Taj Torah

We just acquired a truly amazing manuscript that has us all a twitter (though we don't Tweet, just blog!). The manuscript is a copy of the Taj Torah produced in Yemen c. 1400-1450. This is one of only three known Hebrew manuscripts with illustrated carpet pages. The Torah is prefaced with a copy of the Tajim, a Yemenite grammar and guide to reading the Torah, so the manuscript is both a sacred text and a pedagogical device for its reading.

The manuscript has many possible uses in the classroom at a time when medieval and early modern Jewish texts are growing in interest and importance in academia. The specific aspects of it that most excite us are the carpet pages that can be compared and contrasted with Western illuminations and elucidate children's education in the middle ages, and the potential for discussion of the manuscript as an object (i.e., its construction, material components). Among the nice carpet pages are  a drawing of the labyrinth of Jericho and a "Magical Square" of letters in a pattern.

Two years ago we worked with a class on medieval Christian, Islamic and Jewish traditions. We were able to lay out excellent medieval representations of the Koran and the Vulgate Bible but we lacked a comparative example of the Torah or similar Jewish text. That gap is now filled. We are able to lay, side by side, representative texts from all three monotheistic faiths, and all from roughly the same time period.

To take a look, come to Special Collections and ask to see Codex 003265.

When Size Matters

In 1804 John Wheelock, the son of the founder of Dartmouth College, Eleazar Wheelock, and the second President of the College, got into a snit over control of the local Congregational Church. While the details of this disagreement are important, they are far too complex to cover here. Suffice to say that after ten years of wrangling, Wheelock attempted to enlist the Trustees of the College in this fight. The Trustees, suspecting that they were being asked to act beyond their authority, declined. The resulting battle between Wheelock and the Trustees ended with John Wheelock, a Whig, asking William Plumber, the Federalist Governor of New Hampshire, to remove the College from the control of the Trustees and make it a State institution. The Trustees, and most of the faculty, refused to recognize the State’s authority and took the issue to court. The case went all the way to the United States Supreme Court, where Daniel Webster famously argued for the College and won, setting an important and enduring legal precedent.

In the mean time, two institutions of higher education existed side-by-side on the Hanover Plain. On one side was Dartmouth College and on the other was the state run Dartmouth University. Here are the catalogs for the two institutions and the difference between them needs no further comment.

Ask for Mss 817509 and Mss 817509.1 to see the two catalogs. For more information on the Dartmouth College case, see: Will to Resist; the Dartmouth College Case, by Richard Morin (DC History KF 4258 .D3 M65 c.2).

Pocket Relief

Oh, what a cool little find. While looking for a good map of the White Mountains for our current exhibit, "Corresponding Friendships: Robert Frost's Letters," we stumbled on The Pocket Relief Map--Franconia Notch Region (R. D. Woodard, 1930). It is made of pressed plastic, and is just three and a half inches by five inches. The box has a line drawing of the Old Man of the Mountain.

What's it for?  It is hard to imagine carrying it in your pocket for reference. You couldn't really pull it out on a  hike and say, "Ah, now I know where I am!" Our guess is that it was just a souvenir for tourists vacationing in the area and it was never carried in anyone's pocket.

To see it, ask for White Mountains G3741.C18 1930 W6.  The Frost exhibit is on display from now until November 1st in the Class of 1965 Galleries in Rauner.  We found an even better map for that!

A Hebrew Grammar

When John Smith was persuaded by his tutor Samuel Moody to enter Dartmouth College in 1771, he had already spent many years in the study of ancient languages. According to his wife Susan, he "had then read through Homer twice, and all the minor Greek poets he could find." He entered Dartmouth as a junior and by the following year had "mastered the Hebrew and Chaldee languages as to lay the foundation of his Hebrew and Chaldee Grammars." After he graduated from Dartmouth in 1773, he became preceptor at Moor's Charity School for a year before being hired by Dartmouth as a tutor for its students. During that time he worked on a revision of the Hebrew Grammar he had completed in 1772, for the purpose of facilitating "the study of the scriptures of the Old Testament in the original." He emphasized the fact that his Grammar would be particularly useful for those students of the language who did not have instructors.

Letters of the Alphabet

However, the road to its publication was a long one. At one point in the process Eleazar Wheelock wrote to the trustees in London suggesting that Smith's Grammar "should be published as a specimen of the progress some of his scholars were making in this new institution." But, according to Mrs. Smith, "Mr. Smith declined or [had] otherwise given up."

