The RBMSCL Celebrates Banned Books Week

In honor of Banned Books Week, we've asked the staff of the RBMSCL to reflect upon their favorite banned or challenged book:

"To me, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the quintessential banned book. Hilarious, heartfelt, and packed with classic scenes, it has also been seriously offensive in very many ways to very many people in the 125 years since its publication. And yet there has never been any consensus on what, exactly, makes it worth burning—its immorality, poor spelling and grammar, racism, homoeroticism, and encouragement of juvenile delinquency have all come under fire. The book itself remains as tricksy as its narrator, and as its native time and place."

—Will Hansen, Assistant Curator of Collections

"One challenged book that I enjoyed reading and discussing in school was Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. Not only does this book break away from many literary norms, but I think it also succeeds in charging its readers to think about aspects of community, identity, and survival."

—Jennifer Thompson, Research Services and Collection Development Librarian for the Franklin Research Center

"Widespread celebrations have marked the 50th anniversary of the publication of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, one of the American Library Association’s Top 100 banned or challenged novels of the 20th century. As a girl in 1960s Alabama, I was deeply troubled by the pervasive racial inequity that was so much a part of the social fabric. I felt a powerful identification with Scout and her father, Atticus, gave me hope that, eventually, individuals might change that fabric."

—Elizabeth B. Dunn, Research Services Librarian

"While not a banned book (banned broadside), Martin Luther's 95 Theses which he nailed on the Wittenberg Church door on Oct. 31, 1517 greatly influenced me. As an undergraduate at Duke just after the period of social protests in the 1960s, the idea that a provocative list of concerns by an early 16th century monk could transform the establishment inspired me. I went on study Luther and wrote my senior theses on the use of hymnody for protest. Perhaps those protest songs of the 1960s were not so novel after all!"

—Tim Pyatt, Duke University Archivist

"Thomas Paine's Rights of Man, a rejoinder to Edmund Burke's 1790 denunciation, Reflections on the Revolution in France, was so popular that it was published multiple times in 1791 and caused a furor in England. Paine argued that human rights are natural (not given) rights and that government's are a product of and always accountable to the people. Not unexpectedly, Rights of Man was banned by the British crown for supporting the French Revolution and led to the prosecution of Paine who wisely had left England prior to his conviction. In a time when our nation's human rights record is questionable to say the least, I am heartened, encouraged, and inspired by Paine's courage and conviction in arguing that human rights are the foundation of a just society and the publication of Rights of Man reminds me that human rights have been with us since the birth of this country."

—Patrick Stawski, Human Rights Archivist

Take a look at the lists of Frequently Challenged Books available at the American Library Association's website and tell us about your own favorite banned or challenged books!

Photo Op with the AOTUS

During the recent Society of American Archivists (SAA) meeting in Washington, D.C., several RBMSCL staff members received a very special tour of the National Archives. Former Duke University Librarian and current Archivist of the United States, David Ferriero, gave the group a personal tour of his office.The group (click photo to enlarge) is gathered here under the portrait of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, which hangs in Ferriero’s office. (The National Archives began during Roosevelt’s administration.)

Ferriero, who has been AOTUS since last November, regaled the group with stories of great documents housed in the Archives. He recently examined Walt Whitman’s federal employee file (he was briefly employed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs). In the file was a five page letter of reference—written by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Post contributed by Tim Pyatt, Duke University Archivist.

O Pioneers!

Seth reads the Book of Mormon. Photo by Beth Doyle.

For many members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the experience of holding and reading a first edition copy of the Book of Mormon—including one of the two held at the RBMSCL—elicits reverence and profound emotion. According to the church, the Book of Mormon is the record of ancient Americans and their relationship to God, and includes a visit from Christ after his resurrection. Joseph Smith, under God's direction, received and translated the work before its 1830 publication in Palmyra, New York, and reestablished the priesthood and Christ’s church. While the information contained within the Book of Mormon can be found in any of the over one hundred million copies (in 108 different languages), a copy of the first edition represents a physical connection to a prophet, the church’s origins, and God. Indeed, it is among the most requested of our holdings.

Preserving Duke’s Webpages (At Least 457,009 of Them)

Archive-It's capture of www.duke.edu/web/joecollege

As I was preparing for my last year at the School for Information and Library Science (SILS) at UNC, I knew that I needed to gain some practical experience in the library field in addition to my current part-time job. At SILS, I became fascinated with electronic records and how they are being preserved for the future. The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) defines electronic records as “any information that is recorded in a form that only a computer can process and that satisfies the definition of a record.” The actual definition of a record can vary slightly depending on who is consulted (i.e., NARA or the Society of American Archivists).
I contacted Duke’s University Archivist, Tim Pyatt, who put me in touch with Seth Shaw, the Electronic Records Archivist. Unbeknownst to me, Tim and Seth had been discussing the need of preserving information found on Duke’s various websites. When I approached them about a possible field experience, they felt that this would be a good project for me to assist with.

