All posts by Meghan Lyon

Featured, From Our Collections

An Unlikely Alliance: Medical Civil Rights Reformers and Southern Senators in the Age of Deluxe Jim Crow

ThomasKarenprofilepicDate: Wednesday, October 29, 2014
Time: 5:30 p.m.
Location: Room 217, Perkins Library
Contact: Rachel Ingold, rachel.ingold@duke.edu  or (919)684-8549

Please join us on Wednesday, October 29 at 5:30 p.m. for our next Trent History of Medicine lecture. Karen Kruse Thomas, Ph.D., will present An Unlikely Alliance: Medical Civil Rights Reformers and Southern Senators in the Age of Deluxe Jim Crow. A reception will follow the talk.

How could Jim Crow segregation ever be described as “deluxe”? Thurgood Marshall, lead counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, used the term “deluxe Jim Crow” to refer to the efforts of southern state and local governments to shore up segregation by spending money to improve separate black facilities and programs. This strategy was applied to the fullest extent in health care, with federal assistance from the Hill-Burton hospital construction program and other health initiatives. Although the majority of civil rights history scholarship has focused on issues that captured extensive media attention such as school desegregation, public accommodations, and voting rights, the story in health care was largely overlooked, at the time and since. Yet the unlikely alliance during the mid-twentieth century between medical civil rights activists, southern policymakers, and New Deal liberals has much to teach us about the possibilities and limits of political compromise, especially in the context of our own era of Congressional deadlock.

Karen Kruse Thomas has served as Historian of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health since 2012. Dr. Thomas earned her doctorate in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and has taught U.S. history at the universities of North Carolina, Minnesota, and Florida. Her publications in the history of medicine and public health have received national awards from the American Association for the History of Medicine and the Southern Historical Association. She’s also received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library. In 2011, the University of Georgia Press published her first book, Deluxe Jim Crow: Civil Rights and American Health Policy, 1935-1954.

The event is sponsored by the History of Medicine Collections and the John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American History and Culture.

Archive of Documentary Arts, Events, Featured, Readings and Talks

Tomorrow! Sound performance by lowercase music pioneer Steve Roden

Photograph by Randy Yau.
Photograph by Randy Yau.

Tuesday, October 21, 7:30pm
The Carrack Modern Art
111 W Parrish St., Durham
Cost: Free!

Steve Roden—a renowned sound artist, painter, writer, and collector of photographs and 78s—is in residence at Duke this month. He’s giving a talk and visiting classes, but this is the only performance he’s giving of his lowercase style of music in which quiet, usually unheard, sounds are amplified to form complex and rich soundscapes.

Roden’s solo exhibitions include the Chinati Foundation, Marfa; the Henry Art Museum, Seattle; and the San Francisco Art Institute. Roden has been part of group exhibitions at the Fellows of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Mercosur Biennial in Porto Allegre, Brazil; the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; the Serpentine Gallery, London; the Sculpture Center, New York; the Centre Georges Pompidou Museum, Paris; and Miami MOCA, Miami. Check out his website here and more examples of his work here, and be sure to come tomorrow to hear him perform!

Featured, From Our Collections

Steve Roden: Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel Visiting Artist

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[10/23 UPDATE: The CDS event for Oct. 23 has been canceled.]

In October 2014, the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library will welcome internationally known sound and visual artist Steve Roden as the inaugural Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel Visiting Artist.  Named in honor of Dr. Diamonstein-Spielvogel, a prolific author, interviewer, curator, and champion of the arts, this new artist-in-residence program will provide an extended opportunity for an artist to study and engage with archival, manuscript and other special collections in support of developing a new body of creative work.  The Library’s diverse and unique collections have the potential to inspire a variety of works, from new documentary films and textile designs to installations and theatrical plays, and the fellowship will be open to artists working in all media.

Photograph by Randy Yau.
Steve Roden. Photograph by Randy Yau.

