Category Archives: Featured

Remembering the Legacy of SNCC Veteran and Folklorist Worth Long. (Jan. 15th 1936- May 8, 2025)

Post contributed by Mattison Bond, Coordinator, Movement History Initiative

image of Worth Long with hat, glasses, goatee, and African print shirt
Photo of Worth Long taken from SNCClegacyproject.org

On May 8, 2025 Worth Westinghouse Long Jr., Folklorist and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (also known as SNCC) Veteran passed away. The Franklin Research Center and Rubenstein Library mourns this lost and remembers his contributions as not only an activist, but also as a cultural archivist and true Durham native.

Black and white mugshot of Worth Long arrested
Worth Long’s Alabama State Police file, undated, Alabama Photographs and Pictures Collection, ADAH. Photo found at https://snccdigital.org/people/worth-long/

Long joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1963, organizing in Selma, Alabama, during a pivotal time in the Civil Rights Movement. He would later become a nationally recognized folklorist, committed to preserving and celebrating Black cultural traditions. His work with the Smithsonian Institution, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Library of Congress helped amplify the voices, music, and stories of Black communities across the South.

A proud son of Durham’s Hayti community, Long’s legacy bridges activism and cultural memory. We are grateful for his life and his enduring contributions to justice and history.

To learn more about Worth Long and his legacy:

Worth Long Profile on SNCC Digital Gateway https://snccdigital.org/people/worth-long/

In Memoriam: Worth Long by Charlie Cobb https://sncclegacyproject.org/in-memoriam-worth-long/

“Organizers Influence other Organizers: Being SNCCy with Worth Long” https://youtu.be/5duRa3LFumA?feature=shared

“Outsinging Trouble” By Worth Long and Emile Crosby https://sncclegacyproject.org/outsinging-trouble/

Interviews

Civil Rights History Project Interview completed by the Southern Oral History Program under contract to the Smithsonian Institution ’s National Museum of African American History & Culture and the Library of Congress, 2015 https://www.crmvet.org/nars/long_w.pdf

Molly McGehee, “You Do Not Own What You Cannot Control: An Interview with Activist and Folklorist Worth Long,” Mississippi Folklife (Fall 1998), 12-20. https://snccdigital.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/10_Worth-Long-Interview-with-Molly-McGhee.docx.pdf

John Hope Franklin Research Center

SNCC Legacy Project Critical Oral History Conference Interviews at Duke’ Center for Documentary Studies https://archives.lib.duke.edu/catalog/cdssncccriticaloh

The Charlie Cobb Interviews, 2012-2014 Collection

The SNCC Digital Gateway Project Files, 2002- 2018 (bulk 2010-2018) Collection:

Duke Faculty in the Civil Rights Movement: Peter Klopfer and Robert Osborn

Ah-ha! I haven’t been stopped yet as I continue my series on the Woolworth sit-ins (both in Greensboro and Durham) and Duke’s ties to civil rights movements in the early 1960s. I have finally moved forward in time, jumping from 1960 all the way to…1964.

In 1964, we see some Duke faculty get involved in the Civil Rights movement, this time, integrating a restaurant just a few miles down the road (near that…other university) in Chapel Hill. Professors Peter Klopfer, Robert Osborn, and Frederick Herzog, along with a young Black student, sat in the Watts Grill in Chapel Hill. In what started as a simple protest would later include Klan activity, and would even turn into a court case on trespassing, a case that would later go to the Supreme Court.

Peter Klopfer, professor of biology, in an oral history found in the Duke University Oral History Program collection, describes the significance of Watts Grill:

Paragraph 1 is the interviewer:

I’ll let Peter Klopfer describe the court case further, here:

And finally, highlighting some of the great finds from the archives, is a copy of the subpoena so graciously gifted to Robert Osborn, Harmon Smith, Frederick Herzog, and Peter Klopfer, found in the Robert Osborn papers.

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

Cover of a summer 2002 Hammacher Schlemmer catalog, featuring a sonic insect trap.

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.

Cover of an 1884 catalog for Hammacher Schlemmer featuring tools.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:

Advertisement for the Lougee Hair Picker featuring a line drawing of the machine and explanatory text.

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.

Cover of the centennial Hammacher Schlemmer catalog featuring a pastel illustration of a woman in pink riding in a horse-drawn carriage.

