All posts by Leah Tams

Featured, From Our Collections, Hartman Center

A History of French Marketing with Draeger Frères

June 4, 2026 Leah Tams Leave a comment

Post contributed by Brandee Newkirk, Processing Intern for the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History.

During my time as an intern for the Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History at Duke University’s Rubenstein Library, I had the opportunity to process the Draeger Frères printing collection. While at first glance this collection seemed distant from my dissertation research that focuses on diet and fitness culture among Black women between the 1920s and the 2000s, I was pleasantly surprised by the collection’s breadth and depth. The collection includes hundreds of items that reflect an almost century-long span of French’s marketing history, and it touches upon so many research interests that even some of its items contributed to my own research.

Draeger Frères was one of the leading, high-end publishing companies in France for close to 100 years. Founded in 1866 by Charles Draeger as Draeger & Lesieur, the company began expanding its clientele through participation in the 1889 International Exposition, which featured several of its specialty self-promotional color catalogs.[1] After the death of Charles Draeger in 1899, Draeger’s wife, Amélie Bagdassard Draeger, took over the company with their sons Georges, Maurice, and Robert, keeping Draeger Frères a family business.[2] By the interwar era, Draeger Frères had reached its peak and was known as one of the pioneers of marketing and advertising in France. This success led many companies to work with Draeger Frères; among them are Coty, Hermès, Renault, Printemps, and Ford.[3] This success also drew many artists to begin their careers with Draeger Frères, including René Vincent, Charles Martin, Man Ray, and R. Ernst, among countless others.[4]

Draeger Frères achieved success through its innovative color printing techniques, established by Charles Draeger’s early work. The printing company became known for its half-color and two-color printing processes and, by the 1930s, invented Procédé 301 (Process 301), which combined methods of three-shot color photography, color correction, and photogravure printing to create bright, colorful photographs and illustrations in its printed catalogs.[5] This patented technique quickly propelled the printing company, as many companies desired brochures and catalogs that best captured their products. Printing for the Draeger Frères company ended in the 1970s, as large-scale print advertising began to dwindle, yet the Draeger brand remains active in France today.[6]

The collection of industries, companies, artists, and governments, including the Vichy regime, featured in Draeger Frères’ printed brochures, catalogs, and art books displays the topical reach of advertising and marketing. For my own research, which focuses on diet and weight culture among Black women in the early 20th century, Draeger Frères’ extensive work producing catalogs for many fashion stores and clothing companies in France gave me deeper insights into French beauty and clothing trends. Many elite Black figures began to travel to France in the 1920s due to the country’s more accommodating attitudes toward Black Americans, including artists such as Laura Wheeler Waring and W.E.B. Du Bois, and French beauty ideals regarding a woman’s figure began influencing Black culture. Draeger Frères’s collection of catalogs for the High Life Tailor company, a large-scale French clothing store, became a primary resource for my research.

The Draeger Frères printing collection at the Hartman Center demonstrates the vast intellectual range found in advertising and marketing materials. From fascist regimes to 20th-century automobile marketing, researchers can use this collection and pull at the historical threads that linger within the oeuvre of Draeger Frères’ printed works, which present a distinctive narrative to French and even global consumer histories. This collection is already available to researchers at the Rubenstein Library.

Footnotes:

[1] Kim Timby, “Draeger Frères: Tradition and Innovation in the Printing of Art and Advertising,” in Factory Photobooks. The Self-Representation of the Factory in Photographic Publications, ed. Bart Sorgedrager (nai010, 2023), https://hal.science/hal-04308687. Background information on Draeger Frères can also be found on their company website: https://fr.checkout.draegerparis.com/pages/notre-histoire.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Draeger Frѐres printing collection, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University.

[4] Ibid.

[5] See Box 14, Item # 4, For a more detailed description and finding aid see: https://archives.lib.duke.edu/catalog/draegerfreres

[6] See boxes 7,8,9, and 12, Item #s 170-213

Featured, From Our Collections, New Finding Aids

Marginalized, but Not Marginal: Accounting for Enslaved Lives in the Ledgers of a New Orleans Merchant

May 6, 2026 Leah Tams Leave a comment

Post contributed by Reina Henderson, PhD, Eleanor Jantz Processing and Cataloging Intern

At first glance, the accounting books of E.L. Bernard look like any other set of nineteenth-century commercial records. The pages are filled with the looping script of professional clerks and the endless columns of numbers that drove the economy of antebellum New Orleans. They list shipments of French wine and invoices for mahogany furniture. They track the price of cotton and the arrival of ships from Bordeaux. It is a picture of sophisticated international trade. However, if you look closer at the columns of debits and credits, a much darker reality begins to emerge. These books do not just record the movement of goods. They record the systematic commodification of human beings.

Account books like these have long carried an aura of authority. Ledgers are presented as neutral instruments of fact where emotion falls away, and truth is reduced to figures that can be verified and balanced. We’re inclined to trust them precisely because they appear unadorned. Numbers seem to tell us what happened without interpretation. However, this promise of neutrality is itself fiction. Ledgers do not simply record economic life. In a place like New Orleans, one of the most profitable ports of the nineteenth century, they actively shaped it. They organized human activity into categories of value and loss. What they choose to name, how they name it, and what they render interchangeable all reveal the moral architecture of the world they helped sustain.

Accounting for Human Lives

The most chilling aspect of the Bernard ledgers is how mundane the entries are. In a General Ledger dating from 1815 to 1826, the merchant tracks his financial assets. On one page he lists his shares in the State Bank. On the very same spread, he lists an account titled “Nègres de Compte à 1/3.”

