MTU ARCHIVES ANNOUNCES RESEARCH TRAVEL AWARDS

The MTU Archives and Copper Country Historical Collections is pleased to
announce the recipients of its 2002 Research Travel Award program.  The
program is designed to provide support for travel, food, and lodging to
carry out research using the collections of the MTU Archives. Financial
support for the travel award program is provided by the Friends of the Van
Pelt Library, a support organization for the Library and Archives of
Michigan Technological University.

The first of this year's two $600 awards will be presented to Dag Avango, a
doctoral student in the Department of History and of Science and Technology
at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. The award will
support his research into the development of the Swedish coal mining
industry in Svalbard, an arctic archipelago of islands above Scandinavia.

Also known as Spitsbergen, the Svalbard archipelago contained economic
reserves of coal that proved increasingly strategic during the early
Twentieth Century. The region's inhospitable climate and competing claims of
ownership presented a complex puzzle for mineral extraction. Avango's
research will examine records at the MTU Archives pertaining to the Arctic
Coal Company, a successful American venture funded by John Munroe Longyear
of Marquette and other Michigan capitalists. Avango's research hopes to
clarify and highlight the cooperation between the Swedish coal mining
industry and Arctic Coal on political, logistical and technological issues.
The research visit is part of a larger multi-disciplinary project to
investigate the relationship between scientific research, technological
development and industrial renewal.

The second of this year's awards is to be presented to Aaron Shapiro, a
doctoral candidate in the Department of History at the University of
Chicago. The travel grant will support Shapiro's research into the
development of vacationing and tourism in the Upper Midwest from World War
one to the 1950s.

During the early part of the Twentieth Century vacationing developed as a
mass phenomenon. An increasing number of Americans received time off from
work and promoters marketed extended vacations to urban dwellers as a way to
improve health, productivity, and family life by providing an escape from
the city to a more natural environment. From the perspective of rural areas
and small towns, tourism was viewed as a way to revive and diversify sagging
economies. Shapiro's research will examine a variety of historical records
at the MTU Archives documenting tourism activities in the Copper Country. He
will compare his local research to similar activities across several states,
investigating how business, government, and the middle and working class
consumer influenced the development of the vacation as a commodity and how
the vacation experience changed over time.

The two award recipients plan to visit Houghton over the summer to conduct
research in the collections of the MTU Archives. Both research projects have
immediate short-term publication goals with the possibility of book-length
work developing from this grant-funded travel. Both researchers also plan to
make public presentations about their research while they are in Houghton.

This is the fifth annual cycle for the MTU Archives Travel Award Program.
Previous awards have supported research into the development of company
housing at Hecla Location near Calumet, the role that fraternal orders have
played in Lake Superior mining communities, and the adoption of the English
language by European transplants to Michigan's Copper Country. This year's
awards committee consisted of three individuals: Larry Lankton from the MTU
Social Sciences Department, Kim Hoagland of the Friends of the Van Pelt
Library, and Erik Nordberg, representing the MTU Archives.  For further
information about the awards program or about the collections of the MTU
Archives, call 487-2505.


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Erik C. Nordberg, University Archivist
MTU Archives and Copper Country Historical Collections
Michigan Technological University
1400 Townsend Drive
Houghton, MI  49931
Tel 906-487-2505  Fax 906-487-2357
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http://www.lib.mtu.edu/jrvp/mtuarchives/mtuarchives.htm
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