The Great Unknown

One of our favorite maps in the collection is woefully incomplete. "The General Chart Showing the Track of H. M. Ships Hecla & Griper," from William Parry's Journal of a Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage (London: John Murray, 1821) has huge blank spaces. There are no sea monsters or interesting decorative elements to fill in the Great Unknown, just empty space with an imposed grid of latitude and longitude.

The map demonstrates how little was known of the polar regions at the time. Some theorized they would find an open Polar sea while others anticipated ice filled channels leading to the Bering Straits.  Competing theories advanced the idea that land would block the way through.

Seeing this map makes the perilous journeys seeking a Northwest Passage all the more real. Not only were the explorers headed into ice with wooden hulled sailing vessels, they also had no idea what to expect as they charted the unknown.

To see the map, ask for Stef G650 1819 P151.

Queen of the Snows

1929 Winter Carnival Queen
and Court

"Beauty and Charm to Be the Basis In Picking 1923 Carnival Queen" reads the front page headline in The D on February 8, 1923. Three judges would pick the "lucky" girl out of the grand march at the costume ball on the stroke of midnight. This was the beginning of a fifty year tradition in which the dates of Dartmouth men who were invited up for Carnival would be picked by judges, and later by fraternity members, to enter into a beauty contest.

The contest, unlike modern pageants, required no display of talent. Skills at dancing, piano playing, singing or spelling mattered not. A beautiful face and a good costume were the only necessary qualifications for consideration. In earlier years a real costume for the accompanying Grand Costume Ball was required. Eleanor Gray won for her colonial dame costume in 1925, though a stylish ski outfit was deemed a more important accessory in later years. Early winners had their name added to a silver trophy cup, but beginning in 1947 the newly recognized monarch was allowed to wear the Queen's tiara.

The "Queen of the Snows" crown.

1939 Winter Carnival Queen
and Court.

The tradition finally came to an end in 1973 when women were admitted to the College. A January 15, 1973, article in The D explains that the "43-year-old 'Queen of the Snows' Winter Carnival beauty contest is dead" citing "changes in attitudes toward women both on campus and throughout the country" as a reason for the contest's decline in popularity, and that it had "outlived its usefulness."

Ask for the photo files and vertical files on "Winter Carnival" and all of the associated events.

Book Improper

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men begins with thirty-one photos. The most famous one being there, to your left. And the first words are these: "(Serious readers are advised to proceed to the book-proper after finishing the first section of the Preface. A later return will do no harm.)"

Though they are in whispered parentheses, Agee's message is no nonsense: narrative is for dilly-dallyers. Real readers need be active participants in literature. Do not expect for this to be easy. Do not expect sequence. That is for the lazy.

This is fitting in the context of this book, once you realize there is no table of contents, but instead a page titled, "Design of the Book," and that Agee was uncomfortable with the book-form at all. He writes, "This is a book only by necessity. More seriously, it is an effort in human actuality, in which the reader is no less centrally involved than the author and those of whom they tell."

Agee continues to play with his reader, demanding their attention and participation, with such tongue-in-cheek bits as the following "cast-list" he includes in the beginning of Book II:

James Agee: a spy, traveling as a journalist
Walker Evans: a counter-spy traveling as a photographer
Unpaid Agitators: William Blake, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Ring Lardner, Jesus Christ, Sigmund Freud, Lonnie Johnson, Irvine Upham

Jesus as an "unpaid agitator"? Provacateur. Funny man.

To begin the book, there is no title page, no words at all: just a blank page followed in the first edition by 31 photographs arranged in three groups. The photographs have no captions or locating information of any kind. These images were shifted so they appeared before all words--before the title, before the copyright, before the table of contents. And why?

Agee tells us, "The photographs are not illustrative. They, and the text, are coequal, mutually independent, and fully collaborative." He insisted that the publisher not distribute bound galleys without the photographs because reviewers would be incapable of understanding what the book was about if they received only the words.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is Agee's discontent distilled and given its most convenient form, the book. But convenience is far from perfection. Indeed Agee is tortured by the act of writing—the act of showing, and so enabling, maybe even encouraging, voyeurism. He cannot stand "that you are what you are, and that she is what she is, and that you cannot, for one moment exchange places with her, nor by any such hope make expiation for what she has suffered at your hands, and for what you have gained at hers." Is this all exploitation? He agonized over Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, in part to rebel against his fear that, yes, all this is.

1937 Winter Carnival Queen

1938 Winter Carnival Queen

There are included here to demonstrate the gap in privilege that so chafed Agee.

He would never recover from the book's poor reception (it was remaindered after selling only 600 copies), and continued on to a troubled life of alcoholism, dying early at 45, in a taxi en route to a doctor’s appointment. After the posthumous publishing of his Pulitzer Prize winning novel A Death in the Family, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men exploded in popularity and is now considered a classic, precisely for all the quirks and experimentation that make it so challenging a read.

Let's end with Agee in his own words (taken from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men): "Isn’t every human being both a scientist and an artist; and in writing of human experience, isn’t there a good deal to be said for recognizing that fact and for using both methods?"

To see all this energy given book-form, ask for Rare F 326 .A17. It’s a first edition.

Posted for Maggie Tierney '14

Alfred Hitchcock Presents...

"The Brain is the material organ of all the Intellectual and Moral manifestations. Of the nature of the mind, or soul itself, but little is known beyond what Revelation has unfolded. Chemistry in vain has been invoked to test for its essence; and the most accurate anatomists have failed to point out its domicile, or discover its mode of union with the body."

