Special 2014 Issue

It takes a great deal of strength to leave the security of home. This audio short features a mother sharing immigration stories with her daughter, and what it took for their family to build a life for themselves here in America. Produced for The Short Audio Documentary course taught by John Biewen at the Center for Documentary Studies.

Symbols wield immense power over people, but often their meaning is different for each of us. This story reflects on an encounter with a particularly polarizing symbol long-steeped in American southern culture in the voices of diverse students from across the country. Produced for The Short Audio Documentary course taught by John Biewen at the Center for Documentary Studies.

When asked which of the four countries she has lived in she considers home, she stumbles. So Iyanu decided to explore four different definitions of home. Produced for The Short Audio Documentary course taught by John Biewen at the Center for Documentary Studies.

The trigger of your senses can often prompt specific memories. For Tracy, it’s a particular piece of music that brings thoughts of the place she once called home. Produced for The Short Audio Documentary course taught by John Biewen at the Center for Documentary Studies.

Charles Taylor ’15 presents a visual guide to his time at Duke. Produced for the Motion Design course taught by Raquel Salvatella de Prada, assistant professor of the practice of art, art history & visual studies, and arts of the moving image.

Produced for the Motion Design course taught by Raquel Salvatella de Prada, assistant professor of the practice of art, art history & visual studies, and arts of the moving image.

Produced for the Motion Design course taught by Raquel Salvatella de Prada, assistant professor of the practice of art, art history & visual studies, and arts of the moving image.

Produced for the Motion Design course taught by Raquel Salvatella de Prada, assistant professor of the practice of art, art history & visual studies, and arts of the moving image.

Warm… Safe… Home. To be ripped away from it and endure a near-death illness at only nine months old, and still be alive to make it back home in the end — was a miracle. Produced for The Short Audio Documentary course taught by John Biewen at the Center for Documentary Studies.

Music can bring us back not only to where we once lived, but to places in which we’ve thrived, felt comfortable, and had a niche. Laura journeys to several homes using audio and imagination. Produced for The Short Audio Documentary course taught by John Biewen at the Center for Documentary Studies.

From the outside, W. Steven Burke’s elegantly understated Greek Revival home and adjoining buildings—all designed by him—in the heart of the historic district in Hillsborough, North Carolina, offer no hint at the worlds and wonders inside. But cross the threshold and suddenly you’re surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of small buildings that occupy nearly every surface.

It’s a mid-April morning in Highland Park, a neighborhood just north of Richmond, Virginia, where historic Queen Anne-style homes the color of popsicles give way to boarded-up buildings along a slight Main Street.

Kimberly Blackwell ’89 could have gone about anywhere to begin her career as a pioneering breast-cancer doctor. After graduating from the Mayo Medical School in 1994, she chose to come back to Duke. Now a clinical oncologist at the Duke Cancer Institute, Blackwell is regarded as one of the top breast-cancer researchers in the country. Her groundbreaking work developing new breast-cancer treatments earned her a place on Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2013. Sterly Wilder ’83, associate vice president for alumni affairs, talks with her.

New page turners on the shelves Bravery, humility, loyalty, and service are the common threads linking the soldiers profiled in Valor: Unsung Heroes From Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Home Front by Mark Lee Greenblatt ’95.

Each April, as the azaleas come into bloom, thousands of Duke alumni return to campus for Reunions Weekend, and I greet them with the words, “Welcome home.” But why do we think of college as a home? In many countries this is not the case: There, people feel a lifelong allegiance to their secondary schools and strike a more pragmatic, businesslike relationship with their universities. But in America, we expect that college will be our home for four years and stake a claim on our emotions for the rest of our lives. How does college become a home?

ON A MORNING in early 2006, Don Byrne walked through an overgrown field of grass. Alongside trudged his father, who, despite the early hour, carried a bottle of Jameson Irish whiskey. At the highest point on the land, the two men paused. It was here that they wanted to drill the well. In a makeshift christening, they sprinkled the land with liquor.

In the afternoon, Don visits the third cabin, which he recently made his workshop. He lifts a pine plank and secures it between two bench vices, checking to see that the grain runs in the right direction. Over one edge, he steadily passes an old-fashioned hand plane, forming a groove in the wood. Pine shavings curl at his feet, reminding him of golden angel hair, and he inhales the woodsy, clean scent of pine, tinged with the perfume of wisteria.

