For Gallant and Meritorious Service

On September 29, 1864, Samuel Augustus Duncan, Dartmouth '58, then a Lieutenant Colonel in command of the Color Troops of the 4th Brigade of the 3rd Division of the XVIII Corps, led his men on a heroic and tragic charge up New Market Heights.

New Market Heights is a hill about 8 miles south east of Richmond, Virginia. On that morning in 1864 the top of the hill was fortified and held by General John Gregg of the Confederate Army. Gregg’s 2,000 men were part of a set of strategic fortifications put in place by General Robert E. Lee to keep the Union Army from reaching Richmond. These fortifications had been frustrating attempts by General Ulysses S. Grant's Army of the Potomac to push the confederates southward.

Colonel Duncan’s brigade in conjunction with the 6th Brigade, both under the command of General Paine, was to spearhead the attack. The African American soldiers were chosen for this task because General Butler, an advocate for the use of Colored Troops, wanted to prove to the world that they would and could fight.

The confederate forces were well aware of the, supposed, surprise attack on their stronghold. They waited until Duncan and his men, who had made their way to the hill over swampy ground in the dark, were well entangled in the abates (sharpened sticks driven into the ground as a defense) before opening fire. The officers and color bearers were quickly eliminated as they made easy targets. Duncan himself was wounded four times. His men suffered 452 casualties including 63 killed. After two days of fighting the Union troops finally drove the Confederate forces from the hill.

In a letter home to his mother from the hospital on October 6, 1864, Duncan describes his wounds and recovery. But he also speaks proudly of his men, "You will see that they all [the New York papers]—the Herald even—praise the Colored Troops of Genl. Paine’s command for what they did on the 29th."

Duncan was honored for "gallant and meritorious service." He went on to become a patent lawyer after the war. Samuel A. Duncan died in 1895 at the age of 69.

Ask for the Samuel Duncan papers, MS-541.

W. W. Dewey and the "Old Dartmouth Cemetery"

In 1797, William Worthington Dewey, a local farmer, decided to begin an "accurate record" of all the "Deaths in the Vicinity of Dartmouth College." At the time the only records available were those kept by the churches, which seldom indicated the causes of death. Dewey was determined to change that. His record would not only reflect that information but would also benefit from his own observations and knowledge about the deceased.

His comments ran the gamut from the mundane to the unintentionally humorous. While there are descriptions pertaining to the status of the deceased, such as "consort of" or "a transient person," more often they are lengthy descriptions of the circumstances of the person's death. John Russell, for example, who died in 1795, was "gorged to death by an enraged bullock with which he was contending," while Frederick Weizer, a "native of Germany," was "one day dining very heartily [when] he swallowed a very large piece of meat which caught in his throat and caused almost instant death." Mr. Samuel Bingham, who died in 1804"

had been indisposed for three years and all the while was rather an enormous eater… He likewise grew very corpulent and unwieldy… He finally died suddenly… He then weighed over 300 pounds. To examine him internally after death it was necessary to cut over four inches through a clear fat substance. It took 6 men at each relief to support the bier while conveying him to the grave.

In the summer of 1807, Dewey's record was "purloined" and he abandoned the project for the next few years. "On the solicitation of some friends" he began again in 1810, using his own "recollection" and some "extraneous assistance" to reconstruct the register up to that date. He continued the record until 1859, two years before his death at the age of 84.

Since then Dewey's record has been used by many researchers including Professor Arthur H. Chivers who, in the 1950s, mapped and recorded in six volumes all of the grave marker descriptions in the Old Dartmouth Cemetery, verifying their authenticity through correspondence with the surviving families of the deceased.

List of Deaths in the Vicinity of Dartmouth College, including likewise the hamlet usually called Greensborough from AD 1769 to 1859 will be on display in the Rauner Reading Room through the month of November.

Professor Chivers records The Dartmouth Cemetery can be found in The Collection of New Hampshire and Vermont Cemeteries, DH-38, Box 2.