This was a joint-venture investment account. E.L. Bernard was not just buying enslaved people for his own use. He was speculating on them and trading them. The ledger shows that he held a one-third financial interest in a partnership designed to buy and sell human beings for profit. The debits represent the purchase price of men and women. The credits represent their sale. To the merchant and his accountant, these individuals were indistinguishable from the bales of cotton or barrels of sugar listed on the subsequent pages. They were simply inventory.

“Armantine, Her Child”

While the earlier ledgers show the cold mathematics of the slave trade, the later volumes reveal the daily reality of labor and control. In an account book from the 1850s, we find the name Armantine. She was an enslaved woman hired by Bernard from her owner for temporary work. The entry is brief but devastating. It records a payment for “Armantine, son enfant,” or Armantine and her child.

This single line item exposes the total dehumanization of the system. Bernard paid for the pair as a single unit. The child is listed not as a person but as an appendage to their mother. The age of Armantine’s child is impossible to determine from the record. Like so many children born into slavery, the child appears only fleetingly in the archive, visible only insofar as their dependency affected the price of their mother’s labor. The line does, however, imply the child was too young to be separated from her and so the business simply absorbed the cost of the child’s presence as a necessary expense attached to Armantine. Other entries show Bernard paying for “robes and souliers” or dresses and shoes for Armantine. These were not gifts. They were maintenance costs for a rented asset. In other words, supplies.

The Hidden Labor of the Port

The ledgers also challenge our image of slavery as a purely agricultural institution. E.L. Bernard was a city merchant and his books show that urban slavery was the engine of the New Orleans port. We see payments for enslaved men named Hilaire and Edouard. They were hired for “armement” or the outfitting of ships. These men were the ones loading the cargo and repairing the rigging and preparing the vessels that connected New Orleans to New York and France. They were skilled laborers whose time was rented out by the day or week.

When we read the manifests of the ships Mohawk or Neptune in the 1830s journals, we see lists of “Colonial Goods” like coffee and indigo arriving from the Caribbean and bales of cotton leaving for New York. It is easy to see these merely as commodities, but the names in the ledger remind us that every pound of sugar and every bale of cotton was the product of enslaved labor. The “Maison de Noir” or slave quarters mentioned in the expense accounts was just as essential to Bernard’s business as his warehouse or his counting house.

Recovering the Names

Documents like Bernard’s ledgers are difficult to read. They reduce complex human lives to prices and dates. However, they are also vital. They provide proof of the individuals who built the wealth of the Atlantic world. Armantine and her child. Marthe. Hilaire. Edouard. Nicaise. The names of enslaved people often appear in spaces such as these, in the margins of a white merchant’s account book. Whole lives, thoughts, and actions caught in a line or two of text from which entire stories can and should be brought into view. Recovering such names from documents like these is an act that insists that accounting records be read not only for what they quantify but for whom they erase. The ledgers of merchants like Bernard remind us that modern systems of finance and record keeping were built alongside and through human commodification, a legacy that continues to shape how institutions measure value, responsibility, and loss today. By studying these ledgers and telling the stories of the people trapped within their columns, we can begin to acknowledge the human cost buried in the archives of western economies.

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

Anne Pickford: A Timeless Model

February 16, 2026 Leah Tams

Post contributed by Brandee Newkirk, Processing Intern for the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History.

For my first-ever processing project as an intern at the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History, I was given the opportunity to process the papers of Anne W. Pickford, known professionally as Kaylan Pickford. Anne Pickford was a model between the 1970s and the 2000s. However, unlike traditional models who typically begin their careers in their late teens or early twenties, Pickford, with the help of her friend J. Frederick Smith, started her career in her 40s after two marriages and the birth of two children.

To better understand the significance of Anne Pickford’s presence in the modeling industry, it is helpful to understand the changes the fashion industry made by the early 1980s. Through the commercial success of 1960s models like Twiggy and Donyale Luna, by the late 1970s the fashion industry saw the potential in establishing new relationships between the models and the public audience. This new preoccupation with how models engaged with the audience created the rise of the “Supermodel” and saw the deliberate hiring of models at younger and younger ages.

For Anne Pickford, who began her career in the late 1970s and into the early 1980s, the industry’s interest in cultivating youth as fashion ambassadors made it difficult for her to enter the industry at a later age. In an interview with the New York Times, Pickford described the beginning of her career as difficult and how she had to break through, stating, “I earned $3,000 the first year and $3,000 the second year. Then I sort of caught on.” This financial difficulty is reflected in the Hartman Center’s collection of Pickford’s papers, as Pickford kept detailed records of her checkbooks and pay stubs.

This early difficulty led Pickford, throughout her career, to dedicate herself to celebrating her age, opting not to dye her grey hair or undergo cosmetic surgery. When considering the fashion industry at the time, Pickford had good reason to assume an ageist bias. Models such as Brook Shields, Farida Khelfa, and Paulina Porizkova all began their careers in their mid-to-late teens, and larger fashion brands like Yves Saint Laurent, Chanel, and Jean Paul Gaultier were all known for hiring only teen to twenty-year-old models. This industry standard trickled down to more commercial advertising.

Inside the Anne “Kaylan” Pickford papers, researchers will see Anne Pickford’s interest in challenging the commercialization of older women. Featured in the collection are a series of advertising images that showcase Kaylan Pickford using beauty cosmetics or luxury goods. Anne Pickford wanted older women to be celebrated for their beauty in aging, making a conscious effort to turn away commercial pharmaceutical jobs for more beauty-based photoshoots. The collection also includes the writings of Anne Pickford. Two of her books, Always a Woman (1982), and Always Beautiful (1985), were written to inspire “mid-life” women and provide helpful tips on maintaining beauty without resorting to surgery.

