The Radio Haiti Records are the fruit of the work of Haitian dissident and “agronomist” Jean Dominique, and chronicle the station’s role in fighting for the people of Haiti. Jean Dominique was assassinated on April 3, 2000. His widow and Radio Haiti partner, former UN Spokesperson Michele Montas, brought the Radio Haiti Records to the Rubenstein Library last year, and while it has its challenges – its primary language is Haitian Kreyol and its 3,420 analog tape recordings have spent the better of their lives in a mold-inducing tropical climate – it is that rare collection where value (historical, cultural, human) outweighs almost any conceivable obstacle to making it accessible.
To begin the process of digitizing the recordings, as a first step to transcription and translation, we have created a small pilot project that tests our capabilities and captures the kinds of numbers we need to evaluate the costs associated with preserving Radio Haiti in the long term. We made the video below to demonstrate some of the basic considerations in approaching the preservation of this important collection. For more information, check out the Preservation Underground blog, where Head of Conservation Beth Doyle discusses the process we used to clean the mold off the tapes.
Post contributed by Craig Breaden, Audiovisual Archivist
Date: Monday, March 31, 2014 Time: 5:30 p.m. Location: Room 102, Duke Medical Center Library Contact: Rachel Ingold, rachel.ingold@duke.edu or 919-684-8549
Please join the History of Medicine Collections for our spring Trent History of Medicine Lecture Series event. We are pleased Dr. Edward C. Halperin, M.D., M.A., will be presenting, “A Defense of the Humanities in Medical Education.” In his lecture, Dr. Halperin will distinguish between medical humanism and the medical humanities, discuss the role of the medical humanities in medical education with particular emphasis on the role of medical history, and provide some specific examples of the value of the humanities in the education of physicians.
Dr. Halperin was on the faculty at Duke from 1983 to 2006. He was the LR Prosnitz Professor of Radiation Oncology and the RJ Reynolds Professor of Medical Education. From 2006 to 2012 Dr. Halperin was dean of the School of Medicine, Ford Foundation Professor of Medical Education, and professor of radiation oncology, pediatrics, and history at the University of Louisville and university vice provost.
Dr. Halperin’s research has focused on pediatric cancer and the history of racial, religious, and gender discrimination in higher education. He is the co-author/editor of the first five editions of the textbook Pediatric Radiation Oncology and of the fifth and sixth editions of Principles and Practice of Radiation Oncology. He has published more than 200 articles in the peer-reviewed scientific, historical, education, and ethics literature.
Dr. Halperin is currently Chancellor for Health Affairs and Chief Executive Officer at New York Medical College and Professor of Radiation Oncology, Pediatrics, and History as well as Provost for Biomedical Affairs at Touro College.
Date: Thursday, March 27, 2014 Time: 6:00 p.m. Location: Room 217, Perkins Library Contact: Kelly Wooten, kelly.wooten@duke.edu
In honor of its 25th anniversary, the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture will host an evening with author, playwright, teacher, and feminist activist, Sallie Bingham, who will reflect on 25 years of documenting women’s history at Duke and offer her vision for the Center’s next 25 years.
Rachel Seidman, Associate Director, Southern Oral History Program, at UNC-Chapel Hill and visiting lecturer in Women’s Studies at Duke University, will begin the program with her perspective on Bingham Center contributions to preservation, teaching, and activism.
In 1988, the Women’s Studies Archivist position was created thanks to the generosity of author, playwright, teacher and feminist activist Sallie Bingham. In collaboration with pioneering historian Anne Firor Scott, Duke Women’s Studies’ Founding Director Jean Fox O’Barr and then head of Special Collections Robert Byrd, Sallie Bingham determined that Duke was the right place to create a new archive for women’s history. The center was permanently endowed in 1993 and named the “Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture” in 1999 to honor Bingham’s vision and legacy.
Thought “Dirty Durham” was new? Turns out, in the early 20th century people already thought Durham was dirty, as this undated flyer from our collections shows. However, they weren’t saying “Keep it Dirty, Durham.” They wanted to change “Dirty Durham to Cleaner Durham.”
Post contributed by Kate Collins, Research Services Librarian
Bruno Foa (1905-1999) was an Italian-born, Jewish economist, lawyer, consultant, and professor. Educated in Italy as an economist and lawyer, Foa became Italy’s youngest full professor of economics at age 28. In 1937, he married Lisa Haimann, a refugee from Munich, and they moved to London in 1938. While in London, Foa worked for the British Broadcasting Company, the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, and guest lectured at the London School of Economics. In 1940, Foa moved his family to the United States. He began work at Princeton University on a Rockefeller Foundation Grant and later moved to Washington D.C., where he worked for the Rockefeller Foundation, the Office of Inter-American Affairs, the Bureau of Latin American Affairs and the Federal Reserve Board.
