Category Archives: Exhibits

Bingham Center, Events, Exhibits, Featured, Readings and Talks

Mandy Carter, Scientist of Activism: Exhibit Opening

Date: Tuesday, June 13, 2023
Time: 4:30pm – 6:30pm
Location: Rubenstein Library 153 (Holsti-Anderson Family Assembly Room)
Please RSVP here.

Portrait of Mandy Carter. She is a Black woman, and is seated facing the camera with her chin resting on her hand. She is wearing a black long sleeve shirt and glasses.Please join us for a celebration of the opening of Mandy Carter: Scientist of Activism, an exhibit honoring the decades-long work of Mandy Carter, a Durham, NC-based Black lesbian feminist activist who has been central in the struggle for social justice.

  • 4:30-5:15 p.m.: Exhibit viewing and reception (Chappell Family Gallery, Rubenstein Library)
  • 5:15-6:30 p.m.: Formal program with Mandy Carter and others (Holsti-Anderson Family Assembly Room, Rubenstein Library Room 153)

Parking:

The exhibit will be on view June 10, 2023 – December 3, 2023 in the Jerry and Bruce Chappell Family Gallery, Rubenstein Library.

While celebrating Mandy and her community organizing tactics, this exhibit celebrates four central anniversaries of national and regional organizations that Mandy joined, founded, or led. These organizations: War Resisters League, celebrating 100 years; 60 years since March On Washington; Southerners On New Ground, celebrating 30 years and the National Black Justice Coalition, recognizing its 20th year, are all central to the legacy of nonviolent resistance, Black freedom movements, and queer liberation and through this exhibit shows what it takes to get us free.

This exhibit was curated by Kamau Pope, Doctoral Candidate in History, Duke University with assistance from:

  • Laura Micham, Director, Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture and Curator, Gender and Sexuality History Collections
  • Mandy Carter, Activist
  • Yoon Kim, Senior Library Exhibition Technician
  • Meg Brown, Head, Exhibition Services and E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation Exhibits Librarian

The exhibit design was created by a Durham, NC-based, Black-owned firm, Kompleks Creative and the typeface was designed by Tré Seals of Vocal Type.

Designed by Kompleks Creative and Vocal Type
Exhibits, Featured, From Our Collections, History of Medicine, Students and Interns

A Love Letter

Post contributed by Michelle Wolfson, Josiah Charles Trent History of Medicine Intern.

This exhibit is based on a lot of things. Its main foci are the horrors and heroes of Hiroshima. Three out of forty-five hospitals remained standing after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, though greatly damaged still, and according to numerous resources, 90-93% of doctors and nurses were killed or injured. The medical staff who survived suffered from pain—physical, emotional, and otherwise—and extreme uncertainty and fear, but gave the best care possible to their community. Even with rumors of the atomic bomb making for unsafe conditions for seventy-five years, they did not leave; and some came from outside the city with offers of help and supplies.

But what are the actual things in this exhibit and what do they mean? For me, it is an exhibit based on letters. Letters to oneself in the form of a diary  as seen in the Japanese manuscript written for the medical journal Teishin Igaku. A letter from an artist friend, relieved and grateful to hear of his friend’s survival, in the form of a beautiful scroll. The scroll’s contents were translated and sent by letter to eventually be included in the book that became Hiroshima Diary: The Journal of a Japanese Physician, August 6-September 30, 1945 . A letter—and it is one of many—about the book and the process of it, which serves as a window into the grace, gratitude, and genuine respect and friendship between two doctors. This even became a quest for a missing letter, perhaps Einstein’s last one before passing, still lost but, for me, an education in the world of archives anyway.

Handwritten manuscript for the medical journal Teishin Igaku.
Hiroshima Scroll.
Portuguese edition of Hiroshima Diary.
Letter from Dr. Michihiko Hachiya to Dr. Warner Wells.
A note from Dr. Wells about Einstein’s lost letter.

It is a story based on letters. This exhibit is my own contribution—a love letter to Hiroshima Diary and its creators, for teaching me about Hiroshima in a new way, and the medical staff and people who survived, as well as those that did not. This is what it is to me, and this is what I wanted to share with you. I hope you find meaning in it as I have.

