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!  

A Small University

When Daniel Webster 1801 said that Dartmouth was a "small college," he wasn't kidding. These words, uttered during Webster's successful defense of the college during Trustees of Dartmouth College vs. Woodward in 1819, have become an important part of the school's identity over the last two centuries and more. This week, while looking through our broadside collections in preparation for a history class on the Revolutionary War, we found evidence of just how small Dartmouth was at the time.

In January of 1800, or perhaps 1799, a small broadside was published that listed the names of the members of Dartmouth's class of 1801, including Daniel Webster and his high school and college roommate James Bingham. A total of thirty-four names are listed in both print and manuscript; some names are crossed out, indicating their departure from the school, while a few late arrivals have been inked in by an unknown hand. This little document is fascinating to us because it underscores how tight-knit and intimate each Dartmouth class must have been at the time (no bigger than a large seminar class nowadays, perhaps). We're also intrigued by the various additions and deletions from the sheet, especially the removal of a mysterious John Russell, for whom we can find no other archival records as of yet. Of most interest to us, however, is that the document states that it is a catalogue of the members of the sophomore class of "Dartmouth University". We dug a little deeper and found a similar catalogue of the class of 1788 that also identified the school as a university, less than two decades after the founding of the school and sixteen years before the controversy that sparked the Supreme Court showdown.

This little detail has left us with many questions, some that can be answered and others that will never be: At what point had the College begun to call itself a University long before the schism of 1804 that caused the creation of two rival institutions, Dartmouth College and Dartmouth University? Did Webster and his classmates also call it that when they were students, and if so did it seem odd to him to call Dartmouth a "small college" in 1819? Regardless, the school had clearly left a deep impression on him and his small cohort of classmates during their time in the wilderness.

To see the list of members of the class of 1801, come to Rauner and ask for Broadside 799101.

Spring Colors

This time of year, we're getting pretty wistful for spring. As such, we've been looking at books on flowers and we have a lovely one to share today. Margaret Roscoe's 1829 Floral Illustrations of the Seasons is just what it sounds like: a series of botanical illustrations, each accompanied by a brief description of its classification, cultivation, and history. Prior to this work, Roscoe (née Lace) illustrated another botanical text written by her father-in-law, William Roscoe. Floral Illustrations is dedicated to William, who she describes as a generous patron of the science.  

In the process of making this book, Margaret Roscoe's original illustrations needed to be reproduced in print. To accomplish this, a professional engraver named Robert Havell made aquatint plates imitating her work as closely as possible. Those plates would print black-and-white images, which were then colored by hand. The finished prints could then be bound into each copy of the book, creating a run of more or less identical works. 

The color is the real reason we're mentioning this process now. There's inherent distance between whatever those original illustrations looked like and the published prints, but they were both physical mediums. But there's a new, significant layer of separation in showcasing this book now: the limitations of digital color. You can see the photos included in this post through something called the RGB color model. It's how phones and computers represent all colors, based on various combinations of red, green, and blue light. It's an impressive technology with a very nuanced output, but what it shows you is not how color works on the page. 

When you look at a book (and most other things) in real life, the color tends to be subtractive: white light passes through an object and the nature of the object allows differing wavelengths to be absorbed or reflected. Those wavelengths are then translated by your eye, resulting in your own color perception. This is fundamentally how the pigment on a colored illustration works. In these photos, RGB is doing its best to represent the yellow of the crocus and the blue of the spring gentian, but it is doing so by emitting light, when the illustrations are producing that color by selectively absorbing it. As such, it doesn't actually look the same.

The colors in Floral Illustrations have remained remarkably vivid, despite being almost 200 years old. This foray into optics is all to say that if you want a reminder that spring is coming, we have you covered. We just really recommend that you come see it in person. 

To see this particular piece of loveliness, come to Rauner and request Rare Book SB407 .R79 1829.

Exhibit: "Making the Case for Suffrage"

From the vantage point of 2026, women’s right to vote can seem like a foregone conclusion. Yet it took women almost 150 years from the founding of the United States, and over 70 years from the first women’s rights convention, for women to achieve suffrage on a national level. And even then, it was a partial victory: the Nineteenth Amendment, ratified in 1920, did not protect the rights of minoritized women, many of whom remained prohibited in practice from exercising the franchise.

This exhibit examines some of the strategies women employed to argue for their right to suffrage. It looks at how suffragists relied on mass media and popular culture to create what they referred to as “propaganda” for their cause. It highlights how they utilized American symbols, how they deployed their organizational networks in campaigns of persuasion, and how they eventually turned to more public and direct forms of action to convince American men to grant them the vote.

This exhibit is not a comprehensive overview of the suffrage movement. Limited by the material in Rauner’s collections, it largely focuses on white women suffragists and on the final two decades of the suffrage campaign.

The exhibit was curated by Sarah Bowman, Processing Specialist at Rauner Special Collections Library. The poster was designed by Max Seidman, Exhibits and Graphic Arts Designer for Dartmouth Libraries. It will be on display in Rauner Special Collections Library's Class of 1965 Galleries from January 7th through March 13th, 2026. For more information, visit the exhibit website.

Middle English Printing's Infancy

Lately our Rare Book and Manuscript Metadata Librarian has been spending a portion of his time reviewing our incunable collection and, as a result, we have the opportunity to learn more about the volumes in our collection. An incunable, as you may already know, is the term commonly used to identify a book that was printed on a printing press using moveable type in 15th-century Europe. The name is derived from the Latin word for "cradle"and is meant in this context to refer to the infancy of printing in the West. We currently have nearly two hundred copies in our collection out of roughly thirty thousand individual editions that were printed during the period.

Most incunables were printed in Latin, which makes sense considering that this was the language of the intelligentsia of the time. Today, however, we're showing off a rarer breed of book. Only about a quarter of all incurables were printed in the vernacular instead of Latin, and of those perhaps around fifty editions were printed in Middle English. And we have one of them here at Rauner.

The first Middle English vernacular edition of Vitas Patrum, or Lives of the Fathers, was printed in London, England, in 1495 by Wynken De Worde. Vitas Patrum is a compilation of narratives and sayings associated with the early patriarchs of the Christian Church that was originally transcribed from Greek into Latin in the late 4th century. Over a thousand years later, William Caxton translated the book into Middle English. Caxton was the first person to introduce the printing press to England (1476), and De Worde was his protégé. One of the most interesting details of this edition, in our opinion, is the way in which the typeface has clearly been designed to imitate English vernacular handwriting of the era.

To see one of the earliest books ever printed in English, come to Rauner and ask for Incunable 65.