Category Archives: Hartman Center

From Our Collections, Hartman Center, Just for Fun

A Thanksgiving Menu from the Hartman Center

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In honor of all the cooking and eating we’re planning to do for Thanksgiving, we wanted to share a few menus and recipes from Thanksgivings past. Over the next couple of days, look for delicious posts drawing from the Hartman Center’s extensive collection of advertising cookbooks.

Today’s recipe comes from a cookbook published by the Calumet Baking Powder Company in the 1920s. The following Thanksgiving menu, the author suggests, is perfect for “the average woman, who must prepare for her parties alone or with one maid to help,” without making everyone “uncomfortable” by becoming “a flushed and worried hostess.” I think we’d all appreciate the help of that maid this year!

  • Assorted canapés
  • Turkey with chestnut stuffing and giblet gravy
  • Baked onions
  • Baked squash
  • Caramel sweet potatoes
  • Mashed potatoes
  • Molded cranberry jelly with celery and olives
  • Orange delight salad
  • Pumpkin pie
  • Caramel Nut Cake
  • Salted Nuts
  • Bonbons

The featured recipe – Caramel Nut Cake (pictured below) – of course contained Calumet Baking Powder. The picture doesn’t look too appetizing, but it sure sounds good. And where can I get one of those mini turkeys?

Caramel Nut Cake

  • ½ cup shortening
  • 1 cup sugar
  • ¾ cup milk
  • 4 eggs
  • 2 cup sifted flour
  • 2 level tsp. Calumet Baking Powder
  • ¾ cup chopped nuts

Sift flour three times with baking powder. Cream shortening, add sugar, gradually add egg yolks and nuts. Add dry ingredients alternatively with milk. Fold in stiffly beaten egg whites. Bake in 2 layers in a moderate oven  (375 degrees F.). Ice with caramel icing, sprinkle the top and sides of cake with chopped nuts.

You can check out more images like these in the Emergence of Advertising in America digital collection. Stay tuned for more recipes later this week!

Post contributed by Liz Shesko, Intern for the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Marketing, and Advertising History.

From Our Collections, Hartman Center, In the Conservation Lab, News and Features

In the Lab: Scrapbooking for Victory, Part Two

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In 1918, the week of November 11-18 was not only a celebration of the end of World War I, but was coincidentally also a week of massive fundraising by the United War Work Campaign to support troops and boost morale until their work was done.  The scrapbook of posters and pamphlets from the campaign was described previously in the post “Scrapbooking for Victory.”

The scrapbook has been undergoing treatment in the conservation lab for the last couple of months.  As a paper conservator, I’ve been collaborating with book conservator Meg Brown to treat the album’s myriad problems, from the damaged binding to the fragile items glued to the pages.  The scrapbook has been a challenge because of its large size and the awkward folding items it contains.  The conservation problems have required hands-on treatment, lots of brainstorming sessions, and ongoing dialogue with curators to understand how the scrapbook will be used.  It’s a popular item with librarians, professors and researchers, and it’s no surprise; it’s a wonderful book!

Before Treatment: Tears to a Poster in the United War Work Campaign Scrapbook

Meg cleaned, consolidated and relined the spine to make the text block stronger, and she used the spine lining to securely attach the text block to the cover.  I’ve been mending tears and flattening creases in the posters and leaflets, many of which have broken at the folds from handling and from insect attack.  A few of the damaged booklets will be lifted from the pages and housed in pockets for easier, safer access.  The largest poster in the book unfolds to 82 x 41 inches (208 x 104 cm), so I’ve had to commandeer extra table space.  It’s especially useful at times like this to have a table on wheels that adjusts in height!

Grace and a Very Large Poster

When the treatment is finished, a storage box will be made, and the scrapbook will be sent back upstairs to the Rubenstein Library for all to enjoy.

For more photos of the scrapbook, and its restorative sojourn in the Conservation Lab, visit the “United War Work Campaign Scrapbook” set on the Rubenstein Library’s Flickr photostream.

