Wonder Woman for President, 1972

When we look back at major milestones in Dartmouth's history, we often get caught up in the local conditions that spurred the changes and forget about the broader cultural context. Dartmouth's decision to admit women is a case in point. The discussions we see almost always revolve around the campus response, the difficulties the first generations of women faced, and the impact on campus life. But, of course, the decision to make Dartmouth a co-ed institution occurred at a time when the nation as a whole was wrestling with issues raised by second-wave feminism.

That national context was one of the reasons we were thrilled to receive a mint condition inaugural issue from 1972 of Ms., the magazine that quickly became the primary venue for mainstream feminist thought.  Just a month later the first class of women enrolled at Dartmouth. The 1972 local news in the D resonates in new ways when juxtaposed with this new voice of a national movement. But also, the cover stories speak to the continued social and political battles of today: "Wonder Women for President," "Money for Housework," and "Gloria Steinem on How Women Vote."

Come see it, and the curious mix of ads it contains (Coppertone wasn't too sure how to speak to the feminist movement!) by asking for Rare HQ1101.M55 Vol 1, No.1, 1972.

Malcolm X at Dartmouth

On January 26, 1965, Malcolm X visited campus at the invitation of the Undergraduate Council to offer Dartmouth students an alternative viewpoint to Martin Luther King, Jr. and James Farmer, both of whom had visited campus in the recent past. As you might expect, Malcolm X stirred up controversy with his lecture in Spaulding Auditorium and extended interview on the campus radio station, WDCR.

The D reported that Malcolm X promised "A Long, Bloody Summer," and a series of editorials and letters to the editor alternated expressions of fear, hostility and admiration. The D editorial board was unimpressed. They defended his right to speak on campus, but criticized his views: "His arguments were often irrational and his solutions, based on the ends to be achieved, often ignored the implications of the means to accomplish the ends."

Richard Joseph '65 offered a rebuttal to the editorial board under the disclaimer "THIS COLUMN DOES NOT NECESSARILY REPRESENT OR REFLECT THE POLICIES OF THIS PAPER" and letters to the editor supported Malcolm X. Just a few weeks later, Malcolm X was murdered. Dartmouth students, so recently debating his ideas, had to confront Malcolm X's life, death, and ideas on a personal level.

Come in and read the whole story in the D on our open reference shelves. To read the transcript of the WDCR interview, ask for the Malcolm X vertical file.

A Painful Cure

While researching early pharmaceuticals and medicines for a class, we came across a pamphlet bound in creased yellow wallpaper. Inside, it details a "Cure for Venereal Disease."

The cure includes syringing the penis with a mixture of flax seed, tea, and milk, before progressing to a mixture of "white vitriol" and "rain water." It sounds like a painful cure to a painful disease ....

There are also various warnings about food and drink. In the first week, you can drink a "very moderate quantity" of gin, but cannot drink rum -- "Drink no rum" -- or eat "very little salt pork."

During the class, we discussed how the lack of context changes our evaluations of the item. One student said that if it were made in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries, it would seem more medically valid, whereas if it were from the nineteenth or twentieth centuries, he would view it as folkloric or somehow medically dubious.

Hervey Fisher was a Dartmouth Medical School graduate of the class of 1818. He became a practicing physician and died in 1847. This pamphlet isn't dated, and I'm curious whether it was produced while he was a student or a practicing doctor. Is a prescription for a patient? Notes from a lecture? The wear on the front cover seems to imply that it was used or carried, making me lean towards the former. If you have any theories, let us know!

To see the "Cure," ask for MS 002124. We also have a booklet of Hervey's lecture notes on surgery, chemistry, theory and practice of medicine, and "natural philosophy" from his time at Dartmouth (MS 002364).

Merrill's Circulating Library

While digging around in the book collections for materials to support the English Department's "1850s America" class this term, we stumbled on an 1852 catalog for Merrill's Circulating Library in Concord, New Hampshire. The class is reading Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World this week and Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of Seven Gables next week, so we had to check the catalog. Sure enough, Merrill's had both books available for rental at six cents per week per volume.

But what was odd was how the books were classified. The House of Seven Gables was reasonably in the "Novels and Romances" section, but The Wide, Wide World landed at the end in the "Miscellaneous" section with books like Poe's The Raven and other Poems, Charles Lamb's Essays of Elia, The Blues Laws of Connecticut and other States,  Sam Slick, and The Pirate's Own Book.

Maybe it was the theme? Perhaps Warner's moral and social commentary trumped her plot and pushed the book out of the "novel" classification. Did Merrill's think readers were turning to Susan Warner for something different than when they picked up The House of Seven Gables, Agnes Grey or Last of the Mohicans?  One thing is for sure, Wide, Wide World, as a two volume book, cost twice as much to read as the single volume House of Seven Gables.

We have the first editions of both The House of Seven Gables (Rare PS1861.A1 1851) and The Wide, Wide World (Rare PS3155 W6 1851). You can see what else was at Merrill's Circulating Library by asking for N.H. Imprints, Concord 1852e. For a couple other posts that mention lending libraries, see The Triple Headed Monster, and Mathematical Principles.

Envelope of Death

Most of the time we work with old things here in Rauner. Sometimes it can get a little eerie, because the people who made so many of our books and documents are no longer with us, and, as one astute archivist once said, "their papers really are their last remains." We are pretty hardened to it, but the tales of woe and death sometimes get to us.

