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

RBMSCL Travel Grants: $$$ to Visit Us!

Photo by Mark Zupan.

Good news, researchers! The RBMSCL is now accepting applications for our 2011-2012 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 RBMSCL. 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, 2011. Recipients will be announced in March 2011.

We’re also excited to announce that the RBMSCL will be offering three new grants this year for scholars interested in using our German Studies and Judaica collections. Additional information about applying for one of these three grants will be available on our grants website soon. These new grants will have a later deadline.

Do Your Research, Events, News and Features

Congratulations to the 2010 Middlesworth Award Winners!

On Friday, the RBMSCL celebrated with students and parents at one of our favorite events of the year: the Middlesworth Award and Durden Prize Reception.

Given annually, the Middlesworth Awards recognize the authors of the best undergraduate and graduate student papers based on research in the collections of the RBMSCL. Funding for the awards has been generously provided by Chester P. Middlesworth (A.B., 1949) of Statesville, NC.

2010 Middlesworth Award winners Adrienne Niederriter, Bonnie Scott, and Hannah Craddock.

Undergraduate student winner Adrienne R. Niederriter plumbed the depths of the Hartman Center’s Ad*Access image database for her paper, “Speak Softly and Carry a Lipstick: Government Influence on Female Sexuality through Cosmetics during World War II.”

Undergraduate student winner Hannah C. Craddock received her award for her senior honors thesis, “‘A New Self-Respect and a New Consciousness of Power’: White Nurses, Black Soldiers, and the Danger of World War I.” Craddock’s study focused upon the Ann Henshaw Gardiner Papers and the Samuel Loomis Hypes Papers.

Graduate student winner Bonnie Scott’s paper began at the heart of Duke’s West Campus, as she compared sermons preached in the Duke Chapel to those preached by North Carolina minister Kenneth M. Johnson during the Civil Rights Movement.

Their papers will now become part of the RBMSCL’s collections.

We know that great papers are being researched and written this semester as well. If you are a Duke student, submit your paper and we might be toasting you next fall! Details about submitting your paper can be found here.

Archive of Documentary Arts, Events, Films, From Our Collections, Human Rights Archive

Rights! Camera! Action!: Brother Towns

Date: Monday, 1 November 2010
Time: 7:00 PM
Location: Carolina Theatre
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

Brother Towns / Pueblos Hermanos (59 min.) is a story of two towns linked by immigration, family, and work: Jacaltenango, Guatemala, a highland Maya town, and Jupiter, Florida, a coastal resort town where many Jacaltecos have settled. The docunmentary film chronicles how and why people migrate across borders, how people make and remake their communities when they travel thousands of miles from home, and how people maintain families despite their travel. To learn more, visit the film’s website.

This screening is part of the Latin American Film Festival sponsored by the Consortium in Latin American and Caribbean Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill and Duke University, the Center for Documentary Studies, and the Carolina Theater and will be followed by a panel discussion (panelists TBD).

The Rights! Camera! Action! film series, which is sponsored by the Archive for Human Rights, the Archive of Documentary Arts, the Duke Human Rights Center, the Franklin Humanities Institute, and Screen/Society at Duke’s Arts of the Moving Image Program, features documentaries on human rights themes that were award winners at the annual Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. The films are archived at the RBMSCL, where they form part of a rich and expanding collection of human rights materials.

From Our Collections, Just for Fun

Not Even Covered in Chocolate Sauce

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Wonders never quite cease at the RBMSCL. If ever there were a foodstuff that we strongly believed should not be associated with dessert, it was cauliflower. And then we discovered The Dessert Book: A Complete Manual from the Best American and Foreign Authorities with General Economical Recipes (written by a Boston Lady in 1872). So, in honor of National Dessert Month, we present:

Not dessert.
Not dessert.

Meringues in the Form of Cauliflowers

Fill a biscuit-forcer with Italian meringue-paste, and push this out upon bands of paper, in knobs, or large dots, superposed or mounted one upon the other in such form or fashion, that, when complete, it shall represent, as nearly as possible, the head, or white part, of a cauliflower (of course, on a very diminished scale, of the size of a pigeon’s egg, for instance): this pat of the cauliflower, when fashioned, is to be sprinkled over with rather coarse granite sugar.

