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November 9th, 2017
This blog post is written by Larry Hanover, co-author of Rebuilt from Broken Glass: A German Jewish Life Remade in America (Purdue University Press, July 2017).
Seven years ago, when I proposed to Fred Behrend that we work together to tell the story of a life that changed forever on Kristallnacht – the Night of Broken Glass – I never envisioned it would have much relevance today. I thought his memories and the history etched in the pages of his father’s diary and that of his own were just that … fascinating but somewhat dusty history.
How wrong I was.
Thank God, as we tonight mark the onset of Kristallnacht’s 79th anniversary, we have no reason to think we will see its likes here in America. Yet Charlottesville proved beyond doubt that Rebuilt from Broken Glass: A German Jewish Life Remade in America, is relevant . . . beyond imagination.
Neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists rallied at the University of Virginia in August, holding torches in the night, intentionally evoking images of Kristallnacht-like terror as they chanted “blood and soil” (an English rendering of a Nazi slogan) and “Jews will not replace us.”
On the night of Nov. 9-10, 1938 then 12-year-old schoolboy Fred Behrend walked to school in Cologne, Germany, to see his own terror and to see his childhood stolen from him. One magnificent synagogue was in flames, and then a second, and then what appeared to be the Jewish school itself seemed on fire as well (it was actually the attached synagogue). He didn’t understand why it was happening . . .
As described in this Chapter 2 (“Kristallnacht and Sachsenhausen”) excerpt:
Before November 7, 1938, no one knew the name of a 17-year-old Polish Jew named Herschel Grynszpan. However, his actions that day marked the beginning of a series of events that changed not only my life but that of every Jew in Germany. Grynszpan, a teenager just five years older than I, was living in Paris when the Nazis decided to arrest and deport all German Jews of Polish origin. Because Poland wanted no part of them, either, they were left stranded in a small town along the German-Polish border. Grynszpan was enraged when he received a postcard from his father informing him that his family members were among the 12,000 Polish Jews trapped in this nightmare.
Grynszpan reacted in a way his father never could have foreseen. He walked into the German Embassy in Paris, said he was a German resident, and requested to see an embassy official. The clerk on duty asked an embassy diplomat, Ernst vom Rath, to speak to him. Grynszpan walked into vom Rath’s office, pulled out a revolver, and shot him five times. Vom Rath died two days later.
This was an act that any respectable, civilized human being would condemn, regardless of the outrages being committed by the German government against the Jews. But the Nazis, not satisfied simply to remove Jews from the nation’s economic machinery, used the assassination as an excuse to proceed with the next step toward resolving the Jewish “problem.” They orchestrated a pogrom on the night of November 9–10, setting out to arrest all Jewish males from the ages of 14 to 83, with the goal of accelerating the widespread Jewish emigration already underway.
This would become known as Kristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass.” Besides conducting arrests, members of Hitler’s SA (Sturmabteilung) and SS (Schutzstaffel) beat Jewish men and women into a bloody mess, plundering their businesses, breaking their windows, and destroying everything in sight. They did not stop there. The Nazis burned or destroyed 267 synagogues and 7,500 Jewish businesses, and killed at least 91 Jews, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The insanity stood in contrast to the old German saying, “Am Deutschen Wesen, Soll Die Welt Genesen” (The world will benefit from the German character and conduct).
Little did I realize that the insanity had already arrived at our front door in Lüdenscheid. I would only learn the details years later through conversations with my parents and reading my father’s diary.
The greatest terror of all was his father, back at the family home in Lüdenscheid, being arrested and taken to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. He was released on the condition the Behrends leave Germany forever. They escaped to the only place that would take them – Cuba – until their quota number was called to enter the United States.
So, yes, the book is a remembrance of a history that grows ever more distant, a Holocaust that costs 6 million lives that we must “never forget.”
But there are real-life Nazis out there still, trying to instill terror even though they are small in numbers. There are real-life white supremacists who think they are the master race.
Oh yes, Rebuilt from Broken Glass is a story that, sadly, we need today.
