We’re celebrating the beginning of a new fiscal year with a week’s worth of new acquisitions from the first half of 2012. Two newly acquired selections will be featured in a post every day this week. All of these amazing resources are available for today’s scholars, and for future generations of researchers in the Rubenstein Library!
Kitab Dala’il al-Khairat wa Shawariq al-Anwar fi Dhikr al-Salah ‘ala al-Nabi al-Mukhtar [Guidebook of Benefits and Illuminations of Prayers to the Chosen Prophet]. The Dala’il al-Khairat of al-Jazuli (Al-Jazuli, Abu ‘Abdallah Muhammad ibn Sulaymana, d. 1465) is one of the most popular devotional works in Islam, comprising a cycle of prayers to the prophet Muhammad. The manuscript now at Duke is Arabic written in the Maghrebi script, and likely was created in North Africa in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. The manuscript also contains other prayers and devotional texts. Its calligraphy and ornamentation are beautiful witnesses to a text of surpassing importance in the Muslim faith.
Opening from the newly acquired manuscript of the Dala’il al-Khayrat. Arabic in Maghrebi script.
National Coalition for Haitian Rights Records: This organization is dedicated to furthering the civil and international human rights of the Haitian community in the US and helping influence US policy over Haiti to support human rights. In over 146 linear feet of material, the records document the activity of the Coalition from 1981 to 2003. This adds to a growing collection of material in the Human Rights Archive related to human rights in Haiti; see the Human Rights Archive’s LibGuide for more information on other collections related to human rights in Latin America.
We’re celebrating the beginning of a new fiscal year with a week’s worth of new acquisitions from the first half of 2012. Two newly acquired selections will be featured in a post every day this week. All of these amazing resources will be available for today’s scholars, and for future generations of researchers in the Rubenstein Library!
Quintilian, Institutiones Oratoriae: This 1482 incunable (or book printed in Europe before 1501) printed in Tarvisio, Italy, is a rare edition of one of the great Renaissance guides to rhetoric. The remarkable copy now at Duke is unique, bearing the extensive handwritten annotations of a 16th-century scholar, Augustino Pistoia (or Agostino da Pistoia). In addition, Pistoia drew two self-portraits at the end of the text, and noted the date on which he finished reading the work: “On the 20th of October [?] 1583 I Augostino Pistoia have read this book by Quintiliano under the teaching of mag. Pompeo Gilante my master/ 1583 1584.”
Self-portrait by Augustino Pistoia, in Quintilian, Institutiones Orationae (1482).
Edith Ella Baldwin Papers: Born in 1870 in Worcester, Massachusetts, Ms. Baldwin was an artist, craftswoman, and author. Frustrated in her early attempts to publish her writings, Baldwin decided instead to keep one copy of each of her works for posterity, making a binding for each herself. The collection consists of 38 unpublished volumes of stories, novels, poetry, lecture notes, and family history, including a novel about sex education for women, diary excerpts describing her visits with painter Mary Cassatt in 1890s Paris, and copies of letters from her aunt, Ellen Frances Baldwin, dating from 1848 to 1854. Edith Baldwin’s writings tend to cover timeless themes of religion and love, although many compositions feature contemporary issues such as automobiles, labor strikes, and women’s rights. The Baldwin Papers add to the rich body of materials documenting women’s literary expression in the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture.
We’re celebrating the beginning of a new fiscal year with a week’s worth of new acquisitions from the first half of 2012. Two newly acquired selections will be featured in a post every day this week. All of these amazing resources will be available for today’s scholars, and for future generations of researchers in the Rubenstein Library!
Phantom des Menschenhirns, by Ludwig Fick: Published in 1885, this ephemeral pamphlet includes two diagrams of the brain. One diagram features moveable flaps, making this item a nice addition to the History of Medicine Collections‘ anatomical flap books, highlighted in last year’s Animated Anatomies exhibit.
Diagram of the brain, from Ludwig Fick, Phantom des Menschenhirns (1885).
