Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library

Information about the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library

Background

The Collections

Care of the Collections

Use of the Collections

Location and Hours

Public Rooms and Exhibits

Support for Special Collections

Guide for donating materials

Regulations for use of collections

Information for those traveling to the library

Grants, fellowships, and awards

Contacting the Library or Library Staff

Centers in the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library

John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing History
Through preserving historical records and archives and through related programs, the Center stimulates interest in and study of the roles of sales, advertising, and marketing in society.

John Hope Franklin Collection of African and African-American Documentation
The Franklin Collection seeks to identify and preserve materials generated by (rather than simply about) people of African descent, and to make these materials widely available for research and teaching.

Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture
Collections in the Bingham Center document the public and private lives of women and the cultural contexts which have shaped them. You will also find information on the Women's Studies Research Grant Program, news about recent acquisitions, and announcements of upcoming events.

The Digital Scriptorium
In collaborative projects with Duke University faculty, students, and staff, The Digital Scriptorium develops digitized versions of historical materials from the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, and makes them accessible via the Internet.

Searching for items in the collections

On-line catalog for Duke University Libraries

Finding aids for selected collections

Keyword search for files on this web site

Last updated 2002/01/14.

Information about this web site is also available.

Please read our Copyright, use, and reproduction policy for information on citing or reproducing items from these web pages.

Rare Book, Manuscript,
and Special Collections Library
Duke University

Developing an understanding of human experience and culture requires access to historical documentation in many forms and subject areas. The Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library at Duke University preserves such documentation and promotes its use. While the library's holdings are developed in relation to instructional and research interests in the University, they are available for use by visiting scholars and the general public as well as Duke faculty and students.

[About the library | Digitized collections | Exhibits | Centers | Student Projects | Guides | Search | Related Sites]

Recent additions to this web site

Mel Rosenthal: Photographs from In the South Bronx of America. Mel Rosenthal's photographs document the burning of the South Bronx between 1975 and 1983. The portrait photographs depict the everyday lives of residents against backdrops of rubble, abandoned buildings, and destroyed city blocks as they struggle to survive "planned shrinkage," an urban planning strategy utilized from the 1960s-1980s to raze residential buildings in older urban areas and replace them with industrial parks.
American and British Literary Materials in the Duke University Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library
The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana. The Library's collection of Walt Whitman materials, originally collected by Dr. and Mrs. Josiah Trent, incorporates material spanning the years, 1841-1947. This newly published finding aid represents a virtual reorganization of the collection based upon that devised by Ellen F. Frey in her Bibliography of Walt Whitman.
On Fire: Photographs by Larry Schwarm. These dramatic and compelling color photographs of fire raging and slithering across the vast Kansas prairies were selected from over 500 submissions to receive the Center for Documentary Studies/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography.
The Jay B. Hubbell Center for American Literary Historiography has a new set of web pages, describing its background and collecting areas.
The Broadside: "An occasional notice of selections from our newly available sources." Notes and articles on new acquisitions and other news of the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library.
Medicine and Madison Avenue: a database of over 600 health-related advertisements printed in newspapers and magazines between 1911 and 1958, as well as 35 selected historical documents relating to the creation and influence of health-related advertisements.
A Guide to Civil War Materials in the Duke University Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library.

Digitized collections

Medicine and Madison Avenue
A database of over 600 health-related advertisements printed in newspapers and magazines between 1911 and 1958, as well as 35 selected historical documents relating to the creation and influence of health-related advertisements. Includes Instructor's and Student's Guides to provide ideas for use of the database in the classroom.

Emergence of Advertising in America: 1850-1920
A database of over 9,000 advertising items and publications dating from 1850 to 1920, illustrating the rise of consumer culture, especially after the American Civil War, and the birth of a professionalized advertising industry in the United States. The project organizes the materials into eleven categories, including advertising cookbooks, early Lux ads, J. Walter Thompson Company "house ads" and tobacco promotions, and includes transcriptions of the title pages and tables of contents/indexes for the Early Advertising Publications and the Nicole DiBona Peterson Advertising Cookbook categories; descriptive essays for each category; and Boolean searching within each category as well as general searching across all categories.

William Gedney Photographs and Writings
From the mid 1950s through the early 1980s, William Gedney (1932-1989) photographed throughout the United States, in India, and in Europe. From the commerce of the street outside his Brooklyn apartment to the daily chores of unemployed coal miners, from the indolent lifestyle of hippies in Haight-Ashbury to the sacred rituals of Hindu worshippers, Gedney was able to record the lives of others with remarkable clarity and poignancy. These photographs, along with his notebooks and writings, illuminate the rare vision of an intensely private man who, as a writer and photographer, was able to reveal the lives of others with striking sensitivity. Included here are selections from Gedney's finished prints, work prints, contact sheets, notes, notebooks, handmade photographic books, book dummies, and correspondence.

