Date: 1 February-1 May 2011 Location and time: Rare Book Room cases during library hours Contact information: Jennifer Thompson, 919-660-5922 or jennifer2.thompson(at)duke.edu
African Americans have had an important, if not always publicized, role in every American war. Our new exhibit, “‘Brave Deeds Are Proudly Spoken of’: African American Military Service,” explores some of the ways in which the stories of these men and women have been recorded and asks the question, “How should this story be told for future generations?”
During the wars of the 18th and 19th centuries, many African Americans sought to gain freedom by enlisting in the military, which they believed would eventually ensure them rights and privileges as American citizens. In the conflicts of the 20th century, African Americans fought bravely to defend their nation abroad only to return home to discrimination and segregation. On display are artifacts, documents, photographs, and printed material that reveal these struggles and triumphs of African Americans in the U.S. military.
This exhibit highlights one of the collecting interests of the John Hope Franklin Research Center, which is currently celebrating its 15th anniversary.
Post contributed by Jennifer Thompson, John Hope Franklin Research Center Librarian.
From Protest to (PRODUCT) RED: Generational Shift in U.S. Human Rights Activism
Date: Thursday, 10 February 2011 Time: 5:00 PM Location: Rare Book Room Contact Information: Patrick Stawski, 919-660-5823 or patrick.stawski(at)duke.edu
Since WOLA’s founding in 1974, both the human rights community and the community of nongovernmental organizations working on Latin American issues have grown and evolved. Joe Eldridge, Alex Wilde, George Vickers, and Joy Olson—all current and former Executive Directors of WOLA—will discuss how the organization rethinks its position within these overlapping sectors to determine the best contribution it can bring to their collective work. The panel, moderated by Robin Kirk, Director of the Duke Human Rights Center, will explore how human rights challenges and the activism(s) that address them have changed and adapted to the shifting currents of national and international policy and history.
WOLA is the premier U.S.-based human rights organization working on Latin America. The Archive for Human Rights is the repository for the WOLA archives. Since 2008, WOLA and Duke University have co-sponsored the WOLA-Duke Book Award for the best non-fiction work on human rights and social justice in Latin America.
Date: Wednesday, 26 January 2011 Time: 3:00-4:00pm Location: Rare Book Room Contact Information: Kelly Wooten, 919-660-5967 or kelly.wooten(at)duke.edu
Based on over fifteen years of ethnographic and archival research, Dr. Eichhorn’s talk, “Feminist Artists, Activists, and Archivists: Redefining Feminism through the Archive since 1990,” will examine how and why young feminist artists, activists, archivists, and librarians adopted the archive and library as sites of feminist activism in the early 1990s—a period when many established feminist institutions, including presses and bookstores, were collapsing under the pressure of neoliberal restructuring. Her talk will bebased on her book-length project, The Order of Resistance: Redefining Feminism through the Archive, 1990-2010.
(Details about Kate Eichhorn’s 2008 book of poetry, Fond, are available on her website.)
al margen (“living on the margin”) is the result of seven years of photography by Petra Barth in fourteen countries of South America, Central America, and the Caribbean. 70 gelatin silver prints are on display in two campus venues: 40 prints at the Frederic Jameson Gallery in Friedl Building on East Campus and 30 prints in the Special Collections Gallery.
Barth’s photography aims “to tell stories about the everyday lives of people living on the margin—their struggles and their dreams.” In her own words,
I use a spontaneous, intimate approach to photograph the daily life of individuals. I look for quiet, reflective moments when people are unaware of the camera and my presence, and genuine feeling is conveyed. Pieced together, these moments describe, with extraordinary clarity, the living conditions all across Latin America and the Caribbean, from Haiti’s streets to the suburbs of Nicaragua and El Salvador, and from the favelas of Rio to the victims of the recent tsunami in Concepcíon, Chile.
My photographs reveal moments that are not often depicted because they happen every day. My camera simultaneously captures the unusual in the ordinary and the ordinariness of the unusual. We often see images of devastated landscapes and human suffering in the wake of disastrous events, but that is only one part of life. What happens before, after, and in between these times? Despite struggle, there is also happiness and the ability to move on and create new narratives every day.
al margen is a candid photographic work that attempts to establish documentary photography as an art form as well as a method of communication. I would like to raise awareness about the living conditions of those who are marginalized, but I am also interested in people and the beauty of ordinary life.
Join us for an opening reception and panel discussion, as well as a gallery tour led by Petra Barth, on Thursday, Feburary 24th from 4:00-6:00 PM in the Frederic Jameson Gallery. Stay tuned to The Devil’s Tale for more details about this event!
Date: 13 January – 3 April 2011 Location and Time: Perkins Library Gallery during library hours Contact Information: Mary Samouelian, 919-660-5912 or mary.samouelian(at)duke.edu
Who was Doris Duke? Her public persona was that of the glamorous, yet eccentric, heiress who named her butler the executor of her estate, but privately she was determined not to be defined by social expectations or her vast wealth.
The materials on display in “Philanthropist, Environmentalist, Collector: Doris Duke and Her Estates” reveal a much different and more complex story of James Buchanan Duke’s only child. On the surface these artifacts are seemingly unassuming—inventories of furniture, a security ledger, and architectural drawings are amongst the objects in the exhibit—but in fact they paint a picture of an adventurous, intelligent and independent woman, who in many ways was considered ahead of her time. Throughout her life, Doris Duke continued her family’s quiet but innovative pattern of philanthropy, eagerly advocated for the protection of the environment, and pursued her lifelong passion as both a collector and patron of Islamic art.
