The harsh and beautiful landscape of Afghanistan has been the site of many conflicts, including the Anglo-Afghan Wars of the early 20th century. The RBMSCL’s Archive of Documentary Arts has recently acquired a collection of 34 black-and-white prints of the 1919 war taken by British photographer Randolph Bezzant (R. B.) Holmes, who owned a photography studio in Peshawar, Pakistan. The majority of these well-preserved, highly detailed, and skillfully composed images depict large British military camps and vast landscapes, sometimes with camel caravans or military convoys. Some scenes show the remains of villages, military features such as towers, and religious structures. The landscape views include the Khyber Pass, Tanai Gorge, Kabul River, and Khargali Ridge. Military camp views, many in grand panoramic scale with fine detail, include Landi Khana, Dakka Plain, and Landi Kotal.
For more information about the collection, take a look at the collection guide. If you’d like to arrange a visit to view the collection, or if you have any questions, please e-mail us at special-collections(at)duke.edu.
Post contributed by Tim Pyatt, University Archivist and Associate Director of the RBMSCL
Early in Gloriana; or The Revolution of 1900, a rare 1890 novel recently acquired by the RBMSCL, the heroine, twelve-year-old Gloria de Lara, stands on the seashore, plotting:
“I was imagining the foam flakelets to be girls . . . and I looked upon them as my audience. I told them . . . of all the wrongs that girls and women have to suffer, and then I bade them rise as one to right these wrongs. I told them all I could think of to show them how to do so, and then I told them that I would be their leader, and lead them to victory or die. And the wavelets shouted. . . . I seemed to hear them cheer me on, I seemed to see them rising into storm, the wind uprose them, and their white foam rushed towards me, and I seemed to see in this sudden change the elements of a great revolution.”
Years later, posing as a man named Hector l’Estrange, Gloria wins a seat in Britain’s Parliament . . . and you’ll just have to visit the RBMSCL and read the book to find out the rest.
Lady Florence Dixie. From the Illustrated London News, March 1883.
The novel’s author, Lady Florence Dixie, was a prominent travel writer and advocate for women’s rights. At her death in 1905, British women were denied the right to vote. 92 years ago today, the Representation of the People Act, which granted voting rights to women over 30, received Royal Assent.
These cheerful and warmly dressed children, enrolled in Durham’s Scarborough Nursery School, were posed on the front steps for a class photograph on a chilly day in 1932. But this was 1932, during the depths of the Great Depression. Durham was in the heart of the Jim Crow South.
The significance of this progressive school is tremendous. Founded by Mrs. Clydie Fullwood Scarborough, it provided effective and healthy daycare for African American children. With a safe place for their children, mothers could confidently work and help provide the family with necessities, including these little coats and hats.
The detailed inventory of the Clydie F. Scarborough Papers, 1818-1984, which documents her work, is available here. For more information on using this collection, contact the RBMSCL staff at special-collections(at)duke.edu.
Post contributed by Elizabeth Dunn, Research Services Librarian
Dates and Times: Wednesday, 27 January 2010, 1:00-5:00 PM and Thursday, 28 January 2010, 9:00 AM-5:00 PM Location: Rare Book Room Contact Information: Karen Glynn, 919-660-5968 or karen.glynn(at)duke.edu
Unidentified man wearing a blue tie. Quarter-plate tintype, ca. 1850s. From the Jarratt-Puryear Family Papers.
The Archive of Documentary Arts‘ annual display showcases the numerous formats that document the evolution of the photographic process from early daguerreotypes to modern digital prints. The display will include photographs by Mathew Brady, Timothy O’Sullivan, Edward Curtis, Doris Ulmann, Eudora Welty, Lewis Hine, Manual Alvarez Bravo, Minor White, and Walker Evans.
Please note that the display is open by appointment only during the hours noted above. Contact Karen Glynn (919-660-5968 or karen.glynn(at)duke.edu) to schedule your appointment.
Unable to visit the display? Over 100 images from the archive’s collection have been reproduced in Beyond Beauty: The Archive of Documentary Arts at Duke University. This full-color, 128-page publication is our gift to you with a $50 minimum donation to the archive (donation form here).
Alice Mary Baldwin’s 95-page memoir, “The Woman’s College as I Remember It,” is now online! As the first dean of the Woman’s College at Duke University, Dean Baldwin had a unique opportunity to work for the equality of women and men students. She came to Trinity College in 1923 as the first woman to have full faculty status, and her efforts on behalf of equality allowed Duke to be very progressive. Her memoir illustrates her beliefs and efforts to mold the Woman’s College into an elite institution and shows her effect on Duke University as a whole.