We have recently re-processed the Bruno Foa Papers in order to enhance their description and access for researchers as part of the Economists Papers Project here at the Rubenstein Library. The papers include interesting details about his many trips abroad to Italy, Somalia, Spain, and the newly-established country of Israel. It is an added bonus when a collection we acquired for its relevance to the history of economics ends up including materials on other topics too–like mid-twentieth-century travel writings.
Souvenir postcard collected by Foa during his trip to Jerusalem.
During his life, Foa was invited several times to guest lecture at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. His first trip was in 1946, just two years before Israel was declared a state. From his writings, Jerusalem seemed to be a city split between the struggles of the time and the echoes of the past. Foa writes, “Jerusalem is indeed an armed camp, and looks like a besieged place. Barbed wire–miles of it– is spread around all public buildings and throughout the city. Tanks and armored cars scout the streets day and night: one of them its Bren guns ready to fire, is permanently stationed at the center of Jaffa Road.” His letter then describes the resiliency of a people who have come to accept as normal daily bomb and landmine explosions, and the strain and tension developing between the Jewish and Arab populations.
But Foa also talks about the natural beauty of the city. From atop Mount Scopus, the view of the city seems to transcend the struggles going on below. “It is a stern view, since Jerusalem is built on stones (beautiful yellow stones) and is surrounded by rocky hills–yet it is a glorious view, when bathed by the warm Palestinian sunshine or the glory of the moon. There, on Mount Scopus, Titus and his legions stood, and from there laid siege to the city. There is the Valley of Final Judgement–as stern as death itself. On the other side, one can see the Jordan, the Dead Sea, the desert of Judaea and the mountains of Noab. Beauty, history and tragedy fill the air. It is a most unforgettable sight.” Bruno Foa’s writings allow us to take a step into the past and see Jerusalem as it stood nearly 70 years ago.
Post contributed by Vicki Eastman, a graduate student at Duke’s Center for the History of Political Economy.
When: Thursday, March 20th, 7:00pm Location: FHI Garage, Bay 4, Smith Warehouse
Free and open to the public. The Devil Came on Horseback, 2007 (TRT: 87 minutes)
Directors: Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg; Full Frame/Working Films Award and the Seeds of War 2007
An up-close and uncompromising look at the crisis in Darfur, this film exposes the ongoing tragedy in Sudan as seen through the eyes of one American witness, former U.S. Marine Captain Brian Steidle, an official military observer. Armed with just a camera, paper and pen, but with access far beyond that of a journalist, Steidle’s photographs and testimony reveal a genocide that had by 2007 claimed over 400,000 lives. The film presents the historical and economic basis for the Sudanese government’s support and encouragement of the atrocities, alongside UN and US debates on the definition of “genocide,” as millions of people suffer. In Arabic and English with English subtitles. A panel discussion follows the screening.
Contact: Patrick Stawski, Duke University Libraries, 919-660-5823, patrick.stawski@duke.edu
Abraham Joshua Heschel: The Voice on the Back of the Page
Anyone familiar with Abraham Joshua Heschel’s English writings has encountered the distinctive cadence of his sentences. From the early book The Earth is the Lord’s (1949) to his final work A Passion for Truth (1973), one can hear and feel the rhythm that we now all find so familiar. Reliant on evocative words, on short phrases strung together mostly through suggestions, his sentences pile steadily one atop another, compelled from within as if by their own heartbeat.
Heschel saved nearly every scrap of paper on which he wrote. From napkins and hotel stationary to JTS announcements and publisher’s proofs, often what we record in the database is only the “front” of the page—what appears to us to be a paper’s final use. But the other side, the crossed out side, is often just as lively, covered in sentence fragments, Talmudic quotations, half-written letters of thanks or condolence. Often these backsides record, as if by sheer happenstance, a couple of seconds of Heschel’s mind, a brief instance when a thought, a turn of phrase, caught him amid other actions and was hastily scribbled down.
“The Kotzker, on the other hand, was concerned with truth, being in distress {rather} that imagination being dormant. Somber and plaintive he had no patience with the playful or the rhapsodic.”
More often than not Heschel returned to these scraps, edited them, sounding after each change more rhythmically alike to the unhurried but morally tugging voice that characterize his finished prose.
