Tag Archives: transcultural experience

Sidney D. Gamble Photographs

Three Gorges Dam in the Gamble Photographs

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Weighing Vegetables, Sidney Gamble Photographs: 92A-513
Weighing Vegetables, Sidney Gamble Photographs: 92A-513

A new exhibit entitled “Displacement: The Three Gorges Dam in Contemporary Chinese Art” opens tonight at the Nasher Museum of Art here at Duke. In the exhibit, four contemporary artists respond to the Three Gorges Dam, a project to build a hydroelectric dam across the Yangtze River, completed near Yichang, China, in 2008. Construction of the dam “displaced more than one million people and submerged more than 1,200 towns,” including some important cultural and archaeological sites.

The Sidney D. Gamble Photographs digital collection offers photographs of people, villages, and Yangtze River life around the Three Gorges and Yichang area, mostly dating from 1917 to 1919. The embedded slide show provides some selected glimpses into this vanished landscape. Continue reading Three Gorges Dam in the Gamble Photographs →

Americans in the Land of Lenin, Announcements

Americans in the Land of Lenin

We’re excited to announce the publication of the digital collection, Americans in the Land of Lenin: Documentary Photographs of Early Soviet Russia, 1919-1930. This collection of photographs of daily life in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is drawn from the personal papers of Robert L. Eichelberger and Frank Whitson Fetter, two ordinary Americans who found themselves in an extraordinary place and time. Both men left unique photos of their encounter with ordinary individuals of the self-proclaimed first socialist country in the world. Their images of life in the Soviet provinces between the World Wars reveal an agrarian, multi-ethnic country, still reeling under the impact of the revolutionary forces unleashed at the beginning of the 20th-century. This collection complements the resources in the University of Michigan’s Polar Bear Expedition Digital Collections.

Erik Zitser, the sponsor of this digitization project, published a longer description of the Eichelberger photos in his article: Images of the Russian Civil War in Siberia in the Robert L. Eichelberger Collection at Duke University Libraries.

Please feel free to leave feedback and suggestions for this collection in the comments.

Announcements, Vica Nazi Propaganda Comics

Vica Nazi Propaganda Comics

Vica Defie l'Oncle Sam cover

The Vica Nazi Propaganda Comics is one of the collections we published in our October build. According to WorldCat.org, Duke University’s Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library holds the only copies of this comic in the United States. The Nazi-controlled government in France produced the Vica comic during World War II as a propaganda tool against the Allied forces. The digital collection features the three published issues of the comic: Vica au Paradis de l’U.R.S.S, Vica contre le service secret anglais, and Vica défie l’Oncle Sam (representing the Allied forces: USSR, England, and US). The comics could support research in multiple disciplines, such as World War II history, French language and culture, popular media, comic arts, and propaganda.

We’d love to get feedback on this collection in the comments.