“I’m going home. That’s it. I don’t want to hear anything else!”

There are four sacred mountains that outline the traditional Navajo homeland, and inside is where all your blessings are, where all life started. You’re only supposed to perform traditional ceremonies within the boundaries. For example, a baby’s umbilical cord is often buried in the ground. Mine is buried in the horse corral at my maternal grandmother’s house. My mom said it’s done so that I will always return to my people and care for the animals and Earth.

Ninth Street in the 1980s was like a boomtown, or maybe boom village. The rents were cheap, the neighborhoods were friendly and young, and West Durham, with its tolerant, open arms, was welcoming everyone. Especially everyone with good food or a good idea.

Sitting a comfortable distance from the U.S. military conflicts abroad, I had envisioned “coming home” as both a welcome departure from the battlefield and a new beginning for returning veterans. However, my perspective shifted upon interviewing one of the subjects from my first documentary. After Dennis Murphy came back from Vietnam with severe, combat-related posttraumatic stress disorder, he engaged in an endless and losing battle with alcoholism, ultimately walking out on his wife and three young children forever.

At some point or another, most of us have been afflicted by homesickness—that pang of nostalgia and longing for familiar people and places. To understand the origin and purpose of homesickness, we asked Mark Leary, professor of psychology and neuroscience and the director of Duke’s social psychology program, to give us some insight into this common human experience. How would you define homesickness?

I grew up in a household where my dad has been always supportive. He always praised women for their minds and for their compassion. I never got the sense from my father that women were inferior; I never felt that I was less than my brothers. Whenever he would see an amazing woman on television, like a scholar or a scientist, he would always tell me to come and watch. My dad supported me in my travels and when I decided not to be a doctor in my career choice.

Why do most of us love our homes? Because, of course, they are saturated with the memories of how we became who we are. Like the family photographs displayed within them, homes tend to archive good times, not bad ones.

Fall 1974. Late again. Waiting for the bus on East Campus. Why aren’t there enough buses when it’s time for class—all right, a little past time for class—but there should be more buses! Finally arriving on West and then running through the woods to get to Gross Chem. Could any building be more appropriately named? Rushing through the woods to get there always reminded me of the Wizard of Oz, and when I reached Oz, the gust of wind that overwhelmed me as I opened the door reminded me I was no longer in Kansas.

When I was diagnosed with breast cancer, at the age of thirty-five, I did not see my life pass before my eyes. I did not have black spots at the edge of my vision. Instead, I thought, “Oh, crap, what do I do now?”

Eleven years ago, when my wife, Leah, and I were far from home in the Anbar province of Iraq, American friends with whom we were traveling had a car accident. Three of them split their heads open on impact and stumbled out of the car onto a dusty highway strewn with the debris of war. A car of Iraqis stopped, took them into their car, and drove them to a town called Rutba. There a doctor spoke to them in perfect English: “Three days ago, your country bombed our hospital. But we will take care of you.” He sewed up their heads and saved their lives.

"It was a rough time for us, when they accused our boys of that heinous crime.” We were in a midtown Manhattan hotel conference room in 2007, attendees at a Duke University Black Alumni Connection meeting, my first. I thought I had misheard the speaker, an impassioned former Duke athlete who by the end of his speech had pledged $60,000 to either DUBAC or the Reggie Howard Scholarship Fund—I no longer recall which. But his words I never forgot. “They accused our boys.”

The willow oak has written in it an ink of time-underlayment. I say the word emeritus and the wind-rubbed coppery surface touches my eyes like a worn rug. Corded by limbs to a base in soil it recovers those years of toil that layered other leaves in another place. The library’s vellum and coffee still drug my memory, like Gothic walls and trees above. There I and my gnarled masters strove, limning interpretive cursives and dots onto the passionate dead’s still living arguments.

The cashier at the Dollar General gave me a somewhat confused glance as I checked out, looking at me with a combination of perplexity and shyness. He did not quite understand what my purchase would be used for, but he also seemed too shy to ask. And so, without explanation, I paid for my item and left.