A Fair Shot? Black Student-Athletes and the Limits of Dartmouth's "Equal Opportunity"

For the majority of Dartmouth's history, a Black student on campus was a rarity. The College had graduated its first Black student in 1828, but by 1968 the College had only 130 Black alumni. Then, in the span of six years, the on-campus Black population increased a whopping 500%, from 14 students in the Class of 1968 to 85 in the Class of 1974. The Class of 1973 alone brought 82 Black students, nearly triple the class before it. The Trustees' Committee on Equal Opportunity's 1968 report, commonly known as the McLane Report, recorded Black matriculants climbing class by class, and within a few years the Black applicant pool had grown from 94 for the Class of 1972 into the hundreds. On paper, it looked like a college remaking itself.

Before this, for a sizeable portion of the Black men who arrived at Dartmouth, the door in was football. Black students had been athletes at Dartmouth since Matthew Bullock, Dartmouth's first Black football player, in 1904. Beyond this, the recruiting surge of the late 1960s meant the team was one of the largest pipelines onto campus. The McLane Report itself urged coaches to recruit harder in Black communities, while adding: "Care must be taken... not to exploit an applicant's athletic ability."

However, getting to Hanover was not the same as being treated as an equal once here. In 1974, three Black students, Eileen Cave '76, Judi Redding '76, and Monica Hargrove '76, wrote "Institutional Racism and Student Life at Dartmouth College." This report, which came to be known as the Redding Report, aired grievances of the community that had been communicated at the 1972 Black Alumni Conference. These included the lack of a Black quarterback in the program's history. Black men recruited as high-school quarterbacks were switched to other positions, and most of those who got playing time played defense. Complaints weren't easy to communicate, as they could bring "covert retaliation by the coaches."

The oral history of Wesley Pugh '73 puts this into perspective. He was an all-Ivy safety, ranked among the nation's leaders in interceptions; however, he was benched until games became close, and the coaches offered to keep him on the field only if he switched positions. After a coach screamed at him during a home game against Yale, he threw down his helmet and quit the team. He had likened the arrangement to a "plantation", though he highlighted the problem as the coaching, not his white teammates, whom he counted as friends.

The College eventually admitted much of this itself. Its 1975 Trustees' report, released in January 1976, confirmed a years-long "preponderance" of Black players on the defensive squad that the community read as discriminatory, and noted that just two of sixty-four athletic department staff members were Black.
Despite this report and formal recognition of its own shortcomings, the pattern continued. In December 1979, the Valley News ran the headline "Dartmouth Blacks Charge Racism On Football Team." The complaints were nearly identical: players moved off their positions, a teammate who quit after a coach threw a cup of water in his face during a racist "joke." Tellingly, the players did not all agree. Co-captain Cody Press, the only Black captain in the Ivy League that year, said he had "always been given a fair shot," while others said the opposite. Coach Joe Yukica also maintained that he saw no color on the field, only football players. Even among themselves, Black athletes were still arguing over whether the field was fair.

Across a decade, Dartmouth could point to a rising number of Black students as evidence of progress, but the football program and Redding Report pointed to a lack of progress in many other areas of student life. The reality of enrollment numbers of the Black population at school was starkly contrasted with being treated as unequal, both on the field and off it.

To view the Redding Report, you can request the Minorities vertical file, and to see the Trustees' reports, request DA-1, Box 5416.

Posted for Israel Allen '28, 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.

Faith in the Desert

In 1944, Dr. Agnes Bartlett left Hanover to serve as a medical officer at the Poston Internment Camp in southwestern Arizona, one of the largest concentration camps for Japanese-Americans that was run by the United States during World War II. Bartlett was the granddaughter of Samuel Colcord Bartlett, eighth president of Dartmouth, and the daughter of missionaries to Japan. Her parents, Samuel Colcord Bartlett Jr. and Fanny G. Bartlett, were living there when Agnes was born in Kyoto on March 18, 1911. We have a small collection of papers that belonged to Dr. Bartlett, including manuscript stories, personal correspondence, and publications related to Poston as well as Manzanar, another of the internment camps where Bartlett volunteered to serve as a physician.

While preparing for a class on Asian American history earlier this year, one document in particular caught our eye: a bulletin from the Poston-1 Christian Church. The Poston Internment Camp was so large that it was subdivided into three separate camps, Poston-1, Poston-2, and Poston-3, which were known by the inhabitants as "Roastin'", "Toastin'" and "Dustin'." The bulletin for the first camp's church is for the Sunday night service on February 25th, 1945; its simple and matter-of-fact contents provide a vivid picture of a community of faith that is committed to its members and to its beliefs despite the suffering that it is currently experiencing. The last page contains a poem written by Dr. Toyohiko Kagawa titled, "The Burden". Kagawa was a Japanese Christian and pacifist was incarcerated in Japan at the time for his opposition to Japanese militarism.