Perfect Verbs

In 1777, John Smith was appointed Professor of Greek, Latin, Hebrew and Oriental languages at Dartmouth College. He was the first academic hired by Wheelock who, until then, had been doing all of the teaching with the help of the tutors. For his services, Smith was promised one hundred pounds annually, "half in money and the other half … in such necessary articles for a family as wheat, Indian corn, rye, beef, pork, mutton … ." In return Smith had to continue as tutor as well.

Smith stayed connected to the College for the rest of his life. In addition to teaching he served as the pastor for the Church of Christ at Dartmouth College and introduced the practice of giving commencement sermons to the Senior Class on the Sunday before Commencement Day. He also became a trustee in 1788.

Chaldaic Grammar

Smith's Hebrew Grammar Without Points was finally published by John West in 1803. It was only the second Hebrew Grammar book published in the Unites States and the first using no points.

If you would like to take a look at the original manuscript and its revision ask for MS-1266. To see a printed edition ask for Alumni S652h.

A War to End All Wars: Whining the War

As a young man at Dartmouth and in the military, Harold Pinkham, Class of 1915, was a confused and unhappy outsider. At Dartmouth, he was not athletic enough to make a sports team nor popular enough to make a fraternity and recalled being targeted during the customary freshman hazing of the period. After one year at Dartmouth, he transferred to Bowdoin, but stayed there only one year before leaving to live as a self-described hobo in the American West.

On April 17, 1917, in his father’s shop in Milton, New Hampshire, Pinkham read the headline announcing America’s Declaration of War. He had always supported Wilson’s neutrality as “a beacon of light in the darkest age of mankind” and saw no justification to assume that France and Britain were right, or that Germany was wrong.^[1] Pinkham realized that, as a healthy, unemployed, single man of 22, he would be drafted.^[2] He could not register as a conscientious objector, because he did not belong to a recognized religious sect that prohibited fighting in wars. He chose to evade the draft and went west when the draft was announced. During his sojourn in the American West, Pinkham held a variety of jobs, including laying railroad track in Idaho and working in a lumberyard in Everett, Washington.

In June 1917 Pinkham had a sudden change of heart. On his birthday, June 16, 1917, Pinkham signed up for the Washington State National Guard and was given the rank of corporal because of his college education. In his edited war journal, Pinkham claims to have been unaware that he was not joining the U.S. Army. In April 1918, the distinction between the National Guard and U.S. Army was erased, but it seems implausible that a year before this merger Pinkham would not have known which division of the military he was joining.^[3] Pinkham attributes his change of mind to financial need and renewed faith in Woodrow Wilson’s idealism.^[4]

Pinkham was chronically dissatisfied with his duties during the war. After attempting to evade the draft, he complained that his six months in Seattle were too tame. When he was finally sent to France in December 1917, he was indignant and insulted that his section’s job was to lay track in Is Sur Tille in the Cote d’Or, the same occupation he had pursued in Idaho. Pinkham considered himself “practically a prisoner” and compared his condition as a soldier to the position of German P.O.W.s. After falling ill from “weak kidneys and a violent back ache,” he was reassigned to sorting boxes for the quartermaster while the rest of his section dug trenches and set up machine guns to protect against air raids.^[5] Pinkham argued that other units should be doing the digging, and that his unit should be dispatched to the front.

Pinkham’s dissatisfaction continued throughout the war. In May 1918, Pinkham’s unit left Is Sur Tille and he wrote eagerly that he hoped to be done with “drill and senseless games.”^[6] Instead of going to the front, however, he was transferred to Pont Levoy to train newly arrived infantry sections, who “a month earlier were in civilian clothes . . . many of them ignorant to how to load a rifle and destined for slaughter, just as surely as the lambs in the Chicago stock yard.”^[7] He was then summoned to St. Dizier, Marne, a city close enough to hear the gunshots from the fighting in the Argonne Forest, but instead of fighting, he cared for casualties. Pinkham was extremely disappointed by what he perceived as his disgraceful war record: “it seemed that all my life had been a failure, in college, business, art, and love. And now, within earshot of the guns, I was to fail at war.”^[8] Pinkham had hoped that his service would be a source of personal redemption.

