Tag / Allan Burke

by ndsupress

Publishing Students to Print 10th Annual Chapbook on Antique Printing Presses

from NDSU Press Publisher Suzzanne Kelley

Students in the Introduction to Publishing class at NDSU Press will be printing the cover of the tenth annual poetry chapbook for NDSU Press on an antique printing press at Bonanzaville, Sat., Sept. 27.

The class will be hand-feeding the covers into a Chandler & Price press from 1897 in The Hunter Times building in Bonanzaville’s pioneer village. The students will work in shifts from 10 a.m. to 3:45 p.m.

Fall 2025 Intro to Publishing Students: (at front, left to right) Grace, Maddie, Hannah, Mason, Maverick; (standing, left to right) Morgan, Eliza, Maggie, Tara, Alison, Aidan, Dr. Kelley, Ingrid.

 

Past publishing students at The Hunter Times: (left to right) Abbie, Breanna, Jamie, and Anish.

The students will travel to Braddock, ND, to print the inside pages of the chapbook on antique presses at The Braddock News Letterpress Museum the weekend of Oct. 10-12.

This year’s winners of Poetry of the Plains and Prairies (POPP) Award are co-authors Josh Gaines, Portland, OR, and Ben Clark, Minneapolis, MN, for their manuscript After the Floating Barn.

In our archives, we’ve found copies of, and photos of, chapbooks being letterpress published by poet and faculty member Richard Lyons in the 1950s and 1960s. Decades later, in 2016, NDSU Press returned to publishing chapbooks on letterpress equipment. Now, as we produce our tenth POPP Award publication, I’ve expanded the enterprise by taking my publishing students into North Dakota communities; by publishing state, regional, and nationally located poets; and by providing national distribution for our prizewinning chapbooks.

The success of our project is the result of our collaborative arrangement between Bonanzaville and The Braddock News Letterpress Museum of the South Central Threshing Association and the dedication of Allan and Leah Burke, retired weekly newspaper publishers, who are the driving force behind the collection, preservation, and revitalization of letterpress printing. We also rely upon the generous nature and expertise of pressman Mike Frykman and the Iron Men (and women) of the threshing association.

Beth Jansen, executive director of Bonanzaville, said she is pleased to welcome the students to the pioneer village. “There is nothing better than to have students visit Bonanzaville to experience history through 19th Century technology,” Jansen said.

Introduction to Publishing is one of the required classes for NDSU’s Certificate in Publishing.

 

 

 

 

by ndsupress

A Safe Place

. . . where-in we share “A letter to Lance Richey,” author of Champagne Times: Lawrence Welk and His American Century (NDSU Press 2025) from Allan Burke, Secretary-Treasurer, Friends of the Welk Homestead, Inc., presented here with Allan’s permission.

Author Lance with a photo of Lawrence.

Lance,

I found one of your statements in the recent radio interview so profound that I spent considerable time transcribing it. I’m sure there is a way to transcribe it instantly with AI, but I did it the old-fashioned way by listening, typing, rewinding, listening, typing . . .

Here’s that section, which I’d like to title “A Safe Place”:

“Lawrence gave the people what they wanted. He was an entertainer. He wouldn’t describe himself as an artist. He loved Jazz music. He loved Dixieland. But he said, ‘I don’t play much of that on my television show because the audience wants something different.’

“Lawrence’s greatest success on network television actually came in the most tumultuous times, the 1960s. He hit the Top Ten of all television programs in 1968. In 1969 when the nation was coming apart at the seams with the Baby Boomer revolution, with the Vietnam War, with the civil rights movement. Because everyone knew for one hour a week I can check into Lawrence Welk and I’ll hear music I recognize, I won’t have politics in my face, and I can just for a moment step away from all the turmoil and enjoy a show that presents to me the America that used to be or that I imagine used to be. That was Lawrence’s secret.”

This section is what I think could be the heart of a marketing campaign for the [Welk] biography and documentary.

The times we live in today, highlighted by this week’s assassination of Charlie Kirk and earlier by the shootings of Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband (not to mention school and other shootings), call for “A Safe Place.” At the risk of being declared sophomoric, I believe Public Television can provide that with the Welk documentary and The Lawrence Welk Show, and NDSU Press can market Champagne Times: Lawrence Welk and His American Century.

