The Enemy of all Civilized People

Dartmouth students over the years have produced scads of short lived journals. Most are venues for literary output, and some are devoted to specific causes. Surprisingly few have directly engaged in major issues outside of the confines of campus, but we just stumbled on one from the 1920s published by the "Round Table of Dartmouth College" that smacks of the witty, vaguely elite, cultural magazines of the time. It seems to be trying to emulate the American Mercury under H. L. Mencken, or maybe the early New Yorker.

Titled Tomahawk as a nod to Dartmouth's past mascot, it set out to "seriously but without solemnity publish informative and reflective articles on matters touching social well-being" to help determine "How liberal is a liberal college?" Their target is "the enemy of all civilized people, and it finds its expression in bigotry, muddle-headedness, and obscurantism: these are particular to no camp."  So, the presidential candidates all get equal treatment and there is a lament about how difficult it is to get conservative speakers relative to liberal or radical ones on campus. Tomahawk only lasted a year, but you can still read it here in the Library by a asking for DC HIST LH1.D3T6. It is a pretty interesting window (and counter to The Dartmouth) into the campus zeitgeist of the 1920s.

After break, on January 11th from 3:00-6:00, the Library will be holding an open house for students currently publishing journals and for those thinking of starting one. Who knows, with a little more support a journal like Tomahawk (hopefully with a better name!) might have thrived--we would have loved to see what it had to say when so many students were being radicalized on campus in the 1930s.

Wherefore Dartmouth College?

On this day, 247 years ago Dartmouth College was officially chartered. But how did a charity school housed in a poor minister's house grow into something so grand as a college?

The story begins in the winter of 1766 when Eleazar Wheelock sent Samson Occom and Nathaniel Whitaker to Great Britain to raise funds for Moor’s Indian Charity School. In their absence, Wheelock was in Connecticut attempting to get a charter for the school to improve its legal standing.

At first, Wheelock was stymied because the colony of Connecticut was itself incorporated. Under English law at the time, one corporation could not charter another. Because of this, Wheelock began to look further afield. He considered sites in New York, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire. The officials from all of these colonies were more than interested in hosting Wheelock’s school and they plied him with offers of money, land and prestigious positions.

William Smith, Jr. to Eleazar Wheelock, May 26, 1767

In 1767, William Smith, a prominent New York lawyer and a member of the Governor’s Council, wrote to Wheelock in an attempt to persuade him to locate his school in Albany. In his letter, he mentions that the people there will give £2,300 and would be pleased to see the school made into a university or college, with Wheelock at its head. This appears to be the first mention of the possibility of the school becoming a college. Wheelock turned this offer down because his relationship with the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy had soured, and he could not anticipate many Indian students coming to the school from the Albany area. But, one has to wonder if this did not alter his aspirations.

Wheelock to Woodbridge, November 12, 1768

The next prominent offer came from Massachusetts in 1768. In his letter to Wheelock, Timothy Woodbridge suggested that the Governor of Massachusetts would be interested in making the school a college. In his response Wheelock noted his reasons against locating the school in Massachusetts, chief among them is that there was already a good college in the colony. This appears to be first time there is an indication from Wheelock that he had ambitions to make his school into something greater.

Wheelock, always a bit of a wheeler-dealer, had been corresponding with the newly appointed Governor of New Hampshire, John Wentworth, throughout his negotiations with the other colonies. Wentworth was as anxious as any to locate an institution of higher learning within his colony. When Wheelock first proposed using the term “college” in a draft of the charter in 1769, Wentworth did not balk. He readily added the wording to the Royal Charter he granted for the founding of Dartmouth College in December of 1769.

Charter Draft, December 13, 1769

However, this change in the school’s status flew in the face of Wheelock’s stated intentions. Occom was less than impressed when he returned to the colonies to find that his efforts to raise money to save the souls of his native brethren had been hijacked. In response he wrote Wheelock a scathing letter in which he pointed out that Wheelock’s school had become too grand for the poor Indian.

While the two men patched up their differences in the long run, Occom never set foot on the Dartmouth campus. Eventually Occom came to the conclusion that Native Americans and European Americans could not coexist and he devised a plan to move his family, and many Christian Indian families, to Oneida country. In 1789, just three years before his death, Occom and his wife finally moved to the newly formed Brothertown community in upstate New York.

Celebrity Catalogers

Picture People Magazine in the 19th century... then banish that image from your mind as quickly as you can and take a look at Photographic Portraits of Living Celebrities (London: Maull & Polyblank, 1856-9). There are no glam shots here, and no airbrushed beauty graces these pages. The collection of photographs with biographic sketches tends toward the academic and political. There are a few names you might recognize on the list like Faraday or Cruikshank but for the most part these are not the folks we think of as celebrities today.

Pictured here is Richard Owen, striking a very goth pose with what looks like a crocodile skull. Owen had many accomplishments, but his primary claim to fame was a thirty-year stint as the cataloger of the anatomical collection of the Royal College of Surgeons. He gives us hope that someday rare book catalogers will be all the rage. Or, perhaps our time has passed...

To take a look, ask for Rare TR681.F3 M285 1859.

"Rendezvous of all Sin"

If you are a little too enchanted with Holiday "cheer," we've got just the book for you: Samuel Ward and Samuel Clark's A Warning-piece to All Drunkards and Health-Drinkers (London: Printed for the Authors, 1682). Temperance works are not that uncommon, but this particular one comes with "Above one hundred and twenty sad and dreadful examples" of the evils of drink, as well as twelve illustrations showing various ways people have died under the influence.

Driving (in this case, a horse) is not recommended... nor is swimming.

