Category Archives: Hartman Center

Bingham Center, Featured, Franklin Research Center, Gender and Sexuality History Collections, Hartman Center, History of Medicine, Human Rights Archive, Travel Grants

Announcing our 2023-2024 Travel Grant Recipients

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The Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2023-2024 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!

Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture (Mary Lily Research Grants)

Ola Aboukhsaiwan, Ph.D. candidate, London School of Economics and Political Science, “Surviving Abortion: Clinics, Competition, and Connections.”

Sophie Abramowitz, Independent Researcher, “Rosetta Records Creative Reissue Project.”

Anne Gray Fischer, Faculty, University of Texas at Dallas, “Women Killers: Murder in the Era of Feminist Liberation.”

Wendy Rouse, Faculty, San Jose State University, “The Feminist Self-Defense Movement in the Era of Women’s Liberation.”

Rachel Tang, Ph.D. candidate, Harvard University; Department of History of Art and Architecture, “Lessons in Repair: History, Materials, and Processes of Pedagogy in American Art.”

Tessel Veneboer, Ph.D. candidate, Ghent University, “Negativity, sexuality, and formal innovation Kathy Acker’s literary experiments.”

John Hope Franklin Center for African and African American History and Culture

Anna Duensing, Postdoctoral fellow, Carter G. Woodson Institute, University of Virginia, “Fascism Is Already Here: Civil Rights and the Making of a Black Antifascist Tradition”

Monique Hayes, Writer, “Sally Forth,” a historical novel based on African-American experiences during the American Revolution, 1771-1785.

Marie Hubbard, Ph.D. candidate, Department of English and Comparative Literature, “‘Ivy and Cane’: New and Old Forms of Trans-Atlantic Exchange in the Literature of Ayi Kwei Armah.”

Breanna Moore,  Ph.D. candidate, University of Pennsylvania, “‘Whose Loss?’: Reparations, Indemnities, and Sovereignty During the Era of Slave Trade Abolition in the Atlantic World.”

Elizabeth Schlabach, Faculty, Department of History, Lawrence University, “Segregated and in the Shadows: Black Women’s Off the Books Labor in Jim Crow Southern Cities.”

Katharina Weygold,  Ph.D. candidate, Brown University, “African American Women and Haiti During the U.S. Occupation, 1915 – 1934.”

Harry H. Harkins T’73 Travel Grants for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History

Courtney Block, Faculty, Indiana University Southeast Library, “Rhea White & Margaret Anderson Letters.”

Adam Kocurek, Ph.D. candidate, CUNY Graduate Center, “Academic Closets and Labor Trials: LGBTQ+ Academics and Activism in the Industry from 1960-Present.”

Suisui (Sway) Wang, Ph.D. candidate, Department of Gender Studies, Indiana University Bloomington, “Answering the Call(s): Sexual Politics of Hotlines and Technopolitics of Sexuality.”

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

John Furr Fellowship for J. Walter Thompson Archives Research

Cara Fallon, Faculty, Jackson School of Global Affairs, Yale University, “Ageism in twentieth and twenty-first century United States as it permeated American culture, medicine, and society.”

Susana Sosenski, Faculty, Instituto de Investigaciones Historicas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, “The arrival of Kellogg’s breakfasts in Mexico: a history of the advertising campaign 1940-1970.”

FOARE Fellowship for Outdoor Advertising Research

Jacob Saindon, Ph.D. candidate, Department of Geography, University of Kentucky, “The Production of Commercial Attention: Advertising, Space, and ‘New’ Media in the Contemporary U.S.”

Alvin Achenbaum Travel Grants

Maria Elena Aramendia-Muneta, Faculty, Universidad Pública de Navarra, “The use of new energies and technologies for advertising purposes in the atomic age (50s and 60s).”

Aimée Plukker, Ph.D. candidate, Department of History, Cornell University, “Europe Calling: The Marshall Plan, U.S. Tourism to Europe, and the Making of “the West.””

Pierre-Yves Donzé, Faculty, Graduate School of Economics, Osaka University, “Making Swiss watches and luxury good: the cooperation between J. Walter Thompson and Rolex, 1960-1990.”