Post contributed by Grace White, Conservator for Special Collections, as part of our ongoing “In the Conservation Lab” series.

Bingham Center, Do Your Research, Franklin Research Center, Hartman Center, News and Features, Travel Grants

Travel Grant Season is Open!

Wish you were here? We do too! The David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library is now accepting applications for our 2012-2013 travel grants.

The Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture, the John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American History and Culture, and the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History will award up to $1,000 per recipient to fund travel and other expenses related to visiting the Rubenstein Library.

The grants are open to undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, independent scholars, artists, and activists living outside a 100-mile radius from Durham, NC with research projects that would benefit from access to the centers’ collections.

More details—and the grant application—may be found on our grants website. Applications must be postmarked or e-mailed no later than 5:00 PM EST on January 31, 2012. Recipients will be announced in March 2012.

Standard Gas Stations Billboard Proof.
Standard Gas Stations Billboard Proof. From the Outdoor Advertising Association of America Archives.

Some of last year’s recipients include:

At the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture:

  • Marika Cifor, a master’s student in History and Library and Information Science at Simmons College, who used the Bingham Center’s lesbian pulp fiction collection for master’s thesis research on the historical relationships of lesbians and prostitutes in the United States, 1869-1969.
  • Jennifer Nelson, Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at University of Redland, visited the Bingham Center to conduct research for a book on community health reform movements from the mid-1960s to the present using the Feminist Women’s Health Center Records.
  • Emily Thuma, a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Race and Gender at University of California, Berkeley is visiting this week for post-doctoral research to revise her dissertation, “Not a Wedge, But a Bridge”: Prisons, Feminist Activism, and the Politics of Gendered Violence, 1968-1987. (Check out this blog post for details about Emily Thuma’s upcoming talk.)

At the John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American History and Culture:

  • Ira Dworkin, Assistant Professor, Department of English and Comparative Literature, The American University in Cairo, for research on African Americans in the Congo, particularly George Washington Williams.
  • Nina Ehrlich, master’s student, Department of History, Colorado State University, for a study of relationships between black and white women during the Civil Rights Movement.
  • Tyler D. Parry, Ph.D. candidate and master’s student, Department of History, University of South Carolina, for dissertation and article exploring slave kinship in the Antebellum South.

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

  • Leif Frederickson, an independent researcher from Missoula, MT for research on “From Public Pedagogy to Business Branding: The Development of Green Advertising, 1950-1995.”
  • Janet Golden Professor at the Department of History, Rutgers University to research “The History of American Babies.”
  • Laura Phillip, a Ph.D. candidate at the Corcoran Department of History, University of Virginia for research on “Marketing of the Fair Trade Message.”

Post contributed by Kate Collins, Bingham Center intern.

Bingham Center, Do Your Research, Events, Franklin Research Center, From Our Collections, Hartman Center, History of Medicine, Just for Fun, Manuscripts, Rare Books, University Archives

Haunted Library Screamfest

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Date: Halloween, Monday, October 31, 2011
Time: 11:00 AM-1:00 PM
Location: Rare Book Room
Contact Information: Rachel Ingold, 919-684-8549 or rachel.ingold(at)duke.edu

Have you ever wandered around a library’s stacks in the dark? Or wondered what might go bump in an archival box?

Stop by the Rubenstein Library’s Rare Book Room for a special Halloween “eeeks”-ibit and open house. We’ll be dragging out some of the creepiest and most macabre items from the shadowy depths of the library’s vaults—including the thirteen unlucky items below.

This event is free and open to the living and the dead. There will be candy. Lots and lots of candy.

49 Glass Eyeballs
49 Glass Eyeballs. From the History of Medicine Collections.

1. A travel diary written by John Buck, a young American who found himself face-to-face with Bram Stoker (before he wrote Dracula)

2. Letters to Duke University’s Parapsychology Laboratory describing the 1949 poltergeist case that became the basis for The Exorcist

3. Opera Omnia Anatomico-Medico-Chirurgica by 18th century Dutch anatomist Frederik Ruysch, featuring illustrations of fetal skeletons playing instruments  among “trees” made of veins and arteries and “rocks and stones” that are actually organs, gallstones, and kidney stones

4. An entire box of glass eyeballs (49, to be exact)

5. “Jack the Ripper” and “Cthulhu by Gaslight,” two board games from the Edwin and Terry Murray Role Playing Game Collection

6. Artists’ books Mountain Dream Tarot by Bea Nettles and Femmes Fatales by Maureen Cummins. Tarot cards and pictures of medieval torture devices!

