Happy Friday! Preparing for our upcoming renovation continues at the Rubenstein. This book’s title made us giggle, especially considering the high temperatures we’ve been facing lately in Durham. If you’d like to learn more about Spontaneous Combustion: A Literary Curiosity, you can check out the catalog record. It is a 1937 medical publication discussing cases of spontaneous combustion in literature.
For more photos of our favorite renovation discoveries, visit the Rubenstein’s Flickr page.
The Rubenstein Library at Duke University will acquire the papers of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, a scholar, writer and theologian who is widely recognized as one of the most influential religious leaders of the 20thcentury, the school announced Monday.
Heschel was a highly visible and charismatic leader in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements. He co-founded Clergy Concerned About Vietnam and served as a Jewish liaison with the Vatican during the Second Vatican Council, also known as Vatican II.
The collection, which has never before been available to scholars, consists of manuscripts, correspondence, publications, documents and photographs spanning five decades and at least four languages. Included among the papers are notes and drafts for nearly all of Heschel’s published works, as well as intimate and extensive correspondence with some of the leading religious figures of his time, including Martin Buber, Thomas Merton, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Reinhold Niebuhr. The papers also contain extensive documentation on Heschel’s life-long commitment to social justice, including planning documents, correspondence with organizers, speeches and even hate mail.
The archive will open for research after conservation review and archival processing are complete.
For more information, visit the full press release!
One of our many renovation-related tasks involves re-foldering and re-boxing our fragile newspapers. The Rubenstein Library has thousands of American newspapers, dating from the Revolutionary War through the early twentieth century. Here is one of the highlights, from The Daily Express of Petersburg, Virginia, 1858 Dec.:
Post contributed by Carrie Mills, Holdings Management Assistant in the Rubenstein Library’s Technical Services Dept.
Over the past few months, Perkins staff has been shifting books out of the 3rd floor of the library to make room for the Rubenstein Library to have a home away from home during the renovation. We will be opening our reading room on the 3rd floor of Perkins on January 7, 2013. This month, construction begins in earnest. When we go check on the space, we even have to bring hard hats and safety glasses — this is kind of a thrill for some of us! (Okay, maybe just me.)
Our temporary home will house our reading room as well as work spaces for our Research Services, Collection Development, and University Archives staff. We will also to be able to keep a portion of our collections onsite during the renovation.
As our regular readers know, moving out of our current space is no easy task. In addition to prepping the collections for the move, we also have to execute a safe and secure move in a short period of time with minimal impact on our researchers. We know we cannot do this without the help of professional movers, so we have been talking with and reviewing bids from various moving companies.
Back in 1969 when the library addition we now know as Perkins Library opened, the books were moved by fraternity brothers around campus. Some days I wish our move would be that simple. Although, after looking at the picture below of the 1969 move (from the Duke University Archives), I’m happy we will have the professionals involved.
For more photographs of the Rubenstein renovation, visit the Library’s Flickr page.
Post contributed by Molly Bragg, Collections Move Coordinator in the Technical Services Dept.
LEMUEL JOHNSON (15 January 1828 – 29 April 1900) taught for more than thirty years the entire mathematics curriculum at Trinity College when it was a fledgling institution located in Randolph County, North Carolina.
Though there is no present building or other monument to his name at Duke, the Rubenstein Library holds in various collections a small memorial to this pioneer faculty member in the form of four manuscript letters, a mathematics primer that was widely distributed during the Civil War era, a carte de visite of him and another of the Trinity faculty of the late 1870s, and an 1887 map of Durham County printed from his own manuscript map, the first published presentation of the bounds of this county after its formation in 1881 from sections of Orange, Wake, and Granville.
He was the second graduate of Normal College, Trinity’s predecessor, when it was a very humble institution situated in a rural, red clay, Quaker-Methodist corner of the Carolina piedmont. There, beginning in 1852, he taught courses in arithmetic, mensuration, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and calculus as well as performing the duties of college treasurer, librarian, and first president of the Trinity College alumni association.