Keely Mruk, Ph.D. candidate, Departments of History and History of Science, Medicine, and Technology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, “A Taste for Existential Threat: Women, Food, and Technologies of Preservation in Cold War America.”

Dael Norwood, Faculty, Department of History, University of Delaware, “The Beginnings of the Businessman:  How Exclusion, Education, and Globalization Shaped an American Identity.”

Stephanie Vincent, Faculty, Department of History, Kent State University, “From Luxury to Defense: Glass, Silver, and China During World War II.”

History of Medicine Collections

Christopher Blakley, Faculty, Core Program, Occidental College, “”Race Science and the Senses in the US Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842.”

Austin Bryan, Ph.D. candidate, Department of Anthropology, Northwestern University, “‘It’s Our Aid’: Liberation Through Disease in Uganda.”

Sarah Parker, Faculty, School of Humanities, Jacksonville University, “Science as Spectacle:  Satirizing Scientific Discourse in Shadwell’s The Virtuoso (1676).”

Matthew Soleiman, Ph.D. candidate, Department of History, University of California San Diego, “The Person in Pain: A Genealogy of Bodily Experience.”

Human Rights Archive

Amy Kerner, Faculty, Department of History, University of Texas at Dallas, “Human Rights Activism and Forced Disappearance from the 1976 Coup to the Rome Statute.”

Claudia Monterroza Rivera, Ph.D. candidate, Vanderbilt University, “‘Defender Nuestros Derechos:’ Catholic Women and Transnational Human Rights Activism in Central America and the United States, 1970s-1980s.”

Carolyn Robbins, Ph.D. candidate, Department of Communication, University of Maryland, “Riot Rhetorics: The Language of the Unheard.”

Debbie Sharnak, Faculty, Department of History, Rowan University, “Jewish Internationalism and the Southern Cone Dictatorships.”

Brigitte Stepanov, Faculty, George Institute of Technology, “Cruelty, War, Fiction: Redefining the In-Human.”

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Research Travel Grants

Matilde Manara, Postdoctoral Fellow, Collège de France, “Proustmania! Reading, writing, sewing Proust today.”

Christina Olivares, Ph.D. candidate, Department of English Education, Teachers College at Columbia University, “Reparative Gestures/Queering Education: Eve Kosofsky Sedwick’s pedagogical practices and James Sears’ research in adolescent education.”

Evan Pavka, Faculty, Department of Art & Art History, Wayne State University, “Reconstructing ‘Queer Space’.”

Consumer Reports, Featured, From Our Collections, Hartman Center, Students and Interns

Color Television on Fire

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Post contributed by Blake Beaver, a graduate student intern for the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History.

A decade-plus institutional battle occurred between United States television networks, set manufacturers, and governmental agencies over implementing a technical color standard for TV. The National Television Standards Committee (NTSC)’s second standard, implemented in 1953, included color, allowing color television to compete with black-and-white in manufactured sets and programming. Finally, in the early 1970s, color television sales overtook those of black-and-white sets, and all three major television networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) produced and aired color programs. However, several scares about the safety of color television sets from the late 1960s to the mid-1970s complicated the technology’s hard-won prominence. The radiation levels of color TV sets formed one primary concern. As Susan Murray documents in her history of color television, the panic was “likely exaggerated in its scope and potential dangers,” yet:

It succeeded in bringing to the surface anxieties about the connection between vision problems and television screens, a more general concern over the possibility of radiation leaks from everyday technological objects, a growing mistrust in science toward the decade’s end, and an underlying fear of nuclear war (Murray 2018, 247).

The Rubenstein Library’s recently acquired Consumer Reports Archives shed light on a second safety scare that plagued color television, previously undocumented in Murray and other scholars’ histories: fires.

image showing television set on fire
Product testing for a 19-inch color television set from the Consumer Reports Iconographic materials collection.

 

Relevant manuscripts from the Technical Department include correspondence with parties as diverse as television consumers, set manufacturers, government agencies, and legal firms, in addition to enclosed reports and ephemera like the National Commission on Product Safety’s press release from January 27, 1970, which publicized the color TV fire hazards. These manuscripts extend our understanding of cultural anxieties about color television beyond the radiation problem.

