In 2013, Duke University is commemorating the 50 year anniversary of its first black undergraduate students. Events, exhibits, and performances have been taking place over the year, and will culminate during the weekend of October 3-6.
As we reflect on the milestone of integration, we must also consider the challenges faced by African American students at Duke, especially during the 1960s. This upcoming February will mark 45 years since the Allen Building Takeover of 1969. The Takeover was a seminal event in which nearly 100 black students occupied the administrative building for a day, demanding changes to a number of policies. After leaving peacefully, a crowd gathered outside the building confronted police, and teargas was fired on the crowd.
A new exhibit on the Takeover, curated by Caitlin M. Johnson, Trinity ’12, is now on display on the first floor of the Allen Building. Thirty panels describe the build-up to the protest, the events of that day, and the outcome of the Takeover. Featuring many images from the University Archives and the Durham Morning Herald and Durham Sun, Johnson’s exhibit forms a powerful narrative about Duke’s path toward real integration.
At 6:00 p.m. that evening, Dr. Jack Preiss, Professor Emeritus at Duke, will be speaking at the School of Nursing about desegregation at the University. Dr. Preiss was intimately involved in encouraging the Board of Trustees to change its policies on admissions. The University Archives holds a collection of his papers, including this poster from Black Week, which immediately preceded the Allen Building Takeover.
Email sharon.caple@duke.edu to RSVP for the Sept. 12 exhibit reception or the talk by Dr. Preiss.
Post contributed by Val Gillispie, University Archivist.
Date: Tuesday, September 17, 2013 Time: 6:00 p.m. Location: Thomas Room, Lilly Library, Duke University East Campus (directions to Lilly Library) Contact Information: Kelly Wooten, kelly.wooten(at)duke.edu
Dr. Jean Fox O’Barr will read from her new book, Transforming Knowledge: Public Talks on Women’s Studies, 1976-2011. This collection chronicles her personal journey, which unfolded alongside the women’s movement and the evolution of Women’s Studies. Now retired, Dr. O’Barr founded and led the Duke University Women’s Studies Program for two decades. Her records are preserved at the Sallie Bingham Center.
With great admiration, the Rubenstein Library pays tribute to Catherine Nicholson (1922-2013), theater director/producer, and pioneering co-founder and editor of Sinister Wisdom, who died June 16, 2013. Nicholson’s papers, which are held by the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture, document her life as a scholar and activist. Beth Hodges, former contributing editor, honored Nicholson with an obituary to be published in the fall issue of Sinister Wisdom. Hodges writes, “Friends remember Catherine as a dedicated lesbian feminist cultural worker, gifted writer, thinker, teacher, conversationalist, and a steadfast friend. Catherine possessed exceptional abilities, vision, and creativity and was also unusually motivated and self-disciplined. She chose to do her best in whatever she undertook, be it acting; directing; editing and publishing a women’s journal; [and] teaching theater and producing the world-premiere of a Monique Wittig play.”
With her partner, Harriet Ellenberger, Nicholson founded Sinister Wisdom, subtitled “A Journal of Words and Pictures for the Lesbian Imagination in All Women.” Hodges writes, “Sinister Wisdom became Catherine and Harriet’s life, took over their house, determined they would drive a truck rather than a sports car, even decided where the couple would live. The job of ‘creating a women’s community on paper,’ as one woman put it, was all-consuming.” Michelle Cliff and Adrienne Rich were the next editors to take the helm of Sinister Wisdom, which continues to be published today under the editorship of Julie Enszer.
Several students from the Duke Women’s Studies Senior Seminar class “Feminist Theory: Durham 1960-1990,” taught by Professor Kathy Rudy during spring, 2013 used this collection in their research on Durham’s activist community of the 1960s-70s. One of those students, Chantel Liggett, received the Middlesworth Award for her paper “Divergent Priorities, Diverging Visions: Lesbian Separatist versus Gay Male Integrationist Ideology Surrounding Duke in the 1970s and 80s.”
Post contributed by Kelly Wooten, Research Services and Collection Development Librarian, Sallie Bingham Center
Construction on the new Rubenstein Library is in full swing. Library staff and patrons have no doubt observed the temporary walls around the library building, seen the giant crane in the loading dock, and heard the dulcet tones of demolition throughout the Perkins stacks.
Rubenstein and Duke University Library staff had the opportunity to take a fascinating tour of the construction in progress in recent weeks. Here are some highlights.
First off we got to wear official vests, hard hats and protective glasses – safety first! Above our touring librarians and archivists are pictured in the old Rubenstein reading room, looking into the a section of the 1948 closed stacks previously referred to as the “cage.”
The renovation of the Gothic Reading Room has also started, and demolition crews are removing non-original features of the room. Please note that both the character of the room and its distinctive architectural elements will be retained as we modernize the building. The windows and light fixtures will be restored as close to their original look as possible, but the shelving will be replaced. We toured the entire construction site with Will Dunlop from EHG Demolition. Will commented that the Gothic Reading Room is “one of the most beautiful rooms I’ve ever been called upon to wreck.”