7. Brochures and advertisements for coffins and other funeral-related paraphernalia from the Advertising Ephemera Collection

8.Two copies of Henry Milner’s 1826 melodramatic adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, with the very first illustration of (the actor portraying) “the Monster”

9. Bela Lugosi’s signature

10. Maps and photographs of the Rigsbee Graveyard (yes, the graveyard in the Blue Zone)

11. Comics Review #1, 1965, which includes  Stephen King’s first published story, “I Was a Teenage Grave Robber,”  from the Edwin and Terry Murray Fanzine Collection

12. Halloween postcards (complete with spooky messages . . . or invitations to Halloween parties) from our Postcard Collection

13. Trixie Belden and the Mystery of the Whispering Witch by Kathryn Kenny, 1980

Which one will give you nightmares come the witching hour?

Halloween Postcard, 1908.
Halloween Postcard, 1908. From the Postcard Collection.
Do Your Research, From Our Collections, Hartman Center, Manuscripts, News and Features, Rare Books, RL Scholars

Happy North Carolina Archives Week!

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It’s North Carolina Archives Week, a weeklong celebration of North Carolina’s cultural heritage repositories and the wonderful researchers that use them—that’s you!

Stop in, meet your friendly neighborhood special collections librarians, and request some archival collections and rare books—we think you’ll find that the Rubenstein Library has something for everyone! Or check out the North Carolina Archives Week’s website to find more ways to celebrate with cultural history repositories throughout the state.

Need some inspiration? We’ve gathered together a few previously-published blog posts written by our researchers:

We’ll see you in the reading room!

A very fill Rubenstein Library reading room!

From Our Collections, Hartman Center, News and Features

Week of Students: Jenny Walters

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Today is the first day of a new academic year! Here at the RBMSCL, we’re celebrating this week by taking a closer look at a few of the wonderful student (undergraduate and graduate, Duke and non-Duke) employees who help make this place run. We wouldn’t know what to do without them, and we’d have a lot less fun, too. Thanks, y’all!

Jenny WaltersMy name is Jenny Walters and I am a junior Music major here at Duke.  I have worked in the John W. Hartman Center for Sales,  Advertising, & Marketing History for the past two summers.  This year, in support of the RBMSCL’s upcoming renovation, I got to write up a lot of box lists—basically, inventories of what can be found in each box of an archival collection.  I found a lot of interesting material in these boxes! Some of the funniest things I discovered were job applications for advertisement agencies from the 1950s and 1960s. There were questions such as “Do you have initiative?” and I was surprised to see that many people had answered “no.”  While there is no way that these people would even be considered for a job in this day and age, they were obviously given jobs 50 to 60 years ago.

While I enjoyed discovering everything in all of the boxes, my favorite part of working with the Hartman Center is the advertisements.  I like visually seeing history through the years of advertisements. We even have advertisements from as early as the 1880s!

Two of the most fascinating ads that I worked with this summer were from the 1960s for Seven-Up. The two ads were exactly the same, but one consisted of white people, while the other had black people. The people were in the exact same poses, had the exact same hairstyles, and wore the exact same clothes. Seven-Up wanted to have a broader appeal, but chose to do two ads, reflecting the advertising standards of the day.

Overall, I really enjoy working in the RBMSCL! It’s fun to see all of the different projects people come in to work on and discover something new in the holdings every day.

Post contributed by Jenny Walters, Hartman Center student employee.

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.

Previous posts:

Events, Exhibits, From Our Collections, Hartman Center

Look Boys and Girls!

