Experiencing Black Theater in America

This past spring, Associate Professor of Theater Monica Ndounou taught a class made possible through an experiential learning seed grant from the Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning. Titled “The Making of 21st Century Exhibits: Curating a National Black Theater Museum/Institution,” the course was cross-listed with the Theater Department and African and African-American Studies Program. This class provided seventeen students an opportunity to learn about black theater history, scholarship and practice in the U.S. and abroad. In the process, students helped develop ideas and curated exhibits that represented a range of formats and platforms. As social media and academe become interdependent in the 21st-century digital era, the course enabled participants to imagine and implement exhibits for the museum as a digital and onsite space where national and international contributions to developing black theater can be shared with the larger public.

The current student-curated exhibit in Special Collections, “Experiencing Black Theater in America,” is one facet of the experiential learning component of the class. Another component was a visit to the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., that helped students conceptualize the possibilities for translating the material covered in class into exhibit form. The class also used the opportunity to consider which gaps in the D.C. collection should be filled during the constantly evolving curation process at the National Black Theatre Museum in Memphis, TN, a project conceived and developed by Ekundayo Bandele, CEO and Founder of Hattiloo Theatre, who also participated in the course. Other experiential learning opportunities included activities with the local community’s regional black theatre, JAG Productions, and a chance to attend events featuring choreographer Camille A. Brown during her spring 2019 Dartmouth residency.

The majority of the documents in this exhibit come from the papers of Theater Professor Errol Hill, the first African-American educator to receive tenure at Dartmouth College. A Trinidadian native, Hill joined the faculty of Dartmouth’s Drama Department in 1968 and worked tirelessly here for twenty-one years before retiring in 1989. Hill was a wellspring of productivity, whether as a scholar, a playwright, or a director: over the span of his career, he wrote eleven plays, authored or edited fifteen major books and periodicals, and wrote twenty-five major articles on drama and theater history. While at Dartmouth, he taught a portfolio of thirteen different courses on acting, directing, playwriting, and theater history, directed thirty-three full-length productions, and wrote numerous influential works including Shakespeare in Sable: A History of Black Shakespearean Actors (1986) and, with Professor James Hatch, A History of African American Theatre (2003). Professor Hill passed away in 2003 but his legacy endures.

The exhibit will be on display in Rauner Library's Class of 1965 Galleries in Webster Hall until September 6th. You can download a list of materials and read the exhibit text at the following website: https://www.dartmouth.edu/~library/rauner/exhibits/experiencing-black-theater-in-america.html.

Abraham Lincoln and His Generals

A while back we posted about a sheet of Abraham Lincoln's signatures on a piece of White House stationery that were authenticated by his personal secretary John Hay. Although it's hard to top that exciting find, we have another Lincoln-related item from the Codex collection that we think is also pretty amazing. In a book that has been beautifully bound in blue morocco leather with gold tooling, we have another treasure trove of autographs from the Civil War, including not only Lincoln's signature but numerous other important figures from the Union Army during that time.

The cover of the book reads, "Abraham Lincoln and His Generals | A Collection of Autographs | 1861-1865," and the contents do not disappoint. All told, there are twenty-seven pieces of correspondence or

other paper that bear the signed names of many of the sixteenth president's generals during the war, along with engraved portraits of most of them. Most of the letters are fairly pedestrian and deal with day-to-day business or social courtesies; moreover, a lot of them were written decades after the conclusion of the war. Still, it's thrilling to see so many different hands by so many different Civil War military leaders in one place. My personal favorites are the letter signed by Lincoln, saying only "I so advise" in response to a subordinate's request for his approval (bringing our total number of Lincoln signatures up to twenty!); the pardon issued by President Ulysses S. Grant in 1872 for Jacob C. Clark, who apparently was arrested for selling liquor without a permit but didn't realize he was breaking the law, and the intimidating engraving of General William T. Sherman, who would go on to serve as the Commanding General of the Army (and briefly the Secretary of War) under President Grant.

To have a look through this Union gallery, come to Special Collections and ask for Codex 002120.

