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| The "Recollections" of R. T. W. Duke, Jr. consist of five leather-bound record books. Into these volumes, Duke poured his memories of people and events from a lifetime in Charlottesville and Albemarle County. |
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| Duke began to compose his reminisces on November 20, 1899, in order to leave a record of his experiences behind for his five children. He began with the apparent intent to cover the entire span of his life and devoted Volume I to his "early days." The process proved more absorbing and more time-consuming than Duke anticipated, for he had progressed only a few decades--into "manhood's years"--by the time that he made his last entry in January 1926, less than two months before his death. |
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| In the four and one-half books that Duke filled, he set down both biographical information and his assessment of the great political events which he witnessed, including the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Readjustor movement. Working in rough chronological order, he moved from his birth in 1853 until about 1882. The narrative thus ends almost two years before his marriage to Edith Ridgeway Slaughter. |
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| The Magazine of Albemarle County History has, at various times, published portions of Duke's Recollections. Helen R. Duke edited and published portions of the memoirs relating to the Civil War in 1942. More recently, Gayle M. Schulman, who transcribed the entire five volumes for the Albemarle County Historical Society, has annotated excerpts for publication, which appear in the 1994 and 2001 issues of the magazine. |
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| The University of Virginia Library is pleased to make Duke's Recollections available here in two formats, as a text file and as a digital reproduction of the books themselves. Gayle Schulman and the Albemarle County Historical Society provided the text file, which at this time is searchable only through the user's web browser. Absent from Schulman's transcription are the sketches, photographs, and newspaper clippings that Duke inserted into his work; these all appear in the more difficult to navigate digital version. |