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.

Two-page spread of a Hammacher Schlemmer catalog showing everyday items and luxury items advertised right next to each other.

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.

Announcing “Defiant Bodies: Discourses on Intersex, 1573-2003”

Post contributed by Madeline Huh, Josiah Charles Trent History of Medicine Intern.

As this year’s Trent History of Medicine Intern, I was given the exciting opportunity to curate an exhibit for the Josiah Charles Trent History of Medicine Room. I’m pleased to say that my exhibit, entitled “Defiant Bodies: Discourses on Intersex, 1573-2003,” is now open to the public in the Rubenstein Library. The exhibit explores changing dialogues around nonbinary sex and intersex identity over six centuries, from early modern medicine to 21st-century activism and (some of) the many interdisciplinary representations in between. There is also an online version of the exhibit, which you can explore here.

Thank you to all who have helped me during the process of creating this exhibit, especially Rachel Ingold, Meg Brown, Yoon Kim, and Grace Zayobi–I am very grateful for all your feedback along the way and your consistent willingness to engage in discussion with me on this complicated and important topic with such sensitivity.

“Defiant Bodies” will be on view from May 13, 2025 to October 4, 2025 in the Josiah Charles Trent History of Medicine Room. I am so very excited for you to explore it in-person and online!

A UNC Student Gets a Duke Education

Post contributed by Will Clemmons, Duke Family Processing & Digitization Intern.

Figure 1: Arranging a subset of photographs donated to the Mary Duke Biddle Trent Semans family papers.

When I visited Duke in 2018 with my family, this time to give my younger brother the opportunity to explore the possibilities of life at a top university, I never imagined that I would end up being the one in my family to play a part in this university’s history. Tar Heel basketball has always had my family’s support, but we never disrespected Duke. At the time of the tour, I was trying my best to avoid going on the traditional college route myself, and I certainly was not envisioning a future where I would be pursuing a master’s degree as a Tar Heel. But our best laid plans do not always work out in the way we envision them, often leading to paths far greater than we could imagine. I thus found myself in the summer of 2023 moving to UNC Chapel Hill to pursue a master’s degree in library science, with an emphasis in archiving, pursuing goals I never dreamed were possible.

I knew going into this Duke internship that I would enjoy the job of a processing archivist, but I did not know just how specialized the position was, as the Duke Family Processing & Digitization Intern. My past archival internships/volunteer work had been at smaller institutions that often had a solo archivist. Working with such a small staff meant the hats my bosses would wear, and would pass on to me, spanned the breadth of jobs an archivist can perform, from accessioning to processing, digitizing to describing. At Duke, I was tasked with only processing collections in the fall with Rubenstein Technical Services and digitizing collections in the spring, both tasks I had done before, but not at the level of specialization and detail that was allowed by the Rubenstein Library’s large size. During the fall semester I was essentially doing the job that any full-time processing archivist would do, just as an apprentice, so to speak, under Zachary Tumlin’s tutelage. Tumlin, the Duke Family Papers Project Archivist, was tasked with processing the many additions from Mary Duke Biddle Trent Semans to her collection of family papers at Duke University, and I was hired to assist him. Our job was to establish physical and intellectual control of the donated materials and arrange, rehouse, and describe them for use by others. In the short term, we prepared a number of these objects for the digitization I would do at the Digital Production Center (DPC) in the Spring semester. Through this work I learned more than most about the Duke family, Mary Semans in particular, and her many children and grandchildren.

What makes Mary Semans’ donations so special are her ties to the founding Dukes. Being one of the last living Dukes to have known Benjamin Newton Duke, her maternal grandfather, Mary Semans had a wealth of Duke family history from Benjamin Duke to donate to the Rubenstein Library. For this reason, I was able to interact with objects with date ranges from the late 19th century up to the 2010s, specifically a large variety of photographic formats. Before working at Duke, I had never interacted with a tintype, one of the earliest democratic photography formats (meaning widely available to the public) that, while involving metals in photo processing, ironically tended to use metals other than tin. I was taught about the preservation of tintypes from talking with staff the Conservation Department, also learning how to keep them stored for long term preservation. The education I received through interacting hands-on with items that spanned such a broad period of history is a rare opportunity and will undoubtedly serve me well in my future archival endeavors.