The collection’s first mention of the fire hazard controversy appears in a letter from consumer Frederick P. Schmitt to the Consumers Union on October 16, 1969. Schmitt attached a clipping of a Newsday article, “U.S. Is Checking TV Fire Danger,” published the same day, which reported on a presidential commission to investigate the fire hazards of color TV sets.

Newsday article on color TV fire hazards from the Consumer Reports Technical Department records.

 

Schmitt complained to the union that the government protected “the alleged culprits” by omitting the manufacturers’ names and inquired whether the union knew of “these potential killers” so he might prevent the “risk” of “danger” and “possibly death” from his color set. Unfortunately, per the response from Monte Florman, Associate Technical Director at the Consumers Union, the presidential commission refused to release information to the union and the public.

The National Commission on Product Safety’s release on the matter advised that “approximately 22 million color TV sets” were in use at the time and provided a staggering statistic about the disproportionate flammability of color television sets compared with their black-and-white counterparts: “a smoke and fire incident ratio” of “about 40 to 1.”

National Commission on Product Safety press release header from the Consumer Reports Technical Department records.

Although the commission’s press release applauded “the industry for its efforts” to ameliorate the hazards, not all television set manufacturers handled the controversy in this manner. We observe this fact in the collection’s most extensive exchange about the fire controversy, a series of letters from 1970 between consumer Melvyn L. Marks of Silver Springs, Maryland, Sylvania Entertainment Products, and the Consumers Union. Sylvania’s lackluster response to Marks, whose 21LC 28 M set experienced a fire in its “high voltage flyback transformer,” speaks to manufacturers’ inconsistent approach to such a crisis.

Melvyn L. Marks’s letter to Sylvania Entertainment Products from the Consumer Reports Technical Department records.

 

After repeatedly reaching out to Sylvania about their intentions to “correct or pay for correction of these faulty units,” which “other companies have publicized that they will,” Sylvania subjected Marks to the rigamarole of numerous follow-up communications and a comprehensive service history. Marks signs off in a particularly zesty follow-up, “Awaiting your long overdue reply.”

In addition to consumers, insurance companies and their legal representatives communicated with Consumer Reports. In a letter dated June 3, 1970, San Francisco-based attorney Warren Sullivan wrote the union on behalf of his client, Balboa-Newport Insurance Company, seeking the union’s assistance in “[recovering] [a] loss of $11,000, which occurred by reason of a fire to [their] assured’s home” and which they claim was caused by the client’s Sears & Roebuck “colored television set” catching fire or exploding “in the middle of the night while the set was in the ‘turned off’ position.”

These concerns over the flammability of color television sets continued into the mid-1970s. Tragically, some of these fires proved fatal. In 1973, a memo from the newly formed United States Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), launched a year prior by the Consumer Product Safety Act (CPSA), announced “a possible fire hazard in 12,000 Zenith 19-inch table model color television sets,” in one instance causing the death of “several members of the family.’

This brief glimpse into an overlooked scandal in U.S. television history is just one example of the diverse research trajectories that the Consumer Reports Archives facilitate. In addition to consumer electronics, the Technical Department records collection includes materials on testing procedures, methods, data, and evaluations for appliances, automobiles, chemicals, foods, public services, special projects, and textiles. The collection is available at Duke University’s Rubenstein Library, and the finding aid can be found here.

References

Consumer Product Safety Commission, memorandum. September 13, 1973. Washington D.C. Consumer Reports. Technical Department records, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University.

Melvyn L. Marks to Sylvania Entertainment Productions Division, letter. February 16, 1970. Silver Springs, M.D. Consumer Reports, Technical Department records, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University.

Melvyn L. Marks to Sylvania Entertainment Productions Division, letter. May 18, 1970. Silver Springs, M.D. Consumer Reports, Technical Department records, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University.

Susan Murray. 2018. Bright Signals: A History of Color Television. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

National Commission on Product Safety, press release. “Commission Releases Information on Color TV Hazards.” January 27, 1970. Washington D.C. Consumer Reports. Technical Department records, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University.

Warren Sullivan to Consumer Reports, letter. June 3, 1970. San Francisco, C.A. Consumer Reports. Technical Department records, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University.