Warmest regards,

Michelle

The exhibit, The Horrors and Heroes of Hiroshima, will be on display from August 17 to October 1, 2023, in the Josiah Charles Trent History of Medicine Room. An online exhibit is also available here. This exhibition was curated by Michelle Wolfson, the Josiah Charles Trent History of Medicine Intern. Wolfson is a graduate student in Library Science at East Carolina University and half-Japanese.

Events, Exhibits, Franklin Research Center

Upcoming Event – Black Lives in Archives Day 2023

Post Contributed by John B. Gartrell, director, John Hope Franklin Research Center 

Black Lives in Archives Day 2023 – “I Got a Story to Tell: Black Lives in Print 2.0”

Monday, April 3, 2023

11:00am – 2:00pm

Gothic Reading Room, Rubenstein Library, Duke West Campus

Free and open to the public

Scenes from Black Lives in Archive Day 2022

The David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library is pleased to announce it’s second Black Lives in Archive Day.

This one-day only exhibition allows visitors to browse special selections from the library’s collections, chat with library staff, and explore Black authored primary source materials. From rare first editions by Sojourner Truth to published works exploring Black life in Durham to publications by Black students at Duke, the event will give attendees a hands-on experience with the richness of Black print culture!

 

Exhibits, RL Magazine

Nuestra Historia: Developing an Exhibit on the History of Duke’s Latinx Students

Visitors gather at the opening of “Our History, Our Voice/Nuestra Historia, Nuestra Voz.” The exhibition was on display in the Chappell Family Gallery, January-July 2022.

The following excerpt is from Dr. Cecilia Marquez, Hunt Family Assistant Professor of History. Dr. Marquez was one of the speakers at an event celebrating the exhibition, Our History, Our Voice/Nuestra Historia, Nuestra Voz. The exhibition was on display in the Chappell Family Gallery from January through July 2022.

I came to Duke as an Assistant Professor in the History Department in August 2019. Nine months later, just after I had found a doctor, a grocery store, and a routine, the world shut down as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Along with my students, I was reaching for some kind normalcy and some kind of optimism in what was an increasingly bleak world of quarantines, Zoom calls, and isolation. The exhibition Our History, Our Voice/Nuestra Historia, Nuestra Voz can’t be understood outside of this context. As much as the exhibition was a call for recognition, it also became a way to build community when we were scattered across several states.

It feels almost clichéd to say I learned as much from my students as I taught them, and yet it’s true. The students I have encountered at Duke, and those who curated this project, are some of the most resilient and dedicated young people I have ever known. I watched these undergrads withstand an unprecedented and generational trauma because of COVID-19. Through that they produced something truly beautiful and supported each other in the process. Their vision and dedication to this project was the fuel that made it all possible.

 

“In high school, as an AP US history student, my burning question was constantly: where are Latinos in US history? Where were we in the Civil War? Where were we in World War II, and in other big moments in US history? That was my constant burning question.”  — Elizabeth Barahona

 

The exhibition is a testament to all parts of Duke really working together: faculty, staff, and students. Too often the emphasis at Duke is on faculty and students but this exhibition would not have been possible without library staff who led the way as we learned what it meant to create an exhibition.

Members of the exhibit curatorial team (left to right): Joan Munne’, Senior Lecturer of Romance Language, Elizabeth Barahona (T ’18), Carlo-Alfonso Garza (T ’22), Benjamin Romero (T ’21), Juanita Vargas Ibanez (T ’23), Karina Moreno Bueno (T ’21), Gabriela Fonseca (T ’22), Leticia Flores, Senior Clinical Research Specialist at Duke University Health System, Damary Gutierrez Hernandez (T ’22), Cecilia Marquez, Hunt Family Assistant Professor of History.