In the beginning of November 1918, he sensed an approaching Allied victory and complained to a Marine Sergeant that he would never have the opportunity for combat experience. According to Pinkham’s journal, the sergeant suggested that he join his section by impersonating an AWOL private and advance on Verdun with them. Pinkham took his suggestion and marched with them out of the camp, but the unit took the wrong route. They turned around and returned to Froidos, and Pinkham took advantage of the change to steal back to his quarters. Despite his persistent demands to be placed at the front, Pinkham lost his nerve and decided not to advance with the Marines. This did not prevent him from complaining that he was kept in France as part of the Army of Occupation when others went home. When Secretary of War Newton Baker visited the troops, Pinkham joined the others in crying, “We want to go home!”^[9] Pinkham maintained no clear ideology, but was instead guided by persistent melancholy.

Like many soldiers, Pinkham tried to alleviate his depression through escapism. He drank with his fellow soldiers regularly and sometimes to excess. When he vomited in his quarters, he blamed the monotony of the noncombatant life and excused his behavior as the natural result of war.^[10] During his time in the military Pinkham frequently pursued sexual relationships with women. In Seattle he saw the daughter of one of his older friends and visited Seattle’s red light district. In France he had an affair with a young French widow and later hired a prostitute while on leave. Pinkham derived little comfort from these distractions and could not live up to his own shifting expectations about his military career.

Pinkham considered himself in a personal crisis during his war years, and used literature to develop his beliefs. When he read Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, he saw his own religious struggle in the philosophical agnostic protagonist, Levin. Later when reading Maurice Hewlitt’s Open Country, he identified with the wandering poet protagonist. For a while he read novels by H.G. Wells and tried to adopt a fatalistic attitude. Finally his reading of the New Testament converted him to Christianity. He handled the strains of war both stereotypically through sex and alcohol but also more individually through his philosophical and literary interests. Throughout his war years, Pinkham futilely searched for a philosophy that seemed meaningful to him and an antidote to his persistent malaise. After the war, Pinkham felt strangely uncomfortable in America after so long an absence. He continued his wandering life, but then settled down as the postmaster in his hometown of Milton, New Hampshire.

Harold Pinkham ‘15

Milton, New Hampshire

Corporal, 161st Infantry, Formerly the Washington National Guard

This Series: During World War I, 3,407 Dartmouth men were uprooted from campus, graduate school, or their early careers to serve in a modern war unlike any previous American military engagement.^[11] Four of them, Harold Pinkham ’15, George Dock ’16, Edward Kirkland ’16, and Wainwright Merrill ’19, left records of their war experience in the Rauner Special Collections Library. All four matched the demographics of the College at the time and were united by their experiences at progressive prewar Dartmouth, but despite their somewhat similar backgrounds, their personalities were quite different. Their stories speak to the diverse beliefs, experiences, and sources of comfort of Dartmouth men involved in World War I.

Ask for MS-62.

¹Harold Pinkham, “War Years,” Dartmouth College. The Papers of Harold Batchelder Pinkham at Dartmouth College. 1978, 2.
²Keene, 8.
³Keene, 15.
⁴Harold Pinkham, “War Years,” Dartmouth College. The Papers of Harold Batchelder Pinkham at Dartmouth College. 1978, 7.
⁵Harold Pinkham, “War Years,” Dartmouth College. The Papers of Harold Batchelder Pinkham at Dartmouth College. 1978, 32.
⁶Harold Pinkham, “War Years,” Dartmouth College. The Papers of Harold Batchelder Pinkham at Dartmouth College. 1978, 71.
⁷Harold Pinkham, “War Years,” Dartmouth College. The Papers of Harold Batchelder Pinkham at Dartmouth College. 1978, 94.
⁸Harold Pinkham, “War Years,” Dartmouth College. The Papers of Harold Batchelder Pinkham at Dartmouth College. 1978, 105.
⁹Harold Pinkham, “War Years,” Dartmouth College. The Papers of Harold Batchelder Pinkham at Dartmouth College. 1978, 142.
¹⁰Harold Pinkham, “War Years,” Dartmouth College. The Papers of Harold Batchelder Pinkham at Dartmouth College. 1978, 50.
¹¹Charles Wood, The Hill Winds Know Their Name: A Guide to Dartmouth’s War Memorials. Hanover N.H.: Dartmouth College Office of Public Affairs, 2001, 6.  

North Britain or Scotland?