Anne “Kaylan” Pickford’s collection is a celebration of what it means to get older. Anne Pickford dedicated her career to letting women know that just because they have lived a successful life, it does not mean that their beauty has faded.

Featured, Hartman Center, New at the Rubenstein Library

“The Best, the Only, and the Unexpected” lives at the Rubenstein!

June 9, 2025 Leah Tams

The Hartman Center and the Rubenstein Library are pleased to announce the arrival of the records of Hammacher Schlemmer, the 177-year-old hardware merchants-turned-purveyors of unique, odd, and oddly practical items, sold through a variety of catalogs that themselves represent one of the historical high points of creativity in catalog design and direct-to-consumer merchandising. The company produced its first catalog in 1881 and is considered the oldest catalog-based retail company in the United States, pre-dating Sears and Montgomery Ward by several years.

Hammacher Schlemmer began as a supplier of tools and trade equipment in 1848 in the Bowery section of New York by Charles Tollner. In 1853 he hired a 12-year-old German immigrant, William Schlemmer, as an assistant. A few years later another German immigrant, Albert Hammacher, invested in the growing hardware store. Eventually Schlemmer bought Tollner’s stake in the company, and in 1883 the company was renamed Hammacher Schlemmer & Co., a name it maintained for a century and a half.

Originally Hammacher Schlemmer sold primarily tools, from files and saws to more complicated machinery like the Lougee hair picker (a cotton gin-like machine for combing horsehair used in upholstery stuffing). By the 1900s the company had expanded to offer specialized tools for automotive, piano-building, and other trades; in the 1930s the company began to transition from hardware to housewares and general retail merchandise.

Hammacher Schlemmer maintained a store in the Bowery (and later branched to Chicago and Los Angeles), but an increasing percentage of sales came from its catalog operation. In the early days the catalogs doubled as selling aids for sales agents. They developed a reputation for detailed, useful print and finely rendered line drawings, as seen in this catalog entry for the Lougee hair picker:

With the transition to household goods (kitchen gadgets, furniture, cleaning implements and the like; a separate catalog for gourmet food products began in the 1930s) the catalog layouts shifted from line drawings to black-and-white (and later, color) photography. The catalogs for the centennial years 1947-1948 featured whimsical pastel drawings in color. By 1977 the catalogs would shift to an all-color layout.

The hardware line was dropped in the mid-1950s, and Hammacher Schlemmer turned to feature more high-end luxury goods, curated from other manufacturers’ items, as well as those developed by its own subsidiary, Invento, which was established in 1962. In 1983, the company established another subsidiary, Hammacher Schlemmer Institute, that focused on product testing and comparisons among competing products (similar to testing performed by groups such as Consumer Reports), later adding a Consumer Testing Panel for end-user testing and evaluation. In 1986, Hammacher Schlemmer began online sales in addition to its mail-order catalog operation. It joined SkyMall in 1991 as a charter member, advertising its products to airline passengers on U.S. domestic and selected international routes.

The catalogs featured a wild variety of products at every price point: slipper socks ($34.95); a walking stick with a built-in telescope ($89.95); a single-serving coffee maker ($199.95); a bamboo Tiki bar ($499.95); a leather chair in the shape of a baseball glove ($6,200); a full-scale working replica of the original 1966 Batmobile ($200,000); and a two-person fully functional electric submarine ($1.5 million). These products lived side-by-side in the page layouts of the catalog, a million-dollar submersible or a $65,000 robot next to entries for compression socks, garden hoses, and pens.

Along the way, Hammacher Schlemmer was instrumental in introducing a number of household items that started out as novelties and moved into mainstream popularity: pop-up toasters (1931); electric shavers (1934); steam irons (1948); telephone answering machines (1968); Mr. Coffee (1973); and the Cuisinart (1977), to name a few. Hammacher Schlemmer’s status as an American cultural icon is evidenced through parodies of the company’s catalog offerings that appeared in places such as the pages of Readers Digest and on the Family Guy television cartoon.

The Hammacher Schlemmer records should be available for researchers in the Rubenstein Library by late 2025. The collection offers a rich resource for scholars interested in topics as varied as advertising history; direct marketing; catalog design; line art; and the evolution of a historically important American retail establishment.

Bingham Center, Featured, From Our Collections, New Finding Aids

Tracking the Tendrils: Processing the Papers of Ann Baker

March 12, 2025 Leah Tams

Post contributed by Colette Harley, Graduate Student Intern, Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture.

Image of a group of women marching, holding signs and standing behind a banner that reads "A woman's right to abortion is akin to her right to be." — Photograph of the march organized by In Support of Women’s Lives in response to the National Right to Life’s 1982 National Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

In March of 2024, I read an article about a woman named Julie Burkhart. The article detailed Burkhart’s challenges in opening an abortion clinic in Wyoming, one of the states with the strictest abortion laws in our post-Dobbs era. Burkhart was an employee and mentee of Dr. George Tiller, and worked in his clinic in Wichita, Kansas. Dr. Tiller was shot on two separate occasions by anti-abortion protestors, and his clinic in Kansas was the site of extended protests during the 1991 Summer of Mercy. The Summer of Mercy, organized by the anti-abortion organization Operation Rescue targeted abortion clinics and patients seeking care. This article piqued my interest—for all my knowledge about reproductive rights in America, this was not something I was familiar with. It had a strange sort of prescience, given our current political climate towards reproductive rights.