SpeakOut with Pride

It's Pride Month, and to get in the spirit we have been pouring over SpeakOut interviews that are now available online. In collaboration with DGALA, Dartmouth’s LGBTQIA+ Alumni Association, SpeakOut is an oral history project dedicated to documenting the history of Dartmouth’s LGBTQIA+ community. There are many incredible stories. Check out Leandra Barrett's:

Growing up in Alice, Texas, a small predominantly Mexican-American rural town on the border of Mexico, Leandra Barrett ’15 describes her hometown as being “what people picture when they imagine Texas.” The daughter of a middle-class Mexican-American mother and a working-class Anglo-Cajun father, she describes how her intersecting identities influenced her sense of self as a child and later how they shaped her time at Dartmouth.

Barrett explains that she was “so sure of [her] identity” when she arrived at Dartmouth. For Barrett, her coming out at Dartmouth “wasn’t like a tortured process.” Unlike her experience in high school, Barrett felt as though she could express her queer identity more freely and openly at Dartmouth. In high school she remembers “the very material risk of being thrown out of my house or being—you know, sent to conversion therapy…” Barrett describes living a double life between home and Dartmouth which was shattered when someone outed her to her parents. Barrett graciously shares how her relationship with her parents has evolved since that life altering moment her freshman year.

Barrett shares how she felt her Mexican-American identity was challenged as a student at Dartmouth. She struggled to have her Mexican-American identity feel validated not only because she was ethnically ambiguous and did not speak Spanish, but also because she inhabited an environment that was so “white” and where “so many Latinx students came from immigrant backgrounds.” Barrett explains how “a certain subjectivity was presumed when the university was constructed and that was not a queer Chicana girl from south Texas.”  Barrett goes on to say that “I don’t regret going to Dartmouth. I actually, really like it. [Chuckles.] I think my critiques come from a deep place of love, right? I wouldn’t have worked as an admissions officer if didn’t think it was a transformational educational space.”

We are thrilled that members of Dartmouth’s community continue to reach out to participate in SpeakOut. If you have a story you would like to add to the SpeakOut collection, please sign up here.

The Eagle has Landed

On May 25, 1961, President John F. Kennedy called on the nation to “commit itself to… landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth.” Only a month earlier the USSR had succeeded to put the first human into space and Kennedy needed to trump that feat during the height of the Cold War.  On May 5, 1961, Alan Shepard, Jr.  became the first American in space when his Mercury capsule “Freedom 7” went suborbital.  Over the next three years, six more Mercury missions went up, followed by the Gemini program. Both Mercury and Gemini programs were designed to test and explore every step that would be needed to make Kennedy’s pledge possible. There were of course missteps some minor, some major and one, the tragedy of Apollo 1, fatal.

Apollo 11 launched from Cape Kennedy on July 16, 1969, with a crew of three, Commander Neil Armstrong, Command Module Pilot Michael Collins, and Lunar Module Pilot Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin. The crew had detailed objectives for this mission which included obtaining a variety of data on experiments including solar wind composition and seismic activity, collecting lunar samples and deploying a television camera to transmit signals to Earth. On July 20th, after 102 hours and 45 minutes of flight, the “Eagle” landed in the Sea of Tranquility.

Neil Armstrong was the first to descent the ladder to the moon surface because he was the commander and senior member of the crew and because his seat was closer to the “door.” Buzz Aldrin was next and for the next 2 hours and 31 minutes both men performed the required tasks before heading back to the “Eagle” for some rest and rendezvous with the Columbia in lunar orbit.

Columbia splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on July 24, 1969, and the crew was recovered by the USS Hornet. After a vigorous scrub down of each astronaut and his equipment, the crew was placed into a 21-day quarantine to prevent contamination from possible extra-terrestrial pathogens.

Apollo 11 was an all-around success and opened the door for 7 more missions to the Moon, with 6 of them successful. NASA was able to learn from the crew’s experiences and concerns and adept future missions accordingly. During the crew’s scientific debriefing on August 12, Armstrong had one regret:

In retrospect, the one thing that I felt was a real shortcoming of our planning was the fact we were unable, when we saw something of interest, to collect it at the time; we had to remember where that was and hope that we had time later to come back. I would recommend that in our future work, we not make that mistake and that we improve our ability to pick up samples of interest and record them at the time we see them.

Mission reports and photographs of the Apollo, Gemini and Mercury missions can be found in MS-1024, the papers of Richard Allenby, DC 1944 who was the director of the Manned Space Science Program at NASA.