“We live on the verge of mystery and ignore it. Instead of facing the abyss marvel, we are involved in analyzing reminiscences of old formulations. We take the world for granted, and forget that being is unbelievable. Stand still and behold! Speech is an aftermath.”
“There is {no} word in biblical Hebrew for doubt. Indeed just as the logic of science ; there are many words for wonder. Just as in dealing with judgment, our starting-point is doubt, {wonder is} our starting-point in dealing with reality. is wonder The biblical man never questions the reality of the world around him. He [unfinished].”Though he wrote almost without ceasing, few of Heschel’s notes reveal autobiographical awareness. “I” was not a word he employed readily. Coming upon a personal reflection can feel momentous.
[“Prayer
Entering the shul
I first relinquish all I have know.
I start all over again.
And the words niggun comes —
my lips have known silence
stillness of awe
And my stillness awakes
The niggun is {a sphere} far off my mind, and yet I am all there.
My pride fades to bit by bit.
The niggun never ends.
Abruptness is something
I have never known.
A moment never dies
A song is never is but
a beginning of {one} infinity
of echo.]
But sometimes, too, there are the pages punctuated by sadness, when the search for God recedes behind the dark memory of all that Heschel, and Judaism, has lost.
“My people was burned to death in Poland. Almost all traces of its existence are thousand year history were wiped out. Since 1945 the country was rebuilt, the last remnants of its survivors driven out. No one misses mourns for us in Poland, no one seems to remember us in Poland.”
Post contributed by Samuel J. Kessler, intern for the Abraham Joshua Heschel processing project.
Sometimes in Technical Services, we get to work with the visual arts as they intersect with the Rubenstein Library’s mission of cultural documentation. One such collection, acquired by the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture, is the Clarissa Sligh Papers. Sligh is a visual artist, writer, and lecturer. As a teenager, she was the lead plaintiff in a 1955 school desegregation case in Virginia which later inspired her book “It Wasn’t Little Rock”. After working in math and science with NASA and later in business, she began her career as an artist, using photographs, drawings, text, and personal stories to explore themes of transformation and social justice.
The Bingham Center began acquiring Sligh’s work in the 1990s as part of a collection of artists’ books by women. In 2011, we began the process of transferring her archive to Duke. One of the works represented in her papers is Jake in Transition, a series of 51 black and white photographs, some superimposed with text, documenting one man’s transition from female to male. The project explores issues of gender, identity, and physicality. Sligh revisited those themes in her book Wrongly Bodied Two, which juxtaposes Jake’s story with that of a female slave who escapes to the North by passing as a white man.
Sligh took the original “Jake” photographs between 1996 and 2000, a time when transgender issues were still largely ignored. Her work is particularly relevant now that the transgender rights movement has gone mainstream. This isn’t surprising for a woman who has been ahead of her time since at least 1955.
Post contributed by Megan Lewis, Technical Services Archivist for the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture.
The Library recently acquired a small album of photographs taken in Virginia’s Tidewater region. It contains six cyanotypes depicting work at the freight docks of Newport News and other subjects. Of particular interest is a laid-in cyanotype which appears to be a portrait of Frances Benjamin Johnston, a pioneering female American photographer.
Johnston was a remarkable photographer. She took portraits of American presidents and the high society of the turn of the nineteenth century from her Washington, D.C. studio, but also participated in ambitious documentary projects, such as her architectural photographs of Southern states. For one of her best-known commissions, she traveled to Virginia to document the students of the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in 1899-1900. Her photographs of this important education institution for African Americans and Native Americans are preserved in her collection at the Library of Congress.
Based on the probable identification of the woman in the photograph as Johnston and the photographs of the area around Hampton in the album, these photographs have been dated to the first decade of the 1900s. However, no information about the photographer is yet known. Were they a student or colleague of Johnston? Is it possible that the photographs (or some of the photographs) are by Johnston herself?
African American women aboard a steamboat, from the Tidewater album, ca. 1900.
The album is also accompanied by handwritten directions for making “Pyro Developer” and a “fixing bath for platinum prints,” which may provide further evidence that the creator may have been a student or novice photographer. (The large initial “B” on the “Pyro Developer” formula bears some resemblance to Johnston’s handwriting, but the handwriting of the rest of the formula does not appear to be similar to hers.)
If anyone has clues or guesses to contribute to the mystery of the photographer’s identity, please share them in the comments section below!
Post contributed by Will Hansen, Assistant Curator of Collections.
Dispatches from the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Duke University
