Harsh Climates, Political and Otherwise

1816 was a weird year for Dartmouth. The state of New Hampshire took over the school, transforming it into a public university and making changes to the leadership and how it was run. Naturally, a lot of people within the College objected to this, resulting in the famous Dartmouth College Case. A few years later the case would be decided in favor of the College assuring its independence.

The takeover wasn't the only thing going on in 1816, however. The world was in the middle of its "Year Without Summer," a period of climate chaos caused by the eruption of a volcano in the Dutch East Indies the year before. The ash and gas released into the air was so extensive that it blocked light, causing global temperatures to drop and crops to fail. New England was not spared and the agricultural consequences around here were significant.

David Woodburn Dickey, Class of 1818, wrote a letter home on June 20th, 1816. He starts with a point of disappointed optimism -- "I was in hopes that by this time I should be able to inform you respecting the termination of the College difficulties but large bodies move slow" -- before going on to share his thoughts on both the situation at Dartmouth and the weird weather. David thinks that it's a good idea for the legislature to appoint Trustees to the board, one of the changes recently made by the state. He also spends time describing the great interest students are taking in the current situation. The news about the weather drives home that this isn't a typical June: "Within three weeks past there has been some remarkable cold weather, there was no snowfall here of consequence, but in Vermont and in this state further to the North there was considerable, Here was considerable ... frost for two or three nights, which did some injury though not so much as might be expected." 

The combination of internal political turmoil and external climate upheaval at Dartmouth must have made for a really strange student experience. David's letter seems to take things more or less in stride, but the circumstances appear extraordinary from here. To see the letter yourself, ask for Mss 816370. 

 

Double Consciousness

We have talked a little about Charles Eastman, Class of 1887, in a past blog post in relation to the Osage and his work for the Department of the Interior, but this week we found a very cool connection we didn't know existed. In 1911, Eastman was invited to the "First Universal Races Congress" to represent the American Indian. Eastman spoke on the tensions between integration into white society verses a preservation of cultural values and beliefs. He seemed to come to the conclusion that both were possible--perhaps as a direct result of his own life story where he lived a rich life by keeping a foot in both worlds.

What knocked us out was this picture on the pages listing the speakers. There's Eastman staring right at W. E. B. Du Bois. They both addressed the Congress in the same session so they must have hung out together. Another interesting tidbit from the day, in attendance (though not a speaker) was the not-yet-famous (and-not-yet Mahatma) lawyer from Johannesburg, Mahondus Gandhi.

For the next month (June 2026) there is a great exhibit devoted to Eastman in our lobby. Stop by and take a look! After that, you can see the program pictured here by asking for Eastman's Alumni file. The proceedings from the First Universal Races Congress are out at the LCSF so they are easy to get to by requesting them in the catalog.

The birth of "A.I."

Although Dartmouth is often noted as the birthplace of BASIC programming language, not as many people realize that it is also where Artificial Intelligence was created as an academic discipline. In the summer of 1956, a six to eight week workshop met on the top floor of the Dartmouth Mathematics Department. The workshop was the brainchild of Dartmouth Assistant Professor of Mathematics John McCarthy, who had coined the term 'artificial intelligence' in a proposal that he submitted along with Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon, now known in the field as some of the "founding fathers" of the discipline.

The summer session was less of an intensive conference and more of a rolling series of talks and meetings, with a varying cast of characters in attendance at any given time. Some of the topics that were discussed included the rise of symbolic methods, systems focused on limited domains, and deductive systems versus inductive systems. Unfortunately, because the event wasn't formally sponsored or organized by the college, we don't have a lot of archival documents related to the workshop. However, what we do have has been digitized and is available for exploration online. To see a pdf of the original proposal, visit the Office of Communications' finding aid online (DA-29, Box 2898, Folder 27). You can also look through the vertical file on Artificial Intelligence. Both folders can also be looked through in person at Rauner.

The Brothers Brock

Edmund and Mary Ann Brock had seven children, all born between 1868 and 1879. Each of their four sons and at least one of their daughters were artistically inclined and came up during the Golden Age of Illustration, an era well-represented in our illustrated collections.

Charles Edmund, the eldest, was a prolific illustrator of magazines, literature, and the like. One estimate has him providing illustrations for about 270 books during his career. The next oldest, Richard Henry, also worked in magazine illustration but seems to have spent his career focusing on painting landscapes. Thomas Alfred, the third son, is less well-known than his brothers and his work had a more scientific bent, appearing in textbooks and journals of geology, paleontology, and so on. And Henry Matthew, the youngest son, was closer to Charles in focus and output, working in both books and magazines, with illustrations for over 500 books to his name by the time he died in 1960.

The Brocks had three daughters and significantly less is known about them. That said, Katharine Alison attended the same Cambridge School of Art as her brothers and — like her brothers — won some prizes for her work there. She did not have a career in art as they did; instead, she took care of her parents' household, was involved in local fundraising and church events, published some poetry, and eventually married and started her own family. We can’t say if she had any interest in becoming an artist professionally — there were a few successful female illustrators working at the time, but she did not join their number. 

We bring the prolific Brocks up because of those illustrated collections mentioned previously. Charles and Henry are both well-represented in our printed works, but we also have a rather exciting collection of original art by various artists including Charles, Henry, and Richard. It's satisfying to go through the work of these brothers, noticing the similarities and differences in their styles, and enjoying a window into illustration as a trade and a family business. 

To see the originals, request boxes from MS-1447.  