Image of a newspaper clipping that contains an image of Ann Baker, standing with an arm raised. — Image of Ann Baker from the Ann Baker papers.

It was a strange sort of kismet a few months later when Laura Micham, Director of the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture, suggested I consider processing the papers of a woman named Ann Baker as my next project. Fresh off of smaller processing projects, the 130 linear feet were daunting. Packed by Ann’s widow and friends, the collection arrived on the Bingham ranges in a variety of boxes—some standard sizes, others repurposed from moves and office supplies. At the time, I knew Ann was from New Jersey and that she was a reproductive health and LGBT rights activist. What I didn’t know was that she focused her work on the impact of Operation Rescue and other pro-life organizations during the 1980s and 1990s.

As Laura and I surveyed the boxes, a picture started to slowly unfold. Baker’s organization, the National Center for the Pro-Choice Majority (originally the 80% Majority), served as a clearing house for information on anti-abortion protestors and tactics. Each week, Baker would compile arrest lists (sometimes provided by police departments, clinics, and local newspapers) for the different demonstrations that happened across the country. She would then cross-check with previous arrests to determine if any person had been involved in this kind of event in another city or state. As it became apparent that the same groups of people were involved in these “rescues” week after week, law enforcement began increasing fines and jail time for repeat offenders. The national movement against abortion, the scale of which was promised by leaders like Randall Terry and Joe Scheidler, turned out to be little more than a small group of devoted followers.

Baker documented the protestors, their tactics (such as chaining themselves to blocks of concrete inside the clinic), and their propaganda. She collected newspaper clippings, literature, policy books and reports, and dossiers of protestor information. She even subscribed to some of the more militant publications using money orders, fake names, and P.O. boxes. She tracked lawsuits that ranged from husbands and boyfriends suing their wives and girlfriends for seeking abortion, to Frisby v. Schultz, which made residential picketing of abortion providers’ homes illegal. Armed with this information, she wrote about these organizations in her newsletter, The Campaign Report, which was mailed to clinics, providers, and activists across the U.S. In this newsletter, she tracked the many tendrils of the pro-life movement, provided information on what clinics could expect to see when Operation Rescue came to town, explained how to work with local law enforcement, and offered analysis about politics, the U.S. government, and citizens’ attitudes toward abortion.

Image of folders standing in racks. — Baker’s papers slowly taking shape during processing.

Baker was a diligent filer. Many of the folders were titled and organized loosely by theme. The most difficult part was keeping track of all the different threads I’d found throughout this very large collection. Some of the original order of the collection needed to be fine-tuned for it to be easier for current researchers to use, but I kept all of her original folder titles. As I spent more time with her work, I gained a sense of her personality. One of my favorite aspects of the collection was the marginalia, whether it be complaints, frustrations, or New York Knicks scores scrawled in the margins. She had a penchant for argument through the written word, and some of my favorite letters she wrote had nothing to do with the pro-life movement at all. In one folder, I found a copy of a parking ticket, annotated with a note in which Baker insisted that paid parking should only extend through normal business hours.

I am deeply thankful to Baker and her work, as well as the other activists, providers, and clinic workers documented in this collection. She noticed a gap: no one was tracking the protests state by state, and she took it upon herself to fill that gap. Through this work, she provided clinics with the information they needed, whether it be organizing tactics or information on protestors. She built a deep network of contacts, many of whom are also represented in the Bingham Center’s collections. She is not a household name, but she is a reminder that to make a difference, one does not need to be.

Image of a wooden column with a photograph of Ann Baker thumbtacked to the column. — Photo of Ann Baker, a duplicate in the collection, surveying the processing of her papers. She guided me the entire process, from her spot on the pillar.

Processing archival collections is iterative, exacting work which often requires circling back through materials again and again. I went through this collection many times, moving materials into different series, trying to decide how they best made sense. In the thick of it over the summer, I had a sense that I’d never be finished. But slowly, day after day, it came together. I’ve been thinking often that it takes a village to process an archival collection, and I’m deeply thankful to everyone in Technical Services and the Bingham Center for their knowledge, expertise, and cheerleading. I believe this collection will be a valuable body of material for researchers looking to understand not only the period in which Baker did her work, but also our current era in which reproductive rights remain precarious.

Economists' Papers Archive, Featured, From Our Collections, New Finding Aids

Masahiko Aoki Papers Open for Research

February 18, 2025 Leah Tams

Post contributed by Soroush Marouzi, Research Scholar at the Center for the History of Political Economy.

In 1960, the political activist known throughout Japan by the pen name Reiji Himeoka sat in solitary confinement at Tokyo’s Sugamo Prison. By 1967, now publicly known by his birth name Masahiko Aoki, he had become an Assistant Professor of Economics at Stanford University. His life circumstances had changed drastically over those seven years, but not his desire to understand the world and change it for the better. Today, the Masahiko Aoki papers present rich resources for historians eager to delve deeper into his life and work.

Three Japanese men seated in conversation dressed in formal wear, in front of row of bookcases. — Aoki (right) in conversation with his colleagues.

Aoki was born on April 1, 1938, in Nagoya, Aichi Prefecture, Japan. He initially intended to become a historian, but his growing interest in Marxism led him to pursue economics at the University of Tokyo. As an undergraduate, he emerged as a leading ideologue, describing himself as an “information propaganda director” of left-wing organizations at the forefront of Japan’s student movement that aimed to discourage the ruling conservative government to sign the revised US-Japan Security Treaty—activities that culminated in his arrest in 1960. After his release, he earned his undergraduate degree in 1962 and his master’s in 1964. After reading the work of Kenneth Arrow and Leonid Hurwicz during his graduate studies, he started to distance himself from Marxism and became increasingly interested in “modern economics.” He left Japan to pursue his PhD in economics at the University of Minnesota under Hurwicz and John Chipman, graduating in 1967 then holding appointments at Stanford and Harvard University over the next two years. Returning to Japan in 1969, he continued his academic career at Kyoto University until coming back to Stanford in 1984 and retiring in 2005. He died in 2015, having dedicated his career to studying forms of economic organizations and making contributions in the theory of the firm, corporate governance, and East Asian economies.

