The Exhibition

Cultivating Community: Stories from Special Collections highlights examples of survival, contemplation, competition, protest, and learning. Showcasing narratives spanning centuries and continents, each story demonstrates that the power of constructing community and cultivating hope transcends time and place.

The exhibition features six distinct collections housed in the Rare Books & Special Collections, curated by Hesburgh Libraries faculty members. 

Exhibits within the exhibition include

A Community of Learners in Colonial America and the Early Republic

Curated by Rachel Bohlmann, Ph.D., Curator, American History and American Studies

In colonial America and during the Early Republic, people drew information from various sources to foster their own learning and that of others. Visitors will see an illustrated early scientific report, an unpublished notebook, an almanac, a newspaper, a pamphlet, and a personal or commonplace book. Each text presents information with which authors and readers grappled: about a new land, new religious practices, a new year, a new government, and new character development. 

The Gay Olympic Games: Community Through Sport

Gregory Bond, Ph.D., Curator, Joyce Sports Research Collection

Originating in 1982 at a time of widespread discrimination and prejudice, the Gay Olympic Games helped LGBTQ people find community through sport. At the time, Queer people were often not welcome or did not feel comfortable at mainstream sporting and athletic events—a feeling symbolized for many in the LGBTQ community by the United States Olympic Committee’s successful lawsuit in the summer of 1982 that restrained promoters of the event from officially using the word “Olympic.” The organizers of the rebranded Gay Games sought to bring together LGBTQ people and their allies in a spirit of inclusiveness, cooperation, and friendly competition. The printed materials and ephemera on display demonstrate how the Gay Games sought to organize and uplift the LGBTQ community, counter stereotypes, and claim a more visible presence in the public sphere. The event has continued every four years. This year, Gay Games XII will take place from June 27 to July 4 in Valencia, Spain.

**Note: The strikethrough of the word Olympic throughout is intentional. The USOC sued the organizers of the Gay Olympic Games shortly before the opening ceremonies and received a restraining order that forbade the use of the word “Olympic” in conjunction with the event. Organizers of the (rebranded) Gay Games hastily modified their printed merchandise where possible, including using a marker to cross out the word “Olympic” on pinbacks manufactured for the games. An example of a Gay Games pinback with the word “Olympic” crossed out will be featured in the exhibit**

Women Religious in Male Spaces

Curated by David T. Gura, Ph.D., Curator, Ancient and Medieval Manuscripts

Women's religious communities in the Middle Ages maintained their own educational, devotional, and ritualistic practices. While maintaining these communal identities, they were still subject to regulation by various ecclesiastical offices held by men. Visitors to the exhibit will see various ways in which women carved out places for themselves within the typically male-dominated liturgical space, including devotion, ritual, and even the language used in the books for these practices.

Ireland’s Idealized Community

Matthew Knight, Ph.D., Curator, Irish Studies

On St. Patrick’s Day, 1943, Taoiseach Eamon de Valera delivered a radio broadcast to the nation outlining his dream of an idealized peasant community, “Who valued material wealth only as a basis for right living…satisfied with frugal comfort.” Theirs is, “A land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children…and the laughter of happy maidens.” For De Valera, this was, "Life that God desires that men should live.”

Between 1963 and 1965, photographer John Reader captured the Ireland that de Valera dreamed of in rural Connemara. Mere hours from Dublin, where Beatlemania raged, the community of Cleggan toiled without electricity or running water, and their stories are documented here.

A Community of Solidarity

Natasha Lyandres, Curator, Russian and East European Studies

In August 1980, workers at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk, Poland, founded Solidarność (Solidarity), the first independent, self-governing trade union in the Soviet bloc. Led by the charismatic Lech Wałęsa, a former electrician and advocate for workers' rights, Solidarity quickly developed into a powerful grassroots opposition movement to Communist rule. The materials visitors will see were created and circulated by Solidarity members and their supporters. Handmade and printed secretly in underground workshops on poor-quality paper, these artifacts capture inherent qualities of the Solidarity movement such as spontaneity, commitment to democratic values, and sacrifices of the Polish people in their struggle for civic and political freedoms. 

Transnational Communities of Resistance during El Salvador’s Civil War

Payton Phillips Quintanilla, Ph.D., Curator, Latin American and Iberian Studies

After decades of repressive military rule, the people of El Salvador faced a brutal civil war (1980-1992). As part of its Cold War strategy in the Western Hemisphere, the United States provided billions of dollars in aid to the Salvadoran government to fight a leftist insurgency. However, in arming, advising, and training the Salvadoran military and paramilitary forces, the United States facilitated widespread war crimes targeting civilians. In this exhibit, posters, pamphlets, and other ephemera testify to transnational alliances that formed to pressure the U.S. government to remove itself from the conflict.

This and other exhibits within the Hesburgh Libraries are generously supported by the McBrien Special Collections Endowment.

All exhibits are free and open to the public during business hours.