Figure 2: Tintype featuring Benjamin Duke (upper left), Sarah Duke (upper right), Mary Duke Biddle (lower left), and Angier Buchanan Duke (bottom middle).

Learning about Mary Semans as a person would be sure to leave an impact on anyone. This heir to Benjamin Duke’s wealth did more than most with the wealth she was born into. As a philanthropist, she supported the university that bears her family’s name (with Duke being named after her great Grandfather) and the city in which it is situated. She did much to advocate for the people of NC nationally and internationally, earning the nickname “the unofficial First Lady of NC.” Her support for the arts, medicine, the disabled, and civil rights throughout her life is laudable. She was not unacquainted with grief, with her parents divorcing when she was around 10 years old and losing her first husband, with whom she had four children, at the young age of 28. Yet, she did not let this grief define her, marrying again, raising a total of seven children, and remaining vigorously invested in public life in Durham and NC until her death in 2012. I recall looking through numerous folders of photographs from trips to Europe in the 1990s that were not just sightseeing tours. Each trip was connected to the North Carolina School of the Arts’ International Music Program, designed to introduce students to the life of a touring musician while promoting North Carolina internationally. Even while traveling abroad, Mary Semans was committed to supporting the residents and the state of North Carolina.

Figure 3: Mary Semans, Duke alumna

The people in Duke Libraries who worked around me, and directly with me, imparted knowledge to me that will benefit me throughout my career. The team cohesion at the Digital Production Center (DPC) was evident from my first day this spring. Everyone in the DPC is dedicated to seeing their work reach maximum potential in efficiency and quality, utilizing the best in cultural heritage digitization processes. My work at the DPC saw me scanning artifacts from the Rubenstein Library’s collections, creating faithful digital surrogates for online teaching, learning, and research. In particular, I was able to work with courtship letters from 1935-1938 between Mary Semans and her first husband (Joe Trent), from processing in the Fall through to their digital existence with my work at the DPC. I felt very much at ease working at the DPC, knowing I had experts surrounding me that were eager to share their knowledge and ensure I had a successful internship. I could go on recognizing the talented individuals working in the DPC, but this is meant to be a relatively short blog post, so I will refrain for now.

Figure 4: Author at scanning station in the DPC.

I leave Duke University Libraries, more confident than ever in my abilities to enter the job market with the skills necessary to land me a full-time job in archiving. Duke has also left me with a stronger conviction that archiving is what I want to spend my career pursuing. I hope the reader understands the dedication of the Rubenstein Library’s staff and takes the time to browse their collections, many online (Duke Family Papers), perhaps in the process learning some about the founding family at Duke University and their significant contributions to the Durham area.

Curating “Movement and Memory Through the Lens of Danny Lyon”

Post contributed by Ama Kyereme, Curatorial Intern for the Archive of Documentary Arts (24-25) and curator of “Movement and Memory Through the Lens of Danny Lyon.” The exhibit is on display in the Rubenstein Library Photography Gallery through November 2, 2025.

In 1962, Danny Lyon, then a college student at university of Chicago, hitchhiked from Chicago to Cairo, Illinois, to document segregation to document segregation, and to join the Civil Rights Movement. Brought in by James Forman to work as the first staff photographer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Lyon traveled across the U.S. South documenting the conditions that initially prompted him to action. Armed with his camera, he made his way into spaces that his Black colleagues typically couldn’t go. From the Leesburg Stockade in Virginia to the Toddle House diner sit-in in Atlanta, the photographs Lyon made captured the ethos of the civil rights era. Facing hostile police and armed guards wielding bayonets, Lyon often placed himself in the middle of action to represent in photographs what he was experiencing.