A portrait of an older Japanese man smiling in a dress shirt and jacket sitting at a table. — This digital photo of Aoki during an interview comes from a set among the electronic records in the collection.

Aoki’s papers are the most recently processed collection in the Economists’ Papers Archive, which also houses the collections of Arrow, Hurwicz, and Chipman. A substantial portion of this collection highlights Aoki’s role in shaping the economics profession by establishing institutions, such as the Virtual Center for Advanced Studies in Institution, and by leading influential organizations, exemplified by his presidency of the International Economic Association (IEA) from 2008-2011. There are also collection materials that offer insights into Aoki’s graduate education through handwritten notebooks; the production of his scholarly works on game theory through drafts and referee reports; his contribution to the development of the field of comparative institutional analysis through Stanford University Economics Department records; and his relationships and collaborations with economists such as Arrow, Joseph Stiglitz, and János Kornai through correspondence.

Kornai states “In the first informal discussions several people, including myself expressed the wish to nominate you for the ‘President Elect’ position.” — Janos Kornai’s email to Aoki, dated Dec 18, 2004, asking for Aoki’s consent to be nominated for IEA’s presidency. He eventually won by one vote–a significant moment in his career.

In his memoir, Aoki described his life as “a transboundary game.” He lived in both the East and West, and he embraced an interdisciplinary approach to studying economics. Crossing boundaries—whether geographical or disciplinary—was a defining feature of the life he led. His transboundary game was marked by constant attempts to understand institutional arrangements in economic life, along with his desire to improve them through tireless professional service. This joint pursuit was perhaps the dominant theme of his life, from his time as the Marxist ‘Reiji Himeoka’ until he became a Stanford emeritus professor of economics.

A man in formal wear stands on the shore of a body of water. In the background is a piece of Japanese architecture. — This black and white portrait of Aoki is an example from an album reflective in tone.

Economists' Papers Archive, Featured, From Our Collections

Lauchlin B. Currie Papers Re-Open for Research

January 9, 2025 Leah Tams

Post contributed by Soroush Marouzi, Research Scholar at the Center for the History of Political Economy.

A loyal public servant of the U.S. government, a covert Soviet agent, the mastermind behind Colombia’s economic development, or the architect of policies that inflicted hardship on Colombian people? Lauchlin B. Currie (1902–1993) remains an enigmatic figure, with scholars and media outlets offering conflicting portrayals of his life and work. The majority of his professional papers were gifted by him to Duke and were one of the first economics collections acquired by the University, serving as a foundational piece of what would eventually become the Economists’ Papers Archive. Recently reprocessed with enhanced description, the Lauchlin B. Currie papers now offer new opportunities for historians seeking to deepen their understanding of his legacy.

Currie and his family sitting next to each other. — Currie sitting outside with his family in Colombia in 1992.

Currie was born in Canada, studied at the London School of Economics, and earned a PhD from Harvard University in 1931 before working at the U.S. Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve. He was appointed as a special advisor on economic affairs to the White House in 1939 and stayed there until the end of the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration. Throughout his prosperous career in the United States, Currie played a significant role in shaping and implementing fiscal, monetary, and foreign policies. Accusations of Soviet espionage later marred his career, but he was never charged with a crime and maintained his innocence. After his time in the U.S., Currie began a decades-long relationship with Colombia. He developed a deep affection for the country: he married and raised a family with a Colombian woman, tried his hand at cattle ranching, and obtained citizenship. He advised two Presidential administrations and held significant policy roles, including the head of the World Bank’s first mission to Colombia. He was honored with Colombia’s highest peacetime award, the Order of Boyacá, one day before his death in 1993.

Overhead view of an urban scale model. — A photograph from the collection of an urban scale model.

The Lauchlin B. Currie papers document Currie’s professional life through his correspondence, writings and speeches, published material and clippings (in English and Spanish), and subject files. It highlights his work on topics such as economic growth, development, urban housing, and fiscal and monetary policy, with the bulk underscoring his contributions as an economic advisor, particularly in Colombia and to a lesser extent in the United States. This collection also documents Currie’s work with institutions such as the Colombian National Planning Council, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the White House, and the Federal Reserve. It also includes a large set of printed material written by Currie and other scholars, his notes and annotations on writings by other economists, and correspondence with other economists and politicians.

Notable materials in the collection include documents related to Currie’s trips to and involvement with China during World War II on behalf of the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, his economic plan for Colombia’s government (known as Operación Colombia), his creation of the Colombian housing finance system (known as UPAC), and rich correspondence with his biographer Roger Sandilands and prominent Colombian politicians like former Minister of the Interior Arenas Bonilla.

A typescript transcription of a certificate. — Certificate of Award to Currie, signed by Chiang Chung-Cheng, the President of the National Government of the Republic of China.

