Summer Exhibit: Let the Old Traditions Fail

Rauner's current exhibit, "Let the Old Traditions Fail: Persistence of Feminist and Queer Life At Dartmouth in the Twentieth Century" was designed by the students in Professor Matthew Ritger’s ENGL 61.03/WGSS 66.20 class, "Early Modern Literature and the History of Sexuality." Throughout the quarter, the students explored academic debates over the history of sex and gender, the relationship between identity formation and sexual orientation, and the difference between representations of these issues in literary/dramatic texts and legal/institutional archives. The course was focused on early modern England - the age of writers such as William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Margaret Cavendish, and Katherine Philips. In their exhibit, the students dove into Dartmouth's own archives to see how these dynamics and debates manifested in a different time and place, and in a unique institutional archive.

As the student curators explored the history of feminist campus publications such as Spare Rib and Inner Bitch, or Dartmouth's history of cross-dressed performance before coeducation, or the institutional panic in the face of a growing community of queer students at Dartmouth in the 1920s, they found striking continuities, stark differences, and many fascinating stories. Throughout the records of twentieth century Dartmouth, there remains evidence of the close relationship between literature, drama, and daring acts of self-expression that challenged the "old traditions" of gender and sexuality and defied the narrow definition of "the Dartmouth man" still retained by many aspects of campus culture. Despite facing expulsion and violent threats of repression from so many directions, queer and feminist life has persisted on campus in unexpected ways.

This exhibit is on display from July 9th through September during the Summer 2025 term.

Bad Art on the Cutting Room Floor

We are always touting our beautiful books--so important and culturally significant!--but this summer we are working with a class called "Baaaaad French" and another one called "Bad Art!" We have so much to offer it is dizzying! We have books that have been banned for daring to suggest the earth is not the center of the universe; others that challenged the social mores of the day to such an extent that they were deemed pornography; others that were cheaply printed for a mass market that the cultural elite suspected of being, well, too damn dumb to deserve to read; and many books with lots of naughty bits.

We have so much that not everything we selected could make the final cut to be used in class. Case in point, Did She Fall?, by Dartmouth's own Thorne Smith. The book was marketed to titillate. Its racy pulp cover shows our heroine, Emily-Jane, practically falling out of her dress engaged in a passionate kiss, but the blurbs on the back were what caught our eye: "She could have given lessons to Lolita," and "When she was bad, she was very, very bad, and when she was good, she was luscious until somebody killer her, or Did She Fall?"

That one didn't make it into the class, but you'll be happy to know that Lolita did!

To find out if bad, bad Emily-Jane fell, ask for Alumni S662dia.

Just When You Thought It Was Safe to Go Back Into Rauner...

This month we have a new single-case exhibit installed at Rauner Library, one appropriate to the summer and especially to this coming Fourth of July weekend. Since the movie Jaws just turned 50, we decided to do a survey of sharks and shark attacks in the collections.

We found quite the variety, including 16th-century tomes on ichthyology, painted and written accounts of attacks on sailors, informative pamphlets for 19th-century children and for 20th-century navy men, and -- naturally -- a student's review of Jaws in the Dartmouth. He wasn't entirely convinced that it was worth all the fuss it generated, but we recommend you come by and read his thoughts for yourself. 

The Angling Nudist

Anyone who has spent some time either in our reading room or following our blog will recognize the name Viljhalmur Stefansson. Stefansson was a Canadian explorer born to Icelandic immigrants in 1879. After numerous Arctic expeditions, he became a renowned lecturer and advocate for the Arctic. Stefansson was a lecturer at Dartmouth from 1947 until his death in 1962, and the college acquired his significant collection of polar exploration materials in 1952.

Among the many collections we acquired was a 96-box collection containing Stefansson's personal and professional correspondence over a 67-year period. We are always finding new gems within these boxes, and this week turned up another winner. On May 28 of 1935, Stefansson received an unsolicited request from Henry S. Huntington, the brother of an acquaintance. In it, Huntington says that he would like to come over and talk with Stefansson about "the Eskimos from the 'nudist' angle". After a period of profound silence, Stefansson eventually responded to Huntington on June 14th, admitting that the idea of  "Eskimos from the nudist angle" had "somewhat startled" him and was likely the reason that he had taken so long to reply.

