Not for the Folk

Robert Burns, the Ploughman Poet, the national hero of Scotland, the bringer of Scottish folk culture to the world, done up in about as fancy a dress as you can imagine. This copy of Selections from Burns was executed in an edition of one with every feature handcrafted by the firm of Sangorski and Sutcliffe. The colophon reads:

This "Selections from Robert Burns" has been written out and illuminated on vellum and illustrated with six original hand painted Miniatures. By Sangorski and Sutcliffe of 1-5 Poland St. London. And will not be duplicated.

From the moment you pull it out of its silk lined box, you know you are in for a treat. The cover, morocco leather with a gold-leaf floral pattern, is studded with gemstones. The flyleaves are silk covered and all of the text is in manuscript on rich vellum. The six miniatures are exquisite depictions of key scenes in the poems. It is so beautiful and precious, you forget to read the text.

Alas, no humble ploughman would have been able to afford this one. Made to be a treasured item for a select few, we open it to the public--to take a look, ask for Bindings 243.

Blueberries for Hyde

It is blueberry season here in the Upper Valley. You can walk up to a bush and fill a bucket before you realize you have even gotten started picking. There is nothing like a bunch of blueberries to make you want to celebrate summer and pull out the maple syrup from last spring.

For some, the inspiration goes beyond pies and pancakes. In this early August letter from 1969 to Hyde Cox, the artist Andrew Wyeth included a watercolor study as a token of thanks:

Betsy just came in with this rusty pail full of blue berries--these she picked in the fields of Broad Cove Farm--I had to make this study for you.  All of this is done to try and tell you in my own language of how deeply I feel about your gift of the Selected Letters of Robert Frost.

Hyde Cox was a friend of Robert Frost's and a friend and patron of Wyeth. His papers contain a folder of Wyeth's sketches and several folders of their correspondence. A few other letters contain sketches, but none quite so spectacular as the pail of blueberries.

Thank goodness e-mail wasn't around in 1969. A blueberry emoji just wouldn't be the same...

To see the collection, ask for MS-1168. The blueberry study is in box 1, folder 39.

The Best Answer...

Earlier this week, the popular game show Jeopardy! hit home for us. One of the $1,000 "answers" was, "This Ivy League College's Rauner Special Collections Library is the home to the Robert Frost Collection." The question, naturally, was "What is Dartmouth College."  We love the concept, and hope that for someone, somewhere, we are the answer to that question. We have a vision of somebody far from Dartmouth being asked by a friend,"What is Dartmouth College?" and the first response is a reference to Rauner Library. You see, we overshadow all of the other achievements of the College!

Alas, it is not a likely answer: Dartmouth is multifaceted and it would be hard to come up with a phase that answers the question, but for now, we will take Jeopardy's.

We were a bit dismayed that none of the contestants got the right question. I guess they are not regular readers of our blog and missed these posts:

Strange Bedfellows
This Ought to be a Good Book
Robert Frost's Christmas Cards
Two Poets
Phishing for Poets
Audits Happen
Interval... Intervale
Getting to Yeats's House

And, you can use the Frost Collections by asking for MS-1178.

Experience the Life of a WWI Medical Officer

While exploring the Dartmouth College Archives, I stumbled upon a packing list for an officer going to Europe to fight in WWI in the papers of Harry Goodall 1898.. At Dartmouth, Goodall was a member of Kappa Kappa Kappa fraternity. He went to Harvard Medical School, and appears to have been very ambitious, as he opened his own private practice in 1904 and was a professor of Chemistry and Medicine at Harvard until 1917.

Goodall began as a contract surgeon with the Army in August of 1917 but was commissioned as a Major in the Medical Corps on October 20 of the same year. In 1918, Goodall was sent down to Camp Greene, in North Carolina, where in March the Spanish Flu had broken out. Following Camp Greene, Goodall was sent to Camp Wheeler, in Georgia, where he complained about the conditions of the hospital and food, saying in one document, “The place [was] not very clean. The mess [was] frightful [and] the food [was] often unfit for use.” Soon after, though, he was sent to France to work in Base Hospital 51 where, in his diary, he described the commanding officer as “a man totally unfit to command...He lacked medical knowledge...He never appeared in any capacity aside from that of a cheap politician...After the Armistice he was sent home for discharge for inefficiency.”

Goodall appears to have experienced culture shock in France, and complained that the “toilet facilities were anything but American” and described how the French contractors would empty the toilet cans with their bare hands, saying, “this was one thing that perhaps made me disgusted with the French although there were many things of similar nature that would make it impossible for an American to ever understand the French.” In October, Goodall moved to Base Hospital 87 and gained command of 2,000 beds. Here, there were many cases of the flu, but Goodall was proud that he was able to take precautions to avoid tremendous mortalities. The Army was sufficiently impressed with Goodall to send him back to Base Hospital 51 to control the situation there.

Though Goodall’s story itself is fascinating, and detailed wonderfully in his diary, the most interesting document I found among his papers was this packing list. On one page it details everything the Army deemed necessary for a soldier to take to France. At the bottom of the page, they claim that, “[t]his includes everything.” My favorite section of the list is “Articles suggested but not required,” which includes the seeming necessities of toothpaste, soap, bath towel, and toilet paper (apparently the army was less than concerned with personal hygiene). My favorite part of this list is that between the items of handkerchiefs and pocketknife is the entry “housewife.” Apparently for an officer going to France in 1918, a housewife was included on the packing list as a recommended item.