In the wake of the Scottish referendum, we thought we'd share a little gem in our collection that has varying degrees of connection to independence, Scotland, and Great Britain (although not to the West Lothian question). George Taylor and Andrew Skinner were Scottish surveyors from Aberdeen who initially rose to prominence through their careful mapping of the post road between London and Bath. For their next endeavor, in 1776, the two men published what amounted to the first road map ever made of Scotland.  Needless to say, this was also an important year for yet another group of oppressed colonists of England. Less than a decade later, Taylor and Skinner would journey west across the Atlantic to ply their trade in the new country of the United States of America.

The atlas consists of 62 plates, each containing three side-by-side sections of a long strip of road. All but one radiate outward from Edinburgh at a one inch to one mile scale. The atlas includes a detailed chart at the front of the book that gives the distances between each stage of the journey as well as the total distance from Edinburgh. In their explanation of the chart,Taylor and Skinner assure the nervous traveler that "There are good inns on all the Roads, with Post Chaises and Horses at every Stage, as far North as Inverness by Aberdeen," an area with which they were well acquainted. In closing, the two express their confidence that the public road system will be soon completed in the north because "a Spirit of Improvement prevails throughout Scotland." One might venture to say that the recent referendum suggests that such a spirit still lives on in the hearts and minds of the Scottish people, even though there may be some differences of opinion as to what form that improvement should take.


To see our copy of Taylor and Skinner's Survey of the Roads of North Britain or Scotland, walk into Rauner and ask to see Rare G1826.P2 T3 1776. If you aren't able to come by but would like to see more, the National Library of Scotland has scanned the book in its entirety and made it available online to the public.

A War to End All Wars: "Necessary, Just & Righteous"

Kirkland at Bowdoin

Edward C. Kirkland, Class of 1916, was an intellectual through and though. At Dartmouth, he was in the first honor group and a member of Phi Beta Kappa.^[1] After graduating in the spring of 1916, Kirkland enrolled in a PhD program in economic history at Harvard. When America declared war, despite opposing military solutions to the conflict, Kirkland shelved his PhD studies and volunteered for the Harvard Ambulance Corps on June 2, 1917. Now that Americans were involved, Kirkland felt a duty to act and believed that volunteering quickly would relieve his conscience from “fretting, worrying, and doubting.”^[2] Kirkland’s parents had difficulty accepting his decision to volunteer, but Kirkland was thereby able to select the Ambulance Corps. One soldier pithily summarized the advantages of volunteering, “You can pick any branch you want now, later they pick you.”^[3] Still, only 28% of Americans who fought in World War I volunteered, while 72% waited for their service to be conscripted.

After volunteering, Kirkland was sent to a training camp in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Kirkland left Boston amidst a crowd of crying mothers and waving American flags but considered the talk of heroics unjustified. To Kirkland, his role in the war was practical, but not valiant. At camp he reported that after being paraded around town he felt like “such a superficial hero.”^[4] Otherwise he adjusted well to military camp life. He joked to his mother in a letter, “I thank my bringing up for many things, but just now for the ability to eat everything.”^[5] During the Harvard section’s week on kitchen service, Kirkland and a friend were placed on butter duty. In his letters Kirkland hilariously recounted the challenges of mixing 300 pounds of oleo margarine with yellow coloring every day for a week.^[6] After spending more than two months training, Kirkland arrived in France on August 21, 1917.

Like George Dock, Class of 1916, Kirkland was first stationed at Bar-Le-Duc. In October, he moved to La Grange aux Bois in the Argonne. During the war, he was also stationed in Haudainville, near the Verdun front, and in the Chateau-Thierry Sector during the allied offensive of August 1918. Kirkland seemed content with his noncombat role. He downplayed the risks of his position by joking that helmets were very handy for preventing bumping one’s head and regretted that gas masks were not necessary in his region because they gave one “a snappy appearance.”^[7] In November 1917 all of Kirkland’s ambulance work was ferrying the wounded to hospitals behind the line, so he could easily pen these jokes to comfort his anxious family.

Kirkland's Alumni War Record

During the winter of 1917-1918, though, he was stationed close to Verdun’s front line, and he admitted to feeling more vulnerable. He was disturbed by the cries of the wounded in his ambulance, but comforted himself with the thought that “if the [wounded] are making a racket they are probably not intending to die on you.”^[8] On one mission Kirkland was hit by a gas bombardment while driving up a very steep hill near the front. He could not stop because of the grade of the hill, but his gas mask was stuck between the seats out of reach. His nose smarted as he drove, and he started to cough, but the gas cleared by the time they reached the top. He received a Croix de Guerre for his bravery. Kirkland acknowledged that the “Croix de Guerre may be as common as Phi Beta Kappa keys in Cambridge, but still I am happy.”^[9] Within his ambulance unit, Kirkland found a group of like minded men. His compatriots nicknamed the group “the intellectuals.”^[10] In their unit the group established a renting library and offered books for 50 cents a week. The proceeds went towards the purchase of new volumes. Kirkland and two others also wrote a newspaper for their unit called, Every Little Detail.

