Reliving Durham's History

While at boarding school, Mattie Southgate of Durham wrote her mother with a problem familiar to many teenagers: her music "was out of style." Her request for new sheet music, however, is less familar, since she was writing in 1880.

Mattie's words come alive on the Digital Durham website, a project led by Duke historian Trudi Abel that provides a wealth of data, records, government documents, maps, photographs and personal items from late 19th and early 20th century Durham.

Click here to go to the site.

Originally conceived out of a 1999 Center for Instructional Technology (CIT) grant, the Digital Durham site was relaunched last week with new tools and more than 1000 new images. Abel said the site provides a vast resource of information for students, scholars and anyone interested in the history of Durham and the New South.

"Whereas the original Digital Durham website was akin to a snapshot, the new site is more like a wide angle lens," said Abel, a scholar-in-residence who teaches in the Department of History and for the Masters of Arts in Liberal Studies program. "The first site was built around the census of 1880. A census is a wonderful place to start because it tells us a lot about the lives of people who often didn't keep written documents. But now, we've given the site more breadth and scope."

The revised site includes first-person accounts written by Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois of their visits to Durham in the 1910s. Personal letters, wills, photographs and even wedding invitations give insight into daily life back then. Panoramic photographs and maps from the 1880s through the 1920s show the growth of Durham.

"This was an important time for Durham," Abel said. "The town's citizenry recognized that their sleepy village was fast becoming a hub of enterprise, commerce and culture in the New South."

This material captures the excitement that seized Durham citizens as they witnessed the arrival of railroads, banks, evangelical revivals, and the new Trinity College, Abel said.

The relaunched site, which received support from a NC ECHO Digitization grant from the State Library of North Carolina and Duke University's Master of Arts in Liberal Studies Program, touches upon several of Duke's key themes and priorities: encouraging undergraduate research, building collaborations with the local community as well as creating and sharing knowledge for a broad public of middle-school teachers, their students and the Durham community.

In her history course, "Digital Durham and the New South," Abel has students analyze the effects of industrialization and emancipation on the social experience in Durham through research in original documents on the site and those from the Rare Book, Manuscript and Special Collections Library, the County Courthouse and similar repositories.

As part of their coursework, students created short audio pieces based on their research. Three of the "audio postcards" can be found on the Digital Durham website.

Corina Apostol started by studying images of black women in advertising from the period, a project prompted by her discovery of a racist Bull Durham ad. However, the project grew into a wider review of visual culture in the black community.

"I wanted to tell the full story," Apostol said. "[In addition to the advertising images,] I also looked into how black people represented themselves through paintings, sculptures, and protest posters. What I found was a visual culture, split between dehumanization and re-representation. It became clear that the African Americans saw themselves as struggling for education, jobs, a family, places to dance and express themselves without being stereotyped."

In a second audio piece, Theresa Mohin talked with long-time Durham resident Gwen Phillips about the experience of African-American women in post-Civil War Durham and the New South.

"I didn't really need to ask any questions, I just listened and recorded what she had to say about her life in Durham. I was really struck by her perspective of Durham as a town and a place where she chose to stay and raise her family. For me, Durham is where I go to school, and my actual ties to the town itself are limited. -- What the Durham community really is became much more real to me after meeting her."

The Digital Durham website contains a wide range of source materials that Abel selected from the holdings of the Rare Book, Manuscript and Special Collections Library. One item came from a class taught by Duke art historian Richard Powell for 15 teachers at the Durham School of the Arts. In preparing for the class, Powell discovered a 1901 research paper written by a Trinity College professor whose students went into the homes of black Durham families to record the families' art and literature collections.

"The level of detail in the inventories was revealing," Abel said. Students found the same volume of poetry in several homes—the work of M. Pauline Fitzgerald, one of Durham's first African American school teachers and the aunt of the noted attorney and civil rights activist, Pauli Murray.

Although the site has been launched, Abel said much remains to be done to expand its holdings and to collaborate with Durham school teachers to exploit its full potential. She has worked closely with Durham educators, particularly those in eighth-grade social studies, and she said the site will be useful in a variety of classes. For example, the 1880 census data can be used by fourth graders to develop their data analysis and graphing skills.

"This isn't a case of if you build it, they will come," she said. "It's a case of if you build it and provide good training for teachers, they will use it."