A distinctive feature of this collection is the extensive set of numbered folders, primarily focused on Currie’s work as an economic advisor in Colombia. They were meticulously indexed by Colombian economist Elba Cánfora Argandoña, who supposedly microfilmed them before they left the country. Unfortunately, no complete index or any microfilm was ever sent prior to her passing in 2023, and further investigation in 2024 by Nestor Lovera Nieto, a part-time Research Scholar for the Economists’ Papers Archive and Visiting Scholar at the Center for the History of Political Economy, did not yield any results beyond a small collection at the Colombian central bank. To aid researchers in navigating this challenging series, Nestor described the contents of each file—one of the many valuable contributions he made to the reprocessing of this collection.

Two pages of handwritten notes. — An example of Argandoña’s index and notes on a small range of the numbered folders.

This collection not only enhances our understanding of Currie’s life and work, but also provides valuable insights into Colombian economic history, as seen through the lens of his work and experiences. New portrayals of Currie and the economies he engaged with will undoubtedly emerge from the work of scholars delving into this rich collection.

Economists' Papers Archive, Featured

CHOPE 2024 Summer Institute

September 18, 2024 Leah Tams

Post contributed by Andy Armacost (Head of Collection Development and Curator of Collections), Laura Micham (Director, Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture and Curator, Gender and Sexuality History Collections), Zachary Tumlin (Project Archivist, Duke family papers), and Nestor Lovera Nieto (Part-time Research Scholar for the Economists’ Papers Archive and Visiting Scholar at the Center for the History of Political Economy).

Three months ago on Monday, June 10th, around two dozen participants in the Center for the History of Political Economy’s (CHOPE) 2024 Summer Institute met with four staff members from the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library for a showing of items in the Economists’ Papers Archive (a joint venture between CHOPE and the Rubenstein). The Summer Institute was started in 2010 with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and is an annual two-week long event that brings together faculty and PhD students in economics to examine various topics in the history of the field. This year’s focus was on preparing participants to design and teach their own undergraduate-level course on the history of economic thought, along with showing how such concepts and ideas might be introduced into other classes.

Andy Armacost

While many of the collections in the Economists’ Papers Archive relate to documenting the careers of individual economists, the archive also holds some related collections that offer a larger context for the history and range of work that encompasses this discipline.

A table with several archival boxes and documents laid out on top of it. — Andy Armacost’s CHOPE 2024 table

One goal of the Archive is to chronicle the historical development of the field, and a key early work in this narrative is Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, published in 1776. This work explores the role of markets, international trade, and economic decision making. In it, Smith famously describes market forces acting as an “invisible hand” that guides economic decision making.

The Archive also holds organizational papers, including those of the American Economic Association (AEA; founded in 1885) and its journal American Economic Review. These papers represent more than a century of economic thought and the participation of a broad range of economists, and include correspondence from international economists like John Maynard Keynes, who corresponded on behalf of the Royal Economic Society.

The Archive also holds the papers of economists working in government, such as Federal Reserve Chairman Arthur Burns, who served during the Nixon administration. This collection preserves correspondence between the President and Chairman and their discussions related to economic policy and decisions related to the administration’s ending of the gold standard for US currency.

Laura Micham

The Economists’ Papers Archive holds the papers of several notable women economists, such as Anita Arrow Summers, Anna Schwartz, Juanita Morris Kreps, Charlotte DeMonte Phelps, Barbara Bergmann, and Mary Morgan. Though these scholars emerged from a range of backgrounds and intellectual traditions, and each took different professional paths, they all seem to have been animated by an interest in living independent lives and a realization that financial independence was crucial to that goal.

During this event, I shared materials from each of these collections that offer a window into these women’s contributions to the field of economics and to society:

Professor Anita Arrow Summers’s graduate student work in Professor Jacob Viner’s class during the mid-1940s in the University of Chicago Economics Department.
Memos and other correspondence between Professor Juanita Morris Kreps and President Jimmy Carter when she served as Secretary of Commerce in his administration.
A hand-written manuscript detailing Professor Barbara Bergmann’s groundbreaking scholarship on women and children, “A ‘Cost-Sharing’ Formula for Child Support Payments.”
Heavily annotated writings of Professor Charlotte DeMonte Phelps documenting her contributions to behavioral economics.
A colorful box of materials from the recently acquired Mary Morgan papers alongside annotated drafts of her 2017 book chapter, “Glass Ceilings and Sticky Floors: Drawing New Ontologies.”

An archival box with folders and papers of different colors, as well as a couple of documents, on a table. — The “colorful” box from the Mary Morgan papers.

Zachary Tumlin

My goal was to show different types of material to illustrate the ways in which a researcher might use our collections. Correspondence is typically the most sought-after material, but writing, teaching, and professional service files can also be valuable to researchers. We also hold electronic records and audiovisual material.

Marc L. Nerlove papers

Three folders of correspondence, ranging from a single handwritten letter from John Nash (1953) to one of five folders with Ta-Chung Liu (1959-1975). Liu was clearly not just one of Nerlove’s former professors, but also a close friend.
Lecture notes for “Introduction to Econometrics” (1948), taught by Jacob Marschak at the University of Buffalo. This collection includes a large amount of teaching material created by Nerlove over the course of his 60-year career, plus a smaller amount created by others.

Anthony B. Atkinson papers

Two of four folders for Atkinson’s article “On the Measurement of Inequality” (1970), which has been cited over 10,000 times. This file includes not only the published version but drafts and notes, which show how this notable writing came to be.
One of three folders related to Atkinson’s knighthood, including the initial offer letter (2000) asking if he would like to accept. This collection includes an atypical amount of personal material and offers insight into his hobbies and family relationships.

