Category Archives: Readings and Talks

Bingham Center, Events, Featured, Readings and Talks

Looking Back, Moving Forward with Southerners on New Ground

Date: Wednesday, September 16, 2020
Time: 4:00 p.m.
Online via Zoom: Registration required to receive Zoom link
Contact: Kelly Wooten, kelly.wooten@duke.edu or Laura Micham, laura.m@duke.edu

Please join the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture for a panel discussion grounded in the history of Southerners on New Ground (SONG) that will explore how activist archives inform intersectional struggles for social justice. Mandy Carter (SONG co-founder), Wesley Hogan (historian), Lisa Levenstein (historian), and Mab Segrest (SONG co-founder) will reflect on the importance and contemporary relevance of SONG’s organizing in the 1990s and beyond.

Wesley Hogan’s On the Freedom Side and Lisa Levenstein’s They Didn’t See Us Coming both incorporate research using the SONG Records and the papers of two SONG co-founders, Mandy Carter and Mab Segrest, from the Rubenstein Library.

Co-sponsored by the Duke Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies and the Center for Documentary Studies.

Events, Featured, History of Medicine, Readings and Talks

Trent History of Medicine Lecture Series Event, Nov. 19: Education of American Surgeons, 1900-1960

Post contributed by Rachel Ingold, Curator, History of Medicine Collections.

Date: Tuesday, November 19, 2019
Time: Noon (12 p.m.)
Location: Holsti-Anderson Family Assembly Room (Room 153), Rubenstein Library
Contact: Rachel Ingold, rachel.ingold@duke.edu, (919)684-8549

Please join us Tuesday, November 19 at noon for our next Trent History of Medicine Lecture Series. Justin Barr, M.D., Ph.D., will present Creating a Profession: The Education of American Surgeons, 1900-1960.

In 1900, anyone with a medical degree could declare themselves a surgeon and operate on patients.  By 1960, American surgeons had to complete rigorous, uniform, and regulated training called residency.  Influenced by war, supported by the federal government, and driven by professional organizations, the transformation of residencies over these decades from extraordinary, unique experiences to mandated, standardized education helped create a unified profession of surgery that continues to influence health care in this country.

Dr. Barr is currently a general surgery resident and an instructor in the Department of History at Duke University.

All are welcome to attend. Light lunch will be served.

Sponsored by the History of Medicine Collections in the Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library.

Events, Featured, From Our Collections, History of Medicine, Readings and Talks

Event: Why Did the United States Medical School Admissions Quota for Jews End?

Why Did the United States Medical School Admissions Quota for Jews End?

Date: Thursday, April 11

Time: 5:30 p.m.

Location: Holsti-Anderson Family Assembly Room, Room 153, Rubenstein Library

Contact: Rachel Ingold, rachel.ingold@duke.edu, (919)684-8549

Professional photo of Dr. HalperinPlease join the History of Medicine Collections for our next Trent History of Medicine Lecture Series event. Edward C. Halperin, M.D., M.A. will present “Why Did the United States Medical School Admissions Quota for Jews End?” At the end of World War II anti-Semitic medical school admissions quotas were deeply entrenched in the United States. Twenty-five years later they were gone. Why did that happen and what are the implications for the current controversy regarding alleged quotas directed against Asian-Americans?

Dr. Halperin is Chancellor/Chief Executive Officer of the New York Medical College, Valhalla NY.

All are welcome and encouraged to attend. No registration is needed. A light reception will follow.

Events, From Our Collections, History of Medicine, Readings and Talks

The Newest Negroes: Black Doctors and the Desegregation of Harlem Hospital, 1919-1935

Date: Tuesday, March 26
Time: 5:00 p.m.
Location: Holsti-Anderson Family Assembly Room, Room 153, Rubenstein Library
Contact: Rachel Ingold, rachel.ingold@duke.edu, (919)684-8549

Please join the History of Medicine Collections for our next Trent History of Medicine Lecture Series event. Adam Biggs will present “The Newest Negroes: Black Doctors and the Desegregation of Harlem Hospital, 1919-1935.”

Professor Biggs’s lecture will focus on the desegregation of Harlem Hospital, highlighting the conflicts an tensions that took shape as black doctors sought to merge their professional goals with the larger cause of racial improvement. Adam Biggs is faculty at the University of South Carolina Lancaster where he teaches African American Studies and US History.  His research examines black doctors and their efforts to address the problem of race in early 20th century America.

All are welcome and encouraged to attend.

We thank our friends at the Bullitt History of Medicine Club at UNC-Chapel Hill for co-sponsorship.

Events, Exhibits, Featured, From Our Collections, News and Features, Readings and Talks

Exhibit Talk and Tour, 11/6: “If We Must Die”: African Americans and the War for Democracy

Date: Tuesday, November 6, 2018
Time: 12:00-1:00 PM
Location: Holsti-Anderson Family Assembly Room, Rubenstein Library 153
Contact: Elizabeth Dunn, elizabeth.dunn@duke.edu
Register here!

