Nell Irvin Painter papers, 1793-2011 and undated, bulk 1876-2007.

ArchivalResource

Painter, Nell Irvin. Nell Irvin Painter papers, 1793-2011 and undated, bulk 1876-2007.

Nell Irvin Painter papers, 1793-2011 and undated, bulk 1876-2007.

http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/51907978

Collection is primarily composed of the extensive correspondence, writing, research, teaching materials, and other professional papers that Painter has produced in a forty-year career as a student, scholar, teacher, and writer in 19th- and 20th-century American and African American history. These materials document the breadth and depth of Painter's interests and her intellectual and personal influence on a generation of historians. Her varied roles as student, teacher, colleague, and mentor are recorded in a wide variety of formats: correspondence with colleagues, students, family, and friends; syllabi, department memoranda, and meeting minutes from her graduate and faculty positions at Harvard, Princeton, and the Universities of North Carolina and Pennsylvania; materials from many professional organizations in the fields of African American history, Southern history, American studies, and women's studies; and records of her speaking engagements, conferences, and meetings. Painter the historian and author are revealed in the extensive notes, photocopies, recordings, photographs, manuscripts, and proofs produced in writing many articles and five of her major books: Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction; The Narrative of Hosea Hudson: His Life as a Negro Communist in the South; Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877-1919; Sojourner Truth, A Life, A Symbol; and Creating Black Americans: African-American History and its Meanings, 1619 to the Present. The portrait is rounded out by the materials in several smaller series: personal files, which include materials from her student years at Harvard and abroad in Ghana and France as well as personal journals; a few papers of Ghanaian writer Ayi Kwei Armah; photographs, including many historical photographs of African Americans as well as many personal snapshots in color and black-and-white; and other non-print media such as audiotapes, audiocassettes, videocassettes, and computer diskettes. In effect the collection creates a record of both historical and contemporary value at once. Because of Painter's intellectual interests and research, her papers contain a wealth of information about many topics in American history: biography of African Americans; biography as a literary form; slavery; Reconstruction; the 1870s migration from the South to Kansas; a variety of social reform movements--such as abolition, communism, labor, and women's suffrage--and movers, such as Sojourner Truth and Hosea Hudson; and the history of social conditions and political change in the United States from the early-19th to the mid-20th century, particularly as expressed in race relations, in women's history, and in the South. Painter's papers not only document the content and process of her historiographic inquiry, they also constitute their own, contemporary record of many trends in American culture, especially as regards career and educational choices and opportunities for women and African Americans. Her correspondence with students, colleagues, and longtime friends such as Nellie Y. McKay, her teaching material and academic files, her papers from an array of historians' organizations, and her personal journals each shed their own light on these themes. In sum these documents both outline and detail some of the emerging roles of women and African Americans in American society. The collection attests to the value and stimulation of the intellectual life while recording almost every step taken in pursuit of it, from the minutiae of academic research and job-hunting, to the attainment of personal success, to the challenges and rewards that inhere in a lifetime's worth of effort to get new fields accepted and established in the academic community. Addition (2008-0016) (13,000 items; 19.5 lin. ft.; dated 1964-2007) contains personal and professional papers and correspondence, photographs, scrapbooks, and awards received by Painter. Addition (2010-0116) (10.5 lin. ft.; dated 1970s-2010) includes correspondence, email correspondence, newspaper clippings, articles, board notes, journal articles, CDs with interviews, photographs, notebooks, and miscellaneous material. This addition is closed until processing. Addition (2011-0173) (2.0 lin. ft.; dated 2010-2011) includes email and written correspondence and miscellaneous printed material. This addition is closed until processing.

124,500 items (171.5 lin. ft.)

Duke University Libraries, Duke University Library; Perkins Library