It seems to have gone unnoticed that The Lawrence Welk Show by Joyful Voices drew an estimated 600 people to the Welk Homestead on June 1. This past Sunday, Joyful Voices’ Lawrence Welk Hoedown drew several hundred people to a steamy machine shed at the South Central Threshing Show at Braddock, N.D. Contrary to the notion that Mr. Welk’s fans are dead, none of the people at the show in Braddock appeared to have left this life. In fact, there was some dancing at the end of the show.

In my opinion, public television stations across the country should be adding The Lawrence Welk Show . . .

Just some thoughts.
The best to you and Carol,
Allan


P.S. from Suzzanne Kelley, Publisher, NDSU Press: Here are some links to the Prairie Public documentary about Lawrence Welk (viewed already by 37,000+ people!) and the NDSU Press publication of Lance’s book Champagne Times: Lawrence Welk and His American Century. The biography (a 3-volume limited edition [just 500 copies, autographed and numbered], printed as hardcovers in a beautiful protective slip-case) contains photos and stories beyond the documentary with more insights to Welk’s motivation, aspirations, and success-driven route from farm boy roots to becoming a media mogul millionaire. A history of Lawrence Welk–North Dakota’s and the nation’s eminent entertainer of his time–is also part of a month-long exhibit at the NDSU Memorial Union Gallery, showcasing unique historical objects and running through October 9. For parking as the guest of NDSU Press, email NDSU.Press@ndsu.edu to obtain a free pass. 

by ndsupress

Keeping a Close Eye on Fonts

Note from NDSU Press Publisher Suzzanne Kelley

Breanna (at right) and Megan scrutinize each font’s every twist and turn in their mystery collection.

Our 2023 Introduction to Publishing class has just returned from its Braddock Expedition. While at The Braddock News Letterpress Museum, located on the grounds of the South Central Threshing Association, NDSU students were tasked with a number of activities under the tutelage of Leah Burke and Allan Burke. The museum collection of fonts is magnificent, replete with multiple cases full of alphabet and punctuation pieces. The fonts are mostly formed of metal, but some are wooden and large. A few of the font styles are italic; some are bold. Each case contains lowercase and uppercase fonts of a single type. Previous classes and volunteers have sorted the type so that there is only one style per case, a detail-oriented task that has taken place over time in order to organize the collection. Now, students and volunteers are tasked with the detective work of identifying the measurement and name of each type style. 

Type Gauge Tool

There are tools–physical, printed, and digital–to help the students determine the size and style of the type case they are assigned. Beginning with the Type Gauge Multi-Tool, students insert a sample piece of type to determine the height of each font. Font heights are measured as “points,” there being approximately 72 points to an inch. A size 36 font is about one-half inch, and a size 12 (typically used for Word documents) measures at 12/72 of an inch, or, about 1/6 of an inch. (OK, that is enough math.) 

 

Sara, shown here using digital means to narrow down her font identity search.

A digital resource our font detectives enjoy using is Identifont, one of many free options available for finding font families. Identifont asks questions such as, “Do the characters have serifs?” If the answer is yes, then the next question might be, “What style is the upper-case ‘Q’ tail?”

Each question the students answer leads them to the next narrowing-down clue, much like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure kind of book. Students can also make use of type-face identification books held in the museum library.

Ella and Mike study a printed font-style resource.

 

Once the students identify the font style in their type case, they have the great fun of setting type, using their fonts to name the type in their case, and thus building pages for a museum catalog in progress. 

 

Some mistakes were made. It is not easy to set type to “read wrong” and “print right.” (Yes, these are the technical terms.) Here, we see that a first try at typesetting and printing the font identity and size needs a little work.

 

Fortunately, our mistakes are easily corrected. (Maybe not completely in the first try. Can you see the extant error?) 

 

Check out this brief video, where you’ll see that Anish (in the blue jacket and yellow tee) and Abby keep at the task until everything reads right.

Mission accomplished! 