Books Beautiful

We have two books that are so different but so similar we don't know what to make of them together. The first is T. J. Cobden-Sanderson's attempt to define perfection with his The Ideal Book or Book Beautiful. Lovingly printed by Cobden-Sanderson at his Doves Press in 1900, it obsesses over the role of typography in creating a transparent window into the mind of the author through its purity of form and execution. Flip the title a bit and you get Jack Smith's infamous The Beautiful Book printed by Piero Heliczer's Dead Language Press in 1962. Smith presents 19 original photographic contact prints that kinda sorta tell a cinematic story. It is very avant-garde and drops you into New York's queer subculture, but we aren't sure what the story is. One thing for sure, this one gets you pretty deep into the mind of the author!

Both T. J. Cobden-Sanderson and Jack Smith had a profound influence within their spheres. The publishing world owes a deep debt to Cobden-Sanderson for creating the modernist page layout, and Andy Warhol and John Waters were both major fans of Jack Smith's camp experiments in film and photography.

To see them side by side ask for Presses D751cs and Rare TR675 .S6355.

Paying the Civil Rights Movement's First Dues

We've posted previously about Dartmouth students Johan Liutkus '65 and Roger Daly '67 and how they answered the call of Martin Luther King, Jr., for white people of goodwill in the North to rise up in indignation over the treatment of Black Americans in the South. However, we recently had the opportunity to review more of the letters written in early 1965 by Liutkus to George Kalbfleisch, the Director of Undergraduate Religious Life at Dartmouth, and it seems to us that Liutkus' experiences and insights resonate more strongly than ever with contemporary society.

In a letter to George Kalbfleisch dated January 9, 1965, Liutkus says that when he and fellow Dartmouth student Roger Daly '67 mentioned to more experienced SNCC volunteers that the two of them had been assigned to Selma, the veterans looked at them as if they were "condemned men". However, he notes that Selma itself seems relatively peaceful at the moment. He also draws a clear distinction between the town police and Sheriff Jim Clark's "land posse", which consists of 300 men wearing helmets and carrying 2-foot clubs. Liutkus says that this group roams the county looking for ways to disrupt civil rights movements. In a later letter written on January 14, Liutkus states that because of a sudden appearance by Martin Luther King, Jr. and other members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) that evening for a "Mass Meeting", local police were on every corner in town primarily to keep the Clark "brown-shirts" from causing trouble.

Liutkus provides a telling example of the different strategies and viewpoints held by civil rights organizations during this era when he expresses his concerns about how the SCLC operates. He is frustrated because in his view SNCC is doing the hard work of staying in a community for a long time and building infrastructure while the SCLC and Dr. King "come into an area and put on a high pitched campaign for a month or two and then pull-out, almost like a revival." Whenever SCLC does inevitably leave, Liutkus says that local organization usually collapses and then SNCC has to redouble its efforts to keep the community from falling back into "dis-organization".

However, despite this minor disagreement over tactics, it is clear that Liutkus and Daly were committed to the cause. On January 25, they were arrested and jailed by sheriff deputies for refusing to leave the voter registration line, and a photo of the two men being grabbed and shoved by the law enforcement officers made it into the pages of the New York Times. That same evening, both wrote letters to George Kalbfleisch in response to a telegram of concern that he had sent their way. In his reply, Liutkus says that "Roger wasn't beaten seriously' and that "jail has made us feel more one with the movement -- we have paid our first dues to the Movement."

To read Jonas Liutkus' letters to Kalbfleisch or to see the Times clipping, you'll need to request his dean's file in advance by emailing or visiting Rauner in person. The call number is DA-8, Box 4540.

Three Branches of the Golden Bough

Popular conceptions of folklore and mythology can be a funny game of telephone. In high school, for instance, you may have learned about the “hero’s journey”, a concept developed by Joseph Campbell (Dartmouth Class of 1925, non-graduate) to describe a "universal" narrative structure. It has a tendency to come up in English classes as a useful framework to apply to assigned texts, mapping well onto classics like the Odyssey. And it can be useful in that narrative context, but it’s terrible as any sort of comparative mythology. Still, the trope of the hero’s journey persists in the arts and in pop culture, even though its value as scholarship has been dismissed for decades.

One of Campbell’s influences was James Frazer (1854-1941), a Scottish classicist who sought to collate myths and ritual practices from around the world into evidence of universality. At the time, Darwinism had done a number on the Victorian world, and the social sciences were trying to figure out what it could imply for them. The results were theories like Frazer’s, who proposed that all cultures went through a linear evolution in belief from magic to religion to science. This positioned his own culture as the most evolved and his personal secularism as more evolved still.

Frazer’s interest in the topic began with research into a specific Roman rite, but it did not stay there. He consumed and cataloged a truly impressive amount of data about various cultures, though he never attempted any fieldwork himself, nor was he disposed to question his sources. The result was The Golden Bough, an anthropological work consisting of two volumes when it was first published in 1890, and increasing to twelve by 1915. It had its critics from the start — Frazer’s conclusions were quite speculative, as even he tended to admit — but it was also an exciting and entertaining read, so it gained an audience outside of its academic aspirations. The Golden Bough is no longer creditable, but Frazer’s work had a significant impact on scholarship as well as an influence on the arts.

Rauner has three versions of The Golden Bough, each a bit different. The earliest is a pair of books from that twelve-volume series we mentioned earlier, this pair being Part V, “Spirits of the Corn and of the Wild,” published in 1912. This is Frazer’s most expansive and uncertain version of his own work. The second is Leaves from the Golden Bough, a 1924 book of stories selected by Frazer’s wife Lilly and re-framed for children. The third is a fine press abridged edition from 1970. This last version comes with an introduction from the literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, whose analysis bridges the gap between the work’s failure as anthropological scholarship and its success as “imaginative literature.”

Each of our three versions was meant for a different audience. Each also appeared at a different moment in the perception of Frazer's work, both within and outside of the academy. They're interesting to compare! Ask for Hudson 7, Sine Illus B762leav, and Presses L629fraz to do your own investigation.