Interestingly enough, on the same page, there is an excerpt from a letter written to the Poston community from a Private Minoru Ito who says that "Life really isn't as bad as I expected here at Ft. Douglas." Fort Douglas, Utah, was a critical processing center for Nisei soldiers, or second-generation Japanese Americans who were born in the US and had enlisted or were drafted to serve in the army.

To explore the rest of the many pamphlets, correspondence, and publications related to the War Relocation Authority, request Box 1 of the Agnes Bartlett papers (ML-43) online and then come to Rauner.

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.

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. 

Exhibit: "Reading Sentences: Prison Libraries and Literature"

Beyond punishment for social wrongs, imprisonment has long functioned to silence or remove voices from the public forum. As we have seen with figures from Cervantes to Martin Luther King Jr., however, prison can also give inmates copious time to articulate their thoughts and the fame or notoriety necessary to draw attention to them.

This exhibit examines both the literature consumed and produced by prisoners as well as the evolving depiction of the prison in popular culture. Its scope spans hundreds of years and thousands of miles, from the chivalric romances dreamed up by imprisoned knights (and aspiring knights) of the medieval and Renaissance eras to the cheap, sensational prison dramas peddled to the working classes and the reformist prison library catalogs whose titles sought to educate and equip inmates with secular knowledge and employable trade skills in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century New England. It highlights the electrifying prison manifestos of several prominent civil rights leaders and concludes with contemporary artist and children’s books which grapple with the psychosocial impact of incarceration.

The exhibit was curated by Sophie Chadha, Edward Connery Lathem '51 Special Collections Fellow at Rauner Special Collections Library. The poster was designed by Chadha and 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 April 6 through June 19, 2026.

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!  

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.

The Twelve Terrors of Christmas

Feeling a bit brought down by the season? You’re not the only one. This week we’re highlighting a wry little number, currently on display as part of our “A Ghost Story for Christmas” exhibit. John Updike’s The Twelve Terrors of Christmas attempts to distill the parts of the holiday that inspire more dread than joy in its celebrants into twelve poems. Most of these are commercial trappings like "The Specials" and "Fear of Not Giving Enough". But some are more existential, with the final item on the list being "The Dark". That particular entry reads as follows:

“Oh, how early it comes now! How creepy and green in the gills everyone looks, scrabbling along in drab winter wraps by the phosphorous light of department-store windows full of Styrofoam snow, mockups of a factitious 1890, and beige mannequins posed with false jauntiness in plaid bathrobes. Is this Hell, or just an upturn in consumer confidence?”

Twelve Terrors was originally published in 1992, but its anxieties remain relevant today in one form or another. The text is accompanied by appropriately dreary Edward Gorey illustrations. Shell-shocked shoppers wander through the pages, waiting in lines, eyeing the Christmas tree with suspicion, and placing anxious children on an equally uneasy Santa's lap. It's a hoot, and we recommend it if a little holiday grumbling sounds good to you.

Come see this and other items in our "A Ghost Story for Christmas" exhibit, up through the end of January. If you miss that, just ask for Illus G675upt.

A Ghost Story for Christmas

When A Christmas Carol was published in 1843, it came with the subtitle "Being a ghost story of Christmas." Ghosts might not be the first thing we think of at Christmas-time, but in the U.K. there is a well-established storytelling tradition on just that subject. It's difficult to say if Dickens is completely to blame for this, or if he merely provided the literary text that brought an existing folk practice into a more traceable medium. Oral tradition, after all, is tricky to pin down.

Regardless, the Victorians took this idea and ran with it, and the English-language ghost story had a heyday running from the mid-19th century well into the first half of the 20th. Christmas drifts in and out of the picture -- there are many chilling tales taking place during the holiday, but it was just as frequently used as a framing device for something unrelated. The Turn of the Screw, for instance, begins with a group telling ghost stories at a Christmas Eve party, leading one guest to dig up a manuscript he possesses entailing a "real" encounter, and thus bringing us to the actual plot.

The medievalist (and rare book man!) M.R. James deserves special mention here, having published collection after collection of chilling tales throughout the first thirty years of the 20th century. Many of these began as entertainment devised specifically to read aloud to his students and colleagues during the holiday season. The same stories served as ready inspiration in the 1970s, when the BBC began an annual television program fittingly called "A Ghost Story for Christmas." From 1971 to 1978, a short ghostly film, most often adapted from James, would be aired on or just before Christmas. The series was revived in 2005 and has continued on and off since then.