Ad*Access
An image database of over 7,000 advertisements printed in U.S. and Canadian newspapers and magazines between 1911 and 1955. Covering five categories - Beauty and Hygiene, Radio, Television, Transportation, and World War II - Ad*Access provides a coherent view of a number of major campaigns and companies preserved in one advertising collection at Duke University. The site is browsable and searchable in a variety of ways, including complex searching with Boolean operators. Brief histories of the industries and timelines of world and national events help put the ads in the context of their times.

Historic American Sheet Music
Digital images of over 16,000 pages of sheet music from 3042 pieces published in the United States between 1850 and 1920. A rich database of information about the music is searchable and browsable in a variety of ways, and the site includes background information about the music itself as well as the social, cultural, and political events that shaped the songs and that are depicted in the pieces. Also included is technical information helpful to those considering or planning digital imaging projects.

Emma Spaulding Bryant Letters
Emma Spaulding Bryant wrote these ten letters to her husband, John Emory Bryant, in the summer of 1873. They recount Emma's activities during that summer when she and her daughter, Alice, were visiting relatives in Illinois and Ohio while her husband tended to his political affairs in Georgia. Because these letters are unusually frank for this time period, they reveal much about the relationships between husbands and wives in this era, and shed light on medical practices that were often kept private.

The Urban Landscape Digital Image Access Project
A database of images from various collections held by the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library. The database contains 1000 images from fourteen different collections pertaining to the theme "The Urban Landscape," and can be searched or browsed.

Documents from the Women's Liberation Movement
An on-line collection featuring transcribed texts and scanned images of over 40 articles, pamphlets, flyers, and booklets published from 1969 to 1974 which reflect the diversity of theory and activities characterizing the early years of the U.S. Women's Liberation Movement. Also included is the original manuscript minute book of DAR II, a local activist group in Atlanta, Georgia.

George Percival Scriven: An American in Bohol, The Philippines, 1899-1901
This journal of George Percival Scriven, an American Army Signal Corps Officer in the Philippines at the turn of the century, was written both as a personal memoir and as a place to keep notes for a book that he was intending to write about the American invasion and occupation of the Philippine Islands. The journal has been transcribed and presented here along with photographs from the period and links to related journals and historical documents.

African-American Women
On-line archival collections featuring scanned pages and texts of the writings of African-American women. Includes the memoirs of Elizabeth Johnson Harris (1867-1942), an 1857 letter from Vilet Lester, a slave on a North Carolina plantation, and several letters from Hannah Valentine and Lethe Jackson, slaves on the estate of David Campbell, a governor of Virginia.

Civil War Women
On-line archival collections featuring scanned pages and texts of the writings of women during the American Civil War. Includes the 1864 diary of Alice Williamson, a 16 year old girl from Gallatin, Tennessee, the papers of Rose O'Neal Greenhow, a renowned Confederate spy, and the papers of Sarah E. Thompson, a spy for the Union.

Duke Papyrus Archive
The Duke Papyrus Archive provides electronic access to texts about and images of 1,373 papyri from ancient Egypt. You can browse the papyri by subject or search by keyword, and images of each papyrus are available in various magnifications. Background material about papyri and papyrology introduces the archive.

Exhibits

Mel Rosenthal: Photographs from In the South Bronx of America. Mel Rosenthal's photographs document the burning of the South Bronx between 1975 and 1983. The portrait photographs depict the everyday lives of residents against backdrops of rubble, abandoned buildings, and destroyed city blocks as they struggle to survive "planned shrinkage," an urban planning strategy utilized from the 1960s-1980s to raze residential buildings in older urban areas and replace them with industrial parks.

Alex Harris: Photographs, 1998-2000. Images from the Duke University Special Collections Library. Alex Harris juxtaposes two groups of color images - a series of Havana views seen through the windshields of aging American automobiles and a series of American landscapes seen in the context of a boy's electronic game - to explore the potential of the photographer's eye and the camera's frame both to limit and to expand our view of the world.

A Renaissance at Duke: The Guido Mazzoni Pamphlet Collection
Originally a private library belonging to a Florentine professor of literature and Senator of Italy, the Guido Mazzoni Pamphlet Collection is a rich ensemble of more than 49,000 pamphlets, small volumes, librettos, newspapers, periodicals, and clippings spanning four centuries of Italian and European history. This on-line exhibit features selected items relating to literature, music, popular culture, the two World Wars, early Fascism, and more.

