Since our project team's inception in the Fall of 2016, we have been engaging with our community to foster discussions about memory and memorialization. Below are some of our outreach programming and materials:
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Monuments should reflect Duke’s full, complicated history
HELEN YU, MARY ALINE FERTIN AND CHRISTINE KINYUA Durham Herald-Sun, April 26, 2018 As Duke’s new president, Vincent Price, unpacked his suitcases last summer, protests of Confederate monuments swept Durham and the nation. Downtown, protesters toppled the Confederate statue in front of the county building. Others defaced the Robert E. Lee statue at Duke Chapel, and workmen later removed it in the dead of night. MORE... |
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dangerous memories speaker series
Spring 2017
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We invited three speakers who gave us valuable perspective and advice into our initiative, and helped contextualize our goals with those of other institutions in the nation. We invited Brenda Allen, who was a member on the Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice Committee at Brown University; Tina Allen, who was named head of the Pauli Murray College at Yale University; and Jennifer Scott, who directs the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum at the University of Illinois Chicago.
"Begin with a Clock: How Brown University Addressed its Connection to Slavery" with Brenda Allen Watch full video of Allen's talk here. 
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"Lessons from Yale: Writing New Histories Onto a University Campus" by Tina Lu Watch full video of Lu's talk here. 
Watch full video of Scott's talk here. 
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bass connections show case
April 2017
We presented our research to Duke and Durham community members, including families and children, at a showcase for all the Bass Connections Brain & Society project teams for the Spring 2017 semester. The kids got very creative with coloring Julian Abele!
We assembled a coloring book with images from different sources, including the Duke University Archives, to show how different stories can be used to tell a deeper and broader history of Duke. To download the coloring book, click here.
natasha trethewey op-ed
April 2018
Natasha Trethewey discusses her collection Native Guard with a group of Duke students at the Franklin Humanities Institute on March 21, 2018. Helen Yu, the blog's author, is in the bottom left-hand corner. Photo by Dean Rhoades.
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Monuments and Memory: Uncovering Obscured Pasts
by Helen Yu Last week, I joined fifteen other students to sit down with Natasha Trethewey, two-time US Poet Laureate, to discuss the writing process behind her Pulitzer Prize-winning collection. Native Guard is based on the history of a regiment of black Union soldiers who guarded Confederate captives on Ship’s Island off the coast of Gulfport, Mississippi during the Civil War.
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project press release
April 2018
Activating History for Justice at Duke University
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April 19, 2018, Durham, NC: A Duke student research team today released a report that documents the university’s ties to slavery, white supremacy and discrimination and calls on the school to change how history is memorialized on campus.
“Activating History for Justice at Duke” joins efforts at schools like Brown, Georgetown, Yale and the University of North Carolina to revisit their pasts. Over the past eighteen months, students researched in the University Archives, mapped memorials on campus and designed their own sites. |
Students discovered that of the 327 sites they mapped, 53 per cent honor white men. Among them are slave owners and white supremacists like Duke’s longest-serving president, Braxton Craven. Duke’s History Department is housed in the Carr Building, named for industrialist Julian S. Carr. Along with donating the land where East Campus sits, Carr was a virulent white supremacist who also supported the 1898 Wilmington coup d’etat against black leadership, considered the only violent government takeover in US history.
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Read the full press release here.
the monument debate lecture event
April 2018
A lecture co-hosted by project team supervisor, Robin Kirk
OTHER LINKS
Duke History 101 (Durham Herald, June 1, 2015)
by Robin Kirk
Working in a university is a little like living in a fast-forward nature video. While I molder in my chair, the students swirling around me only get younger. They blossom, bloom and before the petals fall are off changing the world. I’ve learned to ration the Star Trek references – yes, even the J.J. Abrams reboot is getting a little dusty – and keep a straight face when the wide-eyed undergrad looks blankly at me when I mention dinosaurs like Henry Kissinger or Mao Zedong (however we ended up spelling his name). Click for more...
by Robin Kirk
Working in a university is a little like living in a fast-forward nature video. While I molder in my chair, the students swirling around me only get younger. They blossom, bloom and before the petals fall are off changing the world. I’ve learned to ration the Star Trek references – yes, even the J.J. Abrams reboot is getting a little dusty – and keep a straight face when the wide-eyed undergrad looks blankly at me when I mention dinosaurs like Henry Kissinger or Mao Zedong (however we ended up spelling his name). Click for more...