Kirkland comforted himself throughout the war with these intellectual pursuits, but at the end of the war, the joy of the Armistice was coupled with the distressing news of the death of his good Dartmouth friend, Harold Bridgman Stedman, Class of 1916, who contracted influenza and died in a training camp at Fort Slocum, New York. Reminded so recently of the human costs of war, Kirkland greeted the news of the Armistice with an increased determination that the peace should be a righteous one that would “purge our minds of prejudices and hate.” Though most of the allied countries held the Germans in contempt and called them “Brute, Barbarians, and Huns,” Kirkland believed that their sins were sins of the mind that could be remedied through education, not sins of the heart.^[11]

Kirkland, who at the beginning of the war disapproved of the conflict and saw it as the result of irresponsible militarist governments, admitted, “I have changed my view, you see, since I entered the army. The war was necessary and just and righteous in order to overthrow a pernicious philosophy, the philosophy of brute force.” Kirkland believed that the war could usher in a new era of peace, or at least a time where war would be less common. He was concerned, though, that “America was as unprepared for peace as she had been for war” and that if a spirit of vindictiveness prevailed at peace talks, the great suffering on both sides would have been for nothing. As an ambulance driver Kirkland knew intimately the human suffering caused by war, and was “not anxious for another war.”^[12] He considered the ideologies at stake and ultimately agreed with Wilson that fighting “a war to end all wars” was justifiable. Kirkland, however, lived to see WWII. After completing his PhD course at Harvard, he taught history for many years at Bowdoin College.

Written by Ellen Nye '14.

This Series: During World War I, 3,407 Dartmouth men were uprooted from campus, graduate school, or their early careers to serve in a modern war unlike any previous American military engagement.^[13] Four of them, Harold Pinkham ’15, George Dock ’16, Edward Kirkland ’16, and Wainwright Merrill ’19, left records of their war experience in the Rauner Special Collections Library. All four matched the demographics of the College at the time and were united by their experiences at progressive prewar Dartmouth, but despite their somewhat similar backgrounds, their personalities were quite different. Their stories speak to the diverse beliefs, experiences, and sources of comfort of Dartmouth men involved in World War I.

Edward C. Kirkland ’16

Bellows Falls, Vermont

Private First Class, Section Sanitaire Americaine No. 510

Ask for Rauner Alumni K635l.

¹Joseph M. Larimer, “Voice of the People.” The Dartmouth: November 9, 1915.
²Kirkland, Edward C. Letter to his parents, June 3, 1918. The Letters of an Ambulance Driver. Rauner Special Collections Library, 1919.
³Keene, 15.
⁴Kirkland, Edward C. Letter to his parents, July 1, 1917. The Letters of an Ambulance Driver. Rauner Special Collections Library.
⁵Kirkland, Edward C. Letter to his parents, June 24, 1917. The Letters of an Ambulance Driver. Rauner Special Collections Library, 1919.
⁶Kirkland, Edward C. Letter to his parents, July 1, 1917. The Letters of an Ambulance Driver. Rauner Special Collections Library, 1919.
⁷Ibid.
⁸Kirkland, Edward C. Letter to his parents, February 1, 1918. The Letters of an Ambulance Driver. Rauner Special Collections Library, 1919.
⁹Kirkland, Edward C. Letter to his parents, January 11, 1918. The Letters of an Ambulance Driver. Rauner Special Collections Library, 1919.
¹⁰Kirkland, Edward C. The Letters of an Ambulance Driver. Rauner Special Collections Library, 1919, “Dear Ma and Pa,” February 17, 1918.
¹¹Kirkland, Edward C. Letter to his parents, November 13, 1918. The Letters of an Ambulance Driver. Rauner Special Collections Library, 1919.
¹²Ibid.
¹³Charles Wood, The Hill Winds Know Their Name: A Guide to Dartmouth’s War Memorials. Hanover N.H.: Dartmouth College Office of Public Affairs, 2001, 6.