Category Archives: New at the Rubenstein Library

Franklin Research Center, From Our Collections, New at the Rubenstein Library, Rare Books

10 Days, 10 New Acquisitions: Day Seven

We’re celebrating the beginning of a new fiscal year by reviewing some notable items and collections that arrived here at the RBMSCL in the past year. Get ready for announcements of many more exciting acquisitions in 2011-2012!

Cover of Carpet Bag Rule in Florida

Carpet Bag Rule in Florida: The Inside Workings of the Reconstruction of Civil Government in Florida After the Close of the Civil War by John Wallace, 1888

John Wallace (1842-1908) was born a slave in North Carolina, served in the Union army during the Civil War, and settled in Florida at the end of the war.  He served in the Florida state House of Representatives and Senate during the Reconstruction era as a Republican, the longest political tenure of any black man in Florida; however, his book, published in 1888, is very critical of his fellow Republicans and Reconstruction rule.  Doubts about Wallace’s authorship emerged quickly, both because of his race and his stance against the Republicans, but proof that the book is not by him remains unfound.

From the John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American History and Culture.

For more photos of our new acquisitions (and other materials from the RBMSCL’s collections), check out the “From the RBMSCL’s Collections” set on the Duke University Libraries’ Flickr photostream.

Post contributed by Will Hansen, Assistant Curator of Collections.

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Archive of Documentary Arts, From Our Collections, New at the Rubenstein Library

10 Days, 10 New Acquisitions: Day Six

We’re celebrating the beginning of a new fiscal year by reviewing some notable items and collections that arrived here at the RBMSCL in the past year. Get ready for announcements of many more exciting acquisitions in 2011-2012!

Page from Mildred Hoover's Photo Album

“My Siberian Trip,” 1919 May-1920 August by Mildred E. Hoover.

Mildred Hoover was an American Red Cross nurse. Her photo album records two trips that Hoover took with Red Cross commissions, to Russia in May 1919 and Europe in February 1920, in 440 black-and-white photographs. While in Siberia, the commission worked at various camps and hospitals for the American Expeditionary forces, but Hoover included photographs of local inhabitants, soldiers of various countries, and provided rare images of a Russian submarine. During their travels in Europe, the commission stopped in London, Antwerp, Warsaw, Krakow, Switzerland, and Paris. There are also photos of Warsaw’s celebration of Poland’s victory over the Bolsheviks at the Battle of Warsaw.

From the Archive of Documentary Arts.

For more photos of our new acquisitions (and other materials from the RBMSCL’s collections), check out the “From the RBMSCL’s Collections” set on the Duke University Libraries’ Flickr photostream.

Post contributed by Will Hansen, Assistant Curator of Collections.

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From Our Collections, New at the Rubenstein Library, Rare Books

10 Days, 10 New Acquisitions: Day Five

We’re celebrating the beginning of a new fiscal year by reviewing some notable items and collections that arrived here at the RBMSCL in the past year. Get ready for announcements of many more exciting acquisitions in 2011-2012!

Unsterblicher Tugend-Schatz durch gute Handelschafft erworben von der weyland durchleuchtigsten Chur-Fürstin … Elisabetha Amalia Magdalena verwittibten Pfaltz-Gräfin bey Rhein, und Chur-Fürstin in Bayrn …bey drey-tägiger Leich-Begängnus in einer Lob-Rede by Nicolaus Staudacher, 1710

A memorial volume produced in Augsburg, Germany, after the death of the Countess of Pfalz-Neuburg (1635-1709), showing engraved versions of the 25 giant emblematic paintings created for the funerary ceremonies by the Countess’s court painter, Franz Haagen. A very rare book, it complements the outstanding collection of German emblem books in the RBMSCL.

For more photos of our new acquisitions (and other materials from the RBMSCL’s collections), check out the “From the RBMSCL’s Collections” set on the Duke University Libraries’ Flickr photostream.

Post contributed by Will Hansen, Assistant Curator of Collections.

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From Our Collections, New at the Rubenstein Library, Rare Books

10 Days, 10 New Acquisitions: Day Four

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We’re celebrating the beginning of a new fiscal year by reviewing some notable items and collections that arrived here at the RBMSCL in the past year. Get ready for announcements of many more exciting acquisitions in 2011-2012!

The Penny Pickwick by Thomas Peckett Prest. Edited by Bos, ca. 1837-42

Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers (1836-37) was so popular that it almost immediately generated a flurry of piracies, travesties, and plagiarisms.  One of the first of these was the Penny Pickwick, so called for its being issued weekly in 112 parts, each costing one English penny.  The set now at the RBMSCL contains 108 of the 112 original parts, now very hard to find in their original state (since most sets were read and discarded or bound together).  While its claims to artistic merit are few and far between, Prest’s work nevertheless provides a fascinating glimpse of London’s popular culture at the dawn of the Victorian era and the workings of its publishers, hack writers, and illustrators.  The Penny Pickwick is also an early example of the “penny dreadfuls” that swept through England in the nineteenth century: cheap, sensational fiction aimed at lower-class audiences, and important works in the development of genres such as mystery, science, and horror fiction.

