What’s in a name: Introducing Pearl 2.0

At the Presbyterian Historical Society, everyone knows Pearl.

At least, we know the name. We toss it around like confetti, utter it hundreds of times a day. It’s the name of our online archive, Pearl Digital Collections. The repository that holds all our digitized and born-digital content: photographs, videos, oral histories, publications, and so much more.

This week, PHS is pleased to unveil the fresh new site for Pearl Digital Collections.

First launched in the fall of 2015 with approximately 2,000 digital objects, Pearl has grown immensely in the decade since its creation. Since then, PHS staff have worked to add more than 30,000 digital objects in a variety of formats: photographs, books, newspapers, historical documents, audio, video, and even websites. In 2015, the majority of those first 2,000 items in Pearl were photographs. Now, the range of materials from our archives that are freely accessible to the public stretches much farther.

Because the site has experienced such exponential growth, PHS staff began in February to redesign the site as a whole to give it a cleaner, more accessible and modern look.

And what better way to celebrate this next chapter for our digital repository than to spend time getting to know its eponym: Nobel Prize-winning author and prominent Presbyterian, Pearl S. Buck.

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Pearl S. Buck was the daughter of Southern Presbyterian missionaries to China, and grew up there surrounded by her parents’ faith, Chinese culture, and a passion for putting her thoughts down in words. In 1932, Buck’s first novel, "The Good Earth," a historical fiction which told the story of a Chinese peasant farming couple as they lived through the fluctuating social and political landscape of early 20th-century China, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. In 1938, she became the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in literature “for the notable works which pave the way to a human sympathy passing over widely separated racial boundaries and for the studies of human ideals which are a great and living art of portraiture.”

When asked about the choosing of the digital archives’ namesake, PHS Executive Director Nancy J. Taylor remembers the dual benefits of Pearl: not only that it would honor the headstrong, passionate Presbyterian missionary and author, but that it also resonated with the lower-case meaning of “pearl” as something of value. Perfect, as that’s exactly what Pearl Digital Collections is: full of true gems.

That other gem, Pearl S. Buck, finished the manuscript of "The Good Earth" (1931) in just three months. Many other novels would follow, as well as a memoir, biographies of her parents, children’s books, articles and more.

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At the time of her death — from lung cancer in March 1973 — Buck left 25 manuscripts unfinished. Renowned and remembered for her dedication to bridging the gap between cultural misunderstandings and assumptions, Buck infused her books with emphases on human rights, women’s rights, the human connection to the earth, and the dignity and worth of the individual — no matter their race or ethnicity, no matter the country they lived in.

Anchee Min, author of "Pearl of China" (2010), said she “broke down and sobbed” after reading "The Good Earth" for the first time as an adult, having been forbidden to read growing up in China during the Cultural Revolution. Min said Buck portrayed the Chinese peasants “with such love, affection, and humanity,” and it inspired her to write her own novel, a fictional biography about Buck, with the same sense of appreciation.

“Her experience as a missionary gave her a certain view, but she was able to step outside a purely church-oriented world in which her parents operated, to see a much broader scope of China and the world,” Edgar Walsh says of Buck, his mother. “She was a builder of bridges between China and the rest of the world.”

Pearl Digital Collections shares this in common with its namesake, too.

Because it serves as a bridge between the past and the present, between the PHS archives and you, we encourage you to get to know Pearl.

Further Resources

Browse the Foreign Missions digital collection in Pearl 

Watch a video of the 1938 Nobel Prize award ceremony for Mrs. Pearl S. Buck

Read the full transcript of Pearl S. Buck’s Nobel Prize lecture