To explore Harry Goodall's papers, come to Rauner and ask for MS-397.


Posted for Addison Himmelberger '15, HIST 62 class.

Spare Room

Ever wonder what your dorm was like in the distant past? How much the rooms cost, which were the most desirable? Well you can easily find out by consulting the Dormitory Floor Plans, Descriptions and Room Rate put out by the College Bursar.

In 1931 Mass Row was touted for its vestibule enclosed stairways that shielded the rooms from the noise of people going up and down the stairs. It was also unique in that the rooms all had private toilets for every room. Even the color scheme of the rooms and corridors is described (rooms were finished in ivory and brown while the brick walls of the corridors were painted in brown and cream). Rooms were priced based on desirability and ranged from a high of $320 per occupant to a low of $165.

What the Dormitory Floor Plans fail to impart is the spartan nature of the rooms. Rooms came with a bed frame--you brought your own mattress--a set of roller curtains and a dresser. Everything else had to be supplied by the students. In fact, the rooms were so barren that the Dartmouth Handbook (for freshman) provided this piece of advice to new arrivals: "If you are rooming in a dormitory, don't let the former occupants of the room sell you the radiator or the roller curtains. They come with the room."

So if you're housed in one of the older dorms, come by and check out the Dormitory Floor Plans, Rauner Reference LD 1439.8 .D3. You might be amused to see what your room once cost and how it stacked up against other dorm rooms at the time.

Where the Wild Things Really Are

In response to Martin Luther King's assassination on April 4, 1968, riots broke out in Northwest Washington, DC's predominately black neighborhood around 14th and U streets. 2,500 law-enforcement officers were able to establish order in the early morning of Friday, April 5. By then 150 stores had been looted and 200 people had been arrested. On Friday, April 5, the riots spread to other parts of the city. They were still going strong on Saturday, April 6, despite the deployment of more than 13,600 federal troops and National Guardsman. The security forces were under strict orders from Mayor Washington not to shoot rioters. When the riots finally died down on Sunday twelve people had died and more than 1,000 had been injured.

In response to the riots and to help the children who attended the inner city schools in the riot areas cope with what was happening around them, Norman W. Nickens, the assistant superintendent, gave the following instruction to his teachers:

"Remember, classes simply cannot go on as usual. Unusual events have occurred and your children are preoccupied with these. In times of crisis, children learn rapidly. Therefore, make use of the events of the April 5 weekend to help them learn. Do not fail them by lecturing when they need to talk."

John Mathews, a reporter on education for The Evening Star in Washington, DC, who quoted the above passage in a 1968 article he wrote with Ernest Holsendolph for the New York Times Magazine had access to some of the material that had been created by the children. According to Mathews, "the discussions, compositions and pictures showed that fear and a feeling that the adult world was spinning out of control were prevalent emotions."

We recently received several drawings created by these kids who were then between the ages of 8 and 14. The feeling of devastation is prevalent in all of them, so is the fear. However, Mathews also noticed a certain "excitement and elation" related to the fact that "before the troops arrived in force, masses of black people controlled the streets and for once, it was truly safe to be black."

To view the collection, which contains 23 drawings, as well as a variety of posters, student newspapers and ephemera of that time ask for MS-1335.

Alpha Delta Phi Meeting Minutes

Dartmouth College fraternities have played a large role in college fraternity history and inspired the movie whose poster almost every Dartmouth student has in his or her dorm room: Animal House. It is no surprise that Dartmouth fraternities are still very much alive today, but walking into a basement on “Frat Row” tells only a limited story.

At Rauner library, one can look into the fraternity life at Dartmouth as far back to the 1840s when the first ones opened on campus. Almost all of the fraternities have extensive records housed there with photographs of the fraternities’ drama troops, the Delta Kappa Epsilon initiation books with mysteriously burned edges, and what I found to be most interesting, the meeting minutes.

One fraternity that should definitely be checked out is the Alpha Delta Phi—today known as Alpha Delta or AD—meeting minutes. A fraternity that just recently got derecognized, it gives people the chance to see the mischief the fraternity got into, how the brothers’ values changed with time, and how some traditions stayed the same. For instance, in the early twentieth century, the brothers discussed the house parties they would hold for Winter Carnival. Then when the U.S. entered World War I, they rapidly turned their attention to Europe even discussing if polygamy will be necessary in Germany after the war. But all the while, they continued freshman recruiting rituals or what they called “chinning.”

As a freshman girl, I may have no idea what goes on in the meetings Wednesday nights at fraternities, but now I can know what the brothers did, what they cared about, and what they thought about. It gives us an inside look not just into the minds of the people who lived through large events like World War I and World War II, but into what college boys thought at the time. In my opinion, it does not seem too different than how they think today. Don’t believe me? Have a look at the records then knock on a fraternity house door, a house that may have stood there since 1919.

To see the meeting minutes for Alpha Delta, ask at Rauner for the Alpha Delta Phi, Dartmouth College Records (DO-3).

Posted for Allison Gelman '18, HIST 62 class.