Archive of Documentary Arts, Bingham Center, Do Your Research, Featured, Franklin Research Center, From Our Collections, Gender and Sexuality History Collections, Hartman Center, History of Medicine, Human Rights Archive, Travel Grants

2023-2024 Research Travel Grants Open

The David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library is now accepting applications for our 2023-2024 research travel grant program. Our program is open to all kinds of researchers– artists, activists, students, and scholars—whose work would be supported by sources from the Rubenstein Library’s research centers.

Research travel grants of up to $1500 are offered by the following Centers and research areas:

Archive of Documentary Arts
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Travel Grants
Harry H. Harkins T’73 Travel Grants for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History
History of Medicine Collections
Human Rights Archive
John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American History and Culture
John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History
Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture (Mary Lily Research Grants)

Each grant offering is specific to the associated subject area and collection holdings, and our archivists can help you determine eligibility for your project. We encourage applications from students at any level of education; faculty and teachers; visual and performing artists; writers; filmmakers; public historians; and independent researchers. Applicants must reside beyond a 100-mile radius of Durham, N.C., and may not be current Duke students or employees. Awards are paid as reimbursement after completion of the research visit(s). The deadline for applications will be Friday, February 24, 2023, at 6:00 pm EST. Recipients should be announced by the end of April 2023, and grants will be for travel during May 2023-June 2024.

An online information session will be held Thursday, January 19, 2023, 1-2 EST.  This program will review application requirements, offer tips for creating a successful application, and include an opportunity for attendees to ask questions. This program will be recorded, and posted online afterwards.  Register for the session here. Further questions may be directed to AskRL@duke.edu with the subject line “Travel Grants.”

[An earlier version of this post had the incorrect date for the info session. It will be held Thursday, January 19.]

Consumer Reports, Featured, From Our Collections, Hartman Center

The Consumer Reports Archive

Post contributed by Joshua Larkin Rowley, Reference Archivist, John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History

The Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History acquired the archive of Consumer Reports, the consumer advocacy and education non-profit, in October of 2019.  Staff were thrilled with the new acquisition and eager to make these fabulous collections available to researchers as soon as possible.  Then…the pandemic hit.

Finally, after nearly three years and hours of work by staff and interns in the Rubenstein Library’s Technical Services Dept. approximately 65 individual collections have been fully described and made available.  To mark the occasion we’ve published a website dedicated to highlighting the breadth of the Consumer Reports Archive, the history of the organization, a selection of archival collections, recently cataloged print items, and its interdisciplinary potential in teaching.  Explore the site here and check out some highlights from the collection below.

Two fake mouths mounted on a cylinder with red lipstick residue from testing.
Lipstick tester from the testing equipment collection.
Image showing cover of Consumers Union Reports.
First issue of Consumer Reports, May 1936.
Letter on Consumers Union letterhead.
Consumer Reports founder Colston Warne’s sworn statement that he’s never been a member of the Communist Party, April 1953, from the Colston Warne Papers
Image showing pen testing equipment with six pens writing on a white sheet of paper.
Pen tester from Consumer Reports Iconographic Collection.
image showing a room of television sets
Television set test from the Consumer Reports Iconographic Collection.
Archive of Documentary Arts, Bingham Center, Featured, Franklin Research Center, Gender and Sexuality History Collections, Hartman Center, History of Medicine, Human Rights Archive, Travel Grants

Announcing our 2022-2023 Travel Grant Recipients

The Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2022-2023 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!

Archive of Documentary Arts

Rebecca Bengal, Independent Researcher, “‘Bad Roads Ruin Even the Best of Cars’: William Gedney’s Kentucky.”

Alexandra Le Faou, Independent Researcher, “James H. Karales European Exhibition.”

Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture (Mary Lily Research Grants)

Brianna Anderson, Ph.D. candidate, Department of English, University of Florida, “‘A Smidgeon of Ecofeminism’: Envisioning Environmental Issues and Activism in Women’s Zines.”

Rachel Corbman, Faculty, Mount Holyoke College, “Conferencing on the Edge: A Queer History of Feminist Field Formation, 1969-1989.”

