Camp Fire Girls

The Camp Fire Girls were founded just up the road from here in Thetford, Vermont, to give girls the same opportunities their bothers had in the Boy Scouts. We just acquired this poster from their 1912 festival with "The First Fire Maker" as the main performance. This complements correspondence between Percy MacKaye and Camp Fire Girls founders, and Luther and Charlotte Gulick. Percy, a multi-talented writer contributed to the first Camp Fire Girls songbook, and appears to have been a friend of the fledgling progressive organization.

The poster is a great example of local printing (the Vermonter Press) from wood display type. It simple layout combines with the rich red ink to make an immediate impact.

We are still cataloging this one, but we will add the call number when we have it (and here it is! Broadside 912640). To see the Gulick's letters to Percy MacKaye, ask for ML-5, Box 39, Folder 10.

Summer Vacation Battles

In July 1864, a group of wealthy women and one gentleman set off on an excursion "to rusticate a few weeks among the mountains." They brought along a camera and took pictures along the way. When they returned, they had a book privately printed, a copy for each member of the party, with photographic prints framed with hand done decorations.

It is an exquisite book commemorating their travels, but one has to wonder about their sense of place and time. While they rusticated and admired the natural wonders of the White Mountains, the country was still in the midst of the Civil War, when battles were being waged across the South. At one point the author notes a parallel, but one that reflects a distance from reality:

From this point it had been our purpose, if possible, to make the ascent of Mt. Washington on horseback, a method more congenial to our taste than the usual, though less fatiguing, one in a carriage from the Glen. But the haze! that pertinacious foe, adopting Gen. Sherman's tactics, had constantly flanked us since we started from Bethel; now, with provoking tenacity, it seemed to be taking position in our front up the mountain, and concentrating to dispute our passage.

Eventually they made it to the top, but the "battlements" of a storm came upon them and they had a "council of war" in the hotel parlor to decide what to do. In despair, they settled on a retreat to the bowling alley for nine pins. The rhetoric of war is not surprising, but it is a bit shocking how they could compare their lack of a view with the horrors of Sherman's march. Perhaps these families were more insulated from the war than most.

The book is a fascinating view into their lives, views of nature, and their sense of adventure in a time of national calamity. To see it, ask for White Mountains F41.32 A465.

Dissolution of a Confederacy

This Fourth of July, we celebrate the 241st Independence Day of the United States of America. However, despite the traditional association of this date with the birth of our nation, the battle for independence had begun more than a year before in April 1775 with the Battles of Lexington and Concord. Soon after, fearing an invasion from the north, the Continental Congress authorized the invasion of Quebec. This campaign, which culminated in the Battle of Quebec on December 31st, 1775, was a disastrous failure and resulted in the death of American General Richard Montgomery and the wounding of Benedict Arnold. After many months of a protracted siege of the city, the Americans retreated in disarray in May 1776 amidst a smallpox outbreak within their ranks.

One of the major concerns of the Continental Congress which prompted the ill-advised invasion of Canada was the question of whether the Native American tribes in the region would choose to side with Great Britain or with the colonists. The Iroquois Confederacy, or the Six Nations as they were known then, was a particularly powerful regional alliance of the Mohawk, Onondega, Oneida, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora tribes. The Iroquois weren't in a position to stay neutral for long, although they initially endeavored to do so; their lands were too close to the theaters of war and they were wary of further encroachment by either the British or their colonists should they stand by and do nothing.

Aware of the importance of sustaining the Six Nations' neutrality for as long as possible, George Washington wrote a letter to them in February 1776, during the Continental Army's siege of Quebec. The letter is addressed to Joseph Johnson, a "missioner to the Six Nations," and asks him to communicate to the Iroquois that "we can withstand all the force, which those who want to rob us of our lands and our houses, can send against us." Washington further emphasizes that they can look upon him, "whom the Whole United Colonies have chosen to be their Chief Warrior," as their brother. He asks the Iroquois to stay neutral so that "the chain of friendship...should always remain bright between" them. However, despite Washington's hope, the Six Nations ultimately dissolved their confederacy, with some tribes siding with the colonists and the others taking up arms for the British.

To see this letter, and other letters by George Washington, come to Rauner and ask for the George Washington Collection (MS-1033), Box 1.

Sachem Howl

 We've blogged before about our amazing first City Lights edition of Allen Ginsberg's Howl, published in 1956, as well as the unique mimeograph of the poem that Ginsberg sent to the poet Richard Eberhart, complete with manuscript corrections in Ginsberg's own hand. Recently, while answering a reference question about the Sachem Oration, we discovered a Dartmouth alum's homage to Ginsberg's groundbreaking work. Previously, many speakers had delivered their traditionally humorous oration in a false old-timey accent meant to harken back to Eleazar Wheelock and the foundation of the college. H. Dutton Foster, member of the class of 1961 and the chosen Sachem Orator for his cohort, decided instead to take a more modern approach to the honor.