Join the Duke University Libraries for a lunchtime talk with Professor Adriane Lentz-Smith and take a tour of the new exhibit marking the centennial of the end of World War I, “Views of the Great War: Highlights from the Duke University Libraries.” A light lunch will be provided.

Adriane Lentz-Smith is Associate Professor of History, African & African-American Studies, and Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies at Duke. Her book, “Freedom Struggles: African Americans and World War I” (Harvard, 2009), won the Honor Book Award from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. Her current book project, “The Slow Death of Sagon Penn,” examines state violence and the remaking of white supremacy in Reagan-Era southern California. A Ford Foundation fellow, Professor Lentz-Smith holds a B.A. in History from Harvard-Radcliffe and a Ph.D. in History from Yale University.

Following the talk, attendees will be invited to enjoy the exhibit in the Mary Duke Biddle Room.

Color photo of Adriane Lentz-Smith. Photo by Rahoul Ghose/PBS.
Photo by Rahoul Ghose/PBS

 

Bingham Center, Events, Featured, From Our Collections, New at the Rubenstein Library, Rare Books, Readings and Talks

Anything and All Things of Interest to Women: The Sarah Westphal Collection

1 Comment

Post contributed by Laura Micham, Merle Hoffman Director of the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture

Join the staff of the Bingham Center as we celebrate the newly acquired Sarah Westphal Collection and the opening of an exhibition of works from the collection.

The attention to recovering traces of women’s voices and women’s agency that motivates all of Sarah’s research and work in the field of medieval gender studies also underwrites her approach to building her collection.

—Ann Marie Rasmussen, Professor and Diefenbaker Memorial Chair in German Literary Studies, University of Waterloo

Date: Wednesday, July 25, 2018
Time: 2:00pm to 3:00pm
Location: Holsti-Anderson Family Assembly Room, Rubenstein Library 153
RSVP on Facebook (optional)

Speakers:

  • Jean Fox O’Barr, Duke University Distinguished Service Professor
  • Ann Marie Rasmussen, Professor and Diefenbaker Memorial Chair in German Literary Studies, University of Waterloo
  • Thomas Robisheaux, Duke University History Department

The exhibit will be on display in the Michael and Karen Stone Family Gallery from July until December, 2018

Sarah Westphal, who received her PhD from Yale in 1983, was a member of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literature and an affiliate of the Program in Women’s Studies at Duke from 1983-1986. In addition to her long academic career as a scholar of medieval German literature, Westphal has spent thirty-five years amassing a collection of over six hundred books written, printed, illustrated, or published by women from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. Westphal’s particular interest is women in Britain and continental Europe in the eighteenth century. The collection includes monumental works such as a beautifully-bound first edition of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) as well as previously unrecorded works and unique manuscript collections.

In Sarah Westphal’s own words the collection is “anything and all things that women published or were interested in, especially in the eighteenth century.” The collection ranges from literature for children and adults to science, cookery, travel writing, prescriptive literature, political and philosophical treatises, biographies of women by women, and works by women printers and artists. This exhibition presents eighteen items selected by Westphal, each with its own complex story.

Color photograph of Sarah Westphal

Bingham Center, Events, Featured, History of Medicine, News and Features, Rare Books, Readings and Talks, Students and Interns

May 23rd: The Menopause Monologues

Color illustration of the anatomy of the uterus and ovaries. From The Viavi Gynecological Plates: Designed to Educate Mothers and Daughters Concerning Diseases of the Uterine Organs by Hartland Law. The Viavi Press, 1891.
Plate II, “Structure of Womb and Ovaries” from The Viavi Gynecological Plates: Designed to Educate Mothers and Daughters Concerning Diseases of the Uterine Organs by Hartland Law. The Viavi Press, 1891.

Date: Wednesday, May 23, 2018
Time: 3:00pm to 4:30pm
Location: Holsti-Anderson Family Assembly Room, Rubenstein Library 153
Contact: Rachel Ingold, rachel.ingold@duke.edu,
RSVP or share via Facebook (optional)

You are cordially invited to a dramatic reading of excerpts from pertinent texts that will bring to life the voices of women and men, past and present, whose perspectives on menopause range from “the historical to the hysterical.” In addition to the readings, individuals are also encouraged to share their own stories and experiences of “the change.”

The reading complements an exhibit, The Change of Life: Menopause and Our Changing Perspectives, on display through July 14 in the Josiah Charles Trent History of Medicine Room.

Co-sponsored by the History of Medicine Collections and the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture.