Rebuilt from Broken Glass: A German Jewish Life Remade in America
Purdue University Press, July 2017
Hardcover with jacket, 184pp, ISBN 9781557537843
“[This] powerful book is the story of a boy whose sheltered childhood gave way to hell; of a hard-working family finding refuge, first in Cuba and then in the United States; and of growing up to become a businessman and author with a voice as empathetic on the page as in person. Rebuilt from Broken Glass is, after all, not simply a memoir about family and faith, but a work of history, written by an eyewitness.”
–Philadelphia Inquirer
November 5th, 2017
Many buildings have been part of Purdue’s campus landscape over the years. Some became institutional landmarks while others were here only briefly, built to serve a specific purpose for a limited period of time. Can you identify the structures in this photograph, their purpose, and where they were located? Share your theories in the comments and check back on Friday for the whole story!
UPDATE:
Purdue was a military training location during World War I and men from across the country traveled to West Lafayette before shipping out to other parts of the world. To accommodate the influx of so many new people on campus, many of whom stayed for just a few weeks before being replaced by the next group of recruits, the university constructed temporary military barracks on the north side of campus in what had been farmland. This photograph looks south toward the barracks that sat on the site of the current Mechanical Engineering Building with the tower of Heavilon Hall visible in the background. They were demolished shortly after World War I ended in 1918.
Interior scene of Company 5 Barracks photographed in Fall 1918.
Please join us again for our final From the Archives photo of the year on Monday, December 4.
Filed under: general, SPECNovember 3rd, 2017
An assignment to find research about a particular drug ultimately changed the way Cameron Pate–a 2017 Purdue University pharmaceutical sciences graduate–searched for information during his studies at Purdue.
Pate, who recently started a new job with the Dow Chemical Company in Indianapolis, said, for this particular assignment, when he had exhausted Google, he headed to Purdue Libraries.
“Thankfully, personnel at Purdue Libraries showed me the access I had to vast electronic resources, including several well-respected research article databases, because of my Purdue student status. This fundamentally changed how I would search for information the rest of my college career and helped me tremendously,” he noted.
Pate also learned to apply his information literacy skills to other aspects of his college career, including how to get the most of out a job search. As part of the Inform Purdue Information Literacy campaign, Pate talks about how he used information to maximize his job search in the video below.
To see more from Inform Purdue, visit https://blogs.lib.purdue.edu/news/category/inform-purdue/.
Filed under: generalNovember 2nd, 2017
An Open House and Reception for the “Missing You: Navigating Amelia Earhart’s Last Flight and Enduring Legacy” exhibition at Purdue University Libraries’ Archives and Special Collections (ASC) is set from 1-4 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 18. The ASC is located in the Humanities, Social Science, and Education (HSSE) Library, Stewart Center, on the fourth floor.
The family-friendly event will offer activities for kids and a chance for individuals to visit the “Missing You” exhibit before it closes Friday, Dec. 8.
Refreshments will also be served, and paid parking will be available in the Grant Street Garage across the street from the Purdue Memorial Union.
For more information, contact Tracy Grimm at grimm3@purdue.edu.
Filed under: events, general, press_release, SPECOctober 26th, 2017
Suresh V. Garimella, Executive Vice President for Research and Partnerships and the R. Eugene and Susie E. Goodson Distinguished Professor in the School of Mechanical Engineering at Purdue University, was honored with the 2017 Leadership in Open Access Award from Purdue University Libraries and the Office of the Provost Monday, Oct. 23.
This week (Oct. 23-29) academic institutions and libraries across the globe are celebrating the benefits of Open Access for research and scholarship during the 10th annual International Open Access Week commemoration.
According to Dean of University Libraries James L. Mullins, Garimella was selected to receive the recognition this year for leading by example in the Open Access movement at Purdue University. Garimella has more than 400 works posted in the Purdue e-Pubs repository, which have been downloaded close to 256,500 times.
“Dr. Garimella has demonstrated leadership in Open Access to Scholarly Publications by depositing his numerous papers and articles, consistent with copyright and contractual agreements, into Purdue e-Pubs. Therefore, we present the 2017 Leadership in Open Access Award to him in recognition of his outstanding leadership and continued partnership with Purdue e-Pubs to increase visibility of scholarship at Purdue,” Mullins noted.