This week we opened up an envelope stuffed with postcards from the early 1900s. All of the cards were written to William M. Chase, Class of 1858 and College Trustee, from Samuel C. Beale, Secretary to the Class of 1858. Each card simply records the death of another classmate. Most are terse:

Grafton 30 Sept 1911
Classmate Livingston died at Peacham, Vt in Aug 1911.
Sam'l C Beane

or

Classmate Hayes. B.S. died Sept 28 1915 at his summer home in Madbury, N.H.
S. C. Beane
Sec 1858

A few show a little more emotion:

Our beloved classmate Chadwick died at his home Sat 11 of pneumonia. Funeral tomorrow, Tuesday. I have been asked to take part in the services.
Sam'l C. Beane
Grafton 13 March 1911

The matter-of-fact reportage of these and the sheer number is profoundly odd. Reported by one classmate, and saved as a packet of death by another, as each measured their days.

Serialized Hate

The German copyright for Mein Kampf (My Struggle), Adolf Hitler's autobiography and master plan, has finally expired, and German scholars have just released a critical edition. But we have a copy that turned Hitler's propaganda back on itself: an unauthorized, war-time translation for a wary British public fretting over German expansion to the East. It is part of our current exhibition Light and Shadow in the Thirties.

In the early 1930s, Hitler refused to authorize an unexpurgated translation, allowing only a few positive abridgments. As Hitler's policies escalated with the annexation of Austria and the invasion of Czechoslovakia, English-speaking audiences demanded a full translation. The publication history is long and complicated -- there was a lawsuit, threats, and, for translator James Murphy, a narrow escape from Nazi Germany.

Rauner has James Murphy's translation, issued by the London firm Hurst & Blackett in eighteen parts. Our copy was probably published during World War II. Each cover boasts that the proceeds will benefit the British Red Cross -- not Hitler's German publishing house Eher Verlag. Mein Kampf became a bestseller in English, even after the war's outbreak, as Britains sought to understand their enemy's convoluted and hate-filled ideology.

The pamphlets use Hitler's face on every cover and stock photos of German sites fill the interior pages, showing how cheap and popular books depended on photography to increase their intellectual and cultural cache. "Illustrated" was just another selling point, just like the "Binding Cases" advertised on the back cover.

For Rauner's Mein Kampf in parts, see Rare Book DD247.H5 A326 1939, currently on display in the Class of 1965 Galleries. The exhibition comes down on April 3, 2016, as we install an exhibition by the first year seminar Anthropology 7: Values of Medicine.

To learn more about the publication history, check out James J. Barnes and Patience P. Barnes' Hitler's Mein Kampf in Britain and America: A Publishing History, 1930-39 (Baker Berry DD247.H5 A3426).

Churchilliana

In 1911, Winston Spencer Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, wrote a secret memorandum entitled Military Aspects of the Continental Problem in which he stated "a decision has been arrived at to employ a British military force on the Continent of Europe." Showcasing his "foresighted statesmanship," this document is only one of several in a small but robust collection of Churchill memorabilia given to Rauner in the 1990s by Frederick Forsch, Dartmouth Class of 1937. Forsch, a passionate collector of Churchilliana, had amassed one of the best private collections of Winston Churchill material that included letters to prime minister David Lloyd George, journalists Adam Marshall Diston and Henry Lucy, and many others as well as extensive correspondence with Admiral Sir Roger Keyes.

Some of the letters are more personal, such as the one addressed to "Sambo," Churchill's Indian servant. In October 1899, when Churchill was twenty-four and on his way to cover the Boer War as special correspondent of the Morning Post, he responds to a request from Sambo "to come to the war" by advising him how to travel to South Africa. However, it appears that Sambo did not meet up with Churchill in the end, as there is no mention of him in any of Churchill's writings about that time.

Another exciting part of this collection is the pen and ink political cartoons of Winston Churchill by prominent cartoonist of the time, including Ernest H. Shepard, Sydney Strube, Edmund Dulac, David Low and Vicky, which appeared in the magazine Punch and the Morning Leader, Daily Express, Pall Mall Gazette and News Chronicle.

A particularly good example is this cartoon by Baron Benjamin entitled Adolf in Blunderland which depicts Hitler as Alice, astonished at the pack of cards bearing the names of such battles as El Alamein and Naples rising up into the air, with Goebbels as the knave on the left and a be-swastika'd white rabbit in the front. The cartoon was published in the Egyptian Mail newspaper on November 6, 1943.

This cartoon by Ernest H. Shepard entitled Two Historians depicts Churchill seated at a desk engaged in writing. Besides the desk is the figure of Julius Caesar holding a volume lettered "De Bello Gallico." It appears that Churchill must be working on the second volume of The Second World War, as the first volume, The Gathering Storm, is already on the shelf. The caption reads, "Do you ever wonder what a treat this is going to be for the schoolboys of 4000 A.D.?"

Another cartoon by Benjamin entitled H Bomb, for a cover of Punch magazine in 1954, depicts Churchill as Punch seated pen in hand at an easel where Uncle Sam appears on the canvas. The cartoon satirizes the fact that in the House of Commons on March 30, 1954, then Prime Minister Winston Churchill made a speech supporting the United States' development of the hydrogen bomb.

To see these and other items in the collection ask for MS-788, the Forsch collection on Winston Churchill.