By Anne Bahde
Title: Robert Dalton Harris, Jr. Collection of Atomic Age Ephemera, 1897-2017
Predominant Dates: 1945-1975
ID: MSS HarrisRD
Primary Creator: Harris, Robert Dalton
Extent: 5.1 cubic feet. More info below.
Arrangement: Series 1: Ephemera lists materials chronologically by date of publication. Items have been individually numbered in sequence, preceded by year of publication (i.e., 1979.001, 1979.002). Growth to the collection is expected; new materials will be added intellectually in sequence, and physically at the end of the collection.
Date Acquired: 00/00/2017
Languages of Materials: English [eng], French [fre], Japanese [jpn], Spanish;Castilian [spa]
The Robert Dalton Harris, Jr. Collection of Atomic Age Ephemera consists of printed ephemera acquired and assembled by Robert Dalton Harris, Jr. and his partner Diane DeBlois, experts on ephemera and proprietors of the ephemera business a’Gatherin.
The collection includes materials produced from the late 19th century to the present day, with the majority of items falling between 1945 and 1970. Materials in the collection comprise broad coverage of many scientific, religious, cultural, industrial, political, environmental, and other aspects of nuclear history. Most items were produced in the United States; however, British, Canadian, and Japanese materials are also present.
Materials prior to 1945 deal with early scientific advances and the therapeutic radium craze, documented through promotional materials, testimonials, and advertisements. Newspapers, speeches, and publications show American response to news of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the end of the war in 1945. Tensions around international control of atomic energy in the years just following the war are represented through offprints, reports, and speeches. In the years before 1950, growing anxiety at the start of the Cold War and calls for peace from individuals and organizations can be seen in pamphlets, newsletters, and article reprints.
The testing and development of nuclear weapons is represented by numerous photographs, press releases, and postcards. Civil defense is a primary concentration of the collection, and a number of handbooks, manuals, training materials, and survival guides dominate the collection from 1950 to 1965. Public engagement with the challenges of atomic energy can be seen through newspapers, radio programs, and other mass media artifacts. Increased public awareness about the personal and environmental dangers of fallout is documented through fallout shelter designs, disaster plans, and guides for the layperson on radiation detection.
A number of items relate to educating laypersons and/or students about nuclear energy and science, including school newsletters, curricula, exhibit guides, and manuals. The presence of the growing nuclear industries is asserted in the later 1940s through the next two decades, in the form of investment guides, company booklets, trade publications, and promotional materials. The growth of nuclear power is well represented in the form of power plant brochures, postcards, and training guides. Materials related to anti-nuclear activism are present from just after WWII and increase in number during the 1950s and 1960s, with organized protests and rallies advertised in posters, flyers, and leaflets. The late 20th century is reflected in ephemera related to nuclear-themed protest art and the space race, as well as satiric posters and postcards.
The collection has particular strength in the early American response to news of the atomic bomb. This response is documented through over 75 pieces produced in the days and months after the United States destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The large set of newspapers in this section, particularly the rare newspapers from Hanford, Oak Ridge, Los Alamos, and environs announcing and discussing the atomic bomb, are a notable highlight of the collection.
There are nearly 50 different material types in this collection, and over 550 individual items. The majority of items are typical printed ephemera formats such as pamphlets, booklets, brochures, leaflets, flyers, posters, and postcards. Additional formats include photographs, stamps, promotional materials and advertisements, instructional materials, government documents, calendars, stickers, original art, sheet music, and petitions. A large fallout shelter sign, a fabric civil defense armband, and a neutron irradiated dime are among the few 3D artifacts.
The majority of published print items have been separated from the larger Robert Dalton Harris, Jr. Collection of the Atomic Age and comprise the cataloged portion of the collection. Some serials are included in the ephemera collection, including newsletters and newspapers, but the majority of serial titles (magazines and journals) will be cataloged. Cataloging for monograph and serial publications from the Harris Collection of the Atomic Age is ongoing; access to these titles is limited until cataloging is finished.
Robert Dalton Harris, Jr. and his partner Diane DeBlois are authors, editors, historians, independent scholars, and long-time proprietors of aGatherin’, a business that deals in ephemera and original source materials. They began building a collection on the atomic age in the early 1980s and added thousands of books, pieces of ephemera, manuscript collections, and artifacts gradually over decades. Oregon State University acquired the collection in 2017.