“It is a great honor to be recognized for our research group’s commitment to Open Access. I am deeply thankful to the scores of students in my group who, over the years, have contributed to the impactful publications that have been eagerly downloaded through the University’s excellent Purdue e-Pubs portal,” Garimella said.
Since 2012, Purdue e-Pubs has close to 15,153,000 downloads from users all over the world, with the average download rate of 2,256,893 per year.
“Dr. Garimella embodies the spirit of the land-grant institution through his work to make scholarly research widely available,” said Jay Akridge, interim Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs and Diversity. “I congratulate him and all of the students in his group who contribute to global learning by broadening the reach of scholarship.”
For more information about Open Access at Purdue, visit www.lib.purdue.edu/openaccess. Learn more about Purdue e-Pubs at http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/.
Filed under: faculty_staff, general, press_releaseOctober 24th, 2017
Kenny Nguyen (Hilliard, OH), a Purdue University senior majoring in neurobiology and physiology, knows something about applying classroom learning to real-life research work.
“Taking joint lecture-lab science courses not only taught me about the life cycle of cells, but also how to raise them in a real research environment,” he noted.
In 2015, Nguyen experienced a “real” research environment, when he was selected as a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship intern and received the William H. Phillips Undergraduate Research Grant from the Purdue Department of Biological Sciences. In addition, he completed an internship at the National Institutes of Health.
In the Fall 2016 edition of JPUR (Journal of Purdue Undergraduate Research), Nguyen published “Degeneration of Neuronal Mitochondria in Parkinson’s Disease” (p. 41), the result of his studies examining “the degeneration of mitochondria in neurons and the implications in Parkinson’s disease.”
The information literacy skills Nguyen — who plans to pursue an M.D. or a Ph.D. in the medical field — has developed in his coursework at Purdue has led to his successful research, publishing, and internship endeavors outside of the classroom.
In his answers below, Nguyen talks about the ways he has learned to use information in his undergraduate studies at Purdue, as well as why it will be important for him to continue to develop his information literacy skills throughout his career in the medical field.
Q. What ways are you learning to use information at Purdue that will be useful for your future professional (or personal ) endeavors?
Through Purdue, I am learning how to apply the information I have learned in the classroom into real-life work directly, such as research or in medical centers. These skills will be vital to me in my future career in the medical field, in which physicians are expected to be updated continually on the progress of medical technology, news, and research. I will be expected to understand these findings and apply them directly to my work. I believe that my time at Purdue has strongly prepared me for my future profession.
Q. Describe a time when you learned to use information in a new way to help you accomplish something.
I used to be the managing editor for the “Purdue Review, Inc.,” the premier campus news magazine. In 2015, we decided to venture onto the online platform to provide news for students in a more easily accessible, convenient manner. None of the members in our organization had knowledge on developing a website, so we used the information and resources available to us for our advantage.
The design team had to learn to design not only magazine spreads, but also online pages, and the writers had to learn how to write articles in a succinct, eye-catching manner that is more suitable for online. And I learned how to upload news articles online and manage the operations of the website.
I had knowledge on how to use Microsoft Office, and by applying the information and skills that I was already familiar with, I learned to effectively use an online software that was entirely new to me.
Q. Have you learned to use information in a course that you have applied to a different situation?
During my freshman year I took a course called COM 217, “Science Writing and Presentation.” In this course, I learned the basics of presenting science to informed and lay audience members, how to craft compelling and informative posters, and write science articles. I used the skills and information I learned in this course to present my research poster for the first time at the Purdue Undergraduate Research Symposium, and publish my work in the 2016 edition of JPUR. Had I not taken this course, I would not have known how to present science, both orally and through writing, effectively.
Filed under: general, UncategorizedOctober 23rd, 2017
Clubs have always been an important part of student life at Purdue. This photo provides a glimpse into the activities of one club and includes its most famous member. Can you identify the club and one of the men in this image?
Share your theories in the comments and check back on Friday for the reveal!
UPDATE:
Neil Armstrong, Purdue class of 1955, was an active member of the Purdue Avionics Club, also known as the Aero Club or Aeromodelers. In the mystery image, Armstrong (right) and fellow club member Frank Claire wear Purdue Aeromodelers t-shirts as they stand among partially assembled model airplanes and parts at Purdue.