Roden is a visual and sound artist based in Pasadena, California, whose work includes painting, drawing, sculpture, film, video, sound installation, text and performance pieces. Roden has shown and performed art around the world, and his work is included in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas, Austin, Texas, and National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, Greece, among others.

In 2011, Roden completed a month-long residency in Berlin where he studied the Walter Benjamin archives at the Akademie der Künste. Since he neither speaks nor reads German, Roden turned his discerning eye toward the visual elements of Benjamin’s archives. Through this paleographic lens, Roden created a series of works in multiple formats inspired by the color-coded symbols Benjamin used to organize and annotate his work. Several of these were featured in two 2013 solo exhibitions entitled “Ragpicker” at CRG gallery in New York City, and Susanne Vielmetter LA Projects in Los Angeles.  Roden is perhaps best known for his pioneering work in lowercase music, a form of experimental music that involves quiet sounds, analog technology, small found objects, and cheap electronics, among other elements.

Roden will be in residency at the Rubenstein Library October 13-30, 2014.  During this time, Roden will be available to meet with scholars, students and staff from across the academic disciplines at Duke and will offer two public talks.

On Saturday, October 18 at 6:30 pm, Roden will present “Ragpicker” at the Full Frame Theater of the American Tobacco Warehouse. Through an interactive discussion format, Roden will consider both g both his work and his creative processes, Roden will show images of some recent work and the found objects, junk, and other detritus of everyday life that inspired them. The event will be followed by a reception, and both are free and open to the public.

Roden’s residency will culminate with a public discussion about how the archival collections, people, and experiences he engaged at Duke may inspire future works.  This event will be held at the Center for Documentary Studies on Thursday, October 23 at 5:00 pm, and will be followed by a reception on the Center’s front porch. [UPDATE: This event has been canceled.]

Roden’s visit is jointly organized and sponsored by the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, the Center for Documentary Studies, and the Master of Fine Arts in Experimental and Documentary Arts Program at Duke University.

Featured, From Our Collections, Manuscripts, New at the Rubenstein Library, New Finding Aids, Technical Stuff

New Collection: Meet the Wilsons

It is a rare treat for me to have a chance to process some 19th century family letters. The family papers of Col. David S. Wilson, from Dubuque, Iowa, arrived in March 2014, thanks to a generous donation from the Kirby, Pfohl, and Quigley Family. The collection was discovered in an attic. It reached the Rubenstein Library as it was discovered, with rusty pins and covered in black dust. Considering its age and environment, the letters themselves were in terrific condition — just filthy. A lot of my time was spent cleaning the paper with special sponges that attract grime.

The original state of the Col. David S. Wilson Family Papers; an up-close view of a rusty pin (used before the invention of the safety pin).
The original state of the Col. David S. Wilson Family Papers, before they were cleaned and sorted; an up-close view of a rusty pin (used before the invention of the paper clip).

I was pleasantly surprised by the contents of the letters. Col. David S. Wilson is moderately famous in Iowa history for his service in the state legislature in the 1850s and early 1860s, and for raising the 6th Iowa Cavalry in 1862. His regiment fought the Sioux in the Dakota Territory. Wilson later worked as a lawyer in both San Francisco and Washington, D.C., and eventually was appointed district judge back in Dubuque.

The collection does not focus on Wilson’s military career, but instead consists largely of letters between David and his family, particularly his wife, Henrietta, and their four children. The letters cover personal topics such as in-laws, health, and finances, and reveal the hardships the family faced as David was frequently separated from his loved ones. They seemed to genuinely miss each other, and it was nice to see such warmth conveyed in their letters.

Also notable in the collection were the courtship letters received by the couple’s daughter Gertrude (also known as “Gertie”) in the mid-1870s. Gertie had at least six different suitors in 1872 and 1873, and their letters to her dominate the correspondence from that period. Emotions turned raw as she rejected a few declarations of love. Gertie finally married George Brock, from Chicago, in March 1874.