Online material has become an integral part of many institutions and Duke is no different. In order to preserve this information, web sites need to be collected and archived. Out of all the ways to do this (and there are many), we decided that the Internet Archive’s tool, Archive-It, would be the best option. Before starting to capture websites, we created a policy that defined what types of materials we wanted to collect. I used that policy to select the websites of 350 out of 500 Duke student organizations for capture.

This project provided me with a good amount of hands-on experience that will definitely be beneficial as I pursue my career in library science. Although I've finished my field experience, there will soon be a new field experience student to take up the reins and assist Seth in making sure that part of Duke’s cultural heritage is preserved.

Post contributed by Stephanie Brantley, RBMSCL Technical Services field experience student.

Who Is That Mustached Man?

I wasn't looking for a "superstar" photograph in a collection, but I found it anyway. I'm Josh Hager, a student in North Carolina State University's Public History Masters Degree program and an alumnus of Duke (B.A., History and French Studies). For a class at NCSU, I was working with the RBMSCL's Technical Services department to process the James Thomas Powers Papers. By process, I had to examine each item in the collection, arrange the items in fashion that made professional and practical sense, and write a finding aid for the collection so that users could examine the papers. (By the way, Powers was a famous Vaudevillian and all-around entertainer on Broadway from the late 19th to the early 20th centuries.)

John Wilkes Booth, undated. From the James Thomas Powers Papers.

The best part of the collection is its photographs. There are over 200 prints, including tintypes, cartes-de-visite, and cabinet cards. These prints depict Powers and his family in theater settings, as well as in personal shots depicting social life in the early 20th century. One photograph stands out as a unique find. Within some photos of relatives of Powers' wife Rachel Booth Powers, I ran into a familiar image. There was neither a label nor a date on the back, which isn't unusual in archival collections. However, I knew this picture was one of the most infamous men in American history. After doing a Google Image search to confirm the identity and conferring with other staff members, we reached a definite conclusion: I had found a new photograph of John Wilkes Booth. The albumen cabinet card, taken in New York state, shows the famous assassin in profile. I can’t be sure, but because of the style of Booth’s clothing, his personal history, and the history of the cabinet card format, I’d place this photograph in the early 1860s; it could be before the Civil War or near its conclusion, making the lack of a recorded date frustrating.

What is this photo doing in James Thomas Powers' papers? Rachel Booth and John Wilkes Booth were likely (distant) relatives in the famous Booth acting family, although I cannot find any definite proof of this. No matter its provenance, the find itself is quite exciting. I can find no exact duplicates of it online so it might be unique. Even if it isn't, it is yet another exciting addition to the Powers papers and to the RBMSCL's collections.

Post contributed by Josh Hager, RBMSCL Technical Services field experience student.

Pharaoh Peepses II

Meghan Lyon, our technical services assistant, just came back from a week in the Land of the Pharaohs. Just for fun, she and her husband Vaughn took along a packet of Peeps. "The weirdest part," she notes, "was that they never melted, despite it being over 100 degrees on most days."

This photograph, taken at the Ramesseum, is included in National Geographic Traveler's Peeps in Places contest. We hope she wins! (Go vote!)

And, lest you object that this post doesn't relate to the RBMSCL's collections, we offer this fragment of a literary text from our papyri collection. It dates from Ramesses II's lifetime.

Behind the Scenes: Intern Angela DiVeglia

Most people associate Victorian women with high tea and corsets, not with struggles for justice and equality. However, Angela DiVeglia, graduate intern at the Sallie Bingham Center and co-curator of "I Take Up My Pen: 19th Century British Women Writers," spends much of her days examining the relationships between current feminist thought and the work done by early feminists in the United States and Great Britain.

Angela DiVeglia gives this Frances Power Cobbe pamphlet a thumbs-up.

Several of the items in the library’s current exhibit, such as the pamphlet above (Our Policy: An Address to Women Concerning the Suffrage by Frances Power Cobbe), were produced by strong and outspoken feminists who wrote and lectured widely during a time when women were still expected to remain within the domestic sphere.

DiVeglia writes, "It’s really inspiring and grounding to work with these kinds of materials; it’s easy to think of our own struggles outside of their historical contexts, to feel like we’re the only people fighting these particular fights. Seeing pamphlets and books produced by people like Frances Cobbe and Annie Wood Besant—women who were often ostracized for their work, and who occupy marginal places in history—reminds us that we’re actually part of a huge, rich legacy of people who want to create a better world."

If you haven’t had a chance to visit the exhibit yet, it will be on display in the Perkins Library Gallery until February 21!

Jazz Archive on Duke Today

Stop by Duke Today for a look at the RBMSCL's Jazz Archive and jazz archivist Jeremy Smith's efforts to "shine a light on North Carolina’s and Duke’s contribution to jazz." Read the full article here.

For more on jazz at Duke, watch "Duke University's Big Band and Jazz Tradition," a narrated slideshow produced by the Jazz Archive.