Peaceful protests are foundational to the Civil Rights Movement, but violence is inextricable to the Movement’s history. That violence, both visible and invisible, is on full display in several photographs selected for this exhibition, from protests arrests to the funeral for the girls bombed in Birmingham, AL. While Lyon did not hold back from documenting the volatility of the revolution as he witnessed it, he focused his camera on capturing the Movement as it was to him and those around him. He directed the camera just as much towards moments of stillness, depicting the reality of the Movement within the image, as well as between and beyond the frame. He made evidence of organizing, protesting, rest, grief, and celebration, all equally deliberate actions towards an investment in an imagined future. Many of the images Danny created during this period became synonymous with SNCC and the Civil Rights Movement, and through their circulation were key in bringing about social and political change. The images of the young girls imprisoned in the Leesburg Stockade in Virginia were critical in making the public aware of the condition these girls were in, and ultimately led to their release. In this way, there is a cycle of action that Danny’s photographs take part in. Danny’s impulse to follow the action leads him to take photographs, and in turn he takes action through the intervention of taking a photograph. The photograph then goes on to act as a catalyst for other social and political action based on the content of the image. In addition to the iconic and spectacular images of the era, this exhibit includes images that provide a more comprehensive narrative of SNCC activism, through depictions of the South as a geographic hub, the role of women and youth, and the involvement of the church and religion as equally critical parts of the Civil Rights Movement.

Continue reading Curating “Movement and Memory Through the Lens of Danny Lyon”

Meet Madeline Huh!

Every year, we enjoy hearing more from our graduate student interns who work in the Rubenstein Library. We are thrilled to have Madeline Huh, the Josiah Charles Trent History of Medicine intern, share more below about her experience. Thank you, Madeline for your work and contributions over the past year!

Tell us a little about yourself.

My name is Madeline Huh, and I am currently finishing up my first year in the MSLS program at UNC School of Information and Library Science in Chapel Hill. For my undergraduate, I attended Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, where I studied Greek & Latin language and worked in the department of Special Collections in the library.

My study of classical languages is what introduced me to working with special collections, and more specifically rare books and early manuscripts, in the first place. I took a course in Medieval Latin my freshman year of college, and a significant part of that course was learning to transcribe early Latin manuscript fragments and get that transcription into a machine-readable format, so the library’s description of the fragments could be improved. My interest in special collections stuck after that experience. As the years have passed, I’ve developed strong interests in the history of the book, medieval Latin manuscripts, and early modern print culture. Ideally, I hope to pursue a career as a rare book librarian.

Outside of work and school, I enjoy running, reading for fun, spending time with my cat, and going to concerts!

What do you find interesting about working in libraries, especially our History of Medicine Collections?

For me, it’s wonderful to be in close contact with historical books, papers, and artifacts and to feel connected to the past in such a material way. I think there’s so much value in being able to work directly with physical materials in the library and better understand their historical context through the lens of materiality. Likewise, it’s special to be able to share this with patrons and students who come to the Rubenstein Library’s reading room and instruction sessions, especially those who are just beginning to learn about special collections research. Each person brings their own unique interests and experiences to the library, and it’s rewarding to do what I can to help people’s research blossom.

Beyond that, I am personally interested in histories of gender and sexuality, particularly in medieval and early modern Europe, which has made working in the History of Medicine Collections a great fit for me. Working here has allowed me to consider the many ways that the study of women, gender, and sexuality intersects with health and medicine–just a few of these are the development of the fields of obstetrics and gynecology, global health outcomes for women, changing definitions of “deviant” gender and sexuality, the development of contraceptive care, and medical responses to queer identity. These topics are strongly represented in the History of Medicine Collections, also often having some overlap with materials from the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture. I consistently learn so much through my work here, which is a huge part of why I enjoy working in libraries.

What is a memorable experience from your internship?

Oh, there have been so many! It’s hard to choose just one.

There were a couple days where Rachel Ingold, Meghan Lyon, and I worked on creating an inventory for the Thomas Bashore Collection of artifacts. There were so many surprising and remarkable items to look at during these meetings, from a leech jar, to various bloodletting tools, to electro-therapy devices, to a physician’s sample of LSD.

small box labelled as containing LSD. It is stamped "Physician's Sample"
Physician’s Sample of LSD

We would open up a box with a vague idea of what was inside, unwrap the artifacts from tissue paper (which felt a little like unwrapping gifts, in a strange way), and then try to figure out what we were looking at more specifically. Rachel came equipped with reference books on medical instruments that were so interesting to look through as well.

I’ve deeply enjoyed getting to learn more about the artifacts in the History of Medicine Collections throughout this year. These are things you might not expect to find in a library, but they have such great teaching and research potential and are such a great compliment to the other print and archival materials in the collections. Beyond that, learning about donors and the donation process in the History of Medicine Collections has been so interesting to me.