Among his most memorable achievements as an educator was his tutoring of the gifted Giles sisters, every evening in his parlor after a full day of classroom teaching. Mary Z. Giles, Persis P. Giles, and Theresa Giles were graduated with the Trinity class of 1878 (although segregated into a “Ladies” column with less than full membership), an event that the Wilmington Morning Star reported as “unprecedented in the history of North Carolina colleges.” Indeed, the celebrated Sallie Walker Stockard, early historian of Alamance county and first female matriculate at the University of North Carolina, received her diploma in Chapel Hill in 1898.
In the last years of his life, Professor Johnson supported himself through hard times by teaching in rural high schools and by working intermittently as a civil engineer, and his maps of Randolph and Davidson counties are available online via the NC Maps site.
Post contributed by David Southern, Rubenstein Library researcher and Managing Editor for the Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle at the Duke University Press.
Among the many treasures of the Rubenstein Library is an impressive collection of nearly 3,000 historic American newspapers. As part of our major renovation project, these items along with all our collections are being physically prepared for their impending move. In the case of the newspapers, this is a particularly daunting task. Large in scale, centuries old, sometimes folded, and typically preceded, superseded, and sometimes paralleled with alternative titles, it is often difficult to know what goes together and in what order. While such changes in title and places of publication can befuddle those of us working on rehousing the collection in appropriate order, they sometimes offer remarkable clues about America’s history.
Take, for instance, the Massachusetts Spy. Begun by Isaiah Thomas in 1770, it was the first American newspaper geared toward the middle class. While an average newspaper of the time might have 400 subscribers, Thomas grew the circulation of his paper to more than 3,500. An adamant patriot with close connections to John Hancock, Paul Revere, and other Sons of Liberty, Thomas used his paper to broadcast anti-British views and inflame the colonists to action. The British considered Thomas so dangerous that his name was on the list of twelve people to be summarily executed if captured.
The last edition we have of the Mass Spy published in Boston is issue number 217 published on March 30, 1775, less than a month before the Battle of Lexington. Subtitled Thomas’s Boston Journal, Thomas included a version of Benjamin Franklin’s “Join or Die” cartoon in the paper’s masthead.
The paper next appears in Worchester, under a new title—The Massachusetts Spy, Or, American Oracle of Liberty—and with a new masthead—this one proclaiming in large letters “Americans!—Liberty or Death!—Join or Die!”
While changes in newspaper titles and places of publication are common, the significance of this one cannot be overstated. With tensions rapidly escalating in Boston, and with Thomas on the British’s most wanted list, the printer waited until the last possible moment to smuggle his press and himself out of heart of the controversy and to the relative safety of Worchester, some forty miles west of Boston. And, when he printed his first issue of the newly reconstituted paper on May 3, 1775 he deliberately changed the subtitle and masthead to reflect the nature and urgency of his message.
On the paper’s front page, Thomas gave his own account of the dramatic events that unfolded in prior weeks: “I accordingly removed my Printing Materials from Boston to this Place, and escaped myself from Boston on the memorable 19th of April, 1775, which will be remembered in future as the Anniversary of the Battle of Lexington!” He devotes much of the issue to firsthand accounts of the battle, the first published: “Americans! Forever bear in mind the Battle of Lexington!—where British Troops, unmolested and unprovoked, wantonly, and in a most inhuman manner fired upon and killed a number of our countrymen, then robbed them of their provisions, ransacked, plundered and burnt their houses! nor could the tears of defenceless women, some of whom were in the pains of childbirth, the cries of helpless babes, nor the prayers of old age, confined to beds of sickness, appease their thirst for blood!—or divert them from their DESIGN of MURDER and ROBBERY!”
Given the rarity of this issue with its firsthand accounts of the very first battle of the American Revolution, I was surprised to discover that there are two copies in the Rubenstein Library’s newspaper collection. A further curiosity is that each is signed by Thomas in the lower left-hand corner.