Among other assignments on site this past weekend at The Braddock News Letterpress Museum, all students had their try at identifying fonts, typesetting, and printing. Our hands-on learning experience illustrated how typesetting and printing were done at the turn of the twentieth century and provided a plethora of new-to-the-students terms for the art and process of letterpress publishing. (They also learned about the magic of Gojo.)

We so appreciate our community-university partnership, teaching students (new and) old ways of publishing, while providing aid to the collection management at The Braddock News Letterpress Museum. Special thanks go to Tracy and Paula Moch–who kept us fed and hydrated (and to Johanna for her delicious homemade brownies)–and to Allan and Leah Burke, who kept the training and tasks a’coming! Leah, in all those years of running the newspaper business, you may have missed your calling as a teacher! 

by ndsupress

Eric Hoffer Likes Us!

Note from NDSU Press Publisher Suzzanne Kelley

We are pleased as punch to announce we have just been notified that Surrender Dorothy, by Brett Salsbury, has won 1st Runner-Up in the Eric Hoffer Award for Poetry in the Chapbook category!

 

Brett Salsbury, winner of the 2022 NDSU Press Poetry of the Plains & Prairies Award for his chapbook collection, Surrender Dorothy,”and 1st Runner-Up in the Eric Hoffer Award for Poetry in the category of Chapbook. Brett is a writer of poetry and prose who has split most of his life between Kansas and Nevada. His work has also appeared in Fatal Flaw Literary Magazine, The New Territory, and Concrete Desert Review, among others. He was the 2022 recipient of the Langston Hughes Creative Writing Award in Prose.

Brett was our 2022 prizewinner of the Poetry of the Plains & Prairies Award, resulting in our standard publication contract, ten comp copies, author discount, and the hand-letterpress publication of Surrender Dorothy. This collection of poetry is the seventh in our series of chapbook publications, produced by the students in the Introduction to Publishing class, which meets every fall. The class is part of our Certificate in Publishing, which is offered to undergraduates, graduate students, and Project 65 students.

Introduction to Publishing students learn the art of letterpress printing. Here, at The Hunter Times Museum located at Bonanzaville, West Fargo, students feed paper through the antique Chandler & Price printer, examining each cover with close scrutiny. Not in the picture is Allan Burke, pressman extraordinaire, who provides history, guidance, and mentoring to our chapbook-printing projects. Left to right: Saraa, Ella, Levi, and Monika.

Individual cover samples and a bucket of ink.

We print the covers at The Hunter Times, and then we travel far west to Braddock, ND, to print the interior pages and assemble some 300+ copies at The Braddock News Letterpress Museum.

Past winners of the POPP Award are:

  • 2021 Prairie Madness, by Katherine Hoerth (Nebraska)
  • 2020 A Muddy Kind of Love, by Carolyn A. Dahl (Texas)
  • 2019 Harvest Widows, by Nick Bertelson (Iowa)
  • 2018 Destiny Manifested, by Bonnie Larson Staiger (North Dakota)
  • 2017 Thunderbird (out of print), by Denise Lajimodiere (North Dakota)
  • 2016 Land of Sunlit Ice (out of print), by Larry Woiwode (North Dakota

But Brett’s chapbook prize isn’t the only award we’ve garnered from the Eric Hoffer Awards. In 2022, our 2021 POPP Award Winner, Prairie Madness, by Katherine Hoerth, won Honorable Mention, and in 2019, Thunderbird (now out of print), by Denise K. Lajimodiere, also received Honorable Mention in the Chapbook category.

In other categories, Mammals of North Dakota, 2nd Edition, by Robert Seabloom, was the 1st Runner-Up in the Reference category, and David Mills’s Operation Snowbound: Life behind the Blizzards of 1949, won the Gold Medal in the category of Culture.

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“The Eric Hoffer Book Award honors the memory of the great American philosopher Eric Hoffer by highlighting salient writing, as well as the independent spirit of small press publishers. Since its inception, the Hoffer has become one of the largest international book awards for small, academic, and independent presses.”

by ndsupress

C’mon in! The door’s open!

