The Road to Redemption

On a Tuesday in May of 1831, President Nathan Lord of Dartmouth sat down at his writing desk to pen an awkward letter to Reverend Jacob Cummings, a member of Dartmouth's class of 1819 who was a friend of Lord's and the minister of a small congregation in Stratham, New Hampshire. Cummings had written to Lord to inquire about a recent incident involving Daniel Clark, a member of the class of 1834 and a Stratham boy. Lord began by telling Cummings that although he was "unwilling to give pain", he felt "obliged to correct [Cummings'] impressions" about the story that Clark had told him.

The facts of the case, as per a faculty investigation, were as follows: that several nights earlier, a sizable group of pious and concerned young students had gathered at 1am before the front door of local resident Mr. Holton, whose home was known to be a den of ill repute; that they had peaceably gained access with the intention of relocating the ladies of the night from the establishment; that Mr. Holton had drawn a knife and threatened them when they tried to enter a back room; and that when they had finally been able to enter said room, they had discovered Mr. Clark hiding within. The investigation resulted in Clark's suspension from the college for a year.

Apparently, soon after being dismissed from the college and returning home, Clark had entreated Cummings to intercede with Lord on his behalf; the young man claimed that he was merely out for an evening walk to get some exercise and stopped for a rest at Holton's without realizing the nature of the dwelling. Lord's incredulity is palpable as his letter lays out Clark's story in detail: a casual stroll down the darkest road in Hanover at one in the morning followed by a random visit to an unknown residence? Nearly two hundred years later, one can almost feel the force from Lord's eyes rolling. The president ends the letter by openly acknowledging Clark's intellectual gifts and his potential, expressing his hope that Clark will repent of his sins, and praying that the young man will return to Dartmouth to finish his studies after a year's suspension so that he may "yet become a blessing".

Lord's prayers were ultimately answered, though perhaps not quite in the way that he would have hoped. Clark did repent and return to Dartmouth to finish his studies. Several decades later, he was elected to represent New Hampshire in the United States Senate where he served from 1857 until 1866. In contrast to Lord, who was well-known for his support of slavery, Clark was a staunch abolitionist who gave eloquent speeches denouncing slavery as well as supporting suffrage for all men regardless of race. His colleagues in the Senate held him in such high regard that they elected him president pro tempore for the Thirty-Eighth Congress (1865-1866).

To read Nathan Lord's frank assessment of a youthful Daniel Clark's indiscretions, request MSS 831317.1 online and then come to Rauner.

A Most Weird Look

A couple of years ago, we were lucky enough to be near the path of totality for a total solar eclipse. Upper Valley residents may have dealt with traffic and crowds, but a jaunt north of about 56 miles would get you in range of something quite spectacular. Today we're looking at a pair of artifacts from someone who traveled much, much further to see the same kind of event. In August of 1896, a total solar eclipse took place that was visible from parts of Russia, Japan, and northern Scandinavia. A group of British astronomy enthusiasts identified that last location as their best bet and made plans to head for Vadsø, Norway, near the northernmost point of that country where it converges with Sweden and Finland. Vadsø was about 1,600 miles away as the crow flies. 

This excursion included one Lawrence Neville Holden, a lifelong amateur scientist and fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society. We have his diary and photo album from the trip, so we have record of his great disappointment when the weather that day was overcast:

"As it was obviously no good trying to use telescopes everyone stood up & looked round. The scene was most curious. It was light enough to read print & the time on my watch & the lamps which we had lighted to record observations by were certainly no required. No stars could be seen even with our field glasses which we used, in the few clear patches of sky. We could see right across the fjord & the hills there had a blue black light over them, further away we saw hill tops lit up with a bright light & there were probably outside the line of totality. The temperature fell about 3°. The color of the sea did not change but at one place just beyond Vadso pier we saw a great glittering caused it was said by fish jumping out of the water. Round about us nothing appeared out of the ordinary but the whole landscape had a most weird look, & it was quite a different darkness to night. Then like a flash almost light came back & the long looked forward to Eclipse was over & the result of all our preparations was 'absolute failure' in every way."

The photo album is a bit less dour, filled with pictures of party members, the landscape, the locals, and the group's scientific instruments. There are two photos taken during the eclipse itself and while they aren't particularly compelling to look at, the  film's exposure is undeniably different than that of the other daytime shots. This was probably cold comfort to Holden, who said that afterwards "everyone had a long face & the disappointment was very keenly felt."