The under part, or green leaves, which envelop a cauliflower, are imitated in a somewhat similar manner to the above by pushing out the paste in pointed dots upon bands of paper, in the manner and form as directed for the imitation of the heads, only somewhat flatter: these, in order the better to represent green leaves, are to be sprinkled over with green granite sugar; and when both parts have been dried in the closet, or screen, stick the head, or white part, upon the leafy or green part; thus you will form more or less truthful imitation of a cauliflower, according as in a greater or lesser degree you may have displayed your taste.

Should you want to make these for your next dinner party—imagine the aghast looks on your guests’ faces!—you’ll find the recipe for Italian Meringues after the jump.

Continue reading Not Even Covered in Chocolate Sauce →

Events, Jazz Archive, Readings and Talks

In Conversation: Michael Cuscuna

Date: Wednesday, 27 October 2010
Time: 7:00 PM
Location: Regulator Bookshop
Contact Information: Jeremy Smith, 919-660-5839 or jeremy.smith(at)duke.edu

Grammy Award winning record producer Michael Cuscuna (Blue Note Records, Mosaic Records) will discuss his work producing the recordings of jazz pianist Horace Silver.

Silver was one of the leading composers and pianists of the hard bop era of jazz, and his music will be the focus of a concert by the SFJAZZ Collective the following evening at Page Auditorium.

SFJAZZ Collective

This event is co-sponsored by Duke Performances and the Jazz Archive.

Bingham Center, Events, Exhibits, Readings and Talks, RL Photos

Pictures at an Exhibition

Click to enlarge.

On Friday, library staff members and UNC SILS students gathered for an impromptu gallery talk for our new exhibit, “Book + Art: Artists’ books from the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture,” led by curators Christine Wells and Kelly Wooten and exhibits coordinator Meg Brown. For more pictures from the gallery talk, visit the Bingham Center’s Flickr photostream.

And remember: book artist and photographer Bea Nettles will be speaking tomorrow at 5:30 PM in the Rare Book Room as part of this fall’s Book + Art series of events!

Bingham Center, Events, From Our Collections, Readings and Talks

Stories of SNCC

Date: Sunday, 24 October 2010 
Time: 3:00 PM
Location: Durham County Library Auditorium, 300 N. Roxboro Street
Contact Information: Will Hansen, 919-660-5958 or william.hansen(at)duke.edu

To celebrate the publication of the essay collection, Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC, editor Faith S. Holsaert (whose papers are held by RBMSCL) and contributor Margaret Herring will speak along with Nia Wilson, Executive Director, and Mya Hunter, member of SpiritHouse, a local grassroots organization that supports the empowerment, transformation, and self-determination of marginalized communities of color.

In Hands on the Freedom Plow, fifty-two women—northern and southern, young and old, urban and rural, black, white, and Latina—share their courageous personal stories of working for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) on the front lines of the Civil Rights Movement. Along with these stories, participants in the panel will discuss the legacy and continuing work of women for civil rights and equality.

This event is co-sponsored by the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture, the North Carolina Collection at Durham County Library, and The Regulator Bookshop.

From Our Collections, Just for Fun

Voting = Cake

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In honor of National Dessert Month (which everyone celebrates, right?), we’ll be posting recipes from the RBMSCL’s collection every Friday this month. Last Friday—The Devil’s Tale’s first birthday—we started the celebration with a recipe for a pretty pink birthday cake.

Today’s recipe comes from an advertising brochure with a marvelous title: How to Make Bread (But Not in This Disagreeable Old-Fashioned Way). Really, we’re not making that up:

You see, this brochure advises the smart homemaker to purchase The Universal Three Minute Bread Maker from Landers, Frary & Clark (of New Britain, Connecticut). The transformation is nothing short of astonishing:

And, of course, no advertisement for an absolutely revolutionary bit of kitchen gadgetry would be complete without a few recipes to make with said gadgetry. So, in honor of a certain approaching first Tuesday in November, we offer this fine recipe:

Loaf, or Election Cake

Put into the Bread Maker one and one-half cups milk, one cup potato yeast, one cup sugar, five cups flour, turn crank three minutes, put on cover and raise till light. When light, add one cup shortening, (half butter and lard), one cup sugar, whites of two eggs, nutmeg to season, turn crank five minutes, cover and raise again till light. Fill pans with batter and fruit (raisins or citron, or both), well floured alternately, until pans are two-thirds full, add also fruit on top.