Closer inspection reveals that the signature is photo-mechanically reproduced, a technology not available in 1775. Both our copies are in fact facsimiles reproduced from Thomas’s own copy which resides at the American Antiquarian Society in Worchester, the nation’s third oldest historical society which Thomas founded after he retired as a printer and editor. The facsimiles were most likely produced in 1876 in celebration of the country’s centennial.
The fact that our copies are facsimiles produced more than 125 years ago is fascinating in its own right, and tells us something about the history of how this country has celebrated anniversaries. I do not know yet how these two copies will be boxed and foldered with other original issues from the Mass Spy; but, I do know that our newspapers will be ready to move out of Perkins in time for the renovation — just like Thomas was ready to move out of Boston in time for the Revolution.
Post contributed by Kat Stefko, Head of the Technical Services Dept. in the Rubenstein Library.
We’re going to start our second update on Duke’s participation in the CCC Project with exciting news: the first three CCC-digitized collections are now available online! You can now find digitized content directly through each collection’s finding aid. Take a minute and check out the digitized portions of the Basil Lee Whitener Papers, the Rencher Nicholas Harris Papers, and the Women-in-Action for the Prevention of Violence and Its Causes Records.
This month, we feature an item from the Basil Lee Whitener Papers. Whitener was a Democratic Congressman representing Mecklenburg County (N.C.) from 1957 through 1968. Like many other Democrats from the South (who collectively became known as “Dixiecrats”), Whitener was a vehement opponent of integration and any federal action intended to address civil rights issues.
His papers contain a great deal of correspondence, speeches, bills, and other materials that reflect both the views of constituents regarding civil rights and how he acted in the House of Representatives to try to derail reform-minded legislation.
Whitener’s opposition was firm, but such groups as the NAACP and the North Carolina Baptist Student Union sent telegrams and letters to the Congressman arguing for strong civil rights legislation. Knowing that these efforts fell on deaf ears, who then actually lobbied against civil rights legislation? The answer is the NRA . . . but not that NRA. The organization in question is the National Restaurant Association; the letter that their representative Ira Nunn sent to Whitener in opposition to what would become the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is presented below.
The given reason for the NRA’s opposition to H.R. 7152 was that its proposals “can only result in the diminution of free enterprise and of the rights and freedoms of all citizens.” Decode this political jargon and you will see that the NRA disapproved of the proposed ability of the federal government to mandate the integration of all public dining spaces.
Instead, the NRA offered the solution of voluntary integration. In his letter, Nunn claimed that voluntary integration had been a “widespread success.” While Nunn’s claim was literally true insofar as a certain percentage of restaurant owners had chosen to integrate their establishments voluntarily, the spirit of the argument is false. Restaurateurs were not en masse choosing to integrate their establishments, especially in the South. For example, only forty percent of businesses in Greensboro were integrated by the end of 1963. Nationally, out of a possible 60,000 districts where mandated integration could have existed, only 1,000 had integrated facilities. It is understandable that Nunn would like to present his industry as reform-minded while preserving laissez-faire standards, but the historical reality does not corroborate his argument.
Why would Nunn and restaurateurs more broadly oppose civil rights reform? While a culture of segregation may have contributed to the NRA’s opposition, it is much more likely that members of the NRA feared the potential loss of business that forced integration would entail, especially in the South. Therefore, at its core, the NRA’s argument against integration was primarily economic rather than cultural or social, making it stand out from most anti-integration documentation from the early 1960s. Furthermore, in an ironic twist given Whitener’s role as a representative of North Carolina, it is probable that the NRA’s economic argument was in part inspired by the events of the 1960 Greensboro Sit-In and subsequent protests across the South. In fact, such protests provided strong evidence of the social role of restaurants and the necessity for integrating their dining counters, even if the members NRA could only see the possibility of losing customers and profit.
