Rauner Special Collections Library

Beyond punishment for social wrongs, imprisonment has long functioned to silence or remove voices from the public forum. As we have seen wit...

We have a lovely first edition of Adam Smith's An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations published 250 year ago in...

When Daniel Webster 1801 said that Dartmouth was a "small college," he wasn't kidding. These words, uttered during Webster...

In addition to our current collections of phenomenal books and manuscripts, we are always collecting new amazing items that we know will be ...

One of my responsibilities at Rauner is ingesting PDF scans of archival material into our digital repository for long-term preservation. If ...

When Hanover decided to erect a new meeting-house in 1794 it needed to find a way to pay for it. The meeting-house would serve many uses: a ...

When the second edition of The American Gazetteer came out in London in 1762, it was a pretty quiet event. There was nothing really new, ju...

This week's book is John Brand's Observations on Popular Antiquities: Chiefly Illustrating the Origin of Our Vulgar Customs, Ceremon...

This book is so cool, we can't believe it. It is a liturgical guide for feast days produced in the Benedictine monastery of Ambronay in ...

In 1889, William Butler Yeats published his poem "Down by the Salley Gardens," based on a half-remembered song he'd heard sung...

While prepping for a class this Winter, we stumbled on an amazing 18th-century chart of prices. It has the typical merchandise you would exp...

We recently acquired two humble yet fascinating little manuscripts that shed an impressive amount of light on the capitalistic and exploitat...

“I find very great Profit by having the other Rib join’d to my Body for it hath taken away all my Housework from me. But I had very hard sp...

Dartmouth counts many famous people connected to the school. For the Fourth of July this year, we feature Josiah Bartlett... no, not the fic...

What is wood engraving exactly? It's a method of illustration printed from blocks of wood where the image has been carved into the end g...

Almanacs have been in existence since at least the second millennium BCE; their annual predictions of weather and other calendar-related nat...

As spring creeps in, we're taking a look at some of the more exuberant botanical books in our collection. Today, it's Robert John Th...

Tomorrow is New Year's Day! Well, at least, it would be here in the former English colonies if not for an Act of Parliament in 1750 tha...

Four hundred years ago, in the city of Constantinople, an alchemist named Avedis discovered a revolutionary means of treating alloys. Avedis...

This week the New York Times published an article about how experiencing awe might be good for your mental and physical health. Well, we ju...