Benjamin Holtzman, Faculty, Lehman College, “’Smash the Klan’: Fighting the White Power Movement in the Late Twentieth Century.”

Cindy Lima, Ph.D. candidate, Northwestern University, “Transnational Latinas: A Twentieth Century History of Latina Politics.”

Molli Spalter, Ph.D. candidate, Department of English, Wayne State University, “”Feeling Wrong and Feeling Wronged: Radical Feminism and ‘Feeling Work’.”

Emily Hunt, Ph.D. candidate, Emily Hunt, Georgia State University, “‘We are a Gentle Angry People and We are Singing for Our Lives’: A Story of Women’s Music, 1975-1995.”

Felicity Palma, Faculty, Department of Film and Media Studies, University of Pittsburgh, “of flesh and feelings and light and shadows.” (Grant sponsored jointly with the Archive of Documentary Arts.)

Lara Vapnek, Faculty, Department of History, St. John’s University, “Mothers, Milk, and Money: A History of Infant Feeding in the United States.” (Grant sponsored jointly with the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing History.)

John Hope Franklin Center for African and African American History and Culture

William Billups, Ph.D. candidate, Department of History, Emory University, “”Reign of Terror”: Anti-Civil Rights Terrorism in the United States, 1955-1976.”

Thomas Cryer, Ph.D. candidate, Institute of the Americas, University College London, “’Walking the Tightrope’: John Hope Franklin and the Dilemmas of African American History in Action.”

Mikayla Harden, Ph.D. candidate, Department of History, University of Delaware, “Remnants: Captive African Children in the Black Atlantic World.”

Frances O’Shaughnessy, Ph.D. candidate, University of Washington, “Black Revolution on the Sea Islands: Empire, Property, and the Emancipation of Humanity.”

Emily Tran, Ph.D. candidate, University of Wisconsin-Madison, “American Reckonings: Confronting and Repressing the Racist Past and Present, 1968-1998.”

Evan Wade, Ph.D. candidate, Department of History, University of Connecticut,” Henrietta Vinton Davis: From Teacher to Black Nationalist– an examination of a Black Woman’s Politics.”

Elizabeth Patton, Faculty, Department of Media and Communication Studies, University of Maryland Baltimore County, “Representation as a Form of Resistance: Documenting African American Spaces of Leisure during the Jim Crow Era.” (Grant sponsored jointly with the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing History.)

Harry H. Harkins T’73 Travel Grants for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History

Mori Reithmayr, Ph.D. candidate, University of Oxford, “Community Before Liberation: Theorizing Gay Resistance in San Francisco, 1953-1969.”

Cathleen Rhodes, Faculty, Department of Women’s Studies, Old Dominion University, “Touring Tidewater: An Immersive Virtual Walking Tour of Southeastern Virginia’s Queer History.”

John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing History (John Furr Fellowship)

Jennifer Hessler, Faculty, Department of Media, Journalism, and Film, University of Huddersfield, “Television Ratings: From Audimeter to Big Data.”

Conrad Jacober, Ph.D. candidate, Department of Sociology, Johns Hopkins University, “Debt Prophets: American Bankers and the Origins of Financialization.”

Jeannette Strickland, Independent Researcher, “Lever Brothers Advertising and Marketing, 1900-1930, in the J. Walter Thompson Archives.”

John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing History (Alvin Achenbaum Travel Grants)

Anne Garner, Ph.D. candidate, Department of History and Culture, Drew University, “Recovering Throwaway Histories: Patent Medicine, Black Americans and the Blues in the Postbellum Piedmont.”

Rachel Plotnick, Faculty, Department of Cinema & Media Studies, Indiana University Bloomington, “License to Spill: Where Dry Devices Meet Liquid Lives.”

Elizabeth Patton, Faculty, Department of Media and Communication Studies, University of Maryland Baltimore County, “Representation as a Form of Resistance: Documenting African American Spaces of Leisure during the Jim Crow Era.” (Grant sponsored jointly with the John Hope Franklin Center for African and African American History and Culture.)

Lara Vapnek, Faculty, Department of History, St. John’s University, “Mothers, Milk, and Money: A History of Infant Feeding in the United States.” (Grant sponsored jointly with the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture.)