Armstrong put his aviation skills to good use as a test pilot before entering the astronaut program and becoming the first man to walk on the moon.
Test Pilot Neil Armstrong poses here with the X-15 rocket plane after a research flight in 1960.
Original X-15 photo courtesy of NASA. Aeromodelers photograph courtesy of Andrew Claire.
Filed under: general, SPECOctober 23rd, 2017
This week is International Open Access Week, and Purdue University Libraries is joining libraries and other learning and educational institutions and organizations across the globe to celebrate the benefits of “opening up access to research and scholarship.”
As part of the Open Access Week celebration, Purdue Libraries is hosting Brian Hole, CEO of Ubiquity Press, who will give a talk on open access starting at 10 a.m. Thursday, Oct. 26 in the Wilmeth Active Learning Center (WALC), room 3121. The presentation is open free to the public.
In addition, Purdue Libraries will announce the 2017 Purdue University winner of the Leadership in Open Access Award later this week.
This year marks the 10th year Open Access Week as been officially celebrated, according to Heather Joseph, executive director of SPARC, the organization responsible for creating Open Access Week to broaden support for Open Access to scholarly research.
“Since Open Access Week first began, we’ve made significant progress in building global awareness of the benefits of opening up access to research and scholarship. Around the world, institutions and individuals are increasingly embracing the use of ‘Open’ as an enabling strategy,” said Joseph. “Whether your mission is to tackle critical problems like climate change or ending poverty or to capitalize on the enormous opportunities that having the world’s knowledge at your fingertips presents, Open Access practices and policies can help you speed up progress towards achieving your goals—and that’s
a very powerful, very appealing prospect.”
To provide a bit of background about Open Access at Purdue University, Scholarly Publishing Specialist Nina Collins, who works in the Purdue Scholarly Publishing Division (part of the Purdue University Libraries), answered a few questions about the Open Access services and scholarly publishing resources offered.
Q. What is Open Access and why is it important to recognize?
Collins: According to the Budapest Open Access Initiative, Open Access is the “free, immediate, online availability of those works that scholars give freely to the world without expectation of payment.” It is an alternate business model for scholarly publishing, allowing free access to the end user. Traditional scholarly publishing business models can contribute to information access inequality—where only affluent research institutions or countries can afford scholarly literature. Open Access breaks down this barrier, allowing access to anyone. Open Access can increase the pace of research and innovation by removing paywalls that limit access to the most recent scientific literature.
Q. What are the Open Access services and resources that Purdue Libraries’ Scholarly Communication offers?
Collins: Purdue Libraries’ Scholarly Communication involves several departments within the Libraries, and personnel in Research Data @ Purdue University Libraries are available to assist with data management planning, data curation, and publishing datasets. In addition, Purdue University Libraries is the home of the University Copyright Office, and staff there are available to assist with copyright, helping make sense of copyright transfer agreements. Purdue Scholarly Publishing Division staff members are also available to assist with most scholarly communication questions.
Purdue University Libraries support Open Access by offering services such as PURR (Purdue University Research Repository), and Purdue e-Pubs, Purdue’s institutional repository.
Purdue e-Pubs staff members work with individuals and departments across campus to provide “open” copies of articles that have been published by Purdue faculty and researchers. We also engage in campus-wide outreach, giving presentations on various topics relevant to scholarly communication.
The Purdue Scholarly Publishing Division offers a free mediated CV review service to Purdue faculty and researchers. Our staff will review sharing policies of the journals in which staff have published their research; and, for those that permit sharing, we will upload the articles on behalf of the staff members—with their written permission, of course. We will review copyright transfer agreements upon request, and we seek to find ways to make Purdue research freely available.
Q. What is your role in regard to Open Access resources at Purdue?
Collins: Within the Scholarly Publishing Division, I am the go-to person for scholarly communication and Open Access concerns. I manage Purdue e-Pubs, engage in outreach, and collaborate across departments to help researchers find the right service for each scholarly communication concern.
Purdue University Libraries, which is an institutional member of SPARC, supports many Open Access initiatives including DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals), HathiTrust, the Open Textbook Network, and SCOAP3.