We couldn't believe this one. Earlier this week for an Anthropology class, "The Values of Medicine," we looked at 19th-century Dartmouth Medical School theses. One group of students stumbled on "Influence of the Mind on Disease" by one Alfred Hitchcock written in 1837. We were sorry to learn he was no relation, but clearly a precursor to his more famous namesake: they shared a fascination with the curiosities of the mind, but worked in different media.

Come see this and other medical theses by asking for DA-3, Box 10932. Also enjoy this posting featuring a 1832 thesis on Tight Lacing.

A View from Pemberley

This week marks the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, perhaps the most beloved novel in the English language. We have two copies of the first edition "By the Author of Sense and Sensibility." One of the fun things to do in Special Collections is surround a favorite novel with contemporary books that give you insights into the world of its original readers. One such book is Humphry Repton's Observations on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening (London: T. Bensley for J. Taylor, 1805).

 

Repton's treatise on English landscapes would have fit right in at Mr. Darcy's Pemberley House library. The lavishly produced book uses flaps to show before and after views of improved landscapes. The pictures give you a sense of what Elizabeth Bennett and her aunt and uncle may have seen as they "found themselves at the top of a considerable eminence, where the wood ceased, and the eye was instantly caught by Pemberley House."

Come in and behold the grounds that Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy may have strolled in their happy dotage by asking for Rare SB471.R427 1805. And don't forget the first edition of Pride and Prejudice: Rare PR4034.P7 1813.

A Real John Hancock

Sometimes a person is so inextricably linked to a specific event or time that it can be a little jarring when you find evidence of them in a completely different context. John Hancock is one of those people. The famous, though apocryphal, anecdote about his signature and King George's spectacles is so well known that seeing the same signature on a document that is not the Declaration of Independence can produce a brief moment of "wait, that doesn't belong here."

The other document in question is an affidavit by John Wheelock from March 4, 1790 attesting that, for a consideration of £658, he is discharging all claims on the funds collected by Nathaniel Whitaker and Samson Occom that had been deposited with the Society in Scotland for use of the Moor's Indian Charity School through June 15, 1789. Wheelock was then president of the School, having succeeded his father Eleazar, and the funds in question had been raised to cover any expenses incurred by the School. The document is certified by Hancock as Governor of Massachusetts.

Ask for Mss 790204.1.

Tell Us Your Story

Have you ever considered what it was like to be a black man attending Dartmouth in the 1950s? Or to be a Native American leaving home for the first time to attend Dartmouth in the 1970s? Or to be an international female faculty member whose first language is not English in the 1990s? Or to be a returning veteran working or teaching at Dartmouth in the 1960s? Or to be on a journey of discovery of your sexual identity while enrolled or teaching at Dartmouth in the 1980s?

Rauner Library is looking for narratives such as these. During this month in which we honor the life and work of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., Rauner Library is launching a new oral history project. It's called "Dartmouth's Community and Dartmouth's World" and its goal is to document how the Dartmouth community has been transformed over the past sixty-eight years since the end of World War Two. The lens through which we will be examining this transformation is the concept of the insider and outsider and how those roles have been altered over the years by the increasing diversity of the student body, faculty and staff, as well as the alumni body.

Here are a few paragraphs from the stories we've collected thus far:

"At Dartmouth I always associated as the outsider of the group that I was aligned with. I think it was a way of me getting attention or being noticed. I was the most conservative member of the gay students that I would hang around. I don't know if I actually ever joined the Gay Students Association officially. When I was here at Dartmouth, there was an incident I recall where the Dartmouth Review published the names of the members of the Gay Students Association. And so that terrified me, and I did not want my name on a list. So that kept me from joining. But I did find people that would accept me, but then I always chose to sort of be the odd one out. I can think of a number of instances like that." (Class of 1986)

"You know, there were times when I wanted to reach out to people outside of my social group, and I felt like they were going to - They weren't going to give me the time of day because they thought I was, you know, a rich white kid in a fraternity who played lacrosse. [Laughter] And, you know, he's a jerk, so I don't really want to talk to him." (Class of 2012)

"And I can tell you that coming from a segregated school system in the Washington, DC, area, where we weren't even allowed to go into the theaters until late in the game and then had to sit in the balcony, I didn't know what to expect [when I arrived at Dartmouth]. This was my first venture into a, quote, "white," unquote, world. And so I went with all the prejudices that one would think about. I realized somewhere in the second half of my freshman year that I was my own worst enemy from that standpoint, because I went expecting people to be prejudiced against me, and so I looked for that. And if you look for prejudice and discrimination, you'll very easily find it. And then I woke up one morning and realized, You're your own worst enemy, so why not accept people for who they are and how they treat you, as opposed to what you expect or anticipate? From that point on, I was able to adapt to the environment much better and be much more responsive to what the school had to offer." (Class of 1959)

"I think when you're unaffiliated, you either find some sort of extracurricular thing that provides a community. Or your community is just your friends. And I feel like that's - I don't feel I have a community. I just feel like... I guess in a way... I think if I had to pick something as my community, I would say it's the Womenʼs and Gender Studies department." (Class of 2012)

Come tell us your story.

Dartmouth Class of 1947

Visit the site to read completed transcripts or to contact Mary Donin who is managing the project.