History of Medicine Collections

Jessica Dandona, Faculty, Minneapolis College of Art and Design, “Skeletons in the Drawing Room: Popular Consumption of Flap Anatomies, 1880-1900.”

Jeremy Montgomery, Ph.D. candidate, Department of History, Mississippi State University, “‘Look To Your Map’: Medical Distinctiveness and the United States, 1800-1860.”

Haleigh Yaspan, Master’s candidate, School of Medicine and Dentistry, University of Rochester, “Forceps, Women’s Rights, and Professional Turf War: Pregnancy and Childbirth in the United States, 1914-1962.”

Human Rights Archive

Molly Carlin, Ph.D. candidate, School of Media, Arts and Humanities, University of Sussex, “How to Jail a Revolution: Theorising the Penal Suppression of American Political Voices, 1964-2022.”

Tyler Goldberger, Ph.D. candidate, Department of History, College of William & Mary, “”Generalísimo Franco is Still Alive!”: Transnational Human Rights and the Anti-Fascist Narrativization of the Spanish Civil War and Francisco Franco Dictatorship within the United States, 1936-Present.”

Thomas Maggiola, Master’s candidate, Department of Latin American Studies and History, University of California San Diego, “Guatemala’s Transnational Civil War, 1970-1996.”

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Research Travel Grants

Jennifer Doyle, Faculty, University of California Riverside, “Alethurgy’s Shadows: Harassment, Paranoia, and Grief.”

Annie Sansonetti, Ph.D. candidate, Department of Performance Studies, New York University, “Reapproaching Feminine Boys and Transgender Girls in Queer and Trans Theory and Art.”

Post compiled by Roshan Panjwani, Staff Assistant, Rubenstein Library

Archive of Documentary Arts, Bingham Center, Do Your Research, Featured, Franklin Research Center, Gender and Sexuality History Collections, Hartman Center, History of Medicine, Human Rights Archive, Travel Grants

Applications Open for 2022-2023 Research Travel Grants

The David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library is now accepting applications for our 2022-2023 research travel grants. If you are a researcher, artist, or activist who would like to use sources from the Rubenstein Library’s research centers for your work, this means you!

Research travel grants of up to $1500 are offered by the following Centers and research areas:

  • Archive of Documentary Arts
  • Harry H. Harkins T’73 Travel Grants for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History
  • History of Medicine Collections
  • Human Rights Archive
  • John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American History and Culture
  • John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History
  • Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture (Mary Lily Research Grants)
  • Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Papers

We encourage applications from students at any level of education; faculty members; visual and performing artists; writers; filmmakers; public historians; and independent researchers. (Must reside beyond a 100-mile radius of Durham, N.C., and may not be current Duke students or employees.) These grants are offered as reimbursement based on receipt documentation after completion of the research visit(s). The deadline for applications will be Saturday, April 30, 2022, at 6:00 pm EST. Grants will be awarded for travel during June 2022-June 2023.

An information session will be held Wednesday, March 23rd at 2PM EST.  This program will review application requirements, offer tips for creating a successful application, and include an opportunity for attendees to ask questions.  Register for the session here. Further questions may be directed to AskRL@duke.edu.

Image citation: Cover detail from African American soldier’s Vietnam War photograph album https://idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r4319wn3g

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

Santa and Me!

Post contributed by Rick Collier, Technical Services Archivist for the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History.

A child in a dark sweater and shorts smiles while sitting on Santa's lap. A Christmas tree with tinsel stands behind them.For many towns and cities in 20th century America, the holiday season officially began just after Thanksgiving, which was established as a fixed national holiday in 1941. Frequently festivities included a parade that involved local dignitaries, youth clubs, business and social organizations, a Miss Something-or-Other pageant winner, high school bands, fire engines, culminating in the arrival of Santa Claus in some ostentatious conveyance. Town folk stood in yards and sidewalks, sometimes for hours in freezing weather, to witness the spectacle. To this day, even, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade ends with the Santa Claus float.

Afterwards, Santa generally installed himself in one or several of the local department stores, meeting children, hearing their wishes, and sometimes posing for photographs. In all it was a wonderfully odd synthesis of folklore, consumerism, and technology. How did it begin?

