Mississippi University for Women history student, Whitney Russell, will be exhibiting her research on “Columbus and the Holocaust, 1933-1945” where she explores connections between Columbus, Mississippi and World War II and the Holocaust in Germany.
The exhibit will be on display on the first floor of at the Columbus Public Library from April 30th-May 10th. It is free and open to the public.
The exhibit will have sensitive material due to the subject matter and may not be suitable for children under 11 years of age.
On April 3, the Local History Department at the Columbus-Lowndes Public Library was featured on WCBI’s segment “Hidden Treasures”. Reporter Jillian Garrigues interviewed archivist Mona Vance about the archives and what type of resources can be found there.
Check out the interview by clicking the link below and discover all about the “hidden treasures” located in the Local History Department!
Archivist Mona K. Vance recently met with General and Mrs. Ulysses S. Grant while attending the Golden Triangle Civil War Round Table dinner on Tuesday, April 9th at the Stephen D. Lee Home.
The event was in honor of the sesquicentennial or 150th anniversary of the American Civil War.
In addition to the famous dinner guests, the featured guest speaker historian Parker Hills who gave a presentation on Grierson’s Raid through Mississippi in 1863.
The event was co-sponsored by the Columbus Lowndes Historical Society.
On Tuesday, April 16, the fiftieth anniversary of the day that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. began writing his “Letter from Birmingham Jail”, the Columbus-Lowndes Public Library will participate in a worldwide celebration titled Letter from Birmingham Jail: A Worldwide Celebration.
Portions of the Letter will be read out loud by WCBI reporter R.H. Brown followed by the movie Martin Luther King, Jr.: The Man and The Dream. The film documents Dr. King’s life and leadership in which his courage and commitment continues to inspire people across the world today.
The celebration will begin at 4:30pm and be held in the Meeting Room of the Chebie G. Bateman Building. It is free and open to the public.
King wrote the Letter while confined in the Birmingham, Alabama city jail after being arrested for his part in the Birmingham campaign, a planned non-violent protest conducted by the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights and King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference against racial segregation by Birmingham’s city government and downtown retailers.
The letter includes the famous statement “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”.
The worldwide celebration is sponsored by the Birmingham (Ala.) Public Library and participants in this program will host public readings from the Letter at various locations: libraries, museums, schools, universities, churches, synagogues, temples, places where people work, public parks, bookstores, street corners, coffee shops, and anywhere that people want to participate.
Participants stretch not only across the United States, but also around the globe, from Israel to China to England to South Africa to Somalia.
For more information about the celebration at the Columbus-Lowndes Public Library please contact Mona K. Vance at 662-329-5304 or by email at mvance@lowndes.lib.ms.us.
The Local History Department is proud to announce that it now has two microfilm machines that have digital capabilities. In addition to the Canon 300II that was installed in 2011, the archives now has equiped an already existing machine, the ScanPro400, with a computer.
The ScanPro400 was purchased for the archives in memory of Carl Butler in 2003.
Now, the ScanPro400 can scan microfilm onto a computer where patrons may save the images onto a flash drive or email the files to themselves at no cost.
What also makes this machine unique is that the computer is connected to a printer so that images scanned from the microfilm machine onto the computer may also be printed as hard copies at .25 cents per page.
We hope that our patrons enjoy this new capability!
Local History Announcements 