Last year marked the 100th anniversary of Trinity College renaming itself Duke University, a milestone marked with countless celebrations. The Duke University Libraries embraced the occasion with the exhibit “‘A Worthy Place’: Durham, Duke, and the World of the 1920s-1930s,” which marries traditional and computational history to explore how Duke and Durham changed during those two decades, while also looking at what Duke looked like before.
“A Worthy Place” was co-curated by Robert Buerglener, Hannah Jacobs, Paul Jaskot, Philip Stern, Victoria Szabo and Edward Triplett, with support from the Duke Libraries, the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, the Office of Information Technology and Duke Information Science & Studies.
“A Worthy Place” comes from a quote by Herbert S. Swan, an urban planner who helped design Durham’s city plan and zoning policy throughout the 1920s and 30s. Swan placed the onus of making Durham worthy of hosting a great university on both Durham and Duke, highlighting that Durham’s transformation would be up to the institution and the city. According to co-curator Robert Buerglener, research associate in ISS, Swan was one of many experts Durham’s City Council brought in to make Durham a more modern city.
The exhibit itself is the culmination of previous Duke courses and projects, including the 2023-2024 Bass Connections team “Worldbuilding at Duke in an Emerging Durham: 1924–1932.” This team studied everything from how Duke turned blueprints of West Campus into the final product to how Duke changed the city of Durham in the 1920s and 1930s, using historical research, 3D modeling and geospatial research.
According to an email from Emma Donnelly, a Bass Connections team member from NC State, she got involved in the project after taking a class with Ed Triplett, who co-led the Bass Connection team and is an assistant professor of the practice of Art, Art History & Visual Studies. Donnelly provided archival research support and helped build a digital map of critical sites used to inform the exhibit. She is especially proud of the work they did to reveal the story of Durham’s Black history, highlighting the impact of redlining and including notable Black landmarks in the exhibit.
Junior Brooke Hira, another Bass Connections team member, also got involved after taking a class with Triplett. She contributed to the project’s 3D modeling and geospatial research and helped explore how Duke shaped the topography of the area now inhabited by West Campus. During an interview with the Chronicle, she said her biggest takeaway was the level of intention Duke had in constructing West Campus. For example, “the driveway leading up to the chapel” was originally “a bit higher,” but was carved down to create the “beautiful view of driving up to the Duke Chapel” that is so iconic today.
The walls of the exhibit are covered with a mixture of historical maps, old photos of Durham and a small timeline tracking changes at Duke, in Durham and globally during the 1920s and 1930s. Placed throughout the exhibit are cases containing a wide range of historical documents and artifacts from Duke’s archives, the Durham Public Library’s Archives, the North Carolina State Archives and other sources. Highlights include a small book containing detailed sketches of Duke and Durham landmarks and a map showing all of the universities Joseph Brown, Trinity 1875, and former University president William Few visited throughout the country while seeking inspiration for West Campus.
Alongside the back of the room is the exhibit’s most striking component: an evolving topographical map of what is now West Campus. Created by projecting a video onto a machine-carved plywood map, the display feels like something out of a science fiction movie. In just a few minutes, visitors can watch the pre-Duke topography and landscape change as Duke graded the terrain, removed trees and built different parts of campus. The animation also overlays key parts of the campus infrastructure like major buildings, helping viewers understand how the visualized changes produced modern-day West Campus.
The exhibit provides a great introduction to Duke and Durham in the 1920s and 1930s, covering a diverse range of subjects and the full scope of the city’s changes, while highlighting Durham’s imperfect past in the realm of redlining and discrimination. By including pre-1920s Durham, “A Worthy Place” offers deeper historical context and helps visitors understand how the city evolved.
This strong educational experience is complemented by the exhibit’s strong aesthetics and visual appeal. The various items are consistently engaging, especially the photos and drawings, which provide delightful comparisons to present-day Durham. In particular, the animated display stands out as being both visually spectacular and highly novel — computational humanities have yet to be fully integrated into the world of exhibitions.
“A Worthy Place” expertly explores Duke’s early years, helping visitors understand how the University’s early days and its ever-evolving relationship with Durham. For those not on campus, view the online version here.
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Zev van Zanten is a Trinity junior and recess editor of The Chronicle's 120th volume.