
Albuquerque, NM 87102
What do we have at video
Watch for our upcoming print workshops!
special recollections
The world premiere of a new documentary chronicling the history of Albuquerque’s first public library. This film brings the century-old landmark to life through the memories of former staff and patrons. Produced by Tony Della Flora for GOV-TV, the documentary captures the spirit of a library that has served generations of Albuquerque residents.
video
A video we made for our 96th birthday!
images
Joshua Raynolds
Perkins Hall (library building 1901-24)
Deed of Gift
Sanborn map 1924
Opening Day
1947 bookmobile garage addition
Children's room addition
Young adult corner circa 1948
1951 exterior
1951 Postcard
Reference desk
Exterior 1964
books
Some recommended local history reads
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Beautiful Swift Fox
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The American Southwest has assumed the status of a cultural icon over the last few decades, and one of the writers who helped it to do so was Erna Fergusson, named by the Hopis Beautiful Swift Fox. An Anglo American whose travel writing featured the multi-ethnicity of her region, she popularized the culture and landscapes of her native New Mexico and its surrounding states in a range of writing that prefigured the genre-defying art that has come to be called the New Journalism.Much has been written about New Mexico's remarkable Fergusson family, especially brother Harvey and his novels. But Erna Fergusson's literary career has been largely overlooked. An iconoclast at the forefront of the Southwest Renaissance movement, Erna gained a wide reputation beginning in the 1930s for her "written versions of the Southwest," which embraced the complexities of regional culture and sympathetically and intelligently portrayed the Indian and Mexican influences.Distinguished Southwestern writer Robert Franklin Gish assesses Fergussons's literary contributions and unlocks the inner workings of the prose stylist who operated at the interstices of genres. With his postmodern reappraisal of the creative nonfiction forms she used, Gish prompts readers to reconsider how they view the art of nonfiction writing. Gish argues persuasively that Fergusson's identity as a native New Mexican and the region's singular landscape informed the attitudes and values present in her art. He explores the ways her entrepreneurial stint as a New Mexico tour guide during the 1920s and 1930s shaped the organizational strategies for her writing. He considers thoughtfully her various forms of writing and how she used travelogue, journalistic report, popular history, and persuasive essay to elevate the Southwest to prominence. Gish shows her writing as highly evocative, descriptive, and metaphorical, defying the conventions of the nonfiction forms she used and paving the way for America's school of New Journalism.Beautiful Swift Fox is not strictly biography; nor does it, in a traditional sense, seek to explicate a body of work. Rather, like its subject, it bridges genres, offering a meditation on one Southwestern writer's sense of place.
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Albuquerque Then and Now
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Part frontier town, part cosmopolitan city, Albuquerque has a proud heritage more than 300 years in the making. Named to honor a Spanish Duke, Albuquerque is New Mexico's largest city and the new star of the best-selling Then and Now series. * Albuquerque has been home to Navajo Indians, a U.S. Army outpost during the Mexican-American war, a thriving wool and lumber center, and a key stop on the Atlantic-Pacific railroad line. * Side-by-side then-and-now photographs showcase landmarks like Kistler's department store (demolished to make way for new construction), the Old Bernalillo County Courthouse (rumored to be haunted), and the beautiful California Mission-style Alvarado Hotel, considered the finest railroad hotel of its time (it had electricity!). * Images of San Felipe de Neri Church, the first building erected in the settlement, show how much Albuquerque has changed and how much it has stayed the same. The original adobe chapel has been enlarged and rebuilt many times, but its thick adobe walls remain. * From Old Town across the tracks to New Town, you'll discover a thriving, modern city filled with remarkable architecture and culture.
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Ernie Pyle in the American Southwest
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Ernie Pyle ranks with Richard Harding Davis, John Reed and Edward R. Murrow as one of the greatest war correspondents in American history. But he was different from all the correspondents who went before him or followed him in the combat zones of the world. While the others reported on the big picture of troop movements and massive battles, Pyle wrote about the fighting soldier and his plight on the front lines. It was said that Pyle's daily columns gave nothing more and nothing less than a worm's eye view of World War II. Richard Melzer does for Ernie Pyle what Ernie Pyle did for thousands of average G.I.s overseas: he describes Pyle's joys and struggles from Ernie's perspective, in candid, straightforward terms. The result is a focused biography, rich in detail and broad in appeal, just as Ernie would have liked it. "Book News" reported: "A well-written and researched slice of the famous war correspondent's peripatetic life." * * * * Richard Melzer is a professor of history at the University of New Mexico-Valencia Campus. He is an award-winning author of many books and articles about New Mexico, including two grade school textbooks for New Mexico's 2012 centennial celebration of statehood. Sunstone Press has published three of his previous books, including "Buried Treasures, Famous and Unusual Gravesites in New Mexico History," "Breakdown: How the Secret of the Atomic Bomb was Stolen during World War II," and "When We Were Young in the West: True Stories of Childhood."