Publisher’s note from Suzzanne Kelley

Here you see visible proof of why moving our chapbook publishing project from the spring to the fall semester was a good choice. Iron Man Tracy Moch, with the South Central Threshing Association, illustrates how this winter is progressing as he works to gain access to The Braddock News Letterpress Museum, located in Braddock, North Dakota. As our spring semester draws to a close, we would have been hard pressed—with snow piled high—to conduct our letterpress printing project of printing, assembling, stitching, trimming, and numbering individual chapbook copies. Instead, our students in the Certificate in Publishing program now use the spring semester to acquire our next chapbook collection in preparation for publishing in the fall.

Facing east from inside The Braddock News Letterpress Museum. Thank you, Allan Burke, Pressman Extraordinaire, for this picture and the photo of Tracy. Between his work at preserving and operating The Hunter Times (Bonanzaville, West Fargo, ND) and The Braddock News Letterpress Museum, Allan has his hands full of good projects!

 

These days, as we hunker down in the wake of more blizzardy weather, we continue the process of giving first reads to dozens of manuscript submissions for our 8th Poetry of the Plains & Prairies (POPP) Award. Students learn how the acquisition process works for literary press prizes.

The first step is to learn how to navigate our online submissions portal at Submittable, a platform used by more than 11,000 organizations. Submittable is known to poets and writers of all genres as a place to submit their work for publication consideration. In a 2023 review conducted by FinancesOnline, Submittable ranked 3rd of 253 popular apps used for applicant tracking. I chose Submittable because of its familiarity among authors at large, its user-friendly design, and its price. Submittable is an easy place for students to see how publishers (and nonprofits and institutions offering grants and scholarships) are able to receive and track submissions, and it is a place where authors can keep track of all the presses and magazines where their work is being considered.

At Submittable, we are able to design our online entry forms. Here is what the form for submitting POPP Award nominations looks like.

 

 

Once manuscripts start rolling in, students in the Practicum in Publishing—taught every spring—learn how to assess manuscripts based on the aim of the POPP Award series and the mission of the press. They will each read each of the submissions, ranking them in accord with this call for submissions:

North Dakota State University Press seeks poetry submissions of any style for our annual Poetry of the Plains and Prairies letterpress chapbook publication. While authors may call any place home, their submissions must deftly capture the feeling of, as well as the reality of, living on the plains and prairies. Authors may submit any number of poems equaling thirty to thirty-five pages in length, with no more than one poem per page.

We accept new submissions for the POPP Award every year from January 17 through March 17. Answering a series of questions about the aim and mission for each submission, students—undergraduate and graduate, coming from studies in multiple disciplines—take part in winnowing the submissions down to about seven to ten finalists. Where submission selections are close, we meet to advocate for favored collections. Thus, the experience prepares students for work at other literary presses, where interns or other in-house readers pore through what they call a “slush pile,” discerning which manuscripts should go forward for further review and acquisition. Our finalist selections are then sent to the previous year’s POPP Award winner, who serves as our finalist judge and selects the winning manuscript.

Our team of students learn about the history and form of chapbooks in the Introduction to Publishing class. They take the POPP Award-winner’s manuscript, chosen in Practicum in Publishing, and they are introduced to the line-editing process, standards for book design, selection of cover art, building a copyright page, and developing marketing and publicity plans.

Instead of printing, assembling, stitching, and trimming chapbooks at the Letterpress Museum during our chill “spring” months, the hands-on labor takes place in the more accommodating fall months. How lucky we are to have the good fortune of reading poetry manuscripts indoors, while the snow piles up around us!

For more information about the Certificate in Publishing, check out our course descriptions for undergraduate and graduate students. If you are age 65 or older, and you would like to audit the publishing courses for free, check out the option in Project 65.

Destiny Manifested, by Bonnie Larson Staiger, was our first POPP Award chapbook publication solicited through competition. The award was first named Voices of the Plains and Prairies, and—in 2019—the award name changed to Poetry of the Plains and Prairies Award (the POPP Award).

by ndsupress

Land of Sunlit Ice: Giving Region a Voice

note from Suzzanne Kelley, Publisher, NDSU Press

View from my front porch.