A table with folders and documents laid out on top of it. — Zachary Tumlin’s CHOPE 2024 table

Randall Hinshaw papers

A representative folder from the Bologna Claremont Monetary Conferences series that is full of correspondence. Hinshaw was the “primary driver” behind this conference series, which “brought together Nobel Prize winners and high-level diplomats, businessmen, and politicians to discuss current world developments.”

Raymond C. Battalio and John B. Van Huyck papers

A demo of a Bayesian learning experiment copied from a 3.5” floppy disk that can be played by a single individual against a simulated opponent using DOSBox. This experiment came from the Economic Science Laboratory at the University of Arizona and is copyrighted 1991-1993, when Vernon Smith was still there.

Paul A. Samuelson papers

A digitized copy of “The Economy Prize” (1970), which contains an interview with Samuelson, originally on 16mm film.

Nestor Lovera Nieto

“Correspondence can help researchers to better understand the development of economic thought, the public and private motives of individuals, and the process of interaction within and across intellectual communities” (Weintraub et al. 1998, 1498).

This citation was my inspiration for choosing most of the materials that I wanted to show to the participants of the Summer Institute. As a researcher in the history of economic thought, I believe that correspondence can contain valuable information that can be the starting point for not only writing a paper but also initiating a research project.

Jack L. Treynor papers

Treynor’s correspondence file on Fundamental Indexation, which contains debates between various individuals on the subject. This was unusual for him because he otherwise arranged correspondence by person or date.

Kenneth J. Arrow papers

Arrow’s correspondence file for Janet Yellen (the current US Treasury Secretary), which includes letters of recommendation from him.
One folder from Arrow’s file on ECON 200 at Stanford University, which was a course that he taught on the history of economic thought. This folder includes a syllabus and correspondence.
The certificate that accompanied Arrow’s Nobel Prize medal, which he was awarded in 1972 for his contributions to general equilibrium theory and the welfare economy.

Paul A. Samuelson papers

One folder from Samuelson’s correspondence file with Arrow, which includes exchanges that illustrate the disagreement between these two regarding the Bergson-Samuelson social welfare function.

Weintraub, E. Roy, Stephen J. Meardon, Ted Gayer, and H. Spencer Banzhaf. “Archiving the History of Economics.” Journal of Economic Literature 36, no. 3 (1998): 1496–1501.

Economists' Papers Archive, Featured, From Our Collections

Jack L. Treynor Papers Open for Research

July 31, 2024 Leah Tams 1 Comment

Post contributed by Nestor Lovera Nieto, Part-time Research Scholar for the Economists’ Papers Archive and Visiting Scholar at the Center for the History of Political Economy.

The Jack L. Treynor papers are now open for research as part of the Economists’ Papers Archive, which is a collaboration between the Rubenstein Library and the Center for the History of Political Economy. Jack Lawrence Treynor (1930-2016) was a white American economist who was born in the railroad town of Council Bluffs, Iowa. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Haverford College in 1951 and a Master of Business Administration (with distinction) from Harvard Business School in 1955. Between these two degrees, he was drafted during the Korean War and served for two years with the US Army Signal Corps in New Jersey.

Treynor was one of the first to explore the capital asset pricing model (CAPM) in “Market Value, Time, and Risk” in 1961. Although part of this writing was not published until 1999, it was mimeographed and widely circulated throughout the profession by colleagues who recognized its value. In fact, some of Treynor’s colleagues speculate that had he published his work on CAPM, he might have been a Nobel Prize laureate. In 1990, William F. Sharpe was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for his role in developing CAPM, which he had done independently of Treynor around the same time and published in 1964.

Treynor not only published under his own name but the names of two notable 19th-century economists: Walter Bagehot and Alf(red) Marshall. In fact, one of Treynor’s most cited articles, “The Only Game in Town” (1971), was written under Bagehot rather than Treynor. His motivations for using these pseudonyms and why he specifically chose these two remain a mystery yet to be unraveled.

A page from the "Financial Analysts Journal" dated March-April 1971. It features an article titled "The Only Game in Town" by Jack L. Treynor under the pen name Walter Bagehot. The page combines text, illustrations, and design elements. — First page of “The Only Game in Town” (1971)

The material in this collection came from Treynor’s home, which doubled as his office for Treynor Capital Management (TCM) after it was established in 1985, and two women from his family directly supported his professional career. His wife Elizabeth “Betsy” Treynor served as TCM’s administrative assistant and played a significant role as the creator or co-creator of many records, including most of the electronic ones. Additionally, there are printouts of emails intended for Jack but addressed to Betsy, with her responding either on his behalf or in her own capacity.

An older man and woman standing in front of an exterior, tiled wall with a wall-mounted fountain. — “Betsy” and Jack Treynor outside their home in Palo Verde Estates, California.

His daughter Wendy Treynor, who double-majored in economics and mathematics before pursuing a career in social psychology, annotated drafts of articles and conducted regression analysis.

This is a page that contains two sections of printed text titled "Australia Regression Analysis," each followed by statistical data and a handwritten yellow sticky note with some text. This note was written by Wendy Treynor as a reminder for her to print for her father any data or analysis possibly related to the printed sections. — Regression analysis conducted by Wendy Treynor.

One unique aspect of this collection is the abundance of handwritten items, including over 50 letter-size notepads and hundreds of transparencies (the originals of which have been photocopied and subsequently discarded; preservation photocopies have been retained in the collection).

A handwritten list titled "Recipe for a Loser," it is a copy of a transparency written in red marker. The handwriting is legible but slightly uneven, with some words emphasized by being written in all capital letters. — “Recipe for a Loser,” written in ink on a transparency.

Unlike most other economists represented in the Economists’ Papers Archives, Treynor was not a lifetime academic, having spent only 1985 to 1989 as a visiting professor at two institutions. Instead, his day job was as a financial analyst, with his research and writing on the side.

