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.

Our Bodies Our Selves

If you are a woman of a certain age and your family of a certain social/political persuasion, at some point your mother or your most awesome aunt might have given you a copy of Our Bodies Our Selves. By the 1980s it was a huge book with hundreds of pages covering all aspects of women's health and sexuality, but it started out as a pretty humble, stapled mimeograph in 1971.

We recently received a generous gift of the eighth printing from July 1972, priced at only 35 cents. The printing history on the inside cover reveals a lot:

1st printing December 1970 5,000
2nd printing April 1971 15,000
3rd printing September 1971 20,000
4th printing December 1971 25,000
5th printing March 1972 25,000
6th printing May 1972 25,000
7th printing July 1972 10,000
8th printing July 1972 25,000 

That's incredible. A book printed by the Boston Women's Health Collective, with no real advertising or marketing plan ran through four printings in less than six months and sold 150,000 copies in its first year and a half. Clearly there was a need for some honest information about reproductive health and sexuality that included things not talked about (hell, not even acknowledged to exist) in many circles. This is not your grandmother's gynecologist.

To see it ask for Rare RA778 .B69 1971. 

Surveying the Field

In 1871, Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth officially opened for business. The fledgling school boasted just three students and one professor but also a proud lineage and a bright future. General Sylvanus Thayer, a member of Dartmouth's class of 1807 and the fifth superintendent of the United States Military Academy at West Point, had turned his sights back to Hanover in 1867 at the ripe old age of eighty-one. He had accrued by then a stunning list of life accomplishments, including the establishment of the country's first school of civil engineering during his time at West Point.

Thayer intended for his alma mater to establish a similar program: he donated a total of $70,000 to the college as well as an impressive library of books and manuscripts related to engineering, many of which we still have to this day. He also recommended a West Point graduate, Joseph Fletcher, to be the first (and only) faculty member and dean of the new professional school. His mission accomplished, Thayer passed away in 1872 but he is still remembered to this day in certain circles as "The Father of the Military Academy" and one of the earliest proponents of engineering education in America.

Perhaps Thayer's influence is what made Dartmouth faculty insist that all undergraduates take a surveying course, even before the School of Engineering was formally established. We have several of the student field notebooks from those classes, and it's obvious from looking through them that at least a few of the undergraduates struggled to appreciate the science of engineering. Robert Bolenius, a member of the class of 1870, certainly seemed more interested in creating whimsical doodles in his assignment book than demonstrating his surveying prowess. His drawings, whether of a naked man fighting with a dog over a pair of pants next to a data table or an abstract geometrical shape converted into a Civil War tent, make us hope that Robert went on to discover a profession less rigid in its approach to seeing the world than engineering.

To look through the surveying notebooks of Robert Bolenius and other undergraduate surveying students, come to Rauner and ask for DA-31, Box 2912.