GOTO LINE 1

In 1964, John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz produced the first version of the programming language Dartmouth BASIC. As part of the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System, one of the goals of the project was to provide less-technically inclined users with a way to use a computer without having to learn as many of the specialized mathematical skills that had been necessary up until that time.

Based on earlier languages, especially FORTRAN II and ALGOL 60, Dartmouth BASIC was a more user-friendly language and made heavy use of English words for statements. In his oral history interview from 2002, Kurtz relates that "Kemeny had the idea that all statements in BASIC, not just most, but all of them should start with an English word" as this would be more intuitive and easily remembered by users. Kurtz goes on to say that "bringing computing to the people, having a simplified user interface that really was simple to use, using English words that were easy to remember" were all part of what made Dartmouth BASIC so useful and widespread.  Shown here are Kurtz and Kemeny with True BASIC, one of the successors to Dartmouth BASIC.

Rauner Library holds the papers of John Kemeny (MS-988) and Thomas Kurtz (MS-1144), as well as numerous other resources related to the development of BASIC.

A Triple-Headed Monster

One of the more depressing Victorian novels you can read is George Gissing's New Grub Street. Set in London, it chronicles Victorian literary men and women struggling to make a living from their pens. New Grub Street came out in 1891 in the typical format of the day: a novel in three volumes. The "triple-decker" was designed to maximize profits for publishers and lending libraries. It allowed libraries to charge a greater fee to subscribers. Think of Netflix, you can pay one fee for a single DVD or a higher fee for three simultaneous DVDs. A library subscriber would need to shell out more for three volumes than one.

Gissing's anti-hero, the popular Jasper Milvain, discusses the tyranny of the format with Edwin Reardon, the novel's most tragic figure:

Milvain began to expatiate on that well-worn topic, the evils of the three-volume system.

"A triple-headed monster, sucking the blood of English novelists. One might design an allegorical cartoon for a comic literary paper...."

"For anyone in my position," said Reardon, "how is it possible to abandon the three volumes? It is a question of payment. An author of moderate repute may live on a yearly three-volume novel--I mean the man who is obliged to sell his book out and out, and who gets from one to two hundred pounds for it. But he would have to produce four one-volume novels to obtain the same income; and I doubt whether he could get so many published within twelve months. And here comes in the benefit of the libraries; from the commercial point of view the libraries are indispensable. Do you suppose the public would support the present number of novelists if each book had to be purchased? A sudden change to that system would throw three-fourths of the novelists out of work."

"But there is no reason why the libraries shouldn't circulate novels in one volume."

"Profits would be less, I suppose. People would take the minimum subscription."

In the first volume of New Grub Street, Reardon finds himself destroying his health and his family trying to stretch a thin story over three-volumes: "Reardon's story was in itself weak, and this second volume had to consist almost entirely of padding." The Victorian reader, first encountering the book in its triple-decker format, must have dreaded picking up the second volume of New Grub Street after that warning.

Come see the book in all three volumes by asking for Val 826 G44 T641.

A Dissertation Concerning Vampires

One of the earliest works on vampires and how to deal with them is Dom Augustin Calmet's Dissertations Upon the Apparitions of Angels, Daemons, and Ghosts, and Concerning the Vampires of Hungary, Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia (London, M. Cooper, 1759). In his lengthy treatise, first published in France in 1746, Calmet examines many different occurrences and types of vampirism, which he claims is a new phenomenon not known in ancient times. Calmet writes that "It is common... to see men, who have been dead several years... come again, walk about, infest villages, torment men and cattle, suck the blood of their relations... and, at last, occasion their death."

Fortunately, Calmet also presents the only sure method of defeating such a creature. According to Calmet, "digging them out of their graves, impaling them, cutting of their heads, taking out their hearts, and burning their bodies" is necessary to prevent further calamity.

Oddly enough, Calmet himself seems to be of two minds about the whole subject. In his preface, he writes that those who believe in vampires will "accuse me of rashness and presumption... for denying their [vampires] existence" while others will "blame me for throwing away my time in writing upon this subject, which is... frivolous and trifling." Calmet ultimately sidesteps the whole issue by concluding that whether or not vampires are real, he has done humanity a service by either debunking the myth or presenting people with a means to deal with such creatures.

