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Abraham Joshua Heschel was an internationally known scholar, author, activist, and theologian. He was born in Warsaw, Poland into a distinguished family of Hasidic rebbes, and studied philosophy in Berlin, Germany. In 1938 he was deported from Frankfurt to Warsaw where he escaped to London just before the Nazi invasion. After a brief time in London he immigrated to the United States, first teaching at the Hebrew Union College and then at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America where he taught as Professor of Ethics and Mysticism until his death in 1972. In addition to his active participation in social justice issues and his interfaith work, Heschel was also a scholar and religious thinker who made significant contributions to Jewish studies. As a philosopher of religion, his goal was to make the spiritual insights of Judaism understandable and over the course of his lifetime influenced generations of Jews and non-Jews. The Abraham Joshua Heschel Papers span the years 1880 to 1998 and document Abraham Joshua Heschel's personal, academic, and public life. Items in this collection include correspondence, writings by and about Heschel, typescripts, clippings, printed material, and a small amount of photographs and artifacts. The materials in the collection provide insight to Heschel's identity as a spiritual leader and how this role was inextricably connected to his personal and professional life. The collection is organized into the following series: Audio, Correspondence, Personal and Family Materials, Public Activity, Restricted, and Writings.

Collection consists of two series, Civil War Papers and Lee Family Papers, acquired and assembled by collectors Alfred and Elizabeth Brand. Materials relate to the Lee family, including Francis Lightfoot Lee, Henry Light Horse Harry Lee, Richard Henry Lee, and Robert E. Lee, as well as Civil War history, including battle reports, correspondence between Confederate and Union leaders and officers (such as Braxton Bragg, Jefferson Davis, William T. Sherman, and Thomas 'Stonewall' Jackson), presidential pardons and oaths of allegiance, and some printed materials.

Public official, Indian agent, and Territorial Governor of Utah (1857-1861). Family and political correspondence, mainly of the 1850s, with material on Mormon history, including the "Mormon War," and on frontier and pioneer life. Includes journals, scrapbooks, letter books, and proceedings pertaining to councils and negotiations with the Blackfoot Indians and other tribes (1855). Letters of Cumming's wife, Elizabeth Wells Randall Cumming, describe incidents on her trip to Utah with her husband when he was named governor with frontier conditions and Indian troubles. Cumming's official letter books contain correspondence to James Buchanan, Lewis Cass, Howell Cobb, John B. Floyd, Albert S. Johnston, Brigham Young, and others. Additional correspondents include W.W. Bibb, J.S. Black, William Medill, B.F. Perry, Franklin Pierce, Alexander Stephens, and G.M. Troup. Includes papers of William Clay Cumming, a brother, pertaining to his studies at Princeton University (1805) and at Litchfield Law School; his accounts of opposition to Federalism in New England; his experiences in the War of 1812; travels in the Mississippi Valley and the South; and a few comments on Brazil and Uruguay (1816). The collection also contains papers from Thomas Cumming.

Alvin T. Parnell was a commercial photographer based in Durham, N.C. Collection chiefly consists of 167 black-and-white photographs of the city and people of Durham, North Carolina. The majority, chiefly taken by Parnell from 1920 through the 1950s, are views of downtown streets, commercial and industrial buildings, churches, and infrastructure, especially transportation. Many sites are related to the tobacco manufacturing businesses based in Durham. A few are of African American tobacco workers posed in the field and female factory workers ending their shift. Other images range widely and include a Trinity College (later Duke University) reunion, war veterans at gatherings, a minstrel band, a cart advertising Bull Durham tobacco, and tobacco fields with posed workers, white and African American. In addition, there are portraits of prominent Durham individuals and families. Formats include 85 vintage and modern gelatin silver prints, chiefly 8x10 inches, 82 contact prints, and 12 safety negatives. Includes an information folder with 1986 obituary and collection information.

Basil Lee Whitener (1915-1989) was a U.S. Representative from Gastonia, N.C. Collection includes correspondence between Whitener and his constituents, other congressmen, and government officials, legislative materials, drafts of bills, financial papers, speeches, invitations, printed material, clippings, photographs, and other papers, chiefly from congressional files (1957-1968), relating to issues of national importance during the 1960s, including the Vietnam War, crime legislation, gun control, riots, civil rights legislation, foreign aid, social security, and the Taft-Hartley Act. Correspondents include Sam Ervin, John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Sargent Shriver, and Strom Thurmond.

Textile manufacturer, politician, and United States Senator from North Caroina (1958-1972). Collection includes Senate office files from Jordan's Washington office consisting mainly of correspondence, committee and legislative files, speeches, memoranda, clippings, photographic negatives, and background materials. Topics include public works projects in North Carolina, especially those related to water resources such as rivers, harbors, beaches, inland navigation, flood control, the B. Everett Jordan Lake, and the New Hope Dam. Other subjects represented in the files are U.S. foreign relations, in particular with the Middle East as well as the Vietnam War; agricultural laws; civil rights; school desegregation and busing; pollution; the National Park Service; transportation and highways; social security; public health; the United Nations; the Senate Rules Committee investigation of Bobby Baker, 1963-1966; labor laws; economic policy; library legislation; and economic conditions in North Carolina.

Confederate Army officer, planter, and official of Hampton County, S.C. Mainly personal letters of Williams and his family, concerning his Civil War military service in the 25th and 47th Georgia Infantry Regiments, his efforts to become a planter after the war, his personal life, and his work as sheriff and auditor of Hampton County, S.C. Includes early land deeds, and letters from a physician who served in Cuba and Puerto Rico during the Spanish-American War.

Recorded earlier as the Benson Family Papers. Includes materials from the related families of Elias Benson, physician, of Marion Co., Alabama, and John Ford Thompson, officer of the Alabama Militia. The families emigrated from Greenvilee and Spartanburg counties, S.C., to Alabama in the early 1800s. Personal correspondence and business papers of the Benson, Thompson, and Moore families who migrated from Greenville County and Spartanburg County, South Carolina, to Alabama. Correspondence between the groups in South Carolina and Alabama is concerned for the most part with family matters. However, political events are occasionally discussed, and a number of letters, 1836-1840, deal with the Alabama militia. The collection includes letters reflecting conditions in Alabama during the Civil War; several items on medical education at the University of Louisiana (Tulane University), 1866-1868; and records of the Marion (Alabama) Grange, No. 95, 1873-1876.

Bobbye Ortiz was a social activist and Marxist feminist. The collection consists chiefly of personal correspondence; extensive subject files on international political and cultural movements; photographs and slides; ephemeral publication material such as grassroots newsletters, pamphlets, broadsides, and clippings; cultural artifacts, including buttons and T-shirts; and over 300 sound recordings of spoken voice and music (see separate catalog record for sound recordings). The collection documents the personal life and career of an international feminist, Marxist activist, and mother, who also served as editor of the magazine Monthly Review and was the founder of the organization WIRE (Women's International Resource Exchange). English.

President of North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company, 1923-1952. NC Mutual is the oldest currently active African American-owned insurance company in the United States, founded in 1898 and headquartered in Durham, North Carolina. The collection contains photographs, miscellaneous business papers, programs, speeches, clippings related to C. C. Spaulding, black civil rights, and to African American life more generally, in addition to administrative materials and various publications created by and related to North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company. These papers document the growth of North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company in the mid-twentieth century, Spaulding's and the company's connection to the community, and their involvement in African American issues (local and beyond) and livelihood. Acquired as part of the John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American History and Culture.