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A History Lover's Guide to Albuquerque
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This tour of New Mexico's largest city goes beyond the traditional guidebook to offer a historical journal through an area rich with diverse cultures and their fascinating past. The journey through time starts with the settlement of Native Americans in pueblos along the Rio Grande and then initiatives by Spain to settle and convert the region. Visit Old Town Plaza, where trade from the El Camino Real and Santa Fe Trails flourished. Look around lesser-known sites, including railroad depot facilities, major military landmarks and nostalgic Route 66. Join author and local history lover Roger Zimmerman as he carefully curates an expedition through each era of Albuquerque's history and its most beloved sites.
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Legendary Locals of Albuquerque
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Spanish settlers founded Albuquerque in 1706, making it the third of only four villas (towns) in colonial New Mexico. Located in the Rio Abajo along a wide turn on the Rio Grande, the settlement developed from a small farming community into New Mexico's largest, most modern city. Many notable men and women participated in this remarkable growth, lending their talents and sacrificing their time, energy, and sometimes their very lives. Dozens of these legendary figures are portrayed in this unique book, with chapters devoted to those who played important roles in politics and diplomacy; the military; law and order; religion and education; art and literature; culture and entertainment; business and tourism; health, science, technology, and space; and sports. A final chapter describes several of Albuquerque's sung and unsung heroes. The result is a collage of a Western city filled with diversity, tradition, and cultural pride.
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Albuquerque
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This impassioned book, both a loving description and a critique, defines urban values in a milieu that is rarely recognized as a city. Updated more than ten years after its initial publication, it is more relevant than ever to Albuquerque's future. A new chapter describes Albuquerque's recent development, placing it in the context of urban growth in the West.
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Albuquerque's North Valley
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For centuries, a strand of settlements was built along the Rio Grande by the ancient Pueblo peoples, many of which disappeared before and during the Pueblo Revolt in 1680. In the 1700s, when the Spanish returned, they built villages along the Rio Grande, not only what is now Old Town but many others. To bring to life the history of the North Valley more fully, an effort is made to examine this area and its small villages separately from a general history of Albuquerque. The North Valley provides a unique tapestry of Hispanic, Anglo, and other ethnic groups, rural and urban, historic and modern, old and new architectural styles, and a successful integration of traditional and modern ways of living. The two volumes are intended to appeal both to those readers who have a long history in Albuquerque's North Valley and remember a previous time, and, also, those who do not remember the North Valley as it once was, but now appreciate its unique character. The new book is Albuquerque's North Valley and it is two volumes -- Los Griegos & Los Candelarias (Vol. I) and Alameda & Los Ranchos (Vol. II)
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Forgotten Albuquerque
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In 1706, Spanish colonists founded the Villa de Alburquerque on the wooded banks of the Rio Grande. Three hundred years later, that once quiet farming community has grown to become Albuquerque, the largest city in the state of New Mexico. Over the centuries, this fascinating city's identity has metamorphosed many times. In 1862, it briefly became the western capital of the Confederate States of America, before Confederate hopes for the territory were destroyed at the Battle of Glorieta Pass. In 1880, the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad brought industry and wealth from the east, as well as tuberculosis-infected "lungers" who came by the thousands to seek a cure in "the Heart of Health Country." Then, in 1926, Route 66 transformed the city into a neon-decked oasis for automobile travelers journeying through the newly accessible West. Though many of these identities have faded, their legacy lives on in the beating heart of an ever-changing city.
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The Postwar Transformation of Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1945-1972
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From the end of World War II to the closing months of 1972, Albuquerque, New Mexico, underwent as dramatic a transformation as any American city ever has in such a short time. Its population exploded from about 50,000 to more than five times that number, and the median income of its citizens adjusted for inflation doubled. Fundamental changes took place in the character of the city, as the rugged individualism of the people gave way to more cooperative behavior, and authority relaxed throughout the society. Such broad social changes could also be seen in the country at large, but in Albuquerque they transpired more rapidly and vividly. Ex-Governor Clyde Tingley, Pete Domenici before he became a U.S. Senator, County Commission Chairman Dorothy Cline, Chicano activist Reies Tijerina and many others come to life on these pages. Their words and acts have had a continuing impact on the paths the city has followed to the present day. ROBERT TURNER WOOD first moved to Albuquerque in 1969 for graduate work in American studies at the University of New Mexico, where he completed his PhD with a dissertation on the recent history of the city. His work experience shows his interest in all areas of city life, for he has been a college English instructor, a city planner, a database editor, real estate appraiser, and a medical librarian. Over the years he has written articles on Albuquerque history for local publications.