Events, Featured, History of Medicine, Readings and Talks

April 30: Trent History of Medicine Lecture Series: Contraception Crossroads

Date: Monday, April 30, 2018
Time: Noon (12 p.m.)
Location: Holsti-Anderson Family Assembly Room, Room 153, Rubenstein Library
Contact: Rachel Ingold, rachel.ingold@duke.edu, (919)684-8549

Photo of Dr. Raul Necochea in his office, with bookshelves behind him.Please join us Monday, April 30th at noon for our next Trent History of Medicine Lecture Series. Raul Necochea, Ph.D., will present Contraception Crossroads: Health Workers Encounter Family Planning in Mid-20th Century Latin America.

 Between the 1930s and the 1970s, health workers of different types began to embrace, slowly and selectively, the value of smaller families for all people in the region as well as to become used to new types of contraceptive technologies. What were the circumstances under which physicians, nurses, midwives, and social workers first encountered the use of birth control in Latin America? What they did do to advance and limit the use of contraception? How did they interact with birth control users? The answers to these questions help us better understand the context and the mindsets of people on the forefront of a momentous development: the normalization of family planning in the so-called Third World.

Dr. Nechochea is Associate Professor in the Department of Social Medicine & Adjunct Associate Professor, Department of History at the University North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

All are welcome to attend. Light lunch will be served.

Sponsored by the History of Medicine Collections in the Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library.

Events, Featured, Human Rights Archive, Readings and Talks

Assassination of a Saint: winner of Duke 2017 Méndez Book award

Post contributed by Patrick Stawski, Archivist, Human Rights Archive

Assassination of a Saint: winner of Duke 2017 Méndez Book award

Tuesday, March 20, 2018

Noon – 1:00 pm

Rubenstein Library Holsti-Anderson Family Assembly Room 153

photo of Assassination of a Saint
Assassination of a Saint by Matt Eisenbrandt

Duke University named Matt Eisenbrandt’s Assassination of a Saint: The plot to murder Óscar Romero and the quest to bring his killers to justice (University of California Press, 2017) the winner of the 2017 Méndez Book Award.   Eisenbrandt will be visiting Duke on March 20, 2018 to receive the award and discuss his book.  The event is free and open to the public, light lunch served.  Following the event, The Gothic Bookstore will be selling copies of the book and Eisenbrant will be on hand for a signing.

Assassination of a Saint traces the thrilling story of how an international team of lawyers, private investigators, and human-rights experts fought to bring justice for the slain archbishop. Eisenbrandt, a lawyer who was part of the investigative team, recounts how he and his colleagues interviewed eyewitnesses and former members of death squads while searching for evidence on those who financed them, with profound implications for El Salvador and the United States.

This award honors the leadership of Juan E. Méndez, a human rights champion who has devoted his life to the defense of human rights. First awarded in 2008, this award selects among the best current non-fiction books published in English on human rights, democracy, and social justice in contemporary Latin America.  Méndez’ papers are housed at Duke’s Human Rights Archive.

Co-sponsored by the Rubenstein Library’s Human Rights Archive, the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS), the Duke Human Rights Center at the Franklin Humanities Institute (DHRC@FHI), and the Forum for Scholars and Publics.

Events, Featured, History of Medicine, Readings and Talks

(CANCELLED) Trent Lecture Series, 2/21: Dr. Gerrit Bos on Moses Maimonides

Please note: this event has been cancelled due to illness. We hope to reschedule at a later date and will post updated event information on The Devil’s Tale.

Date: Wednesday, February 21, 2018
Time: 5:30 p.m.
Location: Holsti-Anderson Family Assembly Room, Room 153, Rubenstein Library
Contact: Rachel Ingold, rachel.ingold@duke.edu, (919)684-8549

Illustration of Moses Maimonides. From Medicine: An Illustrated History (New York: Abradale Press/Abrams, 1987).
Illustration of Moses Maimonides. From Medicine: An Illustrated History (New York: Abradale Press/Abrams, 1987).

Please join the History of Medicine Collections for our next Trent History of Medicine Lecture Series event. Gerrit Bos, Ph.D., will present
“Moses Maimonides, medical doctor and author: Aspects of his work, medical training, theory, and practice.”

Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, most commonly known as Maimonides, was a 12th century philosopher and physician. Maimonides authored numerous philosophical and medical treatises. In his talk, Professor Bos will cover a short survey of Maimonides’ medical works, his training as a doctor, and some central aspects of his medical theory and practice such as proper regimen, including the sex res non-naturales (six things non-natural), the role of one’s nature, and his wariness to apply bloodletting.

Dr. Bos is Professor Emeritus and former Chair of the Martin Buber Institute for Jewish Studies at the University of Cologne. His main fields of research are medieval Jewish-Islamic science, especially medicine, medieval Hebrew, and Judeo-Arabic studies.

The event is free and open to the public.