Alice Mary Baldwin’s memoir is an essential resource for understanding the history of Duke University or the history of women in higher education. For more about Dean Baldwin, take a look at this brief biography on the University Archives’ website.
Post contributed by Crystal Reinhardt, University Archives Graduate Student Assistant
Date: Tuesday, 26 January 2010 Time: 7:00 PM Location: Rare Book Room Contact Information: Patrick Stawski, 919-660-5823 or patrick.stawski(at)duke.edu, or Kirston Johnson, 919-681-7963 or kirston.johnson(at)duke.edu
Rights! Camera! Action! is starting off the spring semester with a screening of Hannah Weyer’s 2002 documentary, Escuela. This film centers on Liliana Luis, the daughter of Mexican American farm workers, as she begins her first year of high school.
Speakers will include Judge Allyson Duncan, a 1975 Duke Law graduate, and Dr. Walter Brown, former dean of North Carolina Central University’s School of Education.
Sit-In Songs LP, 1962. From the Frederick Herzog Papers
The recent passing of historian, author, teacher, and activist John Hope Franklin has prompted all of us at the RBMSCL to consider the role of historical research and education in ending injustice, fear, and hatred. As Dr. Franklin wrote in a 3 June 2002 letter to fellow historian Nell Irvin Painter (on display in this exhibit), history’s responsibility is “to illuminate and interpret the past in order to ‘map’ what we think the future should be.”
Inspired by Dr. Franklin’s powerful words, this exhibit is a tribute to his legacy. The exhibit uses materials from the RBMSCL’s collections to explore four themes crucial to understanding the history of African Americans in the United States: African American enslavement, segregation and the Jim Crow era, the Civil Rights Movement, and the contributions of African American historians.
Date: 18 January-28 March 2010 Location and Time: Special Collections Gallery during library hours Contact Information: Karen Glynn, 919-660-5968 or karen.glynn(at)duke.edu
David “Honeyboy” Edwards at home on South Wells near 43rd Street, Chicago, Illinois, winter, 1994.
In this series of black and white photographs, photographer Cedric Chatterley traces the life of blues musician David “Honeyboy” Edwards, beginning at his birth place in Shaw, Mississippi and continuing through the Mississippi Delta to New Orleans, Memphis, and Chicago. Chatterley drove thousands of miles—often with Honeyboy himself—photographing important people and places in Honeyboy’s long career, as well as his performances at blues festivals, concerts, and recording sessions.
Reflecting on the photographs, Chatterley writes, “Touring with Honeyboy in the 1990s, and also traveling alone with his life’s story in hand, were formative times for me as an image maker. . . . From him I learned that there is a rhythm, a cadence, and a particular way in which time and sight and sound and memory—expressed and unexpressed—are inseparable when they come together to shape an image, whether that image is delivered in the form of a song, photograph, or any other form of expression.”
If you’re unable to visit the libraries, you can still see the photographs in the online exhibit.
These photographs belong to the Cedric N. Chatterley Photographs, 1985-2003 (collection inventory here), a collection recently acquired by the RBMSCL’s Archive of Documentary Arts. For more information on using this collection, contact the RBMSCL at special-collections(at)duke.edu.
On 28 January, two additional exhibits of Chatterley’s work—including his handmade cameras—will open at the Center for Documentary Studies. The CDS will also host a public reception for Chatterley that evening at 6 PM. More information is available here.
This past Saturday was the deadline for applications to Duke University’s undergraduate class of 2014. We thought we’d mark the occasion with a look back at a time before Scantrons and SAT prep courses, when students seeking admission to Trinity College (the forerunner of Duke University) might be asked to take a rather perilous entrance examination.
Administered to students without records of study from approved schools, the results of the examination determined which curriculum and class the student would join. The Annual Catalogue of Trinity College for the 1900-1901 school year presented prospective students with “Specimen Entrance Examination Questions” to help them prepare for the July examinations. Here they are, slightly edited for length.
Let us know how you do. We’ll be in the stacks, reading up on Silas Marner and the Battle of Buena Vista. History.
1. Describe the English explorations in North America.
2. Say what you can about the career of Capt. John Smith in America.
3. Compare the life of the Southern and the Northern Colonies.
4. Discuss the Navigation Laws.
5. What were the policies of Hamilton, Jefferson, and Calhoun?
6. Describe the battles of Saratoga, New Orleans, Buena Vista, and Gettysburg.
7. Who were Lycurgus, Plato, Cicero, and Solon?
8. Give outline of the Persian wars against Greece.
9. Say what you can about the Reformation.
10. What part did England take in the Wars against Napoleon?
English.