"I saw the second-best minds of my generation filed alphabetically in Parkhurst Hall," the speech begins, "Leaving their owners empty-headed, facing alone the dreadful I.B.M., / My brothers of sixty-one, Campion-clad, waiting for the sheepskin key to the magic forest of crisp green dollar bills, / Who trundled into Hanover, four years ago, from America's highschools and prepschools [sic] and  reform schools." Foster continues with such choice lines as, "I'm with you, sixty-one, / taking a Herb West course, and telling him that your mother wants you to get an A," or "I'm with you at Dick's House, / putting the thermometer under your armpit because you have an hour exam coming up." In conclusion, Foster says, "Goodbye, Dartmouth! It wasn't as bad as I make it look: we love you, even if we are critical! It's your own fault for lighting candles in our minds!"

To read the entire transcript of the 1961 Sachem Oration, or those from many other years, come to Rauner and ask for the "Sachem Oration 1947-1969" folder in Box 7443 from the Upper Class Deans Records (DA-673).

Posh Pooh

When Winnie-the-Pooh came out in 1926, the English publisher issued an inexpensive copy for mass sales while the American publisher tried to make a splash with a boxed, signed limited edition copy for the discerning connoisseur of children's literature. We are lucky enough to have fairly pristine copies of each edition.

It is hard to imagine what the buyers of the deluxe copies were thinking. Obviously, they didn't have kids--a glassine cover would last about 30 seconds in the hands of any self-respecting six-year-old, and few children would be impressed by Milne and Shepard's signatures on the limitation page.

But more to the point, it lacks the awesome endpaper maps of the "100 AKER WOOD" that serve to remind readers of each of the stories while allowing them to mentally traipse around the trees "WHERE THE WOOZLE WASNT" with a frightened Pooh and Piglet. We will grant that the illustrations in the deluxe edition are better printed but they hardly seem worth the forbidding preciousness of the book and the absence of the maps. Give us a good tattered Pooh that we can thump down the stairs, not one that has to be handled with kid gloves.

To see them, ask for Rare PZ7.M64 W12 and PZ7.M64 W12 1926.

Wild Flowers

Two weeks ago we blogged an herbarium lovingly constructed by a 19th-century missionary. This week, we have a similar object, but one assembled by a clever entrepreneur rather than a passionate collector. Wild Flowers of the White Mountains, published by the Chisholm Brothers in the 1890s, is a selection of wild flower specimens "gathered from Points of Interest in the White Mountains." This particular copy was sold for 50 cents and was a gift to "Margaret" in September of 1891. At that point, many of the flowers in the book would not have been in bloom, so we know the tourist that gave this to Margaret was not the collector. He or she bought this as a souvenir to send to a loved one.

We have a second copy of Wild Flowers of the White Mountains. It must have been assembled at a different date because the specimens it contains are different. On days like today when "Full many a flower is born to blush unseen and waste its sweetness on the desert air," we are thankful for these relics of the 1890s.

To see our copies of Chisholm's Wild Flowers, ask for White Mountains SB439.C44.

International Archives Day

Last week, we joined archives and archivists all over the world in celebrating International Archives Day 2017. The theme of this year’s IAD was “Archives, Citizenship and Interculturalism,” which gave us the perfect reason to mine our collections for a good immigration story.

Marcelle Robert was born in Angoulême, France, in 1902. When she met and married American Chester Dwight Perry in 1925 and planned her move to the United States, it was at a time of increasingly stringent regulations on immigration. Congress had passed the Immigration Act of 1924 only a year earlier, imposing strict nationality quotas on immigrants from European countries and barring Asian immigrants entirely. But as an affidavit prepared by the American Consular Service in La Rochelle, France, shows, Marcelle breezed through the immigration process thanks to her marriage to an American. She was granted “non-quota immigrant” status, exempting her from the hurdles that other immigrants faced and even allowing her to bypass Ellis Island upon arrival in the United States. Marcelle had only to offer up her French passport under her unmarried name to prove her identity, and she was essentially on her way. She settled with Chester in New York and gained her citizenship in 1928.

The immigration landscape has grown undeniably more complicated since Marcelle’s journey of nearly a century ago, but the role of archives in documenting human migration around the globe remains the same. The debates, the laws, the stories of individual immigrants — you’ll find them all in the archives.

For more on Marcelle, ask for the Marcelle R. Perry papers, MS-1067.