For more photos of our new acquisitions (and other materials from the RBMSCL’s collections), check out the “From the RBMSCL’s Collections” set on the Duke University Libraries’ Flickr photostream.

Post contributed by Will Hansen, Assistant Curator of Collections.

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From Our Collections, Hartman Center, New at the Rubenstein Library

10 Days, 10 New Acquisitions: Day Three

We’re celebrating the beginning of a new fiscal year by reviewing some notable items and collections that arrived here at the RBMSCL in the past year. Get ready for announcements of many more exciting acquisitions in 2011-2012!

Illustration from The Story of Bunny Cortex, 1915

The Story of Bunny Cortex, 1915

2010-2011 saw the beginning of a “Literature as Advertising” collection in the Hartman Center: a group of stories, poems, and similar literary works whose primary purpose is the promotion of a product or service.  The collection includes examples from the 1880s to 1950s, featuring such characters as Santa Claus (for the Golden Rule Bazaar of San Francisco), Lewis Carroll’s Alice (selling dairy products), the “Toastie Elfins” (for Post Toasties cereal), and the Pied Piper (for Pied Piper shoes).

From the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing History.

Through July 25th, find more examples from the Hartman Center’s “Literature as Advertising” collection in their exhibit, “Look Boys and Girls! Advertising to Children in the 20th Century.”

For more photos of our new acquisitions (and other materials from the RBMSCL’s collections), check out the “From the RBMSCL’s Collections” set on the Duke University Libraries’ Flickr photostream.

Post contributed by Will Hansen, Assistant Curator of Collections.

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From Our Collections, New at the Rubenstein Library, Rare Books

10 Days, 10 New Acquisitions: Day Two

We’re celebrating the beginning of a new fiscal year by reviewing some notable items and collections that arrived here at the RBMSCL in the past year.  Get ready for announcements of many more exciting acquisitions in 2011-2012!

Metropolis, First and Second Editions

Metropolis by Thea van Harbou, 1st and 2nd editions, 1926 and 1927

The first (at right) and second editions of Thea van Harbou’s Metropolis are notable additions to the Glenn Negley Collection of Utopian Literature.  Iconic as the basis for the 1927 expressionist film by Fritz Lang (von Harbou’s husband), the early editions are also notable for the striking graphic design of their covers.  The second “photoplay” edition also features stills from the film.  The editions were acquired as part of a large collection of German science fiction and fantasy from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

For more photos of our new acquisitions (and other materials from the RBMSCL’s collections), check out the “From the RBMSCL’s Collections” set on the Duke University Libraries’ Flickr photostream.

Post contributed by Will Hansen, Assistant Curator of Collections.

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

10 Days, 10 New Acquisitions: Day One

We’re celebrating the beginning of a new fiscal year by reviewing some notable items and collections that arrived here at the RBMSCL in the past year.  Get ready for announcements of many more exciting acquisitions in 2011-2012!

"My Body My Right," Girl Germs Poster

Girl Germs Posters, 1996-1999

A collection of nine 18 x 24″ posters created and distributed as part of The Coalition for Positive Sexuality‘s Girl Germs campaign in the late 1990s. These posters were created by artist Jeanette May, who was also a founding member of the CPS. The posters were aimed at young women, addressing the issues of safe sex, sexual health, sexuality, pregnancy, and birth control.

"Some Girls Like Other Girls," Girl Germs Poster

From the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture.

For more photos of our new acquisitions (and other materials from the RBMSCL’s collections), check out the “From the RBMSCL’s Collections” set on the Duke University Libraries’ Flickr photostream.

Post contributed by Will Hansen, Assistant Curator of Collections.

From Our Collections, New at the Rubenstein Library, University Archives

Under the Floorboards

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Early last week, friend of the RBMSCL and James B. Duke Professor of Economics Dr. Craufurd Goodwin came to us with an exciting discovery. He has kindly shared a few words about it, noting that “archives are where you find them.”

When my wife and I moved from Durham in 1977 to a property called Montrose on the edge of Hillsborough, a venerable green 1961 Chevrolet pickup truck was included. Legend had it that the truck had mainly gone once a week to a garbage dump on the edge of town and spent the rest of its life in its garage. It had 18,000 miles on the odometer.

Holland Holton, February 1922

After moving most of our possessions from Durham, the old truck reverted to its traditional role and has today only 33,000 miles. But last week, on the old truck’s fiftieth birthday, it seemed appropriate to let someone else play with this toy and I sold the truck. Soon after it left the driveway, I heard from the young man who bought it that he had discovered a photograph taken by a professional studio in Durham called “Miss Johnson, Durham, N.C.” of a person described on the back as “Holland Holton, 1922.”