I. Decline it, who, goose, man-servant, heir-at-law.
II. Indicate possession in the following expressions by means of the possessive case instead of the phrase:
1. The armies of Lee and Grant.
2. The army of neither Lee nor Grant.
3. The property of Mr. Brown, book-seller and publisher.
III. Discuss all errors in the following:
1. This is his most favorite expression.
2. He is wiser than all men of his age.
3. He walked as if he was flying.
4. I wish I was in New York.
5. He promises to earnestly try and do better.
6. You feared you would miss the train.
…
V. Questions on the Required Reading:
1. What part do the Witches play in Macbeth?
2. Give an account of the Banquet scene.
3. Write a paragraph on the character of Macduff.
4. Comment on the following words in Macbeth: Obscene bird, benison, addition, seeling night, speculation, surcease, a modern ecstacy.
5. Give the story of Comus.
6. What authors are mentioned in L’Allegro and Il Penseroso? What landscapes are described?
7. Comment on the following expressions in Milton’s Minor Poems:
Yet once more, O ye laurels.
Sisters of the sacred well.
In Heaven yclep’ d Euphrosyne.
How faery Mab the junkets eat.
All in a robe of darkest grain.
Ennobled hath the buskined stage.
8. What does Macaulay say of the Puritans in his essay on Milton?
9. What reasons does Burke give for the love of liberty in America?
VI. Devote an hour to writing a paper on one of the following subjects, making special effort to give the story accurately, and to express it correctly as to spelling, punctuation, use of capital letters, and division into paragraphs:
1. The Tournament Scene in Ivanhoe.
2. The Story of Silas Marner.
3. The Spectator Club.
4. The Woman’s College in the Princess.
State what books in Mathematics you have studied and the amount of work done in each.
Latin.
1. State the Latin authors you have read and the amount from each.
2. Translate—Cæsar, De Bell. Gall. iv, 15.
Construe fully each word in section I.
3. Cicero In Cat. iii, 4, ll 1-11. (Do not translate).
Select and decline one noun from each declension represented in the section.
Locate the verb forms, explaining the subjunctives.
4. Translate Vergil, Aen., v, 13-25.
5. Write the Latin for the following: The Belgians, who inhabit one of the three parts of Gaul, are the bravest of all the Gauls, because they do not import wine.
Greek.
(The following sentences are taken from Woodruff’s Greek Prose Composition).
Translate into Greek:
69. 5. Tarsus is a large and prosperous city, at which the Cilician queen arrived five days before Cyrus. When the inhabitants of this city heard that Cyrus was coming, they fled to the mountains.
125. 2. Clearchus first spoke of the oaths which they had taken in the name of the gods, and said he would not count the man happy who was conscious that he had violated them. He said the Greeks would be insane, if they should kill Tissaphernes, for he was their greatest blessing.
…
French.
1. Translate into good English: One page selected from the texts the student may have read.
2. Give the disjunctive pronouns in full.
3. Explain the partitive constructions in full.
4. Give the principal parts of: Etre, dire, aller, pouvoir, faire, tenir.
5. Translate the following phrases:
Ces chevaux-la sont a Paul.
Je me mets a lire.
Nous en serons-nous alles.
Il vient d’apparaitre dans la rue.
6. Translate into French: I see a book on the table; whose is it? It is your brother’s. Take it to him, if you please. I will give it to him when I see him this evening. At what o’clock do you think he will come? I think he will not come before eight or nine. My house is larger than yours, but yours is finer than mine. Have you read the paper this morning? No, I have not yet read it; I am going to read it immediately.
German.
1. Translate into good English:
One page selected from the texts the student may have read.
2. Inflect in full:
Der kleine Bruder.
Diese schoene Frau.
Kein kaltes Wasser.
Grosses Hans.
3. Inflect in full:
Ich.
Er.
Jener.
4. Give the principal parts of: Entlassen, befehlen, geschehen, ausbringen, kennen, denken, studieren.
5. Translate the following phrases:
Es wurde viel getanzt.
Er soll sehr reich sein.
Das kind kam gelaufen.
Wie lange sind Sie in Berlin gewesen?
6. Translate into German:
In the room we found three little girls who had beautiful flowers in their hands.
When will you go to Paris? I wanted to go to-day, but now I shall be obliged to wait till (bis) to-morrow.
If he had taken the book with him, he would have told me so.
He looks (aussehen) as if lie were sick.
His younger brother said that he had arrived (ankommen) in town.
He claims to have read the book.
I did this in order to see if he could speak German.
The letter has not yet been written, but it will be carried (tragen) to the city this afternoon.
Come at half-past six and drink a cup of tea with us.
Tell him he is to go and get (holen) me some bread.
Dispatches from the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Duke University