We've just installed a new single-case exhibit showing off an array of spooky tales, some taking place at Christmas and some just referencing the storytelling tradition itself. Dickens is there, as is The Turn of the Screw, as are M.R. James's published thoughts on what a ghost story requires in order to succeed. We suggest dropping by to see it sometime, especially if you need a change of pace from what can feel like mandatory holiday cheer.

A Signet Classic

Okay, it is just #715 in the regular Signet series, not part of the Signet Classics, but the cover sure qualifies as a classic. We were going through some books that came to us as part of the Charles Jackson Papers and the 1949 paperback of his The Fall of Valor stopped us in our tracks. Is that cover saying what we think it says? Yep--in 1949, they had the guts to blatantly show homosexual attraction right there on the cover. This must be one of the earliest (certainly the earliest in our collections) overt depiction of a queer theme on a book cover. This just wasn't done in the 1940s. You could have a gay subplot, you could even write a novel with a lesbian main character, but don't show it on the cover!

Signet was still being careful to let readers know this behavior was NOT normal. The inside cover couched the novel as a kind of psychological examination of a somewhat sinister condition: Jackson explores "the dark corners of the unconscious... whose inevitable climax inspires both terror and pity." Then, if we didn't get it, they say, "The Fall of Valor is a medical case history transmuted into dramatic and expressive fiction." Well, they were still being pretty damned homophobic on the inside, but they were willing to go for it on the cover. It might be worrisome, but they knew sex sells.

We haven't cataloged this one quite yet, but it will be ready soon. 

At the Late Night, Double-Feature Picture Show... by RKO

Trying to pick a scary movie to watch tonight? How about pulling some inspiration from Rauner's script collection? We have a few great ones from RKO Pictures. For something really classic, take a look at our screenplay for the 1933 King Kong, which is still spawning sequels and spin-offs today.

If you want something a little more off the beaten path, how about one of the films produced by Val Lewton? Lewton was hired by RKO in 1942 to make successful horror movies on shoestring budgets, particularly useful to the faltering studio after the financial failures of Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons. He would be given a sensational title, a small budget, and the task of making something that could emulate the monstrous successes of Universal Studios. Instead, Lewton tended to make quiet, unsettling psychological pictures with a deeply nihilistic edge. They were successful enough at the time, and some are now considered classics. We have the scripts for two big ones: Cat People (1942) and I Walked With a Zombie (1943). The latter, a very loose adaptation of Jane Eyre with the addition of a Haitian Vodou element, has a subtitle reading "Based on Scientific Information from Articles by Inez Wallace." It also bears a handwritten note reading "Mr. Breen." We can't say for sure, but perhaps this copy passed through the hands of Joseph Breen, who enforced the Hays Production Code from the 1930s to 1950s. We'd be curious to hear what he thought of this particular picture, but we suspect it wasn't his thing. 

To take a look at the these spooky screenplays, check out Scripts 2206 (King Kong), Scripts 537 (Cat People), and Scripts 1064 (I Walked With a Zombie).  

 

 

Not Noah's Dictionary

October 16th was "Dictionary Day," so named because it is Noah Webster's birthday. Sure, we have lots of editions of Webster's dictionary, from his initial 1806 attempt to catalog American English to the final beast of a book published in 1828. But, while those are cool and all, they are not exactly hep to the times, so today we feature our suite of Cab Calloway lexicological lessons including the 1944 Cab Calloway's Hepsters Dictionary: the Language of Jive. Like Webster, Calloway was looking to define a specific form of English.

It is hard to tell if Calloway was trying to be a serious lexicographer when he started to write these or if he has just trying to cash in on the craze for the Harlem scene, but when the New York Public Library adopted his book as their official dictionary of Harlem slang, it was suddenly very legit. There is no question that he is taking it seriously by the 1944 edition. It is still very playful and super fun to read, but you can tell he is working hard to document a form of English he loved and helped to propagate. So hit that jive, Jack, and truck on in. It'll blow your wig!

Ask for Rare ML102 .J3P76 1939.

 

Exhibit: "From Vision to Reality: The Appalachian Trail from Then to Now"

One hundred years ago, the first Appalachian Trail Conference was convened by the Federated Societies on Planning and Parks in Washington DC. According to the proceedings, the goal was to organize a "body of workers" to complete the construction of the Appalachian Trail. During the meeting, the Appalachian Trail Conference, later known as the Appalachian Trail Conservancy (ATC), was made a permanent body. Its purpose? To guide the completion and continuing care of the Appalachian Trail, an idealistic dream of Benton MacKaye in 1921 that had now become an improbable reality: 2,000 miles of nature trail that stretched across fourteen states as it hugged the Appalachian mountain range from Georgia to Maine. Over the last century, the ATC has provided stable leadership and a rallying point for those who agreed and still agree with MacKaye's long-held conviction that time spent in the outdoors could serve as a "sanctuary and a refuge from the scramble of everyday worldly commercial life".