As I write, periodically gazing out my study window at a crisp, cold negative 24 degrees day, I revisit one of the first books I published when coming on board with NDSU Press. In a conversation with North Dakota Poet Laureate Larry Woiwode about his current work—back in the fall of 2015—we landed on the proposition of publishing a chapbook of poetry: Land of Sunlit Ice. We wouldn’t do it in simple fashion, but in alliance with newspaperman Allan Burke (the mover and shaker behind the Hunter Times and the Braddock News Letterpress Museums), the Iron Men of the South Central Threshing Association, and my Introduction to Publishing students. That inaugural project kicked off a series of publications, evolving into what we now call the Poetry of the Plains & Prairies (POPP) Award. January 17, 2022, kicks off our seventh call for poetry for this prestigious prize.

Hand-letterpressed covers, individually painted by Introduction to Publishing students, class of 2016.

Introduction to Publishing students from the class of 2016.

Pictured after installing a hanging propane furnace in The Braddock News Letterpress Museum in Braddock, N.D., are left to right, Ken Rebel of Bismarck, Tony Splonskowski of Bismarck, David Moch of Hazelton, Tracy Moch of Kintyre and Dave Duchscherer of Bismarck. They are all active in the South Central Threshing Association, Inc.

Getting off to a stellar start with this fabulous collection led not only to our chapbook series. The publication and the publicity surrounding our work led to our tagline: giving region a voice. I’d like to say that we thought of this all-encompassing phrase all by ourselves, but it came instead from an article about what we do, published in North Dakota Living’s article by Luann Dart “NDSU Press Gives Region a Voice.” At root, this simple tagline represents the mission of the press since its first conception in 1950. We are proud to continue that mission today.

But, what exactly is “region,” and how do we apply the term as a geographic and sensate parameter today?

Our mission statement declares that NDSU Press “exists to stimulate and coordinate interdisciplinary regional scholarship. These regions include the Red River Valley, the state of North Dakota, the plains of North America (comprising both the Great Plains of the United States and the prairies of Canada), and comparable regions of other continents.” We do this via publications in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. With our Contemporary Voices of Indigenous Peoples series, we sometimes step out of region, but on the whole, our mission represents region as defined herein.

Still, on the topic of “region,” enter once again Mr. Woiwode. In a recent interview, Woiwode addresses an ever-burbling question about defining our particular region, with a push to include our region as an outlier of the Midwest. To this, Woiwode responds:

Once, talking heads and weather-people on TV became commonplace, the Midwest started to stretch from Pennsylvania to Nevada—perhaps because media people don’t often travel from their studios on the coasts. Iowa and Illinois and Indiana are at the heart of the Midwest, with Wisconsin and southern Michigan and perhaps western Ohio as participants, but northern Minnesota and North and South Dakota and Montana and Wyoming are definitely not the Midwest . . . Nebraska clings closer to South Dakota and Wyoming than any midwestern state, and the grounding in evidence and practicality of the area comes naturally, because many resident families were farmers or ranchers for generations. Neither occupation runs on theory.

I rejoice at this clarification, for it fits my own recognition of our region, and it clarifies how “comparable” regions might well be defined.

Woiwode’s next statement also lands squarely with my understanding of writers of region, based on my own research in memory and collective memory.

My sense is that a writer’s first steps onto terra firma, the place where the writer learns to walk, whether prairie or high plains or beach or forest or the floor of an apartment and on to concrete and asphalt, that place is the locus of creative power, even if never referred to—it’s the center and source of the words that arrive from one who travels the distance of a novel or collection of stories or enough poems to generate the microcosm of a genuine interior. The rhythms and the texture of the language of that place will always be present in all the creative work that follows.

Genius. That rhythm and texture, that locus of creative power in a work about region—these are the golden threads of what we seek in our publications, from chapbooks of poetry to the magnum opus of a book about turkeys that we have now in production.

 

Related notes:

Submissions to the Poetry of the Plains & Prairies Award will run January 17 through March 17. We seek collections of poetry, 30-35 pages in length (one poem per page; single poems may extend beyond one page) by a single author. There is no submission fee. Send manuscripts to NDSU Press Submission Manager (submittable.com)

Land of Sunlit Ice, by Larry Woiwode (2016, out of print). For more information on our chapbook projects, view Thunderbird & The Land of Sunlit Ice, produced by Sandbagger News.