The next total solar eclipse will be this August, almost exactly 130 years after Holden's disappointing excursion. Totality will miss the United States entirely, but will reach parts of Greenland, Iceland, Spain and Portugal. The next one to reach Vermont and New Hampshire won't be until 2079.

To see Holden's diary and album, ask for Stef Mss-296, Box 1, or check out the scans attached to the finding aid. 

 

 

 

 

 

Ticknor's View of Dartmouth

We have been posting to this blog regularly for nearly 17 years. For a long time it was twice a week, but then we switched to once a week. So, we have made a lot of posts. That's why we couldn't believe it when we realized we had never posted about this amazing image in our collection. It was purportedly drawn by a young George Ticknor when he was eleven years old and a student at Dartmouth (yes, really--he graduated in 1807 at age 16). His father was an early graduate of Dartmouth and a major donor, and his grandfather lived nearby in Lebanon, New Hampshire.

The caption says:

This view of the principal buildings of Dartmouth University is humbly inscribed
to the Honorable John Wheelock, Esquire, L.L.D. President by
George Ticknor, Delineator
and Member of the Sophomore Class, aged eleven years.

It all seems kind of incredible that a thing like this would exist, but it all checks out. We know Ticknor was a child prodigy and that when his father sent him to Dartmouth to study he specifically asked John Wheelock to look after him since he was still so young. It is dated July 1803. Ticknor was born in August 1791, so the age is correct, and when we checked the "Catalogue of Officers and Students at Dartmouth University" from October of 1803, George is listed as a member of the Sophomore Class. We don't see any reason to doubt it. We particularly love the detail in the bottom right corner of what we guess is John Wheelock with a dog while someone nearby swings what may be a cricket bat.

To see Ticknor's drawing, request Iconography 001317 online through the catalog and then visit our reading room.

Sammelband Sociology

In our opinion, sammelbands are one of the most curious books to be found in Special Collections libraries the world over. Derived from the German word "Sammelbänd" meaning "collected group", these texts can be comprised of any number of smaller discrete publications that have been bound together to form a single volume. What makes these books intriguing is that the selection and organization of the individual publications within the sammelband has almost always been done by a private individual and not, for instance, by a publishing house seeking to divest itself of lingering back stock by putting an unpopular text together with a more saleable one (something referred to as a "bound-with" in the book world). Unlike "bound-withs", each sammelband is a unique object whose unifying concept was born out of the mind of its creator and whose purpose and value is therefore intextricably bound up with the values and interests of that person.

Recently, while conducting research for a religion class on the Essene community, we came across a sammelband consisting of the rules and regulations of no less than twenty-eight different civic-minded fraternal organizations in Dover, New Hampshire. These publications span the years from 1838 to 1887 and provide a fascinating window into the life of town-dwellers in 19th-century New England. Dover during this period grew from a town of around 6,000 people into a city that was a leading national textile producer and had doubled in population by the end of the 1800s.

The small society pamphlets in the sammelband reflect the needs and concerns of the growing city. The bylaws of seven private firefighting companies are included, along with two documents that standardize the protocol for medical treatment and regulate the fees associated with different medical services by physicians in the area. The book includes the bylaws of organizations established to better the lives of mill laborers, such as the Sovereigns of Industry (1874) and the Knights of Labor (1887). There are rules for the Sons of Temperance (1863), St. Thomas Episcopal Church's parish (1877), and the Dover Public Library (1885). And there are booklets related to a wide variety of fraternal organizations both well-known and somewhat obscure, including the Masons and the Knights of Pythias, among others.

The booklets by themselves are valuable ephemera, shedding light on communal self-governance during the rise of mill towns and city-based industrialism in 19th-century New England. Bound together, as a sammelband, they also provide a clue into the interests and mindset of someone living in Dover at the time.

To explore the twenty-eight books in one, request NH Dover 1838b via the online catalog and then come to Rauner.

Mapping Ancient Rome

We just acquired a stunner of a book: the 1532 edition of Marco Fabio Clavo's Antiquae urbis Romae cum regionibus simulachrum [A Model of Ancient Rome and its Regions]. The book has a crazy history. The Renaissance piqued interest in ancient Rome in Europe and there was a desire to map the city as best they could. Raphael was particularly interested and may have played a part in the creation of the original plans for the book. It was first printed in 1527 right before Charles V's army went rogue and sacked Rome, destroying nearly the entire initial print run. Then the author died, the printer disappeared, and the author's nephew was left to try to pick up the pieces and get the book out. Five years later, our edition appeared.