Joy Golden Papers: Joy Golden was a well-known advertising copywriter who started her own creative company, Joy Radio, in the 1980s that specialized in humorous radio advertising. She did a series of commercials for Laughing Cow Cheese that became particularly well known. She also was active in the Friars Club, including holding the position of Governor. Her papers include files related to her work in advertising from the 1960s forward, and audiotapes of many of the radio advertisements created by her company. Her papers add to the Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing History‘s rich collections on women and advertising and the development of radio advertising.
Currently, there is a debate among faculty at the University of Chicago regarding whether or not President Barack Obama’s presidential library should be erected on campus. Duke University experienced a similar debate in 1981, in what is today referred to as the Nixon Library Controversy.
In late July 1981, Terry Sanford initiated negotiations with former president Richard Nixon (Duke Law 1937) to locate the Nixon presidential library on the campus of his alma mater. When this information was revealed to faculty members during the week of August 10, 1981, many opposed the proposition as well as Sanford’s failure to consult the faculty prior to initiating negotiations.
Many who opposed the library had moral objections to memorializing a president whose behavior in office was reproachable, and they feared a negative effect on the university’s reputation. Other concerns included the effects of greatly increased tourist traffic on campus and the aesthetic nature of the large proposed structure. However, supporters of erecting the Nixon Library on campus argued that the scholarly and academic benefits of locating the vast Nixon Presidential Materials collection on campus should and would outweigh any moral concerns. These supporters tended to denounce the actions of vocal dissenters as divisive and/or arrogant.
Meetings of the Academic Council and Board of Trustees during September and October 1981 were dominated by this debate, and a group of faculty formed the Committee Against the Nixon-Duke Library (CANDL) to organize the efforts of faculty, students, alumni, and others opposed to the proposed library. Although the Academic Council voted not to recommend further negotiations with Nixon in a 35-34 decision September 3, 1981, the Board of Trustees later voted 9-2 to proceed. By April 1982 negotiations had stalled, and a year later Nixon’s representatives announced that a site at Chapman College in San Clemente, California, had been chosen for the Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library.
Duke University Archives houses several collections related to the Controversy. Our most recent acquisition is the Peter Wood Papers on the Nixon Library Controversy. Wood was Professor of History during this time and was a member of CANDL. Included in his papers is the following flyer:
Click to enlarge.
For more information about the Nixon Library Controversy, we invite you to consult resources within Duke University Archives, including the following collections:
One of the best parts about being the University Archivist is the unexpected treasure that sometimes arrives in the mail.
Recently, I received a small packet of photographs from the family of Charles Wesley Clay, a Methodist minister and alumnus from the classes of 1929 and 1932. Clay earned bachelor’s degrees from Trinity and Divinity, and he happened to be on campus from 1925 to 1932, during the heyday of construction on East and West campus.
This small collection of 42 snapshots includes Clay posing next to Duke buildings—some completed, some under construction—as well as shots of equipment, scaffolding, and snowfall on the as-yet unmanicured quads.
We have other construction photos taken by Duke’s construction company, but it is revealing to see the “student’s eye view” of what it was like to be at Duke in these early, exciting days.
Charles Wesley Clay in front of the East Campus Union in the spring of 1927.Duke's football stadium (now known as Wallace Wade Stadium) under construction in 1929.A view of West Campus from the Medical School in the fall of 1929. Note the railroad spur that brought Duke stone from Hillsborough directly to campus.
The University Archives is interested in documenting student life through materials like photographs, diaries, and scrapbooks. Please contact us if you have items you would like to donate.
Post contributed by Val Gillispie, Duke University Archivist.
The personal and professional papers of writer, organizer, and leading women’s movement activist Meredith Tax came to the Sallie Bingham Center in 2010. To celebrate the acquisition of this extensive collection the Center will host a symposium in Tax’s honor on April 13 and 14 called Acting Across Borders: The Future of the Feminist 1970s. Along with Meredith Tax, distinguished African scholar and activist Patricia McFadden will present the keynote address of an event that aims to grapple with how the interventions and methodologies of the women’s liberation movement inform current and future social justice movements. In anticipation of her trip to Duke, Meredith took a few minutes to share her reasons for putting her papers here and to give a sense of what people can expect to learn at the symposium.