Larry Woiwode has been North Dakota Poet Laureate since 1995. Born in Carrington, ND, he spent his early, formative years on the land in the farming community of Sykeston. He is widely (and wildly successfully!) published with poetry, novels, biographies, essays, and memoirs.

Woiwode interview quotes from Middle West Review, Volume 8, Number 1, Fall 2021, p. 206.

by ndsupress

Flash & the Heidelberg

from Suzzanne Kelley, Publisher, and Allan Burke, Retired Newspaper Publisher and Consultant/Operator for Our Chapbook Publication Projects

The title page for a Muddy Kind of Love is printed on 32# Southworth Naturals Paper, Latte. Interior pages are printed on 32# Southworth Naturals Paper, Birch. 27# Red Maroon Vellum tissue insert at front and back. Cover is printed on 67# Cream Cover Stock. All printing is done with 16-gauge wood-mounted dies prepared by OWOSSO Graphic Arts, Owosso, MI.

While our blog title for today sounds like a crime-fighting duo, in reality, we are talking about chapbook press operations. In a typical year, our Intro to Publishing students would be caravanning to Braddock, ND, where they would print hundreds of pages at the Braddock News Letterpress Museum. This year being atypical, however, we have implemented Plan B.

Thanks to the folks at Flash Printing in Bismarck and to operators and consultants Mike Frykman and Allan Burke, our interior pages for A Muddy Kind of Love are being letterpress printed on a Heidelberg with some regional history.

Flash Printing is the proud owner of a Heidelberg letterpress, which they usually use for numbering, perforating, scoring, and die cutting. This weekend, with two new ink rollers that Allan brought to Flash from the Braddock News Letterpress Museum (Braddock, ND), this project is Back to the Future for the press.

The Heidelberg was bought brand new by the monks of the Benedictine Monastery at Assumption Abbey, Richardton, and Flash is its second home. One or more of the Flash owners attended high school at the abbey, which once had both a high school and a college. Several of the Iron Men—from the South Central Threshing Association—who aid and abet the operations at Braddock News, also attended the abbey’s high school, and one was the general contractor for one or more buildings on the abbey’s campus. Braddock Letterpress Museum founders hold the abbey’s folder in storage, awaiting restoration.


Pictured after installing a hanging propane furnace in The Braddock News Letterpress Museum in Braddock, ND, are, left to right, Ken Rebel of Bismarck, Tony Splonskowski of Bismarck, David Moch of Hazelton, Tracy Moch of Kintyre and Dave Duchscherer of Bismarck. They are all active in the South Central Threshing Association, Inc

Today, even as we write, Allan and Mike are letterpress printing the interior pages of A Muddy Kind of Love—the Poetry of the Plains & Prairies Award won by poet Carolyn A. Dahl—on the Heidelberg press. Through the magic of UPS overnight deliveries between Bismarck, Houston, and Fargo, we anticipate having fully printed, assembled, trimmed, and individually autographed and numbered copies available on December 10. Join Carolyn, Allan, Suzzanne, and our Intro to Publishing students on Saturday, December 12, 2020, at 2:00 p.m. CST for a visit with all and a book-launch-reading by Carolyn Dahl. You can register in advance for this meeting here. Free and open to the public.

Copies of A Muddy Kind of Love are available for pre-sales ordering at our NDSU Press online store.

About the author:

Carolyn A. Dahl, winner of the 2020 POPP Award with her chapbook, A Muddy Kind of Love

Carolyn Dahl was the Grand Prize winner in the national ARTlines2 poetry contest and a finalist in the PEN Texas Literary competition and the Malovrh-Fenlon Poetry Prize. Her chapbook, Art Preserves What Can’t Be Saved, won first place in the Press Women of Texas contest and the National Federation of Press Women’s Communications contest, chapbook division. She is the co-author of The Painted Door Opened: Poetry and Art, the author of three art books, and has been published in many anthologies and literary journals. Raised in Minnesota, she now writes from Texas where she raises monarch butterflies, sending them north to Midwest habitats.  www.carolyndahlstudio.com.

