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1918–2026 — the shelf's commissioned end
The company history: Albert Russel Erskine's History of the Studebaker Corporation (1918) is the official history of the city's defining firm, written by its president, and it underlies the encyclopedia spine of the Studebaker file. The build's experience of it is the standard one for a house history: the founding facts it prints — the $68 of 1852 — stand also in Howard (1907), and the tale stock around them (Wheelbarrow Johnny and the rest) can be dated as later embroidery only because the early carriers, Howard and Erskine, print the plainer versions. Where Erskine is the source, this history says the company's own history is the source.
The study: Buford F. Gordon, The Negro in South Bend (1922), is a sociological survey of the city's Black community — housing, employment, recreation — written by a Black minister who had come to the city from Tennessee, and modeled consciously on Du Bois's Philadelphia study. It reaches this build carried inside later scholarship and the Commission report below, and through the scholarship around its modern reprint; the Black History file prints Gordon at that documented strength — a primary voice of 1922, quoted by the record that preserved him.
The commission: the newest book on the shelf is the Final Report of the Reparatory Justice Commission (City of South Bend, filed 5 March 2026), whose history section runs from page 13 to page 76. It is a sourced, primary-grade civic document — the city's own commissioned account of its racial history — and it is the Story of South Bend section of this history's Black History file, including the Natatorium record that Katherine O'Dell's Our Day (Wolfson Press, 2010) documents from the other side. A commission report is an official history and is read as one: its documents are quoted, its framing is attributed, and where its account and the older record part company, both are printed.
Sources:
- Indiana Magazine of History13–76; O'Dell, Our Day, 2010).