During this project, Assistant University Archivist Amy McDonald taught dozens of my students how to discover and engage with archival material. Meg Brown, head of Exhibition Services, taught them how to make an exhibit, construct a project, and reimagine it again and again. Teaching Latinx history these past two years was a collaborative endeavor with Amy, Meg, and my co-conspirator in this project, Senior Lecturer in Romance Studies, Joan Munné, as we imagined this exhibition and brought it to fruition. At every step, I was reminded that the work we do at Duke is a collective and community effort that is not possible without the library and its staff.

 

“[This exhibit] It’s history in the making. You are witnessing history right now. It’s time to hear about those other stories. Those brown stories that have been here, but are not told because no one is asking us or writing about us.” — Elmer Orellana

 

It is my hope that this exhibition is the beginning of telling the history of Latinxs at Duke, not the end. There are many voices that were not represented in the exhibition, maybe some reading this now. The exhibit opened during Black History Month, making us acutely aware that Black Latinx students could not attend Duke until March 1961, when Duke first accepted Black students. Generations of Latinx students were systematically excluded as a result of Duke’s racist admissions policies. Early research from Dr. Javier Wallace, a Postdoctoral Fellow at Duke, suggests that during this time Black Latinx students found a home at North Carolina Central University (NCCU). The absence of their stories in the early period of the exhibition is notable and an urgently needed future direction of this project. In the process of constructing this exhibition and future projects like this one, we also construct a fuller and more representative archive of what the Latinx community looks like at Duke.

Nuestra Historia was sponsored by the Duke University Libraries and the following Duke entities: Latino/a Studies in the Global South Program, History Department, Romance Studies Department, the Provosts’ office, Dean Valerie Ashby, the Dean of Humanities, the Forum for Scholars and Publics, and the Franklin Humanities Institute who funded a Story+ Program to continue the work of this exhibit in the digital sphere.

Exhibits, Featured, History of Medicine

Good Vibrations!

Post contributed by Roger Peña, MLIS Student at UNC Greensboro and Josiah Charles Trent History of Medicine Intern

19th century printed illustration reading "The Electric Era." In the center is a man standing, holding an electric belt above his head with lightning bolts behind him. “We give a written guarantee that our appliance will cure the diseases mentioned…”

 “Indoresed[sic] by the government!”

 “Every man and woman troubled with weak and languid feelings, nervous, rheumatic, or organic disorders should wear the… electropathic belt”

 “Diseases that are now treated successfully by vibration… (colic, gallstones, impotency, insomnia, paralysis, spinal curvature)” See Image for full list.

 “Vibration and Electricity are the most natural remedies known.”

The statements above were just a sample of the testimonials and claims found in advertisements, sales brochures, and user manuals for electrotherapy devices on display in Good Vibrations.  Electrotherapy, or the “use of electric currents passed through the body to stimulate nerves and muscles” gained notoriety from the mid 1800s and into the 1920s. Consumers and patients were eager to explore the endless possibilities of electricity to cure their medical ailments and improve their vitality. Eager to reach new customers and with little-to-no government oversight, producers of medical batteries, electric suspension belts, and electric rejuvenators claimed that their devices could cure nearly all diseases – many with a money-back guarantee if it didn’t work!

Ad for "White Cross Electric Vibrator" listing "Diseases That Are Now Treated Successfully By Vibration." There is a long list of disease and conditions including asthma, dandruff, deafness, falling hair, gout, lameness, ovarian neuralgia, stomach troubles, and weak eyes. Though widely regarded as a modern innovation, the use of electricity in medicine dates back to ancient Rome, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Greece. Centuries ago, these civilizations attempted to harness electricity from eels and catfish to cure ailments such as gout and baldness. We all remember the story of Benjamin Franklin flying a kite. Turns out: this may have been an experiment with medical purposes. Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein has its protagonist experiment with electricity to bring life back from the dead.

Black and white photograph. In the foreground is a man seated with his shirt unbuttoned. Behind him is another man in a suit holding what looks like a small metal rod to the other man's head. The rod is attached to a device on a table next to them. The invention of the battery in the early nineteenth century revolutionized the capabilities of electricity, and its uses for medical purposes were widely studied. From the 1850s to the early twentieth century, once-unimaginable discoveries in battery power and electricity transformed the world. Many people began to believe they could harness this new power for medical, health, and beauty purposes.