The book is a series of woodcuts that show the growth of ancient Rome from a small city with four hills into the famed walled city of seven hills.  In addition, each region is detailed, though certainly not in a way that would give you directions to Pliny's house. The images are more like stylized infographics, giving you a feel for how big each region was. My guess is that in 1532 they didn't have a very keen sense of historical Rome's actual appearance, so they just made representations that seemed reasonable. It would be fun to compare these maps with the representations we have now after 500 years of purposeful and accidental archeology have uncovered more and more of the ancient city.

To see the streets that Caesar and Cicero roamed (Romed?) ask for Rare N6920 .R347 1532.

15 Minutes of Fame: Dartmouth’s Feature in a 1988 Episode of 60 Minutes, and What Was Left Out

In the fall of 1988, famed 60 Minutes host Morley Safer¹ and his camera crew arrived in Hanover to capture a conflict that had erupted on campus earlier that year: a heated confrontation between Professor William Cole and members of The Dartmouth Review, including then Editor-in-Chief Christopher “Chris” Baldwin. Review staff had covertly taped Cole’s class in order to publish the transcript alongside commentary in their weekly paper. Baldwin and other Review-ers, armed with a tape recorder and camera, had entered Cole’s classroom to deliver a letter requesting Cole’s response to the recording, escalating into a physical confrontation and eventual legal battle. Baldwin is featured in the 60 Minutes segment alongside current Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights and former Review editor Harmeet Dhillon ’89. Rauner houses both the official 60 Minutes segment and Safer’s unedited interview with Professor Cole, donated by Cole himself. Viewing these together brings new dimension to The Review’s time in the limelight.²

Setting the tone for the following 15 minutes, Safer opens the segment by stating that “Dartmouth vs. Dartmouth is the ’60s in reverse. A conservative student newspaper, The Dartmouth Review, is suing the liberal university administration of Dartmouth College.” This concept of the “’60s in reverse” is heavily present in Safer’s estimation of the situation, but not necessarily in those of his interviewees, especially Cole. In fact, throughout his entire interview with Cole, Safer brings up this exact concept several times, although none of those moments made the final cut. In one instance, Cole discusses how students are not qualified by themselves to completely overhaul Dartmouth’s curriculum. Safer responds by asking, “That’s kind of what happened in the ’60s though, wasn’t it? That’s kind of what happened from the Left.” Not agreeing with Safer’s framework, Cole replies, “I think that any time, irrespective of that person's political leanings, reactionary or liberal, is attacked, accosted, I don’t care who they are, whether I like them or not, I’ll come to their defense if they’re a professor, because I think that that kind of anarchy can’t be tolerated at a college or university.” Here, Cole also makes an important distinction between dissent and disrespect, a line that is blurred in the final segment, as Baldwin argues that his right to dissent includes actions such as recording classes.

The real shift made during the ’60s, at least according to Cole, was not that college students became anti-establishment, but that there was a widespread pushback, from both students and educators, against the concept that American universities should only teach European literature, philosophy, and history, an idea commonly found in the pages of The Review.³ Cole argues that courses about Native Americans or Black Americans support a uniquely American curriculum that helps students grasp the diversity of the US and its difference from Europe. In the unedited version of the interview, Cole voices his concern with the direction of higher education, asserting that “there has been a struggle since the late ’60s to make American colleges and universities American colleges and universities, not European colleges and universities in America. To do that, you have to speak the truth.” Contrary to Safer’s estimation that the College administration was liberal, the pieces of Cole’s interview that didn’t make the final cut seem to suggest that the College administration is not simply “liberal” as Safer assumes. Additionally, this commentary suggests that there is a deeper, more prolonged conflict at the College beyond The Review and Professor Cole, which is a fundamental disagreement over what should be taught at Dartmouth, and how.

Safer aims to include all perspectives on the situation and compile it all into a 15-minute segment, and this means that not everything from the original interviews can be captured in the final cut. However, Safer’s narrative that this incident represents the “’60s in reverse” doesn’t capture deeper debates at Dartmouth over what students should be educated on and how education should be structured.

¹ “88 RE: DARTMOUTH REVIEW AND PROFESSOR COLE,” 60 Minutes, CBS, November 1988, Rauner Special Collections Library, https://archives-manuscripts.dartmouth.edu/repositories/2/archival_objects/211368.