We are institutional members of BioMed Central—qualifying all researchers at Purdue a 15 percent discount on article processing charges for BioMed Central journals. We are also institutional members of MDPI, qualifying all researchers at Purdue a 10 percent discount on article processing charges for publishing in MDPI journals.
Purdue University Press and Scholarly Publishing Division publishes several completely Open Access journals, and we are proud to have publications selected for “unlatching” by Knowledge Unlatched.
For more information, visit www.lib.purdue.edu/openaccess or contact Collins at nkcollin@purdue.edu.
Filed under: events, general, Open_Access, UncategorizedOctober 20th, 2017
This article is part of the Inform Purdue 2017 information literacy campaign. Read more about it at blogs.lib.purdue.edu/news/2017/10/12/inform-purdue-2017/.
In his college career at Purdue University, Austin Coon–a senior double economics Honors and management major–has found participating in case competitions to be an excellent way to apply what he’s learned in the classroom and to real-world business scenarios.
“Taking part in case competitions has vastly improved my public-speaking skills and given me confidence to succeed in job interviews. In a typical case competition, participants are given anywhere from four hours to two weeks to solve a case with a team. During that time, you are tasked with becoming an expert in the given problem and industry. Oftentimes, you have to start right at square one, as you will be presented with an issue that you know nothing about,” he explained.
Coon is one of many Purdue students whose learning activities outside of the classroom require information literacy skills. In the brief Q&A below, he talks about how he has applied those skills to his areas of study in economics and management.
Q. What are ways that you are learning to use information at Purdue that will be useful for your future professional (or personal) endeavors?
A. Case competitions allow students to expand their knowledge by challenging them to learn as much about a topic or industry as possible in a short time frame. Purdue offers several competitions a year—such as the annual Midwest Business Libraries Case Competition (formerly known as the Parrish Library Case Competition)—that target students who have never competed in a case before.
Furthermore, as you improve your ability to perform in the introductory case competitions, Purdue offers more advanced competitions, for which they will fly you around the country to compete. During my sophomore year, I was fortunate enough to be taken to the University of Connecticut to compete in a competition there.
Q. Describe a time when you learned to use information in a new way to help you accomplish something.
A. A couple of years ago, I competed in an international case competition about big data and applying the data to the human resource (HR) practices of a company in the auto industry. At the time, I knew nothing about big data, had never taken a class on HR, and had very little experience with the auto industry. My team members and I were all in the same boat. We spent that week diving as deep as we could in those three topics and then were able to build a presentation that we were incredibly proud of when we were finished. We ended up earning second place, which was the best placement a Purdue team has ever achieved in the competition.
Q. Have you learned to use information in a course that you have applied to a different situation?
A. Purdue and case competitions have strengthened my ability to process large amounts of information and condense it. For example, in my internship this past summer, I worked with large sets of data. One of my tasks was to turn the data into a “meaningful story” to present to the company’s senior leadership team.
To explain, I was tasked with creating a scorecard that tracked our relationship health with our different clients, so I would track to see which of our clients were happy with us and which were upset, as well as what made them happy or upset.
To create this scorecard, I analyzed data on the hundreds of different metrics that my company recorded for each client, as well as conducted interviews with client contact leaders in the organization to get a holistic understanding of what made clients upset.
After understanding this, I was able to design a scorecard that was automatically populated with objective metrics and organized in an easy-to-understand color code and format for each of the 180 different clients that we tracked internally.
By doing this, I was able to give our leadership a way to pinpoint quickly any pain points we had with our clients. With this knowledge, they could then focus their efforts on any key issues to improve client satisfaction.
My experiences at Purdue have given me the confidence to believe in my own abilities and to trust that I will produce a product of high quality. My time at Purdue has also made me feel properly prepared to work with several other full-time employees that are high in the organization’s hierarchy.
“Inform Purdue,” Purdue Libraries’ Information Literacy Social Media Campaign, to Launch Oct. 16
Inform Purdue: Purdue Libraries’ Information Literacy Celebration
Inform Purdue: Applying Information Literacy to Interior Design
October 18th, 2017
This article is part of the Inform Purdue 2017 information literacy campaign. Read more about it at blogs.lib.purdue.edu/news/2017/10/12/inform-purdue-2017/.