Do you have a favorite item you’d like to share?

I especially love the items in the History of Medicine Collections that show the intersection of art and medicine. One famous example of this is the frontispiece of Andreas Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica, which was so cool to see in person and regularly use during instruction. A few years ago, I read Katharine Park’s book Secrets of Women, and since then, I’ve been so fascinated with the woman depicted at the center of the Vesalius frontispiece.

One book that I wasn’t familiar with before working in the History of Medicine Collections is a 1551 edition of Hans von Gersdorff’s Feldtbuch der Wundt Artzney, which might be translated as the “Fieldbook of Surgery.” For one thing, this book features the original of the woodcut Josiah Charles Trent adopted for use as his bookplate, which depicts an amputation:

On the left is a woodcut illustration show someone having their leg amputated using a bonesaw. It's been hand colored and is in a book. On the right is a book plate with the same illustration and the name of Josiah Charles Trent, M.D.
Illustration of an amputation from Feldtbuch der Wundt ArtzneyJosiah (left) and Dr. Josiah Trent’s bookplate (right)

There are so many interesting hand-colored woodcut images in this book, such as this skeleton with a vibrant green background, which I love.

On the left is a foldout illustration from an early printed book showing a skeleton with the bones labelled. The background is painted green. On the right is a woodcut illustration of various metal medical tools.
Additional illustrations from Hans von Gersdorff’s Feldtbuch der Wundt Artzney

Early printed books like these are so interesting to me because of the way they show the connection between the artisanship of printing and the pursuit of understanding of the human body. I’m deeply grateful for experiences I’ve had during this internship, being exposed to familiar and unfamiliar materials alike and developing a knowledge of the kinds of print and archival materials that make up the History of Medicine Collections.

I’m very grateful for the experiences I’ve been able to have this year as the intern for the History of Medicine Collections!

Announcing our 2025-2026 Travel Grant Recipients

The Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2025-2026 travel grants. Our research centers annually award travel grants to students, scholars, and independent researchers through a competitive application process. We extend a warm congratulations to this year’s awardees. We look forward to meeting and working with you!

The travel grants for the Archive of Documentary Arts and Human Rights Archive have been paused for the 2025-2026 cycle.

Doris Duke Archives

Joan Marie Johnson, Northwestern University, “Doris Duke and the Business of Philanthropy”

Richard Treut, “Doris Duke’s Stewardship of Duke Farms”

Elon Clark History of Medicine Travel Grants

Jessica Brabble, Ph.D. Candidate, College of Willilam & Mary, “Her Best Crop: Eugenics, Agricultural Programming, and Child Welfare, 1900-1964”

Michael Ortiz-Castro, Lecturer, Department of History, Bentley University, “Acts of Citizenship: Belonging and Biology in the Post-Reconstruction US.”

John Hope Franklin Research Center

Irene Ahn, Faculty, American University, “Bridging Divides through Local Reparations: Examining How Communities Repair Racial Injustices”

Emmanuel Awine, Ph.D. Candidate, Johns Hopkins University, “The Socio-Political History of the Raided Communities in Northern Ghana and Southern Burkina Faso 1800-2000”

Carlee Migliorisi, M.A. Candidate, Monmouth University, “Asbury Park Uprising: Race, Riots, and Revenue”

Maria Montalvo, Faculty, Emory University, “Imagining Freedom”

Michael Ortiz, Faculty, Bentley University, “Acts of Citizenship: Belonging and Biology in the Post Reconstruction US”

Summer Perritt, Ph.D. Candidate, Rice University, “A Southern Reclamation: Understanding Black Identity and Return Migration to the American South in the Post-Civil Rights Era, 1960-2020”

McKenzie Tor, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Missouri, “The Black Temperance Movement in Nineteenth Century America”

Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History

John Furr Fellowship for JWT Research

Raffaella Law, “Global Branding, Local Tastes: Nestle and the Rise of Internet-Age Food Advertising in the 1990s”

Joseph Semkiu, “Wartime Advertising and Radio Voices: Selling Masculinity On and Off the Radio to the 1940s US Home Front”

Alvin A. Achenbaum Travel Grants

James Bowie, “The 20th-Century Development of the Logo as a Cultural Object”