Why did you decide to put your papers in the Bingham Center?
I investigated several feminist archives and chose the Bingham Center because it had a much more energetic and activist approach to archival work than I saw elsewhere. I want my papers to be used not only by scholars but by young people who want to learn from the history of earlier social movements. Because the Bingham Center does outreach to inform students about its collections and gives fellowships for researchers to work in its archive, I think my papers will be most accessible there.
What would you tell students about the upcoming symposium celebrating your work?
We are at the dawn of a period of increasing political activism. Attendees at this symposium will learn from the life stories of people who shaped the women’s movement here and internationally. Speakers will talk about their own work and life experiences. They will discuss the way issues of race and class impacted the relationship between feminism and the left, the development of ecofeminism and international women’s movements, and the centrality of questions of sexuality, gender, and LGBT rights. Feminists from Southern Africa, Algeria, and India will discuss their own rich and complex confrontations with sexism, nationalism and religious fundamentalism. These stories will show that, contrary to the right wing myth that feminists are white middle class women who are just out for themselves, feminists in the US and elsewhere have always grappled with issues of race and class, war and peace, nationalism and the environment, and that these efforts continue from one generation to the next.
Frances Ansley and Meredith Tax at a Bread & Roses-organized protest in 1970.
What are some of the topics you plan to address in your keynote speech at the symposium?
I will tell the story of my life, from a childhood shaped by the sexism of the 50s to the early days of the Boston women’s movement, battles within the left and my own struggle to overcome the ignorance resulting from class and race privilege, my participation in the reproductive rights movement, and my work in International PEN (Postsecondary Education Network International) as part of a global movement for women’s human rights which must go on in this new period to link the struggle for social and economic justice and sustainability with the fight against all forms of fundamentalism.
For more information on Meredith Tax, check out her website. And be sure to register here to come to the Acting Across Borders symposium on April 13 and 14, 2012. Registration is free and open to the public!
When you hear the word “Panko,” do you think of Japanese bread crumbs?
Box cover for Panko, or, Votes for Women: The Great Card Game
I did, until the Sallie Bingham Center acquired this deck of Panko playing cards. It’s named for the leader of the British suffrage movement, Emmeline Pankhurst (1858-1928), and pits opponents and supporters of suffrage against each other in a game similar to rummy. The advertisement for the game claimed, “Not only is each picture in itself an interesting memento, but the game produces intense excitement without the slightest taint of bitterness.”
Pank! Pank! Pank! for Emmeline Pankhurst
This translation of the women’s suffrage movement into card games, and also board games, helped bring the message of the cause into domestic circles where more overt forms of propaganda might not have been welcomed. These cards were designed by the well-known Punch cartoonist E. T. Reed, and published by Peter Gurney in 1909.
Votes for Women, say the suffragettes.
These particular playing cards are owned by only three other libraries and are an important, rare piece of suffragette memorabilia that joins a number of other decks of cards held by the Bingham Center that explore issues related to women and gender. Check out the Panko catalog record here!
Post contributed by Megan Lewis, Technical Services Archivist for the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture.
The founders of New Day Films. Back row: Amalie R. Rothschild, Julia Reichert, Jim Klein. Front: Liane Brandon
The Rubenstein Library is pleased to announce the recent acquisition of the New Day Films Collection. The collection includes the founding films and organizational records of New Day founders Liane Brandon, Jim Klein, Julia Reichert, and Amalie R. Rothschild. Documenting a pioneering film distribution company and collective, the first to distribute feminist films in the early 1970s, the New Day Films Collection is an important record of both New Day’s formation and the Feminist Movement. New Day Films is a thriving organization, celebrating 40 years in 2012 as a participatory democratic filmmakers’ cooperative with 120 members and 250 titles. The Rubenstein is committed to preserving the New Day Films Collection for future generations to make this record of the evolution of progressive independent American filmmaking available for teaching and research.