"From Vision to Reality: The Appalachian Trail from Then to Now" looks back at the beginnings of both the AT and the ATC, explores the growth and change that have occurred along the Trail over the last one hundred years, and highlights the commitment and accomplishments of the Dartmouth Outing Club, one of many volunteer organizations that continue to keep the dream of a shared outdoors alive by protecting their portion of the Trail.

The exhibit will be on display in Rauner Special Collections Library's Class of 1965 Galleries in Webster Hall from September 15th through December 12th, 2025. It was curated by Dakota Jackson, Senior Director of Visitor Engagement at the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, and Morgan Swan, Special Collections Librarian for Teaching and Scholarly Engagement at Dartmouth Libraries, with help from Kim Wheeler, Research & Learning Librarian at Dartmouth Libraries. The poster was designed by Max Seidman, Exhibits and Graphic Arts Designer at Dartmouth Libraries.

Two Shootings, One Mistake: The Cost of Leniency in Dartmouth’s Boom Boom Lodge Debacle

Colloquially known as the Boom Boom Lodge incident, the fatal shooting of graduating student Joseph Maroney in 1920 unsettled Dartmouth College in ways that administrators would have preferred to avoid. From the obvious displeasure of the student body to the criticism in the news to even some scrutiny from the government, the whole debacle was pleasant for none.  The shooter, Albert Meads, was hardly an unknown given he had previously been involved in the supposedly accidental death of Norman F. Arnold in 1916, a casual “misfiring” of a gun in the dorm halls they said. Accounts of the 1920 incident, both in Dartmouth histories and in contemporary press coverage though, simplified the Maroney shooting into a quarrel over liquor prices in the Prohibition era. This neat framing conveniently leaves out the awkward fact that Maroney had been sober for more than a year and that there was no grand thief-in-the-night tale. The more uncomfortable part of this story concerns not just the tragedy of 1920, but Dartmouth’s earlier decision to allow Meads back on campus after Arnold’s death, which, in hindsight, reads as a heavily misjudged decision. 

After Maroney’s death, correspondence between President Ernest Martin Hopkins and former faculty member Frederick Adler revealed how uneasy many already were about Meads’ presence. Adler, who had taught Meads himself, condemned Meads’ character in no uncertain terms, and Hopkins admitted that it was “a pity beyond measure that Meads should ever have returned to the College campus.” He assured Adler that Dartmouth would take “no action, direct or indirect, to temper the law’s course in this matter.” Hopkins’ comments acknowledge, if indirectly, that Meads’ readmission had been an error and perhaps one that now looked far more consequential than it had in 1916. More than that however, it strikes one as quite odd that, in opposition to the past, the law would operate as per normal and perhaps there was more than meets the eye to how Hopkins handled the first shooting.

The surviving correspondence on the case is equally notable for how much energy was devoted to Dartmouth’s public image. From friends, alumni, and occasional influential onlookers, Hopkins received a steady stream of offers of legal advice, reassurance about alumni opinion, suggestions on how to manage rumors about alcohol on campus, and more than a few invites to what could be viewed as emotional-support-and-friendly-catch-up golf. In a letter to the Associated Press, he expressed reluctance to make any public statement unless it was necessary to protect Maroney’s reputation, separating Dartmouth as an institution from Meads as an individual. “Among the exceptions there will be men potentially dangerous to the welfare and reputation of the group as a whole,” he wrote.

Even in 1920 though, some observers accused the college of mishandling the situation. One letter claimed that Dartmouth had sided with Maroney because of his “popularity”, using Meads as a convenient scapegoat and expediting his removal from campus before commencement. Hopkins, in private, rejected the idea, insisting that Meads had already benefited from extraordinary leniency after the Arnold shooting but did concede that perhaps it was a mistake to have let Meads roam free. His tendency to bootleg alcohol for instance, was a well known campus and administrative fact. 

What emerges from this all is a picture of an administration attempting to balance accountability with the instinct for institutional self-preservation. The Maroney case prompts a few difficult questions: Why was someone who killed another student, accidental or not, allowed to return to campus with little supervision? How much weight did Dartmouth place on its reputation compared to student safety? More than a century later, those questions still feel uncomfortably familiar, especially following the events of the past year. As such, Dartmouth’s 1920 tragedy remains more than just a curious episode of college lore; it serves as a reminder of how institutions manage crises. Unfortunately for the colleges, it's not always with the clarity or foresight they would like or wish to claim.

To read this and more correspondence about the Meads-Maroney shooting, request DP-11, box 6766, folder 17 at Rauner Library.

Posted for Erica Mao '28, recipient of a Historical Accountability Student Research Fellowship for the 2025 summer 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 the college's past. For more information, visit the program's website.