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!
Brigid Antonia Brophy, Lady Levey (1929-1995), was an English writer of novels, biographies, essays, and other works, and a major feminist and pacifist voice of the 1960s and beyond. She was greatly influenced by Freudian psychoanalytic theory, and this collection shows her engaging with Sigmund Freud’s texts: marking passages of interest to return to, jotting notes to capture moments of inspiration. In one volume she laid in an untitled manuscript on telepathy.
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.
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)
When I first began investigating the Robert Boyd Family Papers at Duke’s Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, I expected to find something that would appeal to genealogists of this family and those researching the history of Abbeville County, South Carolina. I didn’t know that I would discover a rich story about the triumphs of love and the tragedies of war. I would not have believed that two years later their story would be available to the world in The Boys of Diamond Hill: The Lives and Civil War Letters of the Boyd Family of Abbeville County, South Carolina. With the guidance of the staff at RBMSCL and my editors at McFarland Publishers, that is exactly what has happened.
The backbone of this work can be found in the 86 letters of the five Boyd brothers and the husband of their eldest sister lovingly preserved in the RBMSCL. With the additional research of this family and the units they served in, their full story slowly emerged. In April 1861, brothers Daniel and Pressley Boyd joined the Confederate army. Soon the war would sweep the other three Boyd brothers—William, Thomas and Andrew—as well as their brother-in-law Fenton Hall, away from their farm in Abbeville County, South Carolina. Researching this collection uncovered warmth, humor, horror and loss of four long years of war.
I understand from descendants of Fenton Hall that a number of letters from this family had been lost in a house fire. They were thrilled to learn that those destroyed did not constitute the entire body of the brothers’ letters. It is so wonderful that Duke has preserved these surviving letters so the fascinating lives of these young men would not be lost to history. The helpful staff and wonderful facilities made the marathon sessions with this collection a joy and their support through the preparation for the publication process was invaluable.
To learn more about the book, as well as Keith’s other research projects, visit his website!
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Today, March 26, 2011, would be the hundredth birthday of Tennessee Williams, one of America’s great playwrights. The Carson McCullers Papers here at Duke contain many letters between McCullers and Williams, most from the late 1940s, shortly after Williams had written McCullers a fan letter and the two had immediately become close friends. The letters are full of passionate discussion of their work, travels, and deep affection for each other.
On behalf of McCullers and all lovers of American theatre and literature: Happy birthday, “10 Darling.”
Post contributed by Will Hansen, Assistant Curator of Collections.
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During the summer of 1970, four remarkable American writers and editors paid a visit to 70 year old Northumbrian poet Basil Bunting in his home in Corn Close, Yorkshire, England. The leader of this group was Jonathan Williams, poet and founder of North Carolina’s the Jargon Society, which published the works of innovative poets such as Charles Olson, Denise Levertov, and Duke alumnus Guy Davenport.
Williams asked his companions to stop and pose for the camera “near the end of the trek up the Pennines,” a low-rising mountain range separating the North West of England from Yorkshire. “Quite a rough go, by the way.”
On Hadrian's Wall, back of photograph.
Williams helpfully typed on the back of this small (2 ½ inch square) photo the names of those pictured. From the left is Williams’ life partner, the poet and translator Thomas Meyer; Dan Gerber, co-founder of the Michigan-based little magazine Sumac; and Russell Banks, then a recent graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill (BA ‘67), and now the prominent novelist and author of The Sweet Hereafter, Affliction, and other acclaimed books.
He then sent the snapshot to R. Philip Hanes, an executive at Hanes Dye and Finishing Company, who was a founding board member of the Jargon Society.
The photo comes from the R. Philip Hanes Papers. Hanes’ papers provide a rich and entertaining look at one small, North Carolina publisher’s fund raising efforts. Williams’ wit and garrulousness shows in the letters. He has many names for money, for instance, names like “lucre,” “lolly,” “moola,” “smackers,” and plenty of others. “I’m apparently not doing as a fund-raiser. But, us mountain boys is a mess, that’s been true for hundreds of years.”
We also learn about some of Hanes’ interests: “Dear Morchella Esculenta,” Williams writes in August 1971, “One suspects there will be a conglutination of those fearsome fungi of yourn this year. Lots of showers here lately too. Everything grows heavily—the pollens, the tourists, anglophobia, anglophilia—the lot.”
That is, Hanes hunted mushrooms.
Post contributed by David Pavelich, Head of Research Services.
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On any ordinary Monday morning in 1992, then-North Carolina Senator and former President of Duke University Terry Sanford began his week attending to the public’s business. However, this particular Monday in March happened to be the day after Selection Sunday and, like so many of us, Senator Sanford contemplated his blank NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament bracket at the expense of perhaps more pressing work.
Among the hundreds of linear feet of Terry Sanford’s records and papers held in the RBMSCL (his senatorial papers) and University Archives (records from his Duke presidency) is his 1992 NCAA Tournament bracket. Although he couldn’t have foreseen Christian Laettner’s last second turnaround jumper against Kentucky and Duke’s trouncing of Michigan’s “Fab-5” in the tournament final, the man that the Duke Student body fondly referred to as “Uncle Terry” chose Duke to repeat as NCAA champions. Will they do it again in 2011?
Post contributed by Josh Larkin-Rowley, Research Services Assistant.
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The King’s Speech, the film dramatizing King George VI’s efforts to conquer his stutter, is thrilling cinephiles, history buffs, and Colin Firth admirers. On Sunday, the film received four Oscars: Best Picture, Best Actor in a Leading Role (Firth), Best Directing (Tom Hooper), and Best Original Screenplay (David Seidler). It was nominated for an additional eight Oscars, making it the most-nominated film this year.
Our Herbert Henry Asquith Papers contain letters written to this former Prime Minister and his second wife, Emma, by George VI’s father, King George V (played in the film by Michael Gambon), and brother, Prince George, the Duke of Kent. We’d like to share a letter from King George V to Emma Asquith, written from perhaps one of the more recognizable home addresses in the RBMSCL’s collections.
Post contributed by Elizabeth Dunn, Research Services Librarian. With special thanks to Sam Hammond, Original Cataloger of Rare Materials.
A few months ago, UNC-Chapel Hill graduate student Adam Domby spent a morning at the RBMSCL studying several of our manuscripts collections, including a heretofore unidentified North Carolina farm woman’s diary. “You know,” he said as he prepared to leave, “I think I could figure out who wrote that diary.”
Read the full story in the most recent issue of the Duke University Libraries Magazine!
Various as roads, the lines life takes—
Twisting like the boundaries of lakes.
What we lack here, some god can there increase
With harmonies, amends, enduring peace.