During your next visit to Perkins-Bostock Library, be sure to stop by the Perkins Library Gallery to see the exhibit on display. Also featured in this exhibit are Doris Duke’s home movies and an interactive map of a journey she made to the Middle East in 1938. If you can’t visit in person, you can enjoy the online exhibit!
Also, please join curators Mary Samouelian and Molly Bragg for a gallery talk and screening of Doris Duke’s home movies on Thursday, February 24th from 4:00-5:00 PM in the Rare Book Room. Stay tuned to The Devil’s Tale for more details about this event!
The third season of the popular Rights! Camera! Action! film series begins tomorrow evening with Citizen King, which traces the final five years of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr’s life, starting with his momentous 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech.
We’ll provide free drinks and popcorn, as well as a panel discussion following the film!
The Battle of Hampton Roads, fought on March 9, 1862, marks the first time two ironclads engaged in battle: the USS Monitor and the CSS Virginia (formerly the USS Merrimack). While both warships escaped destruction that day, neither would survive the year intact. The CSS Virginia was destroyed by the Confederacy in May rather than risk its capture by Union forces. On December 31st, the USS Monitor sank off the coast of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina during a heavy storm. Duke University has ties to both.
In 1973, John G. Newton, Marine Superintendent for the Duke University Marine Laboratory, led a team that discovered the wreckage of the Monitor. Artifacts recovered from the site are currently on display at the Mariners’ Museum in Newport News, Virginia. However, the Duke University Archives might have a piece of the Virginia/Merrimack in its possession.
Earlier this year, the University Archives curated “‘As Far As Possible from Forgetfulness’: The Trinity College Historical Society.” Precursor to the University Archives, the Society was established in 1892, with the objective of collecting material illustrative of the history of North Carolina and the South. The exhibit included artifacts and documents that once belonged to the Society. One of the most popular pieces displayed was a non-descript piece of wood. My co-curators and I found no mention of this item’s identity or significance in the Society’s records, yet we felt strongly that the piece of wood should be included in the exhibit: at some point in the history of the Society, someone believed that piece of wood had historical significance.
On the day of the gallery talk on the exhibit, I delved deeper into resources available in the University Archives in hopes of uncovering any tidbits on the piece of wood. In the Christian Educator (a predecessor, in some respects, to the Chronicle), I found a reference to two pieces of wood donated to the Society in 1896. One was said to be from Libby Prison in Richmond and the other was said to be from the CSS Virginia/USS Merrimack. I mentioned these references at the gallery talk and also stated that a RBMSCL colleague with a background in archaeology noted the piece of wood appeared to have been in water at some point, leading me to speculate that this particular piece of wood might be from the ironclad.
Professor Emeritus of Botany and former director of the Sarah P. Duke Gardens Richard White attended the gallery talk and graciously offered to submit a sample of the piece of wood to a lab in Wisconsin that could potentially identify its species. We were able to obtain a loose sample from the artifact which was then submitted to the Center for Wood Anatomy Research for testing. The lab determined the wood to be of the white oak group.
Further research shows that white oak was often used in the construction of Civil War ironclads, including the Virginia/Merrimack. Is it possible that the mystery of the piece of wood’s identity and significance has been solved?
As this semester winds down, don’t just hit the books. Make one!
For the conclusion of this semester’s Book + Art festival, undergraduate students from Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill are invited to participate in a juried exhibition of student artists’ books, to be held at UNC-Chapel Hill’s Hanes Art Center. Works selected for the exhibition will be displayed in the John and June Allcott Undergraduate Gallery at UNC’s Hanes Art Center. From the works selected for exhibition, one will be awarded best-in-show honors.
Rules
The exhibit is open to undergraduate students from Duke University and UNC-Chapel Hill.
Or, if you’re in need of some inspiration, visit the Duke University Libraries’ YouTube channel to see students from Merrill Shatzman’s “Book Art: Text as Image” class discussing artists’ books from the Bingham Center‘s collection.
Date: Tuesday, 16 November 2010 Time: 7:00 PM Location: Rare Book Room Contact Information: Patrick Stawski, 919-660-5823 or patrick.stawski(at)duke.edu, or Kirston Johnson, 919-681-7963 or kirston.johnson(at)duke.edu
Rain in a Dry Land (82 min.) chronicles the first 18 months of the new American lives of two families finally allowed to immigrate to the United States after over a decade in a Kenyan refugee camp. Beginning with “cultural orientation” classes in Kenya, where they are introduced to such novelties as electric appliances and the prospect of living in high-rise apartment buildings, the film follows the families as they learn that the streets in America are definitely not paved with gold. The families’ sponsors—Jewish Family Services in Springfield, Massachusetts, and World Relief in Atlanta—have pledged six months of support, which makes for a daunting learning curve as the families settle into their new homes.
A discussion with director Anne Makepeace and Suzanne Shanahan, Associate Director of Duke’s Kenan Institute for Ethics, will follow.
Date: Tuesday, 9 November 2010 Time: 4:00 PM Location: Rare Book Room Contact Information: Tim Pyatt, 919-684-8929 or tim.pyatt(at)duke.edu
William Preston Few
On November 9, 1910, William Preston Few was inaugurated as the sixth president of Trinity College. Few accepted the presidency of Trinity College promising “to keep the future worthy of the past.” This would be no hollow promise as, over the next three decades, he would transform the strong and growing liberal arts college into a major research university.
To celebrate this pivotal moment in the history of Duke University, Michael Schoenfeld, Vice President for Public Affairs and Government Affairs and Stephen Nowicki, Dean of Undergraduate Education, will give brief remarks on Few’s legacy and lasting impact. University Archivist Tim Pyatt will introduce members of the Few family attending and talk about the materials documenting Few’s life and presidency that will be on display.
Dispatches from the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Duke University