Bryce Evans, “Marketing Abundance: JWT’s Creative and Strategic Approach to the Pan Am Account”

Townsend Rowland, “Supplementation, Radiation, Mutation: Food and Scientific Authority in Postwar America”

Mark Slater, “Big Tobacco and Blackness: American Advertising, Black Culture, and Cigarettes in Post-WW2 America”

Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture Travel Grant Awardees

Mary Lily Travel Grant

Daniel Belasco, Independent Researcher, Al Held Foundation, “Total Revolution: The Origins of the Feminist Art Movement, 1963-1969”

Ayumi Ishii and Kate Copeland, Independent Researchers, Pacific Northwest College of Art, “Compleat and Infallible Recipes”

Chloe Kauffman, Graduate Student, University of Maryland, College Park, “’If women are curious, women also like to speak’: Unmarried Women, Sexual Knowledge, and Female Mentorship in the Eighteenth-Century Anglo-Atlantic”

Lucy Kelly, Graduate Student, University of Sussex, Sussex Center for American Studies, “’I want to fight the fight. I want my rightful place’: Queer Worldmaking in the American South, 1970-2000”

Lina-Marie Murillo, Faculty, University of Iowa, Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies, and History, “The Army of the Three and the Untold History of America’s Abortion Underground”

Melissa Thompson, Graduate Student, West Virginia University, “Redefining and Recreating the Meaning of Family, 1929 – 2010s”

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Travel Grant

Stephanie Clare, Faculty, University of Washington, Seattle, “Eve’s Pandas: Queer Futurity and the More-Than-Human”

Julien Fischer, Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer, Stanford University, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, “Writing the Incurable: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick on Love and the Impossible”

Agitator, Advocate, Activist: Joan Trumpauer Mulholland

Post contributed by Ani Karagianis, Centennial Archivist.

Hello again!  You may have noticed if you follow the Devil’s Tale with as much fervor as I do, that this is a continuation of a blog series on Civil Rights, a series that will end whenever somebody stops me. This blog post highlights one person who had simultaneously stayed in the Georgian East Campus and spent time in prison for her participation in the Freedom Rides.

They say well behaved women seldom make history. Joan Mulholland, in the eyes of a segregated Duke in 1959, certainly fit that mold. A woman who was deemed odd for not rushing a sorority would later become a crucial member of the Freedom Rider movement, and has advocated for civil rights all her life.

Joan’s story begins in Washington D.C. in 1941. She was born to working parents, a father from Iowa and a mother from rural Georgia. Joan spent her early years in Arlington, VA, which she claimed, according to a 2013 oral history now housed at the Library of Congress and part of the Museum of African American History and Culture, “was definitely the South, maybe not the Deep South, but everything by law and custom was segregated.”[1] Growing up in a Presbyterian church, Joan would later become annoyed at the perceived hypocrisy of the church preaching equality in a segregated town. The church became an early place for her growing interest in civil rights, starting with Black students attending her then all white church, a move that had to be kept secret to maintain the safety of both Black and white students.[2] Joan would later note that “as a Southerner, that we needed to change. And when I had my chance to do something, I would seize it”[3] after viewing the stark differences between Black and white schools.

Fast forward a few years, and Joan started to look at colleges. While Joan wanted to go to a small school in Ohio, her mother, “a product of her environment” pushed Joan towards Duke University, a school that, according to Joan, “was safely segregated.”[4] At this point (1959), Duke University was still two years away from desegregating the graduate schools, and three years away from desegregating the undergrad population. Duke students had begun advocating for desegregation in 1948, when members of the Divinity School sent around a petition calling for desegregation. Unfortunately, these early efforts and the efforts throughout the 1950s fell on mostly deaf ears in the Board of Trustees.

Joan Trumpauer from the 1960 Chanticleer yearbook. It’s digitized here!

Joan attended Duke for a year—1959-1960. Durham proved to be a great place for Joan to build on her growing desire to make things right, and North Carolina was a good spot for the growing Civil Rights movement. Not long after four students from North Carolina A&T in Greensboro integrated their lunch counter at Woolworth’s, Joan and some other white students attended sit-ins at segregated lunch counters in Durham with students from North Carolina Central University.

Article from the July 2, 1960 edition of the Durham Herald about sit-ins at the S.H. Kress Store.