² Morley Safer, “Bill Cole Unedited 60 Minutes Video with Morley Safer (Raw Footage),” 1988, Video, Rauner Special Collections Library, https://archives-manuscripts.dartmouth.edu/repositories/2/archival_objects/790016.

³ Jeffrey Hart, “Does Dartmouth College Have a Curriculum?,” The Dartmouth Review, October 3, 1980, Rauner Special Collections Library.

Posted for Mackenzie Wilson '27, recipient of a Historical Accountability Student Research Fellowship for the 2026 winter term. The Historical Accountability Student Research Program provides funding for Dartmouth students to conduct research with primary sources on a topic related to issues of inclusivity and diversity in Dartmouth's past. For more information, visit the program's website.

The Wonderful Winters of Old

  

As students are bundling up for a chilly ‘Blizzard of Oz’ Winter Carnival this weekend, we thought we’d take a trip back through the wizardly festivities that Hanover has seen over the years, from ‘The Winterland of Oz’ in 1972 to ‘There’s Snow Place Like Home’ in 2002, to try and answer the question: what continues to draw Dartmouth students to the story and setting of L. Frank Baum’s quintessential American fairy tale? 

As a member of the 2002 Winter Carnival committee explained to The Dartmouth, “obvious connections between the Emerald City and Dartmouth” gave them lots of material to riff off of to play up the theme of the event. Beyond the visual synchronicity and a fervent love of the color green, both the citizens of Oz and Dartmouth students suspend their notions of reality for a bit. Since its inception, Winter Carnival has promised an escape: from coursework for Dartmouth students, and into Hanover’s snowy woods for the guests who joined them.

Despite the magical theme and a towering snow sculpture of the Emerald City, complete with staircases and a slide, the 1972 Winter Carnival arrived amidst a flurry of change, controversy, and anticipation; as the final Carnival held before co-education and the last to host a Queen of the Snows competition, students were abuzz with speculation about the women who would be joining the undergraduate population in the coming academic year. When asked whether the admissions office would be taking beauty into consideration for female applicants, Admissions Director Edward Thoyt Chamberlain stated that scholastic achievement would be the “most heavily weighted” factor for all prospective students and dismissed the feasibility of physical assessment, telling The Dartmouth, “‘You can’t trust pictures they send us. We all know that’” (February 11th, 1972). 

Just days earlier, on February 8th, the college newspaper published a brief article entitled “Sexism: Carnival Council Seeks Dumb Broad” to announce the Winter Carnival Council’s decision to remove the “intelligence criteria” for the Queen of the Snows contest; by February 14th, the paper had dubbed the newly elected Queen “brainless and beautiful.” While Kappa Kappa Kappa member Bill Farnum celebrated his fiancée’s coronation with her in front of the Emerald City, his fraternity’s snow sculpture, ‘Eleazar Goes Broad-Minded,’ depicts the founder of the College leaning down towards a young woman splayed on the ground and inviting her to attend the school. Echoing early imagery of Wheelock gesturing towards a seated Native American student, the sculpture points to the varied response of Dartmouth students to the nearing onset of co-education.

Though the majority of students polled supported the shift to admit women, anti-coeducation sentiment during this period was palpable. Several of the early female Dartmouth students reported feeling particularly unwanted and out of place during Winter Carnivals, as women from the Seven Sisters colleges continued to be preferentially invited as dates for the weekend’s festivities. Beneath the Oz-themed spectacle, the Carnival became a site where broader cultural shifts – and the discomfort surrounding them – played out in very public ways.

Want to see these images for yourself? Head over to Rauner and request Iconography 1647: Photographic files"Snow Sculpture 1972" to explore the 1972 Winter Carnival, or DA-671, Objects 50 and 80 to view the 1972 and 2002 Winter Carnival posters.

You can also check out the ‘Baum-y Weather: Blizzard of Oz Strikes Campus’ exhibit in Rauner’s main entrance to learn more about L. Frank Baum’s beloved children’s novel, its many sequels, and various artistic, musical, and cinematic adaptations. While you’re here, stop by the reference desk and peek at our ‘Something Cool’: a photo of the child actress who played Dorothy in the iconic 1939 film adaptation shooting pool on campus with her short-lived Dartmouth fiancé at Alpha Theta fraternity in 1967!