"Women Cannot Band Together"

This week marks the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution, which legalized the inherent right of women to vote. We've blogged in the past about the suffragist movement and women's ongoing and infuriating struggle to be recognized as equals. Today, we thought we'd share more of the treasure trove of suffrage items in an attempt to present what we like to call a "usable past." Ideally, people's exposure to controversial documents from our collective past will encourage them to make better future decisions for society.

In this particular instance, we want to talk about the vigorous pamphlet war that cropped up during the suffragist movement in the early-20th century. Exhibit A is the reprint of an article published in Harper's Bazaar in 1894 and written by Jeannette L. Gilder, "founder of The Critic," a New York-based magazine of literary criticism. In the article, Gilder (a self-described "working-woman") says that "we cannot worship God and Mammon; neither can we be politicians and women. It is against nature, against reason." She concludes by stating that voting cannot help women, but it can hurt them, just a like a bomb that could "go off in her own hands, and work a mischief that she little dreams of."

Other anti-suffragists quickly joined the fray. One William T. Sedgwick, "noted biologist" and M.I.T. Professor of Biology and Public Health, emphatically states that women are biologically different from men and therefore constitutionally incapable of the same sorts of intellectual and physical work of men. Essentially, Sedgwick claims the menstrual cycle is an insurmountable "handicap" that means women shouldn't vote. He believes that "the particular insane restlessness which is now affecting certain classes of women in America and England seems to be due to the comparative idleness from which they suffer through the gradual removal of the old domestic industries." So, in other words, technological innovations in the domestic sphere have resulted in women's boredom and so they are now "shrieking for 'liberty'".

Thankfully, there are suffragist voices in print during this period as well. In response to an anti-suffrage pamphlet written in 1913 by Minnie Bronson, "formerly Special Agent, Bureau of Labor," two suffragettes published a devastating reply. Edith Abbott, Ph.D. in Economics and Law, and Sophonisba Breckenridge, Assistant Professor of Social Economy, both of the University of Chicago, dismantle Bronson's arguments in a brutal step-by-step fashion. Before they even begin, however, they undermine Bronson's claim to any authoritative position by revealing that her tenure as an employee of the Labor Department was fleeting; instead, her primary occupation was a high school math teacher and then a paid representative of anti-suffragists. This revelation is preceded by a blunt statement that, in arguing that suffrage will not lead to better treatment of women in industry, "Miss Minnie Bronson stands practically alone, opposed to the women who, as a result of long years of experience, are qualified to speak as to the conditions under which women work."

Other suffragists turn to humor and sarcasm instead of rhetorical rebuttals. Our personal favorite is a tongue-in-cheek rant by Marie Jenney Howe. Titled "An Anti-Suffrage Monologue," the pamphlet deftly skewers the hypocrisy and illogical positions of the anti-suffragist movement. Some choice excerpts:

"Many men call me an angel and I have a strong instinct which tells me it is true; that is why I am an anti, because 'I want to be an angel and with the angels stand.' And if you don't like that argument take this one. Women are depraved. They would introduce into politics a vicious element which would ruin our national life."

"Women cannot band together. They are incapable of organization. No two women can even be friends. Women are cats. On the other hand, if women were enfranchised, we would have all the women banded together on one side, and all the men banded together on the other side, and there would follow a sex war which might end in bloody revolution."

These fascinating and occasionally amusing pamphlets (whether intentionally or not) are from the papers of Jesse Belle Hardy Stubbs MacKaye within the larger MacKaye Family Papers (ML-5). She was the president of the Milwaukee Women's Peace Society. To see this amazing collection of pamphlets, come to Special Collections and ask for Box 227 from the MacKaye Family Papers (ML-5).

A Coin Worth Impeachment

We've alluded in the past to the artist Augustus Saint-Gaudens' commission from President Theodore Roosevelt to design a twenty-dollar gold coin. However, the actual letters between the two distinguished men deserve further comment. The context, too, is worth knowing. In the decade preceding the design of the coin, Saint-Gaudens had experienced several frustrating interactions with the United States Mint, including the rejection of his design for the official medal of the Chicago World's Fair in 1892. Instead, the directors went with a design submitted by the Mint's Chief Engraver, Charles Barber. Saint-Gaudens and Barber had both been on a silver coinage selection committee for the Mint in the previous year; after the committee failed to find a suitable artist, Barber had put himself forward as the only qualified candidate for the position (in his estimation). Saint-Gaudens disagreed and publicly criticized Barber's final product, saying that the work was inept and looked like the work of a sixteen-year-old beginner.