As part of her coursework since she arrived at Purdue University as a freshman, Amanda Wegener, a junior interior design major, has been learning to apply her information literacy skills.
“As an interior designer, I have a background in basic design, and since my first year here, I’ve been analyzing and critiquing designs. In our courses, we’re taught to think like designers and see the world the way they see it,” Wegener explained.
For her freshman history honors course, her assignment was to analyze the designs of NASA mission patches, which turned out to be a perfect opportunity to apply her information literacy skills and engage with primary research materials in the Purdue University Archives and Special Collections‘ Barron Hilton Flight and Space Exploration Archives.
“When I was researching NASA mission patches and the preliminary drafts of the designs and the thought processes behind their designs, I mentally dissected the elements–to see how each of them served a purpose to enhance the purpose of the whole. I also thought about how the psychology of color plays into the color choices and how the shapes played into the design and how the designers used symbolism to represent parts of the mission or the crew,” she added.
Under the mentorship of History Professor Michael G. Smith, Wegner took her research one step further and submitted her work to “Quest: The History of Spaceflight Quarterly,” where her research was published.
Wegener said that learning to use information and interpret and apply it has been integral to her success at Purdue. In a brief Q&A piece below, she talks about information literacy and its importance for her current and future projects and experiences.
Q. What are ways that you are learning to use information at Purdue that will be useful for your future professional (or personal) endeavors?
A. There are a number of ways I’ve been getting experience seeking out and utilizing information over my last couple of years here. I’m an interior designer, and research is critical to our field, both the softer side of understanding clients and determining their needs in a space, but also a more scientific side of a current space, what materials are made of and how that affects a space, or how to figure out how much lighting a space needs. Then all that information, technical or vague, needs to be transformed into multiple languages, one for the client, another for designers, and another for contractors.
One super helpful thing I’ve learned at Purdue is how to communicate with people from vastly different fields with completely different vocabularies. I’ve been able to explore how to use terms they understand to communicate a concept from my world. This is something I started realizing I loved doing in high school—translating one person’s jargon into another so that others can understand. This will be super helpful as a designer, but also in communicating with any and every individual I may come across.
Q. Describe a time when you learned to use information in a new way to help you accomplish something.
A. For so much of many students’ college careers, they are focused on learning the facts so they can regurgitate them on tests. But when doing original research on primary materials, there are so many little details about history that you could never discover in a history book or course. It makes history relevant and fascinating because it makes it real and personal, and people care about that and find it interesting. People keep asking me about my work this summer since I’ve been “on the inside” in a way, but not even really, with the Amelia Earhart story. Since I worked with the Frederick Noonan collection, I learned many details about Earhart’s last flight, and I always had interesting updates for my friends and family, which provided quite a handy topic of conversation that all parties enjoyed.
In other ways, I’ve used my experience as a history research student in research more directly related to my major, such as my research this last spring about sustainable lighting design and also in my work last summer at in the ASC.
Q. Have you learned to use information in a course that you have applied to a different situation?
A. My research with Flight Paths was on the design of NASA mission patches, which information I used recently, when the Archives was contributing to an event at the Gus Grissom Museum. We said we would provide an activity for children, and I designed a worksheet for them to design their own patch with some small description on what flight patches were. I also made a more detailed sheet, which included three NASA insignia and some of the thought process behind those designs, for adults. It was also interesting to go back and forth and see how researching NASA design influenced my design work and how being a designer helped me understand how the NASA insignia were designed—it went both ways.
As for the courses in my major, I have used that information in all kinds of other spheres in my life, especially in my “Interior Materials and Finishes” class from last spring. I’ve been advising a friend and her dad who are replacing the flooring in a small business they own, or helping another friend pick out paint sheen, or giving suggestions to the Residence Life Manager of my apartment building about counter tops. It comes up in all kinds of casual conversations with friends and goes way beyond the classroom.
“Inform Purdue,” Purdue Libraries’ Information Literacy Social Media Campaign, to Launch Oct. 16
Inform Purdue: Purdue Libraries’ Information Literacy Celebration