The demolition process has revealed the old exterior wall of the 1928 building. Originally, the Gothic Reading room had windows on both sides of the room. When the 1948 addition was built, one side of windows were filled and the exterior wall was covered by the expansion project. In the first picture above we see the old exterior wall, and the outline of decorative stone elements that were removed. The next image shows the remains of ivy vines that must have been growing on the exterior wall when it was covered around 1948.
The Rubenstein Library director and collection development offices, formally on the 2nd floor of Perkins outside of the Gothic Reading room, have been completely demolished. Here you see the gutted space and the bracing that has been added to protect the building’s structure during renovation.
The room formerly known as Perkins 201 was located right across from the Breedlove Room. Our Technical Services Department worked there before moving to Smith Warehouse several years ago. As you can see in the picture, the windows have been removed and boarded up. This is also where debris is being taken and pitched to dumpsters in the loading dock.
Out on the loading dock you can see where a chute (the black tube looking thing coming out of the top window) has been constructed to funnel debris from the demolition area (and Room 201) into dumpsters.
Post contributed by Molly Bragg, Collections Move Coordinator.
Summer in the Archives is a collaborative initiative of two institutions at Duke – the Center for the History of Political Economy and the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library — focusing on Rubenstein’s Economists’ Papers Project. It is based on joint work of Rubenstein’s staff and outside experts, who are often Ph.D. students in economics. The goal of Summer in the Archives is to improve the availability of the economists’ collections to the research community, as well as to allow young researchers to get hands-on experience with archival work.
Rubenstein Technical Services staff worked closely with myself and Crystal Wong, Ph.D. candidate at University of Washington. Our task was to improve description and organize the existing collections of distinguished economist Oskar Morgenstern and Nobel Prize winner Robert Solow. I would now like to share a couple of interesting “bits and pieces” that we came across while working with the collections.
Oskar Morgenstern
Oskar Morgenstern was born in today’s Austria and left his home country in the late 1930s to join Princeton University. Among many other activities and contributions, Morgenstern was a co-founder of the Game Theory and an important force behind the rise of the Economics Department at NYU, which was one of his last projects before he lost his battle with cancer in the late 1970s. The document that I want to bring the attention to is a 1950 letter from F.A. Hayek, another economist with Austrian roots, who received the Nobel Prize in 1974.
Economist Scandal: A letter from Hayek explaining his divorce. He went on to marry his cousin.
The letter is confidential and Hayek addresses it to his “Austrian friends in the U.S.,” listing five other addressees besides Morgenstern – Mises, Haberler, Furth, Machlup, and Schutz. In the letter, Hayek explains that he and his wife are separated because of the incompatibility of their characters. Hayek is taking the full blame for the separation and he also notes that his personal situation is related to his decision to move from London to the U.S. While other copies of the letter might still exist, I am not aware of them and it is possible that this is the only surviving copy. Whether that is the case or not, the letter certainly documents an interesting part of Hayek’s personal life – his divorce, his subsequent marriage to his cousin, and his related move from a comfortable professorial position at London School of Economics to the U.S.
Robert Solow
Crystal and I also spent a lot of time improving the description of the Robert Solow Papers’ correspondence series. One interesting exchange I found is from 1982, between Solow and Ronald Coase, another economics Nobel Prize winner. Both Solow and Coase put their finger on a critical issue of difference between social sciences and natural sciences. It is no wonder, Coase says, that economists are so notoriously known for disagreeing with each other – an issue that was particularly noticeable during the recent economic crisis. Unlike physicists, economists often cannot run controlled experiments and therefore cannot repeat such experiments to check conclusions of each-other’s research. According to Coase, it is thereby much harder for economists to resolve their disagreements than it is for natural scientists.
The material that we went through is in many ways breathtaking. The quality and the quantity of thoughts and conversations in the collections lead an aspiring scholar towards humility. Indeed, greatness is hard to achieve; but there is no better inspiration than interaction with great minds – whether it is in person, or through their archives.
Post contributed by Dr. Simon Bilo, Assistant Professor in Economics at Allegheny College, PA.
As the nation pauses and acknowledges the 50th anniversary of the August 28, 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, it is important to remember that this was not the first African American organized mass march movement on the National Mall. The leaders of the March on Washington of ’63, Bayard Rustin, Andrew Young, Roy Wilkins, and others, used a blueprint established by another notable African American leader, A. Phillip Randolph, only a generation before them.
While serving as head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, Randolph proposed a March on Washington on July 1, 1941 to protest the lack of opportunities given to African Americans in a recovering American economy. As World War II waged in Europe and Asia, American industry saw remarkable growth as suppliers of arms and supplies to their diplomatic allies, but African Americans were largely shut out of both federal and private jobs. Randolph believed that a march on the nation’s capital would provide a stage to give voice to African Americans suffering from both economic and social prejudice. As the March on Washington movement grew, Randolph threatened President Franklin Roosevelt that close to 100,000 people would descend on the nation’s capital if change did not occur. The March was ultimately called off by Randolph after Roosevelt passed Executive Order 8801, ordering the prohibition of discrimination in defense industries.
