D is for Diaries, Drama, and Dracula

Buck and his chewing gum.

I’m lucky. As a volunteer at the RBMSCL, I’ve been creating finding aids for small manuscript collections—collections such as love letters and travel diaries from the 19th century—which can be more compelling than any historical novel. One in particular I found to be especially memorable is the John Buck Diary.

Elaborate script and comic sketches recount the eight week long vacation in England and Scotland in 1887 of John Buck, an affluent, young American who spent several days in close company with Henry Irving, the famous English actor; the equally famous actress and Irving’s rumored paramour, Ellen Terry; and the business manager of the Lyceum Theatre as well as Irving’s personal assistant, Bram Stoker. Yes, the Bram Stoker who later wrote Dracula. His visit begins with the Royal Lyceum's performance of another popular demonic tale:

I reached Edinburgh at seven o’clock and was met by Mr. Stoker. He took me to the Edinburgh Hotel (close by the station) where Mr. Irving was staying. . . . Mr. Stoker after fixing me comfortably hurried away to the theatre and I had my dinner served in Mr. Irving’s dining room. The dinner was good but I was so anxious to see some of "Faust" that I left at the end of the third course and jumping into a hansom drove to the Royal Lyceum Theatre, where I found Mr. Stoker “laying” [?] for me. He . . . took me into the only remaining private box. Mephistopheles was just transforming Faust into a young man as I entered the box, so I had not missed much of the play. . . . At the end of the act Mr. Stoker took me around [to the stage] to see Mr. Irving and Miss Terry. . . . While we were chatting and I was being questioned about “home affairs” the scene shifters were building Marguerite’s room around us, and very soon I was compelled to "skip" as the curtain was about to be rung up. . . . Mr. Irving was grand, and he will make a tremendous hit with Faust in America. (pages 67-70)

The diary is so extraordinarily descriptive and entertaining; it is as if Buck, who loved the theater, were writing the storyline for his own theatrical play. At times, I could imagine his diary recast as a BBC period drama! Equally remarkable is the extent to which Buck’s personality is so clearly revealed. He was sometimes irreverent and informal, even when visiting the Duke of Beaufort at Badminton House in Gloucestershire, highly competitive, a bit arrogant, and more interested in pretty young women, having fun, and socializing than sightseeing; he seemed so American, and so amazingly like a few modern young men that I have known.

One of Buck's sketches.
Happy Halloween!

Post contributed by Danielle Moore, RBMSCL Technical Services volunteer.

Devil's Food

Our celebration of National Dessert Month has been surprisingly chocolate-free, so we're aiming to correct that today with recipes from Chocolate and Cocoa Recipes, published around 1922. Instead of boring candy bars, we at The Devil's Tale want our plastic pumpkins filled with Devil's Food cake!

Devil's Food

2 cups sugar
3/4 cup butter
4 ounces Baker's Premium No. 1 Chocolate
4 eggs (3 may be used)
2 1/4 cups flour
4 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 teaspoons cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon clove
1 1/4 cups milk

Cream butter and add sugar gradually, while beating to a cream; add chocolate, melted, and beaten yolks and mix thoroughly. Sift together flour, salt, cinnamon, clove and baking powder and add to butter mixture, alternately with the milk. At the last, fold in the stiffly beaten egg whites and bake in a deep pan and ice when cold.

And, just because you can never have too many chocolate recipes (and because there were no pictures of the Devil's Food cake):

Chocolate Jelly

1 pint boiling water
Pinch salt
1 square Baker's Premium No. 1 Chocolate
2 tablespoons gelatine
1/3 cup sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla

Put the water, salt and chocolate in a saucepan. Cook, stirring until the chocolate melts, then let it boil for three or five minutes. Soften the gelatine in a little cold water and pour the boiling mixture over it. Stir until disolved, then add sugar and vanilla. Pour into a mould and set aside to harden, serve with cream and powdered sugar or sweetened whipped cream.

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.

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.

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.