Treynor made significant contributions to the field of financial analysis, such that his peers in professional associations recognized him as having “changed the direction of the profession.” Demonstrating his innovative spirit, Treynor also registered a patent in 2004 for a “Method for maintaining an absolute risk level for an investment portfolio.”

A hand-drawn diagram labeled "Fig. 1," depicting a network of interconnected elements related to trading. — Draft of a diagram for Treynor’s patent application.

Although the above diagram might leave us scratching our heads, it is undeniably cool because it is so well-drawn. Speaking of cool, Treynor was also an avid model train collector and layout builder (a nod to his hometown roots) and enjoyed writing plays in his spare time.

A detailed model train setup in Treynor's two-car garage. The scene features multiple tracks that curve and intersect, with a variety of structures and buildings placed on the layout. There are model trains, including a locomotive, positioned on the tracks. The setup includes industrial elements such as tanks and towers, and there is a bridge spanning some of the tracks. Wooden posts support the ceiling, and the overall layout is intricate and extensive, showing one of Treynor's hobbies. The lighting is provided by overhead fluorescent lights. — Intricate model train layout in Treynor’s two-car garage.

Economists' Papers Archive, Featured, From Our Collections

Raymond C. Battalio and John B. Van Huyck Papers Electronic Records Fully Processed

July 7, 2023 Leah Tams 1 Comment

Post contributed by Zachary Tumlin, Project Archivist for the Economists’ Papers Archive.

Raymond Battalio (1938-2004) and John Van Huyck (1956-2014) were American academic economists who spent their entire careers at Texas A&M University (TAMU; 1969-2004 and 1985-2014, respectively), where they contributed to the development of experimental economics. Battalio was one of the 12 founders of the Economic Science Association in 1986 and served as its third president, and together, they founded the Economic Research Lab at TAMU in 1997. They are primarily known for their lab work on the problem of multiple equilibria in game theory. Along with Richard Biel, they carried out a series of experiments on coordination that began with the minimum-effort coordination game in 1990. They helped explain why players will fail to coordinate even when it is in their best interest to do so, and they showed the importance of learning because player behavior will change over time.

A university computer lab with dividers separating each desktop computer. Each computer has a LCD monitor and no towers are visible. — Figure 1: The Electronic Research Lab in 2004 (photo by Van Huyck) versus 2021 (from the ERL Twitter account). Dividers ensure that participants cannot easily screen peek, and their computers are networked together and controlled by a separate computer at the front of the room.

Dr. Jonathan Cogliano, former Project Archivist, began processing their papers (combined into one collection due to their close working relationship) in 2019 before the COVID-19 pandemic and leaving to become an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Boston in summer 2020. Undergraduate Elizabeth Berenguer imaged and reported on 442 floppy disks during the fall 2022 semester, and Project Archivist Zachary Tumlin finished processing the electronic records in June 2023.

Archival boxes displayed on a table, containing floppy disks, optical disks, hard drives, audio cassettes, and micro cassettes. — Figure 2: Boxes 66-81 of the collection.

There are 65 boxes with 81 linear feet of paper records and 16 boxes with 1,568 electronic record carriers and 43 pieces of audiovisual material. This breaks down as 1,309 floppy disks (both 3.5” and 5.25”), 245 optical disks (CDs and DVDs), nine hard drives (internal and external), five quarter-inch cartridges, three USB thumb drives, 29 audio cassettes, and 14 microcassettes. Some of these disks were separated from related paper records, while others were not. This is the greatest number of electronic record carriers in an archival collection at Duke, and most or all belonged to Van Huyck. Interested in and knowledgeable about the use of technology, he maintained backups and migrated files to newer storage mediums to prevent data loss, or to transport files between his home and office before he would later use Dropbox.

The front cover of Turtle's Discovery Book, which has an illustration of a turtle holding a computer terminal and surfing on water spilled from a bucket by a rabbit who has tripped. — Figure 3: Van Huyck taught his children how to program in the Logo language using Turtle’s Discovery Book, written by Jim Muller and illustrated by C. Micha in 1995.

These carriers contain approximately 1.5 million files that total 655 gigabytes, with the hard drives being the largest source. This material was appraised down to 390,864 files that total 56.2 gigabytes and arranged into ten sets (top-level folders) based on the arrangement of the paper records. There are three main reasons for this reduction: 1) some disks are clearly labeled as copies of other disks, 2) some disks are installation disks for software, and 3) the hard drives contain system files that are never retained, and they show an evolution over time due to being used as backups. However, duplicate files remain, especially between different mediums. Seven of these sets are now open for research but three have restricted access due to the presence of personnel records or personally identifiable information.

A screenshot of the landing page of a computer program in DOSBox. It lets the user know that some personal information will need to be collected first for administrative purposes, and it lists the design consultants and programmers at the bottom. — Figure 4: RL11714-FL3-0744 contains a demo of a Bayesian learning experiment that can be played by an individual against a simulated opponent. It appears to be from the Economic Science Laboratory at the University of Arizona in the early 1990s.

There are correspondence files with email messages and typed letters, files on their professional activities as economists, manuscript files with writings, research files, files on their university activities as faculty (including teaching and advising), and personal files related to Van Huyck and his family. In particular, there are extensive research files on their experiments, including executable files that theoretically, in the right networked environment, could allow users to replay these games/replicate these experiments using the original source code. This offers interesting possibilities, such as an interactive component of an exhibit on the history of experimental economics or specifically experiment design.

Dispatches from the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Duke University