This Week’s Discoveries

Media Burn is proud to announce that we have received a grant from the Illinois Historical Records Advisory Board for an exciting project to make our paper document collection accessible for the first time.

These rare documents chronicle the history of portable video and independent TV, featuring pamphlets, newsletters, notes, magazine and newspaper articles, correspondence, and more.  We have several thousand of one-of-a-kind documents and pictures that will be online someday.

We’ve found some neat things already (click on any of the images to enlarge them):

A postcard from the groundbreaking 1972 TVTV coverage of the Democratic National Convention, “The World’s Largest TV Studio”:

And, when The 90’s covered the 1992 election, they sent this photograph to Clinton campaign manager James Carville, and he sent a letter in response:

Thirdly, we found a pull-out section from the 1961 Chicago Daily News describing the fantastic world to come in 1970, complete with personal helicopters!

(click to enlarge)

Finally, for those of you who have been wanting an end to the Daley era, here’s someone who thought Richard J. wasn’t enough:

We’ve got lots of work to do over the next year, but we’ve gotten a great system started thanks to outstanding advice from Loyola University Archivist Kathy Young. We would never be as organized without the help and commitment of Nausicaa Renner who has been interning with us from the University of Chicago.

We’re off to a good start and have completed organizing the massive 90’s collection of correspondence, production notes, logs, editing records, etc.

Keep your eye out for future updates on this exciting project.