Huntington was a Yale graduate and Presbyterian minister who in 1933 had co-founded The Burgoyne Trail in Otis, Massachusetts, one of the country's first nudist colonies. His promotion of the lifestyle was firmly based in its health benefits and its ability to free people from obsessing about sex. When he met later with Stefansson in July, it was with an eye toward recruiting the charismatic public speaker to give a presentation at the International Nudists Conference in August of the same year.
However, despite Huntington's well-meaning intentions, the potential for negative PR was too great a risk for Stefansson. The explorer responded tersely to a series of initially unanswered letters from Huntington by saying that he had decided against participating "on the principle that there is no point in getting eaten by lions except for what you think is a supreme cause." Subsequent letters from Huntington are marked in pencil with "No Ans", suggesting that for Stefansson the conversation was over.

To hunt for similar gold nuggets with Stefansson's correspondence, request a box online from MSS-196 and then come to Rauner to start digging.

Having a Ball (but No Dancing!)

Starting sometime in the late 1700s, the graduating class threw a ball after commencement. The earliest ticket we have is from 1792. The balls began at 6:00pm in the evening after commencement ceremonies. Young ladies from the community were invited to enjoy what looks like a somewhat staid reception with the students. But, as will happen when young celebrants gather, dancing sometimes broke out. Oh dear, that is not right!

In 1867, one trustee warned that in previous years "some of the young people danced at the close of the social gathering," causing some donors to withhold their gifts to Dartmouth. In his letter to Asa Dodge Smith, Zedekiah Smith Barstow emphatically concluded, "I am persuaded that it behooves us now to say that we will have no dancing at the close this gathering under out patronage." The stricture didn't last--by 1880, the invitation expressly states "Reception at 9:00. Dancing at 10:30."

So, everyone enjoy the Commencement festivities this weekend, and, yeah, it's okay to dance.

To see the tickets ask for the "Commencement Ball--Tickets" vertical file. Barstow's letter is MS 867420.1.

Dolphins, octopi, and bishop fish

French professor and scientist Guillaume Rondelet (1507-1566) dabbled in many areas, among them anatomy, medicine, botany, and zoology. We're going to focus on a subset of that last one today, because Rondelet legacy in our collections is that of ichthyology, the study of fish.

First published in 1554, our copy of Rondelet's masterwork is the 1558 translation, L'Histoire Entière des Poissons (The Complete History of Fish), which remained a standard reference work on the subject until the early 19th century. Not remotely limited to fish, the book includes cephalopods, crustaceans, marine mammals like dolphins, and even less fishy aquatic animals like beavers. And unless you're studying the history of science, the woodcuts are the real stars here. The illustrations are fantastic, and there are a lot of them.

While the "fish" of L'Histoire are all worth looking at, we'll draw your attention to one anomaly, categorized helpfully in the sea monsters section. The "sea monster in the habit of a bishop," now referred to simply as the bishop fish, was something of a hot news item in Rondelet's day. According to his description, the bishop fish has been caught and brought to the King of Poland in 1531, to whom he "made certain signs to show that he had a great desire to return to the sea." The bishop fish was brought back to the ocean, into which he promptly threw himself.

To look at L'Histoire, request it online (Rare Book QL41 .R7) and then come to Rauner to see it.

Um, I have a lot going on that week...

Many people dream of a hand-delivered official summons from the Queen for a private appointment. Sounds pretty exciting, but each of the ten nobles summoned with this letter refused to attend on the appointed date. Some of them wouldn't even allow Lord Paget, Keeper of the Privy Seal, anywhere near them to deliver the invitation. You see, this particular letter was from Mary Tudor to a group of English nobles living in exile in 1556. They had fled their home county when Mary assumed the throne. All of them had helped either Henry VIII or Edward VI bring about the English Reformation, and many had received lands from Henry when he dissolved the monasteries as reward for their loyalty and support.

There is a reason Mary earned the nickname "Bloody Mary." During her short five-year reign she attempted to reverse the Reformation and restore property back to the Roman Catholic Church. This, naturally, involved killing a lot of people, as sensationally documented in Foxe's Actes and Monuments of the Latter and Perillous Dayes (more commonly called Foxe's Book of Martyrs). This formal invitation wasn't to the kind of party anyone wanted to attend.

The intended guests didn't have to wait much longer in exile. Mary died two years later and Elizabeth I assumed the throne and made it safe for these particular nobles to visit court again.

We are still cataloging the letter, but we will put a link here when it is ready. It pairs nicely with our 1563 first edition of Foxe's Book of Martyrs--just ask for Presses D334f.