Tiny letters for Gertie from her fellas; a lock of Gertie's hair returned after a break-up; crumpled up love-note; Gertie's doodles of a former suitor's name
Tiny courtship letters for Gertie from her fellas; a lock of Gertie’s hair returned after a break-up; a crumpled up love-note; Gertie’s doodles of a former suitor’s name.

The collection includes more than just correspondence; there are also some legal documents, land grants, and a diary from David S. Wilson’s 1860 term in the General Assembly. One of the land grants includes a signature from President Franklin Pierce. The children’s activities, particularly their schooling, are documented through report cards and flyers. I also came across this handmade score book, which was largely empty, but I was excited to see what sport it was for: baseball. Along with all his other activities, it turns out that David Wilson was also a pitcher.

David Wilson's score book from his baseball games.
David Wilson’s score book from his baseball games.

The Col. David S. Wilson Family Papers are now fully processed and available for researchers. You can explore it for yourself using the collection guide.

Post contributed by Meghan Lyon, Technical Services Archivist.

From Our Collections, Just for Fun, New at the Rubenstein Library, Technical Stuff

What’s on our accession shelf?

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Every visitor to Technical Services likes to peek down the accessioning shelves and see what new collection materials have recently arrived. One of the most unusual accessions we’ve ever received is a birdhouse, which arrived this spring as part of an addition to the Evans Family Papers. It is a nearly identical miniature of the family’s Durham house, which is still standing (and occupied) on Dacian Avenue. According to the family, the original house was modeled on the style of Le Corbusier. It was built in 1938, making it one of the first examples of “modern architecture” in Durham.

birdhouse
The Evans Family Birdhouse, with a photograph of the original house for comparison.

The family moved away from Durham in 1950, and kept the birdhouse as a fond token of their former home. We were relieved to learn upon intake that no birds ever took up residence. (That would have made for some interesting conservation concerns!)

Post contributed by Meghan Lyon, Technical Services Archivist.

From Our Collections, New Finding Aids, Students and Interns, Technical Stuff

Bruno Foa’s Trip to Jerusalem

foa1
Portrait of Foa from the Bruno Foa Papers.

Bruno Foa (1905-1999) was an Italian-born, Jewish economist, lawyer, consultant, and professor. Educated in Italy as an economist and lawyer, Foa became Italy’s youngest full professor of economics at age 28. In 1937, he married Lisa Haimann, a refugee from Munich, and they moved to London in 1938. While in London, Foa worked for the British Broadcasting Company, the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, and guest lectured at the London School of Economics. In 1940, Foa moved his family to the United States. He began work at Princeton University on a Rockefeller Foundation Grant and later moved to Washington D.C., where he worked for the Rockefeller Foundation, the Office of Inter-American Affairs, the Bureau of Latin American Affairs and the Federal Reserve Board.

We have recently re-processed the Bruno Foa Papers in order to enhance their description and access for researchers as part of the Economists Papers Project here at the Rubenstein Library. The papers include interesting details about his many trips abroad to Italy, Somalia, Spain, and the newly-established country of Israel. It is an added bonus when a collection we acquired for its relevance to the history of economics ends up including materials on other topics too–like mid-twentieth-century travel writings.

foa3
Souvenir postcard collected by Foa during his trip to Jerusalem.

During his life, Foa was invited several times to guest lecture at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. His first trip was in 1946, just two years before Israel was declared a state. From his writings, Jerusalem seemed to be a city split between the struggles of the time and the echoes of the past. Foa writes, “Jerusalem is indeed an armed camp, and looks like a besieged place. Barbed wire–miles of it– is spread around all public buildings and throughout the city. Tanks and armored cars scout the streets day and night: one of them its Bren guns ready to fire, is permanently stationed at the center of Jaffa Road.” His letter then describes the resiliency of a people who have come to accept as normal daily bomb and landmine explosions, and the strain and tension developing between the Jewish and Arab populations.