A Muddy Kind of Love is the winner of the 2020 Poetry of the Plains & Prairies Award, hosted by North Dakota State University Press.

Poetry by Carolyn A. Dahl. Cover design by Jamie Trosen.

About the Intro to Publishing class:

Students—graduate and undergraduate—are able to gain experiential learning through our Intro to Publishing class, where they learn the history, business, and practice of small press publishing. The Intro is part of a series of required classes to earn our Certificate in Publishing, which is offered in conjunction with the day-to-day activities of NDSU Press. We could not take our usual class photo this year, as we only met face-to-face in small groups and at all the distance we could muster. Students from the class printed the covers for A Muddy Kind of Love on a Saturday in October using an 1890s Chandler & Price letterpress located at Hunter Times Museum, Bonanzaville, West Fargo. In light of our need to work at some distance, we invited Mikaila Norman to utilize her caricature-drawing skills to depict our chapbook project crew. If you are interested in earning the Certificate in Publishing offered via the daily activities of NDSU press, check out the descriptions here and here.

2020 North Dakota State University Press Introduction to Publishing students, instructors, operators, and consultants. Illustrations by Mikaila Norman.

Top, left to right, Undergraduates: Meghan Arbegast, Jamie Askew, Grace Boysen, Megan Brown, Jake Elkin. Row 2: Abigail Keys, Shawnia Klug, Sydney Larson, Jack Payette, Corrine Redding. Row 3: Kiri Scott, Madeline Wright. Graduate students: Lis Fricker, Oliver Sime, Elle West. Row 4: Allan Burke and Mike Frykman (Press Operators/Consultants); Dr. Suzzanne Kelley (NDSU Press Publisher/Instructor), Kalley Miller (Teaching Assistant), Zachary Vietz (Graduate Assistant in Publicity and Press Operator/Consultant).

www.ndsupress.org

 

by ndsupress

A Day of Thanksgiving and Praise

As shared by friend of NDSU Press, Allan Burke, retired newspaper publisher, assistant and consultant for our chapbook printing projects

Proclamation of Thanksgiving

This is the proclamation which set the precedent for America’s national day of Thanksgiving. During his administration, President Lincoln issued many orders similar to this. For example, on November 28, 1861, he ordered government departments closed for a local day of thanksgiving. 

Sarah Josepha Hale, a 74-year-old magazine editor, wrote a letter to Lincoln on September 28, 1863, urging him to have the “day of our annual Thanksgiving made a National and fixed Union Festival.” She explained, “You may have observed that, for some years past, there has been an increasing interest felt in our land to have the Thanksgiving held on the same day, in all the States; it now needs National recognition and authoritive fixation, only, to become permanently, an American custom and institution.”

Prior to this, each state scheduled its own Thanksgiving holiday at different times, mainly in New England and other Northern states. President Lincoln responded to Mrs. Hale’s request immediately, unlike several of his predecessors, who ignored her petitions altogether. In her letter to Lincoln she mentioned that she had been advocating a national thanksgiving date for 15 years as the editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book. George Washington was the first president to proclaim a day of thanksgiving, issuing his request on October 3, 1789, exactly 74 years before Lincoln’s.

The document below sets apart the last Thursday of November “as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise.” According to an April 1, 1864, letter from John Nicolay, one of President Lincoln’s secretaries, this document was written by Secretary of State William Seward, and the original was in his handwriting. On October 3, 1863, fellow Cabinet member Gideon Welles recorded in his diary how he complimented Seward on his work. A year later the manuscript was sold to benefit Union troops.

Washington, D.C.
October 3, 1863

By the President of the United States of America.

A Proclamation.

The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature, that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God. In the midst of a civil war of unequalled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign States to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict; while that theatre has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union. Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defence, have not arrested the plough, the shuttle or the ship; the axe has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege and the battle-field; and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom. No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy. It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union.

In testimony whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the Seal of the United States to be affixed.

Done at the City of Washington, this Third day of October, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and of the Independence of the United States the Eighty-eighth.

By the President: Abraham Lincoln

William H. Seward,
Secretary of State