The Manuscript Department in the Duke University Library
1965; Society of American Archivists; Volume: 28; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.17723/aarc.28.3.h54788lnwpgm3804
ISSN2327-9702
Autores Tópico(s)American History and Culture
ResumoDEVELOPMENT of a manuscript department at Duke University is an outgrowth of the intellectual awakening of 1887 at Trinity College in rural Randolph County, North Carolina.1 In that year John Franklin Crowell, a Yale graduate, was inaugurated president of the struggling school. In his first report to the North Carolina Methodist Conference Crowell said that a Seminary of History would be created for advanced students, and this, he predicted, would lead to sound historical scholarship at Trinity. A few years later, after the college had been moved to Durham, he established a separate department of history and political science and appointed Stephen B. Weeks as its chairman. Weeks had recently received the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the Johns Hopkins University; and at that university, through the influence of Prof. Herbert Baxter Adams, he had caught the spirit of the German school of scientific historians. At Trinity he started from scratch. His first move was to appeal in the college paper for the donation to the library of books on history and especially of the raw materials of history. A writer and a diligent collector himself, particularly of North Caroliniana, he successfully aroused in others an interest in history. In his first year he organized the Trinity College Historical Society, to collect books and other printed matter, manuscripts, works of art, and relics illustrating the history of North Carolina and the South.
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