But Foa also talks about the natural beauty of the city. From atop Mount Scopus, the view of the city seems to transcend the struggles going on below. “It is a stern view, since Jerusalem is built on stones (beautiful yellow stones) and is surrounded by rocky hills–yet it is a glorious view, when bathed by the warm Palestinian sunshine or the glory of the moon. There, on Mount Scopus, Titus and his legions stood, and from there laid siege to the city. There is the Valley of Final Judgement–as stern as death itself. On the other side, one can see the Jordan, the Dead Sea, the desert of Judaea and the mountains of Noab. Beauty, history and tragedy fill the air. It is a most unforgettable sight.” Bruno Foa’s writings allow us to take a step into the past and see Jerusalem as it stood nearly 70 years ago.

Post contributed by Vicki Eastman, a graduate student at Duke’s Center for the History of Political Economy.

Archive of Documentary Arts, Films, From Our Collections, Human Rights Archive

Rights!Camera!Action!: The Devil Came on Horseback

the_devil_came_on_horsebackWhen: Thursday, March 20th, 7:00pm
Location: FHI Garage, Bay 4, Smith Warehouse
Free and open to the public.
The Devil Came on Horseback, 2007 (TRT: 87 minutes)
Directors: Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg; Full Frame/Working Films Award and the Seeds of War 2007

An up-close and uncompromising look at the crisis in Darfur, this film exposes the ongoing tragedy in Sudan as seen through the eyes of one American witness, former U.S. Marine Captain Brian Steidle, an official military observer. Armed with just a camera, paper and pen, but with access far beyond that of a journalist, Steidle’s photographs and testimony reveal a genocide that had by 2007 claimed over 400,000 lives. The film presents the historical and economic basis for the Sudanese government’s support and encouragement of the atrocities, alongside UN and US debates on the definition of “genocide,” as millions of people suffer. In Arabic and English with English subtitles. A panel discussion follows the screening.

Contact: Patrick Stawski, Duke University Libraries, 919-660-5823, patrick.stawski@duke.edu

From Our Collections, Manuscripts, Students and Interns, Technical Stuff

Heschel Highlights, Part 6

Abraham Joshua Heschel: The Voice on the Back of the Page

1 HeschelAnyone familiar with Abraham Joshua Heschel’s English writings has encountered the distinctive cadence of his sentences. From the early book The Earth is the Lord’s (1949) to his final work A Passion for Truth (1973), one can hear and feel the rhythm that we now all find so familiar. Reliant on evocative words, on short phrases strung together mostly through suggestions, his sentences pile steadily one atop another, compelled from within as if by their own heartbeat.

2 HeschelHeschel saved nearly every scrap of paper on which he wrote. From napkins and hotel stationary to JTS announcements and publisher’s proofs, often what we record in the database is only the “front” of the page—what appears to us to be a paper’s final use. But the other side, the crossed out side, is often just as lively, covered in sentence fragments, Talmudic quotations, half-written letters of thanks or condolence. Often these backsides record, as if by sheer happenstance, a couple of seconds of Heschel’s mind, a brief instance when a thought, a turn of phrase, caught him amid other actions and was hastily scribbled down.

3 Heschel
“The Kotzker, on the other hand, was concerned with truth, being in distress {rather} that imagination being dormant. Somber and plaintive he had no patience with the playful or the rhapsodic.”

More often than not Heschel returned to these scraps, edited them, sounding after each change more rhythmically alike to the unhurried but morally tugging voice that characterize his finished prose.

4 Heschel
“We live on the verge of mystery and ignore it. Instead of facing the abyss marvel, we are involved in analyzing reminiscences of old formulations. We take the world for granted, and forget that being is unbelievable. Stand still and behold! Speech is an aftermath.”

5 Heschel
“There is {no} word in biblical Hebrew for doubt. Indeed just as the logic of science ; there are many words for wonder. Just as in dealing with judgment, our starting-point is doubt, {wonder is} our starting-point in dealing with reality. is wonder The biblical man never questions the reality of the world around him. He [unfinished].”
Though he wrote almost without ceasing, few of Heschel’s notes reveal autobiographical awareness. “I” was not a word he employed readily. Coming upon a personal reflection can feel momentous.