Holton was one of the first professors at Duke University and an administrator in various capacities; his papers are now at the Duke University Archives. There was no dated photograph of Holton in the RBMSCL’s collections until this week, but now there is.

It is a complete mystery how this picture ended up on the floor of the old truck for at least 34 years, and perhaps 50.  My predecessor at Montrose and in the truck was A. H. Graham, a prominent figure in the state (Lieutenant Governor, Highway Commissioner, etc.) but Carolina all the way. How a picture of a pioneering Duke professor ended up in his farm truck we shall probably never know.

Post contributed by Dr. Craufurd Goodwin, James B. Duke Professor of Economics at Duke University.

From Our Collections, New at the Rubenstein Library, Rare Books

An Anonymous Author Unveiled, 125 Years Later

Title Page of The Fall of the Great Republic
Title Page of The Fall of the Great Republic.

It’s not often that we acquire two copies of the same work at the Library.  Sometimes, however, a second copy can have unique characteristics that make it nearly irresistible—as in the case of a copy of The Fall of the Great Republic recently acquired for the Glenn R. Negley Collection of Utopian Literature, which may have solved the 125-year-old mystery of its author’s identity.

A well-known anti-socialist and xenophobic dystopian work published in 1885 and foretelling the demise of the United States, the book was published under the pseudonym Henry Standish Coverdale.   The copy now at Duke seems to establish the author as New Lebanon, N.Y. newspaperman Abner Hitchcock (1851-1936).  The volume comes from his library, bears the ownership signature “Hitchcock,” and includes a penciled note in the rear, dated from August 1924, stating that “Authorship [was] kept a complete secret.”

The specially-bound volume contains clippings and reviews of the work from across East and parts of the Midwest, including a suspiciously positive review from the Boston Journal, a paper for which Hitchcock wrote.   Of the various reviews, the owner has written in the volume: “The most striking thing about it is in the illustration the pasted-in comments give of the impression it made on different readers. – One sees in me an ass, and one a prophet. I suspect there is some basis for both judgements.”

Clippings pasted into The Fall of the Great Republic
Clippings pasted into The Fall of the Great Republic.

The volume was discovered by a bookseller cleaning out of the attic of the Hitchcock House in New Lebanon, now a bed-and-breakfast inn.  It has now found its permanent home at Duke, where it will remain a one-of-a-kind resource for future generations of scholars.

Special thanks to Garrett Scott for permission to quote from his description of this item.

Post contributed by Will Hansen, Assistant Curator of Collections.

Digital Collections, Do Your Research, From Our Collections, Human Rights Archive, New at the Rubenstein Library, New Finding Aids, Technical Stuff

Human Rights Records, Electronically

I’m a history Ph.D. candidate, so I knew something about working in archives when I started my internship with Technical Services at Duke’s Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library (RBMSCL), but not a lot about processing paper records, never mind electronic ones. However, as I started processing several collections acquired through the Archive for Human Rights, I discovered that electronic files were often just as important to the collection as paper ones. When I started working on the Common Sense Foundation Papers, I faced over 16,000 electronic files in addition to 34 boxes of paper records! A North Carolina think-tank active from 1994 to 2008, the Common Sense Foundation (CSF) worked on initiatives such as the death penalty, testing in public schools, and LGBTQ rights.

When I met with Paula Jeannet Mangiafico (Senior Processing Archivist), Seth Shaw (Electronic Records Archivist), and Patrick Stawski (Human Rights Archivist) to discuss the collection, we decided to integrate the electronic and paper files in the finding aid since the content overlapped and the volume was about equal. A researcher interested in the death penalty will thus find both electronic and paper records described in the Criminal Justice Subseries, which contains letters written by incarcerated people, a survey of capital defense lawyers, research on specific death-row inmates, and documents reflecting the daily work that occurred in CSF’s office surrounding this policy initiative.

Just as when working with paper documents, I screened the electronic files for sensitive information, such as personal, financial, and medical records. I then used the original path of the networked drive to describe the electronic files in the finding aid and used both the number of files and the megabyte size to indicate the physical extent. That way, researchers interested in a particular aspect of CSF’s work will know which electronic folders to request from RBMSCL staff, just as they would request a physical box by its number.

The RBMSCL has acquired almost 200 collections with electronic records in the past few years. Hopefully, my work with the CSF Papers will serve as model for processing future collections with strong electronic components.

Post contributed by Liz Shesko, Technical Services Processing Intern.

The Common Sense Foundation Papers are currently being processed. The finding aid will be published and the collection will be available for use in January 2011. For more information, contact the RBMSCL at special-collections(at)duke.edu.