Robert Jr. was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1943. During the course of his work towards a PhD in Psychology from Yale, Robert Sr. taught at Topaz Japanese Relocation Camp and Toele Ordnance Depot in Utah, as an instructor at Oregon State College 1947-1950, and at Montana State College where he died in 1954. Robert’s mother Marie Schlegel Harris [Bussard] returned to Corvallis and Oregon State College in 1957, becoming an Extension Specialist, Coordinator of the Expanded Food and Nutrition Program, and an Associate Professor of Foods and Nutrition. Robert Jr. graduated from Corvallis High School in 1961, his summers spent working for the chemistry and physics departments at OSU. After attending Stanford University on a General Motors scholarship, Harris received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY. In 1970 he began working for the U. S. Air Force’s special weapons laboratory in Albuquerque, NM, becoming a full-time dealer in postal history and ephemera in 1973.
Harris was always a collector, beginning with postage stamps, which led to an emphasis on postal history as well as transportation and communication ephemera. Diane DeBlois was born in Montreal, Canada, in 1947. After receiving a BA in English Literature from McGill University and a MA in Education from Western University, DeBlois joined Harris as a life and business partner in 1979. Together they have written hundreds of articles for publications in the world of philately and ephemera, and have presented at international conferences on business history, economic history, and postal history. The Atomic Age Collection was the basis for a paper at the 2006 Business History Conference in Toronto, Canada; and for an international art and architecture workshop in 2015.
For 15 years, DeBlois and Harris published P.S.: A Quarterly Journal of Postal History; since 2000 they have edited the Postal History Journal, an effort for which they won the American Philatelic Congress’ Diane D. Boehret awards in 2004 and 2014. They have both been inducted into the Philatelic Writers Hall of Fame. Harris also received the American Philatelic Congress’ C. Corwith Wagner Award (1995), and with DeBlois, the 2008 Jere Hess Barr Award. In 2016, the pair was awarded the Luff Award for Excellence in Philatelic Research. They have served on the Museum Advisory Council for the Smithsonian National Postal Museum.
DeBlois and Harris were charter members of The Ephemera Society of America in 1980, and have organized symposia, conferences and have published many of the Society’s publications. Diane has edited The Ephemera Journal since 2010. The pair share the Ephemera Society of America’s highest award, the Maurice Rickards Medal (2008), for their “continuing efforts at promoting understanding of the historical and cross-disciplinary importance of objects through well-researched, readily accessible, writings.” aGatherin’ is a member of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America (ABAA) and the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers (ILAB).
More Extent Information: 6 boxes, including 3 oversize boxes and 1 oversize folder
Statement on Access: The collection is open for research.
Acquisition Note: The collection was acquired via purchase and donation in 2017.
Separated Materials: The Robert Dalton Harris, Jr. Collection of the Atomic Age is made of up this collection, approximately 1000 books and serials, and approximately 25 separate archival collections. Published materials will be cataloged into the History of Atomic Energy Collection; the archival materials will be separately arranged and described.
Related Materials: The History of Atomic Energy Collection and the Ava Helen and Linus Pauling Papers both hold similar materials on a wide variety of nuclear topics also appearing within this collection, including civil defense, weapons testing, the antinuclear movement, nuclear power, nuclear science, radiation, and more. The Eugene Starr Papers, the Ted Rockwell Papers, and Leonard Maki Nuclear Power Collection hold materials on the development of nuclear power and propulsion. Other materials related to nuclear weapons testing and radiation victims include the Barton C. Hacker Papers, Nuclear Free America Records, and the Charter Heslep Papers.
Preferred Citation: Robert Dalton Harris, Jr. Collection of Atomic Age Ephemera (MSS HarrisRD), Oregon State University Special Collections and Archives Research Center, Corvallis, Oregon.
Processing Information:
We acknowledge that materials in SCARC collections and the language that describes them may be harmful. We are actively working to address our descriptive practices; for more information please see our SCARC Anti-Racist Actions Statement online.
Some materials in this collection use derogatory language to describe ethnic groups. We acknowledge the racism represented by the use of these phrases and the harm they may cause our users. Providing access to these historical materials does not endorse any attitudes or behavior depicted therein.
Harris, Robert Dalton
Antinuclear movement.
Civil defense.
Hiroshima-shi (Japan)--History--Bombardment, 1945
History of Science
Nagasaki-shi (Japan)--History--Bombardment, 1945
Nuclear-weapon-free zones
Nuclear arms control.
Nuclear disarmament.
Nuclear energy
Nuclear industry.
Nuclear physics.
Nuclear propulsion.
Nuclear warfare.
Nuclear weapons--Social aspects.
Nuclear weapons--Testing.
Radiation--Health aspects.
Radioactive fallout
Artifacts (object genre)
Photographic prints.
Printed ephemera.