America Votes: Presidential Campaign Memorabilia from the Duke University Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library
Winners share the limelight with the defeated in this exhibit of U.S. presidential campaign memorabilia drawn primarily from the holdings of the Duke University Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library. The exhibit illustrates the nation's presidential elections in letters, sheet music, leaflets, buttons, bumper stickers, and even t-shirts.

Third Person, First Person: Slave Voices from the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library
This exhibit probes the life experiences of American slaves from the late eighteenth century through the nineteenth century, and examines the enterprise of recovering and preserving African American history of the period. The exhibit showcases the kinds of rare materials that under scrutiny reveal the ambitions, motivations, and struggles of people often presumed mute.

Still Going On: An Exhibit Celebrating the life and times of William Grant Still
A multimedia celebration of the centenary of the birth of William Grant Still, known as the dean of African-American composers. This exhibit contains a timeline of the cultural context in which Still lived and worked as well as a narrative of his life that includes photos, letters, music scores, and sound clips of his compositions.

Student projects

American History Class Projects
Multimedia projects developed by Duke University students in US history classes taught by Professors Peter Wood and Sydney Nathans. These projects are based on documentary sources from the Duke University Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library and were developed in collaboration with the library's Digital Scriptorium. They include transcribed text from manuscripts, scanned images of photographs and manuscript pages, and analytical essays by the students.

Alice Williamson Diary Annotations
As part of an internship with the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library in June 1997, Carolina Friends School student Andy Barco did historical research on people, places, events, and terms described in the Alice Williamson Diary. The results of his research are now available as hyperlinked annotations to readers of the diary.

Guides to the collections

Archival Finding Aids
Finding aids are descriptive tools which serve as the primary point of intellectual access to archival collections in archives and manuscript repositories. You can browse or search these extensive guides to over 300 collections.

The Guide to the Cataloged Collections in the Manuscript Department of the William R. Perkins Library, Duke University
This guide contains information on 5991 collections acquired up to 1980 by the Manuscript Department of Perkins Library, now the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library. Originally a published resource available at select libraries, it is now available for browsing and searching via the web.

Guides to Women's Studies Resources
Detailed collection guides, pathfinders, and bibliographies on a variety of subjects, based on materials available at Duke University Libraries, but including materials generally available as well.

Guide to Selected Materials Documenting 20th Century African-American Life
A guide to African and African American Studies holdings at the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, featuring selected collections that were either generated by African Americans or that contain materials directly documenting 20th-century African American experiences.

The Economists' Papers Project
An introduction to and information about collections in the Economists' Papers Project, which consists of the papers of more than twenty-five eminent economists. These collections offer a valuable resource to researchers in the history of economic thought, particularly those interested in 20th century economic thought.

Sheet Music
Searchable indices of information about and lyrics of many of the items in the library's sheet music collection. The bulk of the collection is from about 1830 to 1930, most of which were published in the United States, but including a significant number of English, German, and Viennese items as well.

Guido Mazzoni Pamphlet Collection
A detailed guide to this collection of over 49,000 pamphlets, newspapers, clippings, small volumes, librettos, epithalamia, and broadsides. Imprints range from the late sixteenth century to 1943. It is one of the largest private Italian libraries of its kind in the United States.

Greek Manuscripts
The Kenneth Willis Clark Collection of Greek Manuscripts in the Duke University Library contains ninety-eight manuscripts--in both roll and codex form--dating from the ninth to the seventeenth century. A short history of the collection, its origins and development, and a short title list of the collection are available here.

William Grant Still Collection
The William Grant Still Papers, 1877-1992, contain chiefly photocopies of music, writings, correspondence, diaries, pictures, printed material, clippings, and recordings, which primarily document his work as a composer.

Religious Materials
A guide to religious materials in the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library. The holdings are chiefly in the Christian and Jewish traditions, and feature a strong collection of material in American and British Methodism, with particular depth in Wesleyana.

The Vietnam War
A guide to resources in the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library at Duke University related to the Vietnam War, including published and unpublished materials.

The American Revolution
An Overview of the Manuscript Sources in the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library.

The Civil War
A Guide to Civil War Materials in the Duke University Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library.

Slave Letters Bibliography
A Guide to Slave Letters in the Duke University Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library.

American and British Literary Materials in the Duke University Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library

Keyword search of this site

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Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University
http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/

Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library
Duke University, Durham, NC 27708-0185 USA
Telephone: 919-660-5822, Fax: 919-660-5934

Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library Duke University

Rare Book, Manuscript,
and Special Collections Library
Duke University