The grant-funded CCC Project is designed to digitize selected manuscripts and photographs relating to the long civil rights movement. For more information on this project, including updates on the progress of digitization, please check out the CCC website. As part of the outreach efforts of the CCC Project, monthly blog posts to The Devil’s Tale will provide updates on the latest Rubenstein Library collections to be digitized for the project. Stay tuned!
Post contributed by Josh Hager, CCC Graduate Assistant.
Preparing our oversize manuscripts for the upcoming renovation means spending lots of time in a corner of the stacks, pulling folder after folder out of our oversize cabinets and trying to prepare these giant documents and photographs to be moved in a few months. “Oversize” is a term that archivists use to refer to things that are bigger than legal- or letter-sized paper. At Duke, our oversize documents range in dimensions from 11×14 all the way up to 40×50 inches in width and height. (We have things in our collections that are even bigger, but their move prep is a different process.)
The oversize cabinets have been used to house collections for decades, and there are hundreds of folders in each cabinet. It’s challenging work, but also fascinating to spend time with manuscripts and photographs that we’ve never had a chance to see in our years of working at Duke. (Usually, as Technical Services archivists, we work with new or unprocessed collections; most of the oversize cabinet collections are very old and were processed a long time ago.) There are so many wonderful collections in the Rubenstein, there’s no way that we would normally have the time to poke through them all — except now we get to, because we have to check them over for the renovation. Here are our favorite “new to us” discoveries from our oversize stack work. This project will be ongoing for the next several months, so more photos to come as we keep digging!
Post contributed by Mary Samouelian and Meghan Lyon, archivists in Rubenstein Technical Services.
Preparing the Rubenstein Library holdings for the move requires the coordination of different departments completing different sets of tasks, sometimes in a specific sequence. For example, first our conservation team will go through a range of books and check their condition to see if they need any extra attention before moving. Next, our holdings management team comes through and looks for missing barcodes and checks the records of our titles. Lastly, students and staff come through and load volumes into trays that are moving offsite. So, how do we coordinate and communicate the efforts of all these different groups?
Three words: color-coded post-it notes.
Conservation has tended to flag their efforts with yellow notes, holdings management uses blue, and everyone uses hot pink as signal that something is 100% “ready to move.” In some parts of the stacks, yellow post-its are also used to signal a manuscript box that needs to be reviewed for padding. Also, book-traying teams use post-it notes to signal where they have left off on sealing Tyvek envelopes or duplicating barcodes in preparation for loading books into trays.
We have other tools for tracking more preparation efforts, such as spreadsheets and access databases. The post-it note system is just as effective as these more sophisticated tools. Post-it notes are easy to understand, easy to update, do not require the use of technology, and are easy to access by people in different departments. Although we really rely on technology to make this move happen, it is nice to know that we can also rely on good old-fashioned paper tools.
Plus our stacks are now very colorful, which makes for some lovely photos. Check out lots of pictures of the renovation on Flickr!
Post contributed by Molly Bragg, Collections Move Coordinator in Rubenstein Technical Services.
While working on preparing print materials for the Rubenstein Library’s upcoming move, I came across a few books on American women’s etiquette. I glanced inside and found rules, rules, and more rules! Although the publication dates range from 1873-1924, the authors seemed to agree on specific social laws of conduct. For instance, one must never shout hello to an acquaintance across the street (“a certain sign of vulgarity”), and a lady should never have a man on each arm or vice versa (apparently, this is only done in Ireland). One of the books decreed never to join in a dance unless you skillfully know the steps. Otherwise, one will “bring disorder into the midst of pleasure!”
These social rules were listed under headings describing every instance of everyday life imaginable- dressing, eating, visiting relatives or friends, attending church, weddings, traveling, even how to not hurt a person’s feelings. It was very interesting to see how vastly different American society and culture were 100 years ago. We have our rules as well (whether followed or not), but nothing like these prim guidelines.
Cullen Cornett is a Holdings Management Assistant in Rubenstein Technical Services.