Ask for Oliver 6 to read the whole treatise.

Two Poets

One of the many delights of working with Special Collections is finding the occasional – and quite unexpected – connection between two figures whose works are represented in Rauner. Vita Sackville-West and Robert Frost are both poets, and their dates are very close (1892 – 1962 for Sackville-West and 1874 – 1963 for Frost). But beyond that . . . two very different characters indeed. So imagine our surprise when a short handwritten letter from Sackville-West to Frost turned up recently in Frost's voluminous correspondence. She wrote to him on January 22, 1933, during a lecture tour in America, promising to send him a copy of her poem, The Land, and expressing great admiration for his work. Further investigation reveals that she met him and dined with him in Northampton, Massachusetts, on March 17, 1933, and described him as "a handsome man who goes in for good conversation."

Sackville-West's grandson, English writer Adam Nicolson, continues his family's tradition of lecturing to American audiences, and spoke here at Dartmouth this month on the King James Version of the Bible in this, the 400th anniversary year of that translation. He published a study of that enterprise in 2003, entitled God’s Secretaries: the Making of the King James Bible.

To mark his visit to Dartmouth, two special exhibits have been mounted in Rauner Special Collections Library. See last week's blog entry for a description of the historic Bibles (including one leaf from the 1611 KJV) drawn from Special Collections' holdings and now exhibited in the Class of 1965 Galleries. Additionally, a small, single-case exhibit is now on display in the Special Collections Reading Room. Included are works by (and one about) his grandmother, Vita Sackville-West, and father, Nigel Nicolson. The dedications of many of these works are of special interest, and many are signed.

Both exhibits remain on view through the first week of November. To see the Sackville-West letter, ask for Frost manuscript 906129.

115 Laps

This Fall, the freshman class will run 115 laps around Dartmouth’s 116th Homecoming bonfire (however it is also acceptable just to run 15 laps, although upperclassmen refrain from telling freshmen this fact).

Before the bonfire became an annual event, Dartmouth students were fond of celebrating great victories with large fires on the Green. In 1888, after defeating Manchester at a contended baseball game, the bonfire "disturbed the slumbers of a peaceful town, destroyed some property, made the boys feel that they were men, and, in fact, did no one any good", according to The Dartmouth.

However the bonfire did not become an official event until 1895, when President Tucker instituted "Dartmouth Night" - a celebration to promote a sense of community at Dartmouth and welcome the new freshman class.

The visit of the Sixth Earl of Dartmouth in 1904 marked the beginning of the tradition of running around the fire. Not content with only a bonfire, students wanted to impress the Earl by parading around the fire in their pajamas. The Earl soon joined the parade of men in night-clothes and proudly led them around the flames. Today, students traditionally wear green Dartmouth shirts with their class year.

Part of the rite of passage that occurs every Homecoming is the yelling of two phrases: "Worst class ever!" and "Touch the fire!". Although upperclassmen will generally refer to the freshman class as the “best class ever” throughout the year, the night of the bonfire is the one night when the upperclassmen are not as cordial. The tradition of touching the fire is for only the boldest of freshmen, as law enforcement officers from Hanover surround the fire in order to prevent any one from getting too close. For Dartmouth students, that is a challenge that is too good to pass up. Every year, save the class of 2013 (worst class ever), after the fire burns down a couple brave souls will run past the police to touch the dying coals (In 2008, this practice resulted in two students being severely burned).

Recent bonfires have used 6x6 timbers and other sheets of wood, but it was not always so. Railroad ties were often used and in 1918 The Dartmouth reported that "those too zealous in their efforts laid violent hands upon sundry front door steps and backdoor steps, and likewise fences, not to mention numerous hen houses carried en masse to the scene of the celebration." Although today the Thayer School of Engineering designs the bonfire so that it can only collapse inwards, the bonfire has been built by the freshman class since 1907.

Posted for Thea Stutsman, '13