Albert Parker’s Negroes March on Washington (1941) and The March on Washington, One Year After (1942), recount the MOW movement from that time. Parker, a staunch socialist, was indeed excited at the prospects of the March in 1941 and continual organization of African Americans against the federal government. But his 1942 publication reflected disappointment with Randolph’s actions in cancelling the march and acceptance of the Executive Order that was slow to desegregate the military and open jobs in the private sector.
Post contributed by John Gartrell, John Hope Franklin Research Center Director.
We are wrapping up processing on the John Hope Franklin Papers — more on that soon! — but I couldn’t let this project end without sharing a bit of its lighter side. Newspaper drawings and cartoons of Franklin popped up throughout processing, often having been clipped and sent to Franklin by his friends and admirers. Here is a case where we see Franklin’s reaction to one of his cartoons, shared with him by a friend in Raleigh.
The sketch in question appears to have been published as part of a syndicated comic strip in newspapers around the country.
Here is Franklin’s response:
“It is not the best drawing I have seen of myself, but I don’t complain.” Understatement of the year, maybe? Franklin’s friendly good humor is prevalent throughout his papers, which has made them particularly enjoyable to process over the past year. Stay tuned for more information about the conclusion of the Franklin Papers processing project.
Post contributed by Meghan Lyon, Technical Services Archivist.
Beginning as a popular pastime in seventeenth-century Europe, freak shows featured performances intended to shock viewers such as exhibitions of biological rarities or heavily tattooed or pierced people, as well as extreme activities like fire-eating and sword-swallowing. Performers could be physically unusual humans such as those uncommonly large or small, those with both male and female secondary sexual characteristics, and people with other extraordinary diseases and conditions. As attitudes changed about physical differences and previously mysterious anomalies were scientifically explained, laws were passed restricting the freak show resulting in a decline in this form of entertainment.
The pamphlet includes six halftone views of Elsie-John as a man and as a woman as well as an autobiographical sketch. Elsie John, a performer in Chicago in the 1930s and 1940s, was connected to the Beat Generation of writers. The poet Herbert Huncke (1915-1996), who appears as a thinly-veiled character in both William S. Burroughs’ 1953 novel Junkie and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, and was by some accounts the source of the term “Beat,” wrote that he had been taken at an early age under the wing of Elsie John, who appears to have introduced Huncke both to heroin and to the gay underground of 1930s Chicago. Huncke’s short memoir “Elsie John” is an unsentimental but affectionate sketch of the performer.
Post contributed by Laura Micham,Merle Hoffman Director, Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture and Curator, Gender and Sexuality History Collections.
As strong advocates for the importance and vibrancy of the humanities, we here at the Rubenstein Library greatly enjoyed Duke President Richard Brodhead’s appearance on The Colbert Report last Thursday. As custodians of thousands of rare books, we were especially interested in Mr. Colbert’s mention of his “beautiful copy of [Moby-Dick] — hand-tooled leather, everything.” Colbert went on to say, “I don’t really want to crack it open, ’cause it’ll ruin the resale value.”
Which leads us to our quick pop quiz for the day: which of these copies of Moby-Dick is more valuable?
Moby-Dick in a gilded leather binding.Moby-Dick in a repaired red cloth binding.
The answer: the second copy — this is the 1851 first American edition of Moby-Dick, in its original variant red binding cloth. The first copy, in “hand-tooled leather,” is a 1977 Easton Press publication, and copies can be found for sale online for roughly 600 times less than you’d need to pay for the first American edition. Book historians and collectors, like Richard and Nancy Riess, who donated the Rubenstein copy of the first edition of Moby-Dick, generally prize first editions in their original bindings, for the evidence they preserve of the process by which a book was seen through the press and first encountered by readers.
The lessons, we hope:
Appearances can be deceiving, as Mr. Colbert and students of the humanities around the world know very well.
And it pays to know your book history — the kind of thing you learn with a quality humanities-based education.
Melville’s signature, pasted into the Rubenstein copy of the first edition of Moby-Dick by a collector.
Post contributed by Will Hansen, Assistant Curator of Collections.
When we haven’t been attending presentations on the latest and greatest in our profession or meeting our fellow archivists, we’ve been exploring this awesome city. A few evenings ago, we stumbled upon a familiar place.
The venerable Antoine’s has stood in New Orleans’s French Quarter since 1840. And, of course, archivists have a soft spot for old things!
The restaurant is familiar to those of us in the University Archives because of Eddie Cameron—specifically, a scrapbook of photos, clippings, and ephemera from the Duke football team’s trip to play in the 1945 Sugar Bowl. Among the pre-game celebrations was a dinner at Antoine’s with the team’s University of Alabama opponents.
We love this photo of Eddie Cameron and Alabama head coach Frank Thomas mixing up some Café Brûlot Diabolique. Thankfully, the game wasn’t the following day! (Duke won, 29-26, incidentally.)
Most of us will be leaving today, to return to our normal Durham lives of collecting, processing, cataloging, answering questions, teaching, and, well, helping to make the Rubenstein the great place that it is. But we’ll be back here soon, we hope! Thank you, New Orleans, and thanks, Antoine’s, for reminding us of a fun evening in Duke’s history!
Dispatches from the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Duke University