6 Heschel[“Prayer
Entering the shul
I first relinquish all I have know.
I start all over again.
And the words niggun comes —
my lips have known silence
stillness of awe
And my stillness awakes
The niggun is {a sphere} far off my mind,
and yet I am all there.
My pride fades to bit by bit.
The niggun never ends.
Abruptness is something
I have never known.
A moment never dies
A song is never is but
a beginning of {one} infinity
of echo.]

 

 

But sometimes, too, there are the pages punctuated by sadness, when the search for God recedes behind the dark memory of all that Heschel, and Judaism, has lost.

7 Heschel
“My people was burned to death in Poland. Almost all traces of its existence are thousand year history were wiped out. Since 1945 the country was rebuilt, the last remnants of its survivors driven out. No one misses mourns for us in Poland, no one seems to remember us in Poland.”

Post contributed by Samuel J. Kessler, intern for the Abraham Joshua Heschel processing project.

Bingham Center, From Our Collections, Technical Stuff

Clarissa Sligh: Jake in Transition

Sometimes in Technical Services, we get to work with the visual arts as they intersect with the Rubenstein Library’s mission of cultural documentation.  One such collection, acquired by the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture, is the Clarissa Sligh Papers. Sligh is a visual artist, writer, and lecturer. As a teenager, she was the lead plaintiff in a 1955 school desegregation case in Virginia which later inspired her book “It Wasn’t Little Rock”. After working in math and science with NASA and later in business, she began her career as an artist, using photographs, drawings, text, and personal stories to explore themes of transformation and social justice.

The Bingham Center began acquiring Sligh’s work in the 1990s as part of a collection of artists’ books by women. In 2011, we began the process of transferring her archive to Duke. One of the works represented in her papers is Jake in Transition, a series of 51 black and white photographs, some superimposed with text, documenting one man’s transition from female to male. The project explores issues of gender, identity, and physicality. Sligh revisited those themes in her book Wrongly Bodied Two, which juxtaposes Jake’s story with that of a female slave who escapes to the North by passing as a white man.

Jakeintransition

Sligh took the original “Jake” photographs between 1996 and 2000, a time when transgender issues were still largely ignored. Her work is particularly relevant now that the transgender rights movement has gone mainstream. This isn’t surprising for a woman who has been ahead of her time since at least 1955.

Post contributed by Megan Lewis, Technical Services Archivist for the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture.

From Our Collections, In the Conservation Lab, New at the Rubenstein Library, Technical Stuff

Preserving a Cork-Covered Scrapbook

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I’ll soon be meeting with Conservation staff to discuss the preservation issues surrounding a few collections I’ve cataloged recently, including this one, a scrapbook I felt I had to catalog before it absolutely fell to pieces.

rothholz cover
It is likely that Marianne “Nan” Rothholz created this unique cork cover for her scrapbook that contains 69 letters, 22 V-mails, 6 postcards, and 37 black-and-white photographs.

Nan Rothholz began this scrapbook during World War II, when she served as a member of the National Jewish Welfare Board and the Baltimore United Service Organizations (USO). She and her family hosted servicemen, generally medical professionals stationed at Fort Meade, in their Baltimore home. She became especially close to and followed 5 of the men during the final years of the war in Europe, and to me this scrapbook represents her “filing cabinet” for their V-mail, letters, photographs, postcards, and clippings, rather than a traditional scrapbook.

rothholz page
Rothholz recorded personal details about each serviceman in ink, then pasted in their related material around it. The paper in the scrapbook is of astoundingly poor quality, and breaks into pieces as the pages are turned.

Our challenge here will be how to keep related material together yet preserve the individual items, all before these brittle pages crumble to bits. Conservation staff will advise me on this, and perhaps digitization will be considered to help preserve the relationships in material that Rothholz initiated. Both the National Jewish Welfare Board and the USO commended her on her work, and our work will honor her as well.

Post contributed by Alice Poffinberger, Original Cataloger.