After these two experiences, Saint-Gaudens swore off working with the Mint in any capacity. True to his word, he rejected any and all commissions that might have any connection to the organization, no

matter how tenuous. By 1904, President Teddy Roosevelt evidently felt the same way about the state of the nation's coinage. He reached out to Saint-Gaudens, with whom he had become friends, to see if the sculptor might be willing to help design some gold coins. Roosevelt, of course, had strong opinions about the appearance of the coinage. In a letter to Saint-Gaudens, written on November 6th, 1905, he says, "I was looking at some gold coins of Alexander the Great to-day, and I was struck by their high relief. Would it not be well to have our coins in high relief, and also to have the rims raised?"

Saint-Gaudens complied with the president's "suggestions" and ultimately produced model coins that delighted Roosevelt. In a letter to Saint-Gaudens dated December 20th, 1906, Roosevelt says, "These models are simply immense - if such a slang way of talking is permissible in reference to giving a modern nation one coinage at least which shall be as good as that of the ancient Greeks." He goes on to say that he has ordered the Mint to begin production immediately and hypothesizes that  he "shall be impeached for it in Congress" but that he "shall regard that as a very cheap payment!" Saint-Gaudens would never really see his final design reach fruition, however. He died of cancer in August of 1907, just a few months before production finally began on the coins.

Later this month, nearly a hundred and twelve years after his death, the Trustees of the Saint-Gaudens Memorial will award the Saint-Gaudens Medal to Dartmouth College Library in recognition of its care and preservation of the sculptor's papers. The Medal is being given to the library for its exemplary care and conservation of the collection of papers and artifacts relating to Augustus Saint-Gaudens, other artists of the Cornish Colony, and the Saint-Gaudens Memorial. Established in 1988, the Saint-Gaudens Medal is awarded, from time to time, by the Saint-Gaudens Memorial to such persons who, by their talents and beneficence, have made a distinguished contribution to the arts in America in the high tradition of Augustus Saint-Gaudens. The Saint-Gaudens Medal was designed in 1992 by sculptor Robert W. White (1921-2002), a long-time Trustee of the Memorial.

To read more about Dartmouth College Library's receipt of the medal, read the press release. To read the correspondence between Saint-Gaudens and Roosevelt, come to Special Collections and ask for the Saint-Gaudens Papers (ML-4), Box 16.

Happy Birthday Walt!

Today is Walt Whitman's 200th birthday. When his spirit is not checking out the produce aisle in the supermarket with Allen Ginsberg, he sometimes pays us a visit. You see, in 1872, he was brought to Dartmouth by the United Literary Societies to deliver a poem on Class Day, and wherever Whitman visited a little of his body electric remains.

The poem he read was a new one, written especially for the day: “As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free.” It fit the mood of commencement: it starts by imploring America to move forward and discover its true art and science, building on the past, but uniquely American in its future:

As a strong bird on pinion free,
Joyous, the amplest spaces heavenward cleaving,
Such be the thought I’d think to-day of thee America,
Such be the recitative I’d bring to-day for thee

Then it goes on:

Thee in thy future;
Thee in thy only permanent life, career—thy own unloosen’d mind—thy soaring future.
Thee as another equally needed sun, America—radiant, swift-moving, fructifying all.

All of that expansive hope and progressive freedom! Whitman’s words would have been such a departure from what had been pounded into the students’ heads the previous four years. When they had entered Dartmouth in 1868, they were faced with a set curriculum with no electives. Freshmen year, they studied Latin, Greek, Mathematics, History; as sophomores, those were joined by a class in modern languages focused on French grammar, Civil Engineering, Rhetoric, and Natural History; Junior year introduced Philosophy and Physics; while seniors enjoyed a class in Anatomy and Physiology and a class in German. American culture was ignored, and God forbid any modern literature would be included from any country. Walt must be amazed when he walks across the Green today.

If you want to hear more about his visit, check out our Hindsight is 20/19 podcast episode "Poet 17.50." To see the poem, ask for Rare PS3207.A1 1872.