It is generally accepted that Macy’s Department Store featured the first in-store Santa Claus character beginning in the 1860s.  Perhaps the first in-store Santa Claus that we might recognize, the rotund and jolly old man inspired by the stories of Washington Irving and illustrations of Thomas Nast, was James Edgar who posed as Santa as a promotional act in 1890 at his dry goods store in Brockton, Mass. The idea caught on and soon Santas were featured in department stores across the country. In the early 1940s, photographers and studios such as Art French in Seattle and Kiddie Kandids, based in the Midwest, began photographing Santa posed with children. What started out as a way to make money in what might otherwise be an off-season became a way to create mementos of childhood.

Recently the Hartman Center acquired a small collection entitled “Santa and Me!”, named for a promotional campaign conducted by Kiddie Kandids, a chain of photograph studios that apparently began in St. Louis and expanded to include over 2,000 studios located in major and regional department stores throughout the United States. The photographs, taken between 1946 and 1948, depict Santa with children on his knee, as well as some other themed settings such as Alice in Wonderland and the circus. There are also shots of Santa on a department store stage with the photographer’s booth hidden in a wall, as well as some images of how the camera was set up to capture the moment of Santa and child.

A man dressed as Santa Claus sits on a gilded carved chair in front of drapery. A Christmas tree stands on either side. He's seated on a platform with entrance and exit ramps and railings.

Accompanying documentation describes how to conduct an “Operation Santa Claus” campaign: instructions on pricing; how to match the children to their photographs; distribution; how to set up the camera and process the flow of children. There are even recommendations on processing children through the experience: “This is a candid photograph and the children can be taken as fast as Santa wants to move them along. At the rate of 300 per hour, 2,000 to 3,000 is not unreasonable.”

This small collection provides a glimpse into an aspect of mid-century holiday celebrations and a commercial photographic practice that was only a few years old at the time. The collection is available at Duke’s Rubenstein Library and the collection guide may be viewed here.

Sources:

Digital Collections, Featured, From Our Collections, Hartman Center, Instruction

Taking Flight: The Pan American World Airways Digital Collection and DPLA Portal

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Post contributed by Leah Tams, Pan Am CLIR Grant Intern.

For National Aviation Day, the Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History is excited to announce the launch of the Pan American World Airways Advertisements Digital Collection, which was supported with a Digitizing Hidden Collections grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources. The Pan American World Airways Digital Collection comprises over 6,500 advertisements from the Hartman Center’s collections, including the J. Walter Thompson Domestic Advertisements, J. Walter Thompson Frankfurt Office Advertisements, and Wells Rich Greene Inc. The digital collection spans most of Pan Am’s history, beginning with its World War II-era expansion and military involvement, and ending with Pan Am’s 1991 acquisition by Delta Airlines.

1991 Delta and Pan Am advertisement. The ad shows an illustration of Earth with "Anywhere You Want" printed in large type below. Six columns listing Delta and Pan Am's service cities flank the illustration.
Anywhere You Want ad, 1991.

The Pan Am Digital Collection can be searched using free-text keyword searches, as well as through faceted searching by year, aircraft type (under the “Subject” search facet), language, departure and arrival locations, and source collection. Highlights from the Pan Am Digital Collection include:

  • First passenger service across Pacific, Atlantic, to South America, etc.
  • First jet service, including the debuts of the Boeing 707 and 747.
  • Inaugural service between New York and Moscow.
  • Noteworthy campaigns including the Clipper concept, “around the world service,” and the debut of new services such as in-flight entertainment.
An ad showing a photograph of a Pan Am 747 on a runway. The ad reads "The first 747s to Hawaii are flying Pan Am."
The First 747s to Hawaii are Flying Pan Am ad, 1969.