In celebration of New Day coming to Duke, the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival will screen New Day’s founding films—Anything You Want to Be (Brandon), Betty Tells Her Story (Brandon), Growing Up Female (Klein, Reichert), and It Happens to Us (Rothschild)—on Friday, April 13, 2012 at 4:50pm. There will be a panel conversation with all four founding members about New Day’s exceptional history on Saturday, April 14, 2012 at 9:30AM.
Film still from Growing Up Female, Jim Klein and Julia Reichert
For more information on the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, including a complete schedule and ticket information, see: http://www.fullframefest.org/
A monthly series highlighting the Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel Collection Project and the woman behind the documents.
Diamonstein-Spielvogel
Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel is a fierce advocate for art in fashion, design and architecture and a leading voice on some of the defining urban issues of our time, including preservation of the historic built environment of the United States. The impact of her work is all around us. Have you been inside re-adapted buildings? Diamonstein-Spielvogel was one of the pioneers of adaptive reuse of buildings throughout the country. Have you seen “Historic neighborhood” medallions on street signs in numerous major cities? She pushed for those (and still does). As we start the New Year, we are excited to announce the Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel Collection, a new addition to the Rubenstein’s Archive for Documentary Arts.
Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel helps to commemorate the inventor of Scrabble with an historic street sign.
Diamonstein-Spielvogel’s interest in the relationship among the arts, public policy, community and politics has charted the course of her career, fostered her involvement in national and local institutions and organizations, and earned her many awards and honors. As the first Director of Cultural Affairs for New York City, she brought the first public art to Bryant Park in 1987 and the first public performance by the Metropolitan Opera to Central Park. Diamonstein-Spielvogel was appointed by President Reagan to the board of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and by President Clinton to the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, where she was elected its first woman vice chair in 2002. In 2010, Barack Obama appointed her as a commissioner of the American Battle Monuments Commission. She has written 20 books and dozens of magazine and newspaper articles and has served as interviewer/producer of nine television series for the Arts and Entertainment Network plus several programs for other national networks, many of which Duke has made available in the Diamonstein-Spielvogel Video Archive.
Diamonstein-Spielvogel's latest book, Landmarks of New York: An Illustrated Record of the City's Historic Buildings
As part of the two-year Diamonstein-Spielvogel Collection Project, we will be processing the 200-plus boxes of manuscripts pertaining to her life and career. The project will culminate in an exciting exhibit in 2013. In our next post, look for information on Diamonstein-Spielvogel’s work with famous designers and artists including Calvin Klein, Adolfo, Robert Rauschenberg, Louise Nevelson, Jeanne-Claude and Christo, Roy Lichtenstein, and Sam Maloof.
Post contributed by Ruth Cody and Caroline Muglia, Graduate Interns for the Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel Collection Project.
What better way to ring in the new year (okay, we’re a couple of weeks late) than with a roundup of exciting new acquisitions from the second half of 2011? All of these amazing resources will be available for researchers in the Rubenstein Library in 2012 and for years to come!
Stereograph of John Wesley Powell with a Native American. From the Powell Expedition Photograph Album.
Powell Expedition Photograph Album: A remarkable album of 539 photographs taken during John Wesley Powell’s Second Expedition along the Colorado River in 1871-75 by John K. Hillers, E. O. Beaman, and James Fennemore. The photographs include landscapes of the Western states and documentary photographs of Native Americans, especially the Paiute tribe. Part of the Archive of Documentary Arts. Look for more information on this album in the Biblio-file column in the January-February 2012 Duke Magazine.
Case book of Dr. Philip Turner. From the Philip Turner Papers.
Philip Turner Papers: Documents from the life and career of Dr. Philip Turner (1740-1815), Surgeon General for the Eastern Department of the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War. The manuscript collection contains correspondence, medical returns, printed materials, records from northeastern field and city hospitals, and ledgers documenting Turner’s career as a surgeon in private practice, in the Continental Army, and in the United States Army. Part of the History of Medicine Collections. More information about this important collection of early American medical history is coming soon!
The Door in the Wall, And Other Stories, by H. G. Wells: This 1911 limited edition of Wells’s science fiction and fantasy stories features stunning photogravure illustrations by the vorticist photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn.