Cities around the world became home to university departments, medical societies, and practices devoted to electrotherapy. At the same time, mass consumerism and mass production allowed average citizens to purchase cheap electrical therapy devices from sales catalogs, local electricians, and medical supply companies and salesmen. Portrayed as an alternative to pills and medicine, electrotherapy devices (through low current shock waves or vibrations applied to different areas of the body) claimed to treat a wide range of conditions, such as arthritis, sciatica, gout, impotency, glaucoma, and “nervousness.”

Although such devices were often dismissed as quackery by many in the medical profession, their low cost and widespread marketing attracted a large audience eager to consume all things electric.

The items on display in Good Vibrations explore the history of electrotherapy from the mid-19th century and into the Roaring 1920s. Several of the items on display, including the Davis-Patent Electric Machine for Nervous Diseases, the Overbeck Electric Rejuvenator, and the Violet Ray Machine, serve as early examples of electrotherapeutic devices. All items on display come from the History of Medicine Collections and the Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library.

Good Vibrations will be on display in The Josiah Charles Trent History of Medicine Room from April 26, 2022 until October 15, 2022 .Box containing an "Overbeck Rejuventaor." The box is black with a leather texture and a clasp. Inside are electrodes and wires connected to handles.

Events, Exhibits, Featured, From Our Collections, History of Medicine

Panel Discussion: J. B. Rhine: ESP at Duke

Date: Thursday, April 14, 2022
Time: 5:00 p.m.
Location: Holsti-Anderson Family Assembly Room, Room 153, Rubenstein Library
Contact: Rachel Ingold (rachel.ingold@duke.edu or 919-684-8549)

The Rubenstein Library houses the Parapsychology Laboratory Records, a collection of 700 boxes of materials that reveal a comprehensive picture of the Laboratory during its existence at Duke. The collection includes personal papers of J. B. Rhine, J. G. Pratt, Louisa E. Rhine, and others, as well as professional correspondence, research records, legal and financial papers, clippings, and photographs.

Join us on Thursday, April 14, at 5 p.m. for a panel discussion on J. B. Rhine: ESP at Duke. Panelists will discuss J. B. Rhine’s pioneering research on telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and psychokinesis.

Panelists include:

  • Barbara Ensrud, Moderator
  • Sally Rhine Feather, Ph.D.,  Clinical Psychologist, co-editor of J. B. Rhine : Letters, 1923-1939 : ESP and the Foundations of Parapsychology
  • John G. Kruth, Executive Director of the Rhine Research Center
  • James Carpenter, Ph.D., Psychotherapist
  • Tom Robisheaux, Ph.D., Professor of History, Duke University

Our event coincides with an exhibit, “Early Studies in Parapsychology at Duke,” on display in the Josiah Charles Trent History of Medicine Room of the Rubenstein Library.

Events, Exhibits, Featured, From Our Collections, University Archives

Finding Your Voice: Developing an Exhibit on the History of Duke’s Latina/o/e/x Students

Post contributed by Meg Brown, Head, Exhibition Services and E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation Exhibits Librarian.

In the spring of his freshman year, Carlo-Alfonso Garza visited the library and saw an exhibition about the 1969 Allen Building Takeover, and decided to use his voice by writing and posting this note:

Carlo-Alfonso Garza's demand, handwritten on yellow paper. He wrote "How about making one of these exhibits for Latinos that Duke always seems to forget. Let's talk, President Price!," followed by his name and contact information.

The librarians read this note, and this small gesture put into motion a plan that eventually became the exhibition OUR HISTORY, OUR VOICE: LATINX AT DUKE // NUESTRA HISTORIA, NUESTRA VOZ: LATINAS/OS/ES/X EN DUKE. To learn more about how it all happened, view a clip of an oral history with Carlo-Alfonso and while you’re there, watch other histories created by students who interviewed a variety of members of Duke’s Latinx community.

Come celebrate the exhibit with the curators (including Carlo-Alfonso) in person on Monday, February 21, 2022  from 4-6:00 PM in the Chappell Gallery, Duke University Libraries. The faculty and student curators will be making remarks at 4:30 PM.