 

More news coverage of the Kress Store sit-in, including a list of students who participated.

 

[1] Mulholland, Joan Trumpauer, Interviewee, John Dittmer, and U.S Civil Rights History Project. Joan Trumpauer Mulholland oral history interview conducted by John Dittmer in Arlington, Virginia. 2013. Video. https://www.loc.gov/item/2015669178/.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

The Politics of Panda Love in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Papers

Contributed by David K. Seitz, associate professor of cultural geography, Harvey Mudd College: Recipient of an Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Research Travel Grant, 2024-25, supported by the Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Foundation

The intellectual and creative legacy of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick is so multi-layered and wide-ranging that even such adjectives scarcely do it justice. But across the many webs and folds of experience and knowledge that Sedgwick’s work interweaves, it is difficult to miss the recurrence of a particular charismatic megafauna: the giant panda.

Pandas, art historian Jason Edwards observes, were “were crucial to Sedgwick’s late style,” appearing in several of her books, poems, and craft works from 1996 onward. But Sedgwick’s panda-love, Edwards points out, began much earlier, as an attachment formed in childhood and sustained in the exchange of countless panda cards over the course of her remarkable marriage to optometry professor Hal Sedgwick. Eve Sedgwick noticed all kinds of queer possibilities and pleasures in pandas – their ambiguous gendering, cozy contentment, shyness, roundness – and in the cross-cultural encounters convened around them, as in China’s practice of “panda diplomacy.”

I came to the Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library under the auspices of the Sallie Bingham Center with a particular interest in Sedgwick’s attention to questions of race, class, and empire. Although I certainly imagined that such questions might come up in her correspondence with Richard Fung, the acclaimed Chinese-Trinidadian-Canadian queer experimental filmmaker, I had not anticipated the place of the panda in such exchanges.

Fung’s card to Sedgwick. Courtesy of David Seitz

In March 1991, Fung visited Duke under Sedgwick’s auspices, screening his 1990 film My Mother’s Place and lecturing on questions of race, gender, and sexuality in Chinese and Caribbean diasporas. There, he met Sedgwick’s student, José Esteban Muñoz, who would later analyze “My Mother’s Place” in his germinalbook Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Politics of Performance. Upon returning home to Toronto, Fung chose an apposite thank-you note for Eve Sedgwick’s hospitality: a pop-up card of two pandas in playful repose, sold to benefit the World Wildlife Fund.

The card must have delighted Eve, both in its imagery and in its three dimensionality, given her interest in the aesthetics of texture and touch. Fung’s postscript – “Which do you think is the girl panda and the boy panda? How do you know?” – subtly extended his longstanding, both serious and playful criticisms of Western stereotypes about Asian genders and sexualities, and must also have affected her. Two years later, in Tendencies, Sedgwick listed Fung among queer artists of color who “do a new kind of justice to the fractal intimacies of language, skin, migration, state.”

Fung’s panda card underscores the wisdom of Edwards’s advice against dismissing Sedgwick’s panda-love as “childish” or “peripheral” to her intellectual and creative contributions. If anything, the card offers an apt metaphor: it is the surprises that “pop up” in Sedgwick’s archive and in all archival encounters that often prove the most informative.

Further Reading:

Edwards, Jason, ed. Bathroom Songs: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as a Poet, (Santa Barbara, California: Punctum Books, 10 Nov. 2017) doi: https://doi.org/10.21983/P3.0189.1.00.

Edwards, Jason. Queer and Bookish: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as Book Artist, (Santa Barbara, California: Punctum Books, 03 Mar. 2022) doi: https://doi.org/10.53288/0328.1.00.

Fung, Richard, dir. My Mother’s Place (Toronto, Canada: V-Tape, 1990).

Hu, Jane. “Between us: A queer theorist’s devoted husband and enduring legacy.” The New Yorker, (9 Dec. 2015): https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/between-us-a-queer-theorists-devoted-husband-and-enduring-legacy.

Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Politics of Performance, (Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1 May 1999).

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. A Dialogue on Love, (Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 9 Jun. 2000).

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Tendencies, (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, Oct. 1993) doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822381860.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. The Weather in Proust, ed. Jonathan Goldberg, (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, Dec. 2011) doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822394921.