Welcome to the new online edition of the Sallie Bingham Center's newsletter! We have shifted to this email format and will no longer be mailing our print edition. All past issues are still available online. We look forward to sharing news and staying in touch with you in your inbox!
Exploring The Brown Papers
This spring we said farewell to our wonderful Bingham Center graduate intern, Amelia Verkerk. She stuck with us through an unexpected shift to remote work in March 2020, and continued to support our projects online. One contribution she made was a blog post about The Brown Papers, which explores the impact of historical experiences of women of color.
Image: Detail from The Brown Papers, a series of publications written and produced by the National Institute for Women of Color (NIWC)
Looking Back on Our Suffrage Commemoration
"Vote Yes on The Woman Suffrage Amendment." New York, c1915. Poster from the Lisa Unger Baskin Collection
We are winding down our observation of the centennial of American Woman Suffrage, but are glad to share these online resources that supplement our knowledge of the activists and communities who worked to expand voting rights.
Setting the Historical (and Bibliographic) Record Straight
The Rubenstein Library's Technical Services Department has been developing a set of guiding principles for collection description as part of our racial justice work. As an example of reparative description, catalogers revisited the Dorothy Farnham Smith travel diary, 1793, with further information provided by researcher Dr. Timothy Whalen, who had transcribed the item. The new catalog record includes identification of the author, previously known only as Mrs. Smith, and applies respectful subject headings describing Smith's interactions with enslaved people.
M.C. Higgins, The Great, by Virginia Hamilton (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1974).
We recently acquired this first edition of the first book by a Black author to win the Newbery Medal. This atmospheric novel about a young Black boy and his family living in the Appalachian Mountains also won the National Book Award and the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award, and marks a significant achievement for Hamilton and for African American children's literature.
Working remotely has not kept us out of the virtual classroom. Here are a few of the classes we supported this year with online introductions to primary sources:
Writing 101: Queer and Trans Memoir
Writing 101: Book Arts
Cultural Anthropology: Research Methods graduate seminar
Book Publishing & Marketing: A Case Study of the Romance Fiction Industry
History of Women’s Health for the Duke Physical Therapists Women’s Health Team
June is Pride Month, celebrating LGBTQ liberation. This photograph from the 1990 Pride Parade in Carrboro, NC, is from the Mandy Carter Papers.
