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This 1914 photograph by Lewis Hine shows workers leaving the Opelika Cotton Mill in Alabama at the noon whistle. Among them is Velma Smith, identified by Hine as "a tiny little spinner with a steady job all day." The image shows Velma running toward the camera while adult workers move past her. Hine's caption provides extensive detail. Velma's father refused to let her keep any of her own wages. Velma's mother had worked in mills before age 12, and multiple members of the family were employed at the mill. The caption also notes that Velma was seen starting work before dawn and suggests that her claimed age of 12 was likely falsified.

Interpretation Note
This photograph presents industrial labor as a family economy structured by dependency and necessity. At first glance, the scene appears almost ordinary, with workers leaving for a break and a child running. However, Hine's caption turns it into clear evidence of generational exploitation. His narrative draws attention to the economic pressures that bound entire families, even very young children (likely under 12), to mill work. Details in the caption about withheld wages, uncertain ages, and shifts that began before dawn show how mills and families together shaped a child's working life. Terry Cook suggests that archives grow out of the social pressures and assumptions of their time, shaping what gets saved and how people make sense of it. With that in mind, Hine's photograph feels like a product of its own system that turns the ordinary routines of mill work into proof of the social and economic conditions he wanted to expose. The photograph also hints at how child labor was viewed then, since Velma's job is shown as normal work rather than as a loss of childhood or schooling. Altogether, it shows how records created within a certain worldview can end up supporting the accepted ideas about labor in early 20th-century industrial settings.

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The Seven Liberal Arts are classical arts that were considered necessary for any student in the classical and medieval periods. These arts were divided into two parts; quadrivium and trivium.

Quadrivium included arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music.

Trivium included logic, rhetoric, and grammar.

This 1943 photograph by Marjory Collins shows women factory workers attending morning mass in Buffalo, New York, immediately after completing the overnight third shift. They sit and stand in the dim interior of a church, their coats are still on, and their scarves are tied tightly around their heads. These suggest exhaustion and the cold of early morning. This photograph shows a moment of transition between industrial labor and religious service, making clear how wartime work schedules shaped daily life for women employed in defense industries.

Interpretation Note
Collins' photograph offers a counter-narrative to the polished images of wartime labor circulated by the Office of War Information. Instead of depicting heroic productivity, this photograph shows fatigue, ordinariness, and the effort to maintain community and spiritual continuity amid punishing hours. The women's quiet postures echo Kate Eichhorn's point that some of the most revealing traces of women's history appear in the ordinary moments and materials that official narratives tend to ignore. In that sense, the photograph functions much like the feminist archives Eichhorn describes, because it shifts attention to lives usually kept at the margins and shows that even everyday acts can speak volumes about the pressures women faced. Ultimately, Collins' photograph reminds us that women's work in defense plants was a patriotic duty, but it was also a grueling cycle that reshaped home life, religious practice, and whatever small pockets of rest remained.

Notes taken on the transmission of the Underscore, a loose schedule of a Contact Improvisation gathering ("jam") originally formulated by Nancy Stark-Smith. The Underscore features symbols for different stages of a jam and events that might happen within a dance.

This course has been offered since 2016/2017 at St. Olaf, and is the only remaining course related to contact improvisation there.

This is a photograph of a Carleton student wearing only their underwear in the Little Nourse Theater dressing rooms. This photograph was taken in 1970 during a Theater Marathon.

A Los Angeles Times article containing the text of the speech Marlon Brando provided Sacheen Littlefeather to be read upon his refusal of the Academy Award. The speech was not read during the ceremony due to time limitations, but Littlefeather read it to the press after the ceremony and its contents was published in several major newspapers. In the statement, Brando writes that while he does not wish to insult the Academy or its members, he would like to "focus attention" on the mistreatment of Indigenous Americans by the United States and their negative representation by Hollywood. While there have been attempts to redress the situation, Brando states that they are "too faltering and too few so I as a member in this profession do not feel that I can as a citizen of the United States accept an award here tonight." He concludes the statement by thanking the audience for their "kindness and courtesy" to Littlefeather, assuming that she would be well-receieved at the Oscars ceremony.

This is an item featuring The School of Athens. The picture can be accessed at Wikimedia Commons

Attribution: "'The School of Athens' by Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino.jpg" by Paul_012 is licensed under Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0).

This item is a newspaper article by Michael Kilian commenting on Marlon Brando’s refusal of the Oscar. The piece criticizes Littlefeather for “exploiting herself” by the roles she has taken and mocks Brando for succumbing to "self righteous self importance," in addition to calling out the alleged hypocrisy of the Indigenous activists occupying Wounded Knee, SD. Overall, the article does not appear to take Littlefeather, Brando, or the American Indian Movement seriously, nor does it view Hollywood as an appropriate venue for political action.

The 1943 Office of War Information poster features a woman in a bright red uniform working on what appears to be an aircraft canopy. Her calm and focused expression suggests confidence and skill. The bold title declares, "The more WOMEN at work the sooner we WIN!" Below, a list of occupations (such as farm worker, typist, bus driver, laundress, and others) encourages women to join many sectors of the wartime economy. The poster presents women's labor, whether in factories or service roles, as a patriotic act essential to victory.

Interpretation Note
This poster is a clear example of how state institutions actively shaped public memory of women's wartime roles by promoting certain stories about women's wartime labor while leaving out others. As Kenneth Foote argued, collective memory is built through selective emphasis, since societies often highlight specific events or meanings and downplay the aspects that do not fit the message they want to project. In this case, the Office of War Information presents women's work as a unified patriotic effort that is essential to national victory. The poster's clear slogan and orderly list of occupations support a motivating narrative. What falls outside that frame, such as the exhaustion, unequal pay, racial segregation, childcare struggles, or the abrupt layoffs women faced after the war, simply does not appear. Foote reminds us that this kind of selective emphasis is common in the formation of cultural memory, where representations produced by institutions determine which versions of the past circulate widely and which are allowed to fade. In choosing to emphasize patriotism, duty, and contribution over the difficulties and inequalities that shaped women's actual working lives, the poster helped define how an entire era would later be remembered.