Additional Quotes

Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Hope, in this deep and
powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or
willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for
success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is
good.

Obstacles don’t have to stop you.
If you run into a wall, don’t turn around and give up.
Figure out how to climb it, go through it, or work around it.

You know you’ve achieved perfection in design,
not when you have nothing more to add,
but when you have nothing more to take away.

Papers

Elizabeth Arnold-Hull

Elizabeth
Arnold Hull received a bachelor’s degree in archaeology from
Appalachian State University in 1999, and is currently pursuing a
Master’s in Public History, Museum Studies concentration, part-time at
the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Employed until recently
as a manuscripts processor in Duke University’s Special Collections
Library, she has begun a new position as archivist/librarian for the
Forest History Society in Durham, NC.

Family photography
is a medium which has been approached from a variety of disciplines —
material culture, social research, art, visual culture, and social
history, to name a few. From these diverse perspectives emerges a
degree of consensus that family pictures function primarily as
reference points for identity formation and maintenance, frameworks for
community-building, signifiers of past achievements and of future
dreams, a means by which to portray families to others, and most
importantly, as documentary records to be preserved as enduring
legacies. These images can serve often overlapping purposes ranging
from intensely individual to defiantly public, even political.

As
a study of the photograph collection kept by the Popes, a successful,
well-educated, African-American family of Raleigh, NC, shows, the
importance of all of these functions was dramatically amplified for
Southern black families living as victims of the Jim Crow system, under
which their claims to identity, community, and other basic rights were
constantly challenged. Because of these ubiquitous threats, the
production, display, and distribution of photographs by families like
the Popes represented political acts of opposition to images of blacks
created by the dominant culture—examples of African Americans taking
control over their own representation in response to white supremacist
stereotypes.

Meanwhile, these photographs also fulfilled
important personal functions, allowing blacks to define and affirm
their own sense of beauty, identity, self-worth, and belonging. Under
the volatile circumstances of segregation, disfranchisement, and the
threat of violence against any black person who dared to step “out of
place,” such affirmation would have been crucial for maintaining
self-esteem.

(more…)

Life indeed is…

Falling in love consists merely in uncorking the
imagination and bottling the common sense. –Helen Rowland

God’s Word, contained in the Bible, has furnished all necessary rules to direct our conduct.
–Noah Webster

Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall
–Confucius

To put the world right in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must first put the family in order; to put the family in order, we must first cultivate our personal life; we must first set our hearts right.
–Confucius

Ancient Egyptians believed that upon death they would be asked two questions and their answers would determine whether they could continue their journey in the afterlife. The first question was, “Did you bring joy?” The second was, “Did you find joy?”
–Leo Buscaglia

Life is so great in its opportunities and possibilities, that you should rise confidently above the inevitable trifles incident to daily contact with the world. Life is too precious to be sacrificed for the nonessential and transient… Ignore the inconsequential.
–Grenville Kleiser