This year, Duke commemorates the 50th anniversary of racial integration at the university, when in 1963 five African American students matriculated into the undergraduate program. Also in 1963, Pepsi sponsored the production of a record album, “Adventures in Negro History,” recently acquired by the John W. Hartman Center as part [...]
Continue Reading →Any day now, the ticker at the top of the Rubenstein’s finding aids page will turn over and mark a milestone 2000th online finding aid. Doesn’t sound like much, especially when you consider that the Rubenstein Library holds more than 6,000 manuscript collections. But those 2,000 finding aids – narrative [...]
Continue Reading →Our manuscripts cataloger, Alice Poffinberger, recently showed me a merchant’s daybook from Normal College, Randolph County, NC. For those unfamiliar with the history of Duke, Normal College was renamed Trinity College in 1859, which was renamed Duke University in 1924. The Normal College daybook dates from 1852 to 1853, and [...]
Continue Reading →One of the most interesting batch of records I’ve worked with in the ongoing processing of the John Hope Franklin Papers are the Honorary Degrees, a subseries of Franklin’s Honors and Awards. In the course of his life, Franklin collected over 130 honorary degrees from colleges and universities all over the United States. [...]
Continue Reading →The Rwandan audiotapes of the International Monitor Institute (IMI) records are comprised almost entirely of the transcripts of radio broadcasts translated from Kinyarwanda into French and English. These are the broadcasts which aired in 1994 during the Rwandan genocide, which took place from April through early [...]
Continue Reading →Well, it’s finally happened. The 2,065 newspaper boxes and volumes and 8,526 pamphlets, books, and ledgers that could not move in January or February have finally been sent to the LSC. We also moved our framed art collection from the stacks to our swing space, where we have an ingenious new storage solution (stay tuned [...]
Continue Reading →Issues involved with the handling and preservation of ephemera—campaign buttons, stickers, scrapbooks, photo albums, brochures and pamphlets and such—have been an ongoing concern among curators and archivists, as many of our procedures and best practices concern materials commonly recognized as “important artifacts” such as art, works of prominent photographers, rare manuscripts and books. Many modern [...]
Continue Reading →Recently the Rubenstein Library received an inter-library loan request that was quite appropriate for a drowsy Friday afternoon: Fatigue: What It Is and How to Overcome It, by Dr. Donald Anderson Laird. This short pamphlet, collected as part of the John W. Hartman Center for [...]
Continue Reading →In Amsterdam, in the year 1775, on Sunday, the 6th of August, will be interred the body of Hermanus van Cleeff; in high old age, 104 years, shall finally this MAN be put into his grave; he was once lifeless, in dire need, but revived; and acquired after that event the nickname of Death.
Thus [...]
Continue Reading →Anyone reading this blog knows that archives are full of wonderfully weird ephemera just waiting to be discovered and discussed, of conversations waiting to happen. This is the story of two archives that, it turns out, have a lot to talk about.
The John Rylands University Library at [...]
Continue Reading →Hello!
Welcome to the blog of the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University.
Questions? E-mail us at special-collections(at)duke.edu.
For information about our upcoming renovation, visit our renovation website!
New Rubenstein Library Materials Added to the Internet Archive- Annual catalogue of the S.P. Lees Collegiate Institute of Central University at Jackson, Kentucky [serial] June 17, 2013
- Annual catalogue of the S.P. Lees Collegiate Institute of Central University at Jackson, Kentucky [serial] June 17, 2013
- Verfassung der Deutschen Schützen-Gessellschaft in Charleston, Süd-Carolina. Gegründet am 21. Mai 1855. Gesetze revidirt Mai 1868 und Januar 1872 June 17, 2013
- Address of Senator Charles A. Culberson at the Iroquois Club Banquet, Chicago, April 13, 1904 June 17, 2013
- The book of nature : containing information for young people who think of getting married : on the philosophy of procreation and sexual intercourse, showing how to prevent conception and to avoid child-bearing : also, rules for management during labor and child-birth June 17, 2013
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