And, should you choose whiskey, be sure not to drink it on the rocks!

For a sobering experience, come in and ask for Rare HV5047 .W37 1862.

The Medieval Hereafter

For those living in the Middle Ages, death was a constant presence: Plague, famine, war, and a lack of medical knowledge all contributed to high mortality rates among European medieval society, especially for those living in cities. Consequently, much of life was occupied by thinking about and preparing for death. The Church provided hope through its promotion of the afterlife, although the path to that blissful eternity was a narrow one. At the Final Judgment, upon the return of Jesus Christ, many souls would be forced into the mouth of Hell instead of being ushered into paradise. Given the inexorable approach of death, and the concerns of the living about what might come afterwards, many artists and authors from the Middle Ages to the present day have attempted to represent the lives and deaths of saints and sinners as well as imagining what life after death might entail.

At Rauner, we're currently displaying an exhibit that explores representations of death and the afterlife, chiefly from medieval and early modern sources. The exhibit was curated in conjunction with the New England Medieval Consortium's annual conference, held here at Dartmouth College on November 19th. From now through January 27th, come visit Rauner's Class of 1965 Galleries and see breathtaking illuminations from our medieval books of hours, fascinating printed books made only a few decades after Gutenberg, and various representations of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, arguably the most important work about the afterlife that has ever been written in Western culture.

The first image is from Codex 003134 and the second from Incun 154, about which we wrote a previous blog post.

Cuba Libre

The recent death of Fidel Castro, controversial politician and undeniable revolutionary, and the impending regime change here in the United States started us thinking about Cuban-American relations and a relatively recent acquisition of ours. In the past, we've blogged about three fascinating items from our collections that are connected to Castro's revolt against the Batista regime in 1959. For today's post, we go back nearly a century earlier, to a series of wars for independence in Cuba that ultimately started the complex and often contentious relationship that now exists between Cuba and the United States.


In 1868, after nearly four centuries of European rule, native Cuban planters and their slaves revolted against their Spanish masters. Led by Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, a sugar planter, a motley army of recently-freed slaves and native sons of Cuba took up arms against the forces of the Spanish Governor-General. Although the revolutionaries initially made great strides, the Spanish forces pushed back with a war of extermination, eventually settling into a rhythm of pitched battles that essentially resulted in a long-running stalemate.

Gil Gelpi y Ferro's Album historico fotografico de la guerra de Cuba, published in Havana in 1872, is a beautiful work of Spanish propaganda written just after the peak of the continuing conflict. Gelpi y Ferro was a Spaniard who had moved to Cuba in 1864 to work at a newspaper in Havana. His large and elegantly bound volume is filled with numerous full-page photographs that have been tipped in between descriptions of people, places, and battles. These images convey a sense of inevitability about the downfall of the rebels while emphasizing the harmony and unity of the royalist population.
However, despite Gelpi y Ferro's optimistic assessment of Spanish might, the war wasn't even halfway finished when his book was published. Finally in 1878, the Pact of Zanjón was signed, signaling an end to hostilities without a clear winner to the conflict. One of the positive results of what came to be called the Ten Years War was that slavery was abolished in Cuba in 1886. However, independence for Cuba was still a dream long deferred. It wasn't until two additional wars of independence had been fought, and the United States had been drawn into war with Spain in 1898 over the sinking of the USS Mainein Havana harbor, that Cuba was finally able to establish its freedom in 1902.

To see Album historico fotografico de la guerra de Cuba, ask for Rare F1785 .G43 1872.

An Immigrant Story

Thanksgiving, the most American holiday, is, at its root, a celebration of immigrants making it in the new world. The story of the first Thanksgiving is a romanticized history of a past that so many people would love to hold as true: a group of immigrants come to a new world seeking a better life; they are helped by the established residents; and a feast is thrown to celebrate survival and the promise of future prosperity.

So, for this Thanksgiving, we turn to more promises: some of which turned out well, and some that did not. In the mid-nineteenth century, hundreds of books and flyers were produced to lure new immigrants to America. Areas in the Plains and the West wanted to boost population, and the industrial Midwest was hungry for cheap labor. In our collection are three guides to help the immigrant settle in America, all offering the enticement of economic prosperity. The 1848 Emigrant's Hand-Book for the United States opens with the U.S. Constitution, then systematically outlines all of the regions of the United States. Iowa as it is in 1856 is a "gazetteer for citizens, and a hand-book for emigrants." It contains extended descriptions of each town in Iowa, the qualities of the soils throughout the state, and is dedicated to those abolitionists committed to keeping Iowa free soil.

But the little pamphlet produced by a Dubuque, Iowa, real estate office best captures the spirit and the hyperbole of the time: Iowa, the "Great Hunting Ground" of the Indian; and the "Beautiful Land" of the White Man": Information for Immigrants (Dubuque: John Taylor, 1860). It boasts that "the quantity of good land entered in Iowa is so much greater than is required by the resident population" and can be obtained for as low as a dollar per half acre but will increase by "ten to twenty percent" annually. The climate is conducive to good health, there is timber land, plenty of water, excellent soil, good schools, and easy access to the markets via six railroads. Buy now, settle the great land, and become prosperous and free in "The Queen State of the West." Despite the motives of the publisher, you can see him playing into some of the same tropes of the original Thanksgiving story: it elides the troubled relationship between the "Indian" and the "White Man" to envision a land of opportunity where community is built and individual freedom is valued for everyone. Not always the truth, but a story retold each year as we feast.

To see Iowa from 1860, ask for McGregor 175. The Emigrant's Hand-Book is Rare E161.E5 1848, and Iowa as it is in 1856 is Rare F621.P23 1856.