The cake should stand in the pans about one-half hour and then be baked in a moderate oven.

Now we’re off to eBay to find a 100-year-old Universal Three Minute Bread Maker.

Events, Exhibits, From Our Collections, University Archives

“To Keep the Future Worthy of the Past”

Date: 14 October-3 January 2011
Location and Time: Rare Book Room cases during library hours
Contact Information: Tim Pyatt, 919-684-8929 or tim.pyatt(at)duke.edu

William Preston Few, undated

“‘To Keep the Future Worthy of the Past’: The Legacy of William Preston Few” celebrates the centennial of Few’s inauguration as President of Trinity College on November 9, 1910.

Few accepted the presidency of Trinity College promising “. . . to keep the future worthy of the past.” This would be no hollow promise as, over the next three decades, he would transform the strong and growing liberal arts college into a major research university and help shape James B. Duke’s transformative gift.

Memorabilia from the inauguration, as well as documents and images pertaining to the growth of Trinity College into Duke University, will be on display in this exhibit.

The Duke University Archives will also commemorate the anniversary of President Few’s inauguration with a special event on Tuesday, 9 November 2010 at 4:00 PM in the Rare Book Room. Watch The Devil’s Tale in the coming weeks for further details about this event.

Post contributed by Tim Pyatt, Duke University Archivist.

Bingham Center, Events, Exhibits, From Our Collections, Readings and Talks

Book + Art

Date: 13 October 2010-9 January 2011
Location and Time: Perkins Library Gallery during library hours
Contact Information: Kelly Wooten, 919-660-5967 or kelly.wooten(at)duke.edu

During your next visit to Perkins-Bostock Library, be sure to stop by the Perkins Library Gallery to see the eclectic selection of artists’ books on display in “Book + Art: Artists’ Books from the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture.” Or if you can’t visit in person, you can enjoy the online exhibit!

R & J: the txt msg edition. Elizabeth Pendergrass. J. Hastings, 2006.

So what exactly is an artists’ book? In the most general terms, it is an original work of art that that incorporates or innovates upon the book form in some—often dramatic—way. These books combine traditional arts, such as graphic design, printmaking, and bookbinding, with the full spectrum of contemporary art practice and theory, expanding and redefining the form. In this exhibit, you’ll see books in the form of a cell phone, a grandmother clock, women’s underwear, and even the traditional paperback book structure. The themes highlighted in this exhibit and in the Bingham Center’s artists’ book collection as a whole reflect the strengths of our broader collection of print and manuscript materials documenting women’s lives: motherhood and family, the domestic sphere, women’s bodies, sexuality, and women’s health.

This exhibit is part of this fall’s Book + Art series, part of a semester-long celebration of book arts in collaboration with UNC Libraries. In the coming weeks, the Bingham Center will be sponsoring several events about the book arts:

Aging Gracefully. Bea Nettles, 2002.

Bea Nettles, Book Artist and Photographer
Date: Thursday, 21 October 2010
Time: 5:30 PM
Location: Rare Book Room

Bea Nettles is a book artist and photographer whose work addresses issues of family relationships, the body, and the ways in which personal identities reflect political and social realities. She will give a lecture with book signing and light reception to follow. For more about Bea Nettles, visit her website.

Careers in Book Arts
Date: Wednesday, 10 November 2010
Time: 9:30 AM
Location: Room 217, Perkins Library

Panel discussion about making a career out of a love of book arts, featuring Laurie Corral, founder of Asheville Bookworks, Dave Wofford of Horse and Buggy Press, and Meg Brown, Duke conservation librarian and exhibits coordinator. Moderated by Beth Doyle, Duke conservation librarian.

Post contributed by Kelly Wooten, Research Services and Collection Development Librarian for the Sallie Bingham Center of Women’s History and Culture.

Dispatches from the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Duke University