Erwin Library – Wayne Community College | Goldsboro, NC

Is your pet a fluffy cat or a scruffy dog (no offense since scruffy is so cute!)?  Or do you have one or more of both, and just hope they get along?  Join us for Children’s Storytime in the Erwin Library on Wednesday, August 23^rd from 9:00 -10:00 a.m. and learn more about the daily life of cats and dogs.  Being a beloved pet is not always as easy as it looks!

Books now on display in the Circulation Desk exhibit area for you to check out highlight the life, work and era of the great English lyric poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, born two hundred and twenty five years ago on August 4, 1792.   He lived a tumultuous personal life, beginning with being severely bullied at Eton, then expelled from Oxford University for writing a pamphlet touting atheism, followed with fame as a Romantic poet, though he never made any money at it, and ending with a mysterious death by drowning while sailing in a thunderstorm on a lake in Italy, just shy of his thirtieth birthday.

Along the way Shelley married twice, first  eloping with sixteen year old Harriet Westbrook, then abandoning her for Mary Godwin, later author of the novel Frankenstein.  Shelley also became close friends with fellow poets, Lord Byron and John Keats, who died young as well.   Learn more about this passionate idealist who at one point declares “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world” and at another muses, “When my cats aren’t happy, I’m not happy. Not because I care about their mood but because I know they’re just sitting there thinking up ways to get even.”

It’s hard to believe that Frank Lloyd Wright, whose fame as an architect is synonymous with “modern” was born 150 years ago this year (June 8, 1867-April 9, 1959). “Wright’s work from 1899 to 1910 belongs to what became known as the ‘Prairie Style.’ With the “Prairie house”— a long, low, open plan structure that eschewed the typical high, straight-sided box in order to emphasize the horizontal line of the prairie and domesticity— Wright established the first truly American architecture. In a Prairie house, ‘the essential nature of the box could be eliminated,’ Wright explained. Interior walls were minimized to emphasize openness and community. ‘The relationship of inhabitants to the outside became more intimate; landscape and building became one, more harmonious; and instead of a separate thing set up independently of landscape and site, the building with landscape and site became inevitably one.'”

One of the most iconic of Wright’s houses is Fallingwater, built for Edgar Kaufmann, Jr. in the 1930s, looking as if it is actually part of the waterfall it was at first intended to merely give a good view of. This is an outstanding example of Wright’s “Organic Architecture,” which as Kaufmann pointed out “stems from his Transcendentalist background. The belief that human life is part of nature.”

Learn more about this innovator from the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation which still carries on his legacy of training new architects in an organic learning environment. Also, visit the book exhibit in the Erwin Library Reference area to learn about this designer and his many and varied designs created over a career spanning more than seventy years, his very last the magnificent Guggenheim Museum which he finished just before he died in 1959 at the age of ninety-two.

Another influence even now on how Americans think about the natural world as well as the duties of a single individual to help create not only the best life in harmony with nature, but in harmony with other people for the improvement of society as a whole, is featured also in the Erwin Reference exhibit area, Henry David Thoreau. Born two hundred years ago on July 12, 1817, Thoreau was a member of the Transcendentalists, thinkers most influenced by the poet philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Thoreau is best known for two works, Walden, now considered a naturalist classic, written as a result of his two-year experiment living close to nature in a house he built himself near Walden Pond, and “Civil Disobedience.”

The latter resulted from his experience of “a night in jail after refusing to pay a poll tax. This experience led him to write one of his best-known and most influential essays, “Civil Disobedience” (also known as “Resistance to Civil Government”). Thoreau held deeply felt political views, opposing slavery and the Mexican-American War. He made a strong case for acting on one’s individual conscience and not blindly following laws and government policy. “The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right,” he wrote.”

What did WCC students do in 1972? How about those hairdos .. and that’s the faculty! You’ll see it was a slightly different world, but still Goldsboro and still our school as you flip through thirteen newly digitized WCC Yearbooks (Yearbooks link) published between 1964 and 1985, now part of the WCC Historical Archives. You’ll also find the WCC Campus Voice newspaper (See: Newspapers) published between 1968 and 2008, and the WCC Renaissance literary magazine (See: Campus Publications) for 1985 through the present.