Exhibits, Featured, New at the Rubenstein Library

Happy 213th Birthday, Abraham Lincoln!

Post contributed by Naomi L. Nelson, Associate University Librarian and Director, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library

Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809, in a one-room log cabin in Kentucky, which was on the western frontier of the young United States. His father was a hardscrabble farmer who moved his family several times in search of better opportunities, but the family never escaped poverty.

Lincoln was an avid reader from an early age. He grew up in Indiana and later remembered that he had less than a year’s schooling there—total. He was ambitious and learned by reading. Over his lifetime, Lincoln is known to have read in many disciplines, including the Bible, law and legal history, classical literature, world and American history, and political economy.

In an address to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society in 1859, Lincoln noted “A capacity, and taste, for reading, gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others. It is the key, or one of the keys, to the already solved problems. And not only so. It gives a relish, and facility, for successfully pursuing the [yet] unsolved ones.”

These are words to warm a librarian’s heart. David M. Rubenstein’s Americana Library includes many of the books that Lincoln is known to have read. He has loaned Duke a number of these titles for the exhibition “To Stand by the Side of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the American Nineteenth Century,” now on view in the Rubenstein Library and online.

Interested in learning more about Abraham Lincoln and his place in American history? Please join us on February 16 for “Abraham Lincoln and the American Experiment: a conversation with David M. Rubenstein and Thavolia Glymph.”

Events, Exhibits, Featured, From Our Collections, Instruction, University Archives

Exhibit Opening: “Our History, Our Voice: Latinx at Duke/Nuestra Historia, Nuestra Voz: Latinas/os/es/x en Duke”

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Date: Monday, February 21, 2022
Time: 4:00-6:00 PM
Location: Chappell Family Gallery, Perkins Library
Contact: Meg Brown or Amy McDonald

Please join the student and faculty curators at the opening of their new exhibition, “Our History, Our Voice: Latinx at Duke/Nuestra Historia, Nuestra Voz: Latinas/os/es/x en Duke.”

Over the past year, Dr. Cecilia Márquez’s Latinx Social Movements courses and Professor Joan Munné’s Spanish for Heritage Learners courses canvassed the collections of the Duke University Archives and conducted oral histories to create this first-of-its-kind exhibition exploring the complex story of Duke’s Latinx community.

The exhibit curators will make brief remarks at 4:30 PM and offer guided tours of the exhibit afterwards.

We encourage you to register for this event. Registration is not required, but will help us to plan the event safely. Masks are required in the Duke University Libraries.

If you’re unable to join us for this event, please check out our online exhibit!

Photograph of the "Our History, Our Voice" exhibit. The exhibit's title appears on the far wall, which is also lined with colorful exhibit panels and exhibit cases. Two exhibit cases display materials in the center of the room.

Exhibits, Featured, From Our Collections, History of Medicine

To Be or Not to Be (Vaccinated)?

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

The history of vaccine hesitancy is nothing new. Pamphlets, magazines, and newspapers from the eighteenth through twenty-first centuries feature opposing views of vaccination. Some profess personal liberty and abhor government intervention (i.e. instituting compulsory vaccination); or claim that potential side effects from vaccines are too risky. Others stress that public health and the well-being of communities against preventable, lethal diseases, should prevail through large-scale, or even mandatory, vaccinations.

Does this sound a bit familiar?

The David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library has material, ranging in format and date, that document the long history of vaccine hesitancy. In October 2019, an exhibit Vaccination: 300 Years of Debate was installed in the Josiah Charles Trent History of Medicine Room. When campus closed in March 2020, so did our exhibit spaces. This exhibit became inaccessible at a time when it was becoming most relevant.

Image annoucing that exhibit was closed in response to coronavirus.
Image from Vaccination: 300 Years of Debate, person in bed from Engravings by Clemens Kohl

We are now happy to share the online exhibit for Vaccination: 300 Years of Debate. Take a break from current news to view materials that give context to this ongoing, historical debate.