Date: May 5-July 25, 2011
Location and Time: Rare Book Room cases during library hours
Contact Information: Jackie Reid, 919-660 5836 or j.reid(at)duke.edu

Cover of The Story of PeanutvilleOver the last 30 years, the explosion of Saturday morning cartoons and children’s television programming has caused American parents no shortage of worry about their children’s exposure to advertising. As the Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History’s new exhibit, “Look Boys and Girls! Advertising to Children in the 20th Century,” shows, this advertising is anything but a new phenomenon: advertisers started selling directly to kids, rather than their parents, in the early 20th century. Companies like Heinz and Palmolive published children’s stories (like The Story of Peanutville at right) that positively portrayed their products.

Advertising to Children: A Timeline

1910s: Companies like the Winchester Rifle Company established contests to encourage the use of their products.

Late 1920s: Kids could join “clubs” and might receive prizes and higher status if they consumed more of the sponsoring company’s product. Some companies promoted products through sponsored radio shows and even through schools.

1930s: Comic strip advertising was used to target children and played off the popularity of this section of the newspaper.

1953: Two of the first television shows aimed exclusively at preschoolers, “Baby Sitter” and “Ding Dong School,” were broadcast.

Outdoor Advertising Incorporated Report1960s: As interest in young consumers increased, advertisers consulted the latest psychological studies about how best to target children. This segmentation of the market has continued to narrow, with children now broken into two-year age groups like “tweens” or “explorers.”

1962: McDonald’s ran its first print advertising campaign and used cartoon-like characters to appeal to children.

1979: Well-known children’s advocate, Peggy Charren, testifies before congress, stating that “children’s advertising should be considered, per se, an unfair commercial practice.” Cable station Nickelodeon launches.

Late 1990s: Advertisers continued to expand their reach to these influential customers through the Internet, re-emphasizing “old-fashioned” ways of appealing to children through contests and loyalty clubs.

If you can’t visit the exhibit in person, be sure to check out the online exhibit!

We’d also like to welcome Julian, son of Hartman Center intern Katharine French-Fuller. He made his first visit to the library today (which included a visit to this exhibit)!

Archive of Documentary Arts, Bingham Center, Do Your Research, Franklin Research Center, Hartman Center, Human Rights Archive, Instruction, Manuscripts, Rare Books, University Archives

Instruction is Sweet!

Bill Fick's "Art of the Comic Book and Zines" Class
Photo by Bill Fick.

85 classes! The RBMSCL had another packed semester of instruction, as our librarians welcomed a group of fledgling Walt Whitman scholars from North Carolina State University, two classes from the Trinity School, and even a local Girl Scout troop—in addition to scores of Duke undergraduate and graduate students. We couldn’t have been more pleased when a student from Bill Fick’s “Art of the Comic Book and Zines” class (pictured at right) observed, “this place is like a candy shop—only it’s free!”

Here’s a goodie grab bag of some of the classes we taught this past semester:

  • Architectural Theory from Antiquity to the Renaissance
  • Art of the Comic Book and Zines
  • Cannibalism to Anorexia:  Embodying Social Meaning (Writing 20)
  • Digital Durham
  • Documenting the South
  • The Family in Documentary Photography
  • From Huck Finn to Miley Cyrus: Children’s History Through Popular Culture (Writing 20)
  • History of Punk
  • Introduction to Contemporary Latin America
  • Introduction to Oral History
  • Language in Immigrant America
  • Legal Documents: Yesterday & Today (Writing 20)
  • Looking In, Looking Out: The Language of Photographic Texts (Writing 20)
  • Major Italian Authors
  • Maps, Exploration, and Empire
  • Martin Luther King, Jr.
  • Photographing South Africa
  • Play, Games, and Culture (Writing 20)
  • Reading the Qur’an
  • Religion and Politics
  • Russian Art and Politics
  • Staging Sexualities
  • Suburbs, Malls, Office Buildings
  • Weimar and Nazi Germany
  • Women as Leaders

Wondering if the RBMSCL could support your Fall 2011 course? Send us an e-mail at special-collections(at)duke.edu!