The Pan Am Digital Collection is part of a larger collaboration with the University of Miami Libraries, who hold the corporate records of Pan Am, and HistoryMiami Museum, who hold artifacts from Pan Am. Together, our digitized materials and artifacts serve as the foundation of the Digital Public Library of America’s new aviation portal, Cleared for Takeoff: Explore Commercial Aviation. In addition to showcasing Pan Am’s history and impact on aviation, the DPLA portal also includes materials related to the broader history of other commercial aviation in America and associated airlines. The portal will eventually feature a chronological representation of Pan Am’s achievements and history through an interactive timeline, which is linked at the top of the portal. The timeline curates materials from each grant partner and puts otherwise disparate items in conversation with each other.

The DPLA Aviation Portal will eventually feature a Primary Source Set, curated by members from the Hartman Center, UMiami Libraries, and HistoryMiami. The Primary Source Set is meant for classroom use and focuses on how Pan Am impacted and “shrank” the world, encouraging critical thinking and analysis of primary source documents and touching upon numerous social, political, and cultural issues.

The Hartman Center is grateful to the Council on Library and Information Resources and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for funding this important project, as well as to our colleagues at UMiami Libraries, HistoryMiami, the DPLA, and our colleagues in Digital Collections & Curation Services and Conservation Services in Duke libraries.

From Our Collections, Hartman Center

Carl Spielvogel, 1928-2021

Post submitted by Jacqueline Reid Wachholz, Director, John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising, & Marketing History

The Rubenstein Library mourns the loss of Carl Spielvogel, advertising executive, diplomat, and donor, who died April 21st.  He started his long career at the NY Times and was their six day a week advertising columnist from 1957-60.  His successful column caught the eye of many folks on Madison Avenue, but Marion Harper hired him for public relations at the ad agency McCann-Erickson in 1960, which led to a long career with that agency and its future parent company,

Interpublic, where he ultimately became vice-chairman.  He left Interpublic in 1979 and soon after partnered with Bill Backer to found a new ad agency, Backer Spielvogel.  Against all odds the startup agency quickly took off with several big clients, including Miller beer, for whom the agency coined the slogan “It’s Miller Time,” and “everything you ever wanted in a beer … and less” for its product Miller Lite.  The new agency succeeded in taking large accounts away from other agencies, but maintained its small agency advantages of flexibility and personal service.  He retired from the agency he helped found in 1994 and undertook other ventures as chairman and chief executive of United Auto Group, and later found Carl Spielvogel Enterprises, a global investment and marketing company. President Bill Clinton appointed him ambassador to Slovakia from 2000 to 2001.  A lifelong New Yorker, Spielvogel also served as board member for many corporate, civic and cultural institutions.

The Rubenstein Library’s Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History has the papers of Carl Spielvogel, including an oral history conducted with him in 2013.

Bingham Center, Events, Featured, Franklin Research Center, Hartman Center, History of Medicine, Human Rights Archive, Readings and Talks, Students and Interns

Library Internship Open House – April 7

Date: April 7, 2021
Time: 3:00 pm ET
Location: Zoom
Register Here

Interested in archival and library work? Come learn about the internships being offered at the Rubenstein Library in Fall of 2021!

On April 7th at 3:00pm Rubenstein Library staff will be hosting an information session and open house where you can learn about the Rubenstein Library, meet the intern supervisors, get details on the internship projects, and ask questions.

The following internships available at the Rubenstein Library in the coming academic year:

  • Consumer Reports Processing Intern: The Consumer Reports Processing Intern will primarily arrange and describe archival materials held in the Consumer Reports Archives collections, part of the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing in the Rubenstein Library. The intern may also participate in outreach, programming, and instruction activities, depending on opportunities and the intern’s abilities and interests.
  • Josiah Charles Trent Internship: Working closely with the History of Medicine Collections, this position will provide support for public services and collection development activities of the History of Medicine.
  • Human Rights Archive, Marshall T. Meyer Intern: Working with RL Technical Services and Research Services staff, you will primarily provide support for research services, technical services, and collection development activities of the Human Rights Archive.
  • John Hope Franklin Research Center Internship: The John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American History and Culture seeks a reliable candidate to fill the position of Franklin Research Center intern. Working closely with the center’s director, you will provide support for public services and collection development activities. This internship provides an opportunity to work closely with the center’s collections which include rare books, personal papers and manuscripts, oral histories, audiovisual, and ephemeral materials that document the African and African Diaspora experience from the 16th century to present day.