Hartman Center Director Jackie Reid Wachholz (at left) speaks to visitors from The Forest at Duke retirement community about advertising in the 1950s. The ads displayed on the table are from the Hartman Center’s collections.
For more photos from the presentation, visit the RBMSCL Collection at the Duke University Libraries’ Flickr photostream.
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!
Date: 1 February-1 May 2011
Location and time: Rare Book Room cases during library hours
Contact information: Jennifer Thompson, 919-660-5922 or jennifer2.thompson(at)duke.edu
African Americans have had an important, if not always publicized, role in every American war. Our new exhibit, “‘Brave Deeds Are Proudly Spoken of’: African American Military Service,” explores some of the ways in which the stories of these men and women have been recorded and asks the question, “How should this story be told for future generations?”
During the wars of the 18th and 19th centuries, many African Americans sought to gain freedom by enlisting in the military, which they believed would eventually ensure them rights and privileges as American citizens. In the conflicts of the 20th century, African Americans fought bravely to defend their nation abroad only to return home to discrimination and segregation. On display are artifacts, documents, photographs, and printed material that reveal these struggles and triumphs of African Americans in the U.S. military.
This exhibit highlights one of the collecting interests of the John Hope Franklin Research Center, which is currently celebrating its 15th anniversary.
Post contributed by Jennifer Thompson, John Hope Franklin Research Center Librarian.
You are the captain of a ship bound for Carolina. As you near the coastline, your normally brave crew begins to mutter about treacherous waters—and possible mutiny.
What do you decide to do?
Onward! The sea is no place for cowards!
Turn around and head for safe harbor!
(Details from A New Discription [sic] of Carolina, ca. 1671.)
Should you be lucky enough to make it to land, our friends at Preservation Underground reveal the terrors that await you!
From Protest to (PRODUCT) RED: Generational Shift in U.S. Human Rights Activism
Date: Thursday, 10 February 2011
Time: 5:00 PM
Location: Rare Book Room
Contact Information: Patrick Stawski, 919-660-5823 or patrick.stawski(at)duke.edu
The Consortium in Latin American and Caribbean Studies conference kicks off with a celebration of anniversaries: 30 years of human rights activism by the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA); the 50th anniversary of the Inter-American Human Rights Commission; and the 100th anniversary of the Organization of American States.
Since WOLA’s founding in 1974, both the human rights community and the community of nongovernmental organizations working on Latin American issues have grown and evolved. Joe Eldridge, Alex Wilde, George Vickers, and Joy Olson—all current and former Executive Directors of WOLA—will discuss how the organization rethinks its position within these overlapping sectors to determine the best contribution it can bring to their collective work. The panel, moderated by Robin Kirk, Director of the Duke Human Rights Center, will explore how human rights challenges and the activism(s) that address them have changed and adapted to the shifting currents of national and international policy and history.
WOLA is the premier U.S.-based human rights organization working on Latin America. The Archive for Human Rights is the repository for the WOLA archives. Since 2008, WOLA and Duke University have co-sponsored the WOLA-Duke Book Award for the best non-fiction work on human rights and social justice in Latin America.
This event is presented by the Archive for Human Rights and co-sponsored by the Duke Human Rights Center and the Consortium in Latin American and Caribbean Studies.
Post contributed by Patrick Stawski, Human Rights Archivist.
Date: Wednesday, 26 January 2011
Time: 3:00-4:00pm
Location: Rare Book Room
Contact Information: Kelly Wooten, 919-660-5967 or kelly.wooten(at)duke.edu
Kate Eichhorn, Assistant Professor of Culture and Media at The New School and Mary Lily Research Grant recipient, will speak during her research visit to use the zine collections at the Bingham Center.
Based on over fifteen years of ethnographic and archival research, Dr. Eichhorn’s talk, “Feminist Artists, Activists, and Archivists: Redefining Feminism through the Archive since 1990,” will examine how and why young feminist artists, activists, archivists, and librarians adopted the archive and library as sites of feminist activism in the early 1990s—a period when many established feminist institutions, including presses and bookstores, were collapsing under the pressure of neoliberal restructuring. Her talk will bebased on her book-length project, The Order of Resistance: Redefining Feminism through the Archive, 1990-2010.
(Details about Kate Eichhorn’s 2008 book of poetry, Fond, are available on her website.)
Lines of Life
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.
—After Hölderlin
Post contributed by Will Hansen, Assistant Curator of Collections. “Lines of Life” by Reynolds Price. Photo from the Reynolds Price Papers, 1927-2006 and undated, bulk 1956-2006.
Date: 17 January-1 May 2011
Location and Time: Special Collections Gallery during library hours and Frederic Jameson Gallery, Friedl Building
Contact Information: Karen Glynn, 919-660-5968 or karen.glynn(at)duke.edu, or Patrick Stawski, 919-660-5823 or patrick.stawski(at)duke.edu
al margen (“living on the margin”) is the result of seven years of photography by Petra Barth in fourteen countries of South America, Central America, and the Caribbean. 70 gelatin silver prints are on display in two campus venues: 40 prints at the Frederic Jameson Gallery in Friedl Building on East Campus and 30 prints in the Special Collections Gallery.
Barth’s photography aims “to tell stories about the everyday lives of people living on the margin—their struggles and their dreams.” In her own words,
I use a spontaneous, intimate approach to photograph the daily life of individuals. I look for quiet, reflective moments when people are unaware of the camera and my presence, and genuine feeling is conveyed. Pieced together, these moments describe, with extraordinary clarity, the living conditions all across Latin America and the Caribbean, from Haiti’s streets to the suburbs of Nicaragua and El Salvador, and from the favelas of Rio to the victims of the recent tsunami in Concepcíon, Chile.
My photographs reveal moments that are not often depicted because they happen every day. My camera simultaneously captures the unusual in the ordinary and the ordinariness of the unusual. We often see images of devastated landscapes and human suffering in the wake of disastrous events, but that is only one part of life. What happens before, after, and in between these times? Despite struggle, there is also happiness and the ability to move on and create new narratives every day.
al margen is a candid photographic work that attempts to establish documentary photography as an art form as well as a method of communication. I would like to raise awareness about the living conditions of those who are marginalized, but I am also interested in people and the beauty of ordinary life.
Petra Barth’s photographs are part of the Archive of Documentary Arts.
al margen was organized by the Archive of Documentary Arts and the Archive for Human Rights. The exhibit is sponsored by the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, the Program in Latino/a Studies in the Global South, the Department of Cultural Anthropology, International Comparative Studies, and the Duke Human Rights Center.
Join us for an opening reception and panel discussion, as well as a gallery tour led by Petra Barth, on Thursday, Feburary 24th from 4:00-6:00 PM in the Frederic Jameson Gallery. Stay tuned to The Devil’s Tale for more details about this event!
This letterhead seems a fitting choice for this last day of National Letter Writing Week.
From, um, the stack next to the staff printer. (Send us a letter!)
From the Richard Harvey Wright papers, 1870-1967.
(At the upper left, you’ll see evidence of the reason why archivists use stainless steel paperclips.)
