Giving It to the Man by Doing It Like a (Wo)man

"I am a radical feminist, there is no doubt about it." - Professor Marysa Navarro, 11/2/1981 interview with The Dartmouth

Traditions are typically celebrated at Dartmouth, and Ivy League institutions are renowned for their rich history, traditions, and culture. The Dartmouth of today is an ever-changing place, with the school becoming increasingly diverse in race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic class. However, there was a time when questioning traditions at Dartmouth was much more taboo. Throughout most of Dartmouth's history up to the 1960s, Dartmouth was an almost all-white, all-male university to which most of the American population likely never had access. It came as a shock to me when I discovered that one of the first women to receive tenure at Dartmouth, Latin American History Professor Marysa Navarro Aranguren, was also a Hispanic immigrant. given our shared Hispanic identity, along with having experienced the immigrant perspective from the third person perspective through my parents, I was immediately interested in studying her life and career at Dartmouth.

Navarro was born in Pamplona, Spain on October 12, 1934. Navarro painted a portrait of a 20th-century Hispanic intellectual, a feminist, an activist, and a professor, despite living and teaching in an overwhelmingly white space. in a 1975 interview with The Dartmouth, Navarro spoke about her childhood and life before Dartmouth. She was born to a republican Spanish family who was forced to flee their home after the Fascist takeover of Spain while she was a baby. First, the Navarro family moved to France, but after it was taken over by the Germans during WWII, they found themselves stateless. As a result, the family finally decided to move to Uruguay, where Navarro finished her high school and her undergraduate education. Afterward, Navarro was able to complete a fellowship at Douglas College in New Jersey, and eventually married and completed her master's and doctorate degrees at Columbia University. Her decision to study Spanish American history over Spanish history stems from the fact that she thought the Spanish civil war was "too traumatic to study." Her upbringing and violent childhood inspired much of her beliefs, decisions, and political activism later in her life.

Spies among us

Winter Carnival is this weekend. We have plenty of snow this year thanks to last week's storm, so the winter games should be festive and fun. The theme is Mission Impossible, so we went searching the collections. There are a ton of options--many impossible missions to the Arctic; books on imaginary contraptions impossible to build; collections where one impossible-to-find-item leaves them incomplete; and amazing items whose survival seems, well impossible. But the fun part of Mission Impossible is the intrigue of cloak and dagger spies. That led us to an innocuous letter from John Henry to Dartmouth President John Wheelock.

Written in 1810 by a formal military officer and sometimes Vermont farmer, John Henry, from his quarters in Boston, the letter thanks John Wheelock for a letter of introduction and expresses Henry's desire to get to know more people of Wheelock's social standing. Why might John Henry have been trying to get to know more social elites in the young republic? Well, at the time he was busy spying on the United States for the Canadian colonial government. When London failed to pay for his work, Henry switched allegiances and sold all of his information to the U. S. government. The result appeared to be another justification for deepening distrust of the British in the lead up to the War of 1812. It sounds kind of like a Mission Impossible plot: a spy cozying up to those in power, turned against one government and flipping to the other side when the profit margin reached the right level. [Cue Mission Impossible theme]

To see the letter ask for Mss 810360. Have a great Carnival! 

Ketchup, Five Ways

Did you know that ketchup used to be a fish-based sauce? Originating centuries before in southern China, British traders developed a taste for the condiment by the early 18th century. Attempts to replicate it at home were varied, and British ketchups often made use of anchovies, mushrooms, or walnuts.

A 1796 edition of Elizabeth Raffald's The Experienced English Housekeeper offers five recipes. The fourth, "catchup that keeps seven years," reads as follows:

"Take two quarts of the oldest strong-beer you can get, put it to one quart of red wine, three quarters of a pound of anchovies, three ounces of shalots peeled; half an ounce of mace, the same of nutmegs; a quarter of an ounce of cloves, three large races of ginger cut in slices, boil all together over a moderate fire till one third is wafted, the next day bottle it for use; it will carry to the East-Indies."

None of Raffald's ketchups make use of tomatoes, a trend that wouldn't emerge for a few more years. It would be nearly another century before tomato ketchup took on the sweeter flavor we're used to today - adding sugar improved the effectiveness of the preservation process.

To read Raffald's other four ketchup recipes, and to sneak a peek at more in The Experienced English Housekeeper, ask for Rare Book TX705 .R33 1796.

Best-Laid Plans

Walter Y. L. Kong, member of the class of 1929, was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, only a decade or so after the islands became a United States territory. One of the first Asian-Americans to go to Dartmouth, Kong traveled halfway around the world to receive his college education after attending secondary school in Guangzhou, China. During his college years, and for many years after, Kong planned to return to China to be an educator. Upon receiving his undergraduate degree here, he immediately enrolled in the Teacher's College, Columbia University, and received his master's degree from that institution in 1930. His education complete, Kong went west to San Diego, where a friend had offered him a job managing his store, in the hopes of raising enough money to procure passage back to China.

However, as the saying goes, the best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry. While in San Diego, Kong became a husband, and then a father. He also decided that the quickest way to raise money for travel was by having a business of his own. He started a Chinese arts store in 1932 in Santa Barbara with the intention of shuttering the business once he had enough capital to fund his family's trans-Pacific passage. Still, opening a business during the Great Depression, and then keeping it open, soon occupied so much of his time and energy that his dreams of moving to China became a distant memory. He also discovered, to his delight, that he greatly enjoyed the independence of owning his own endeavor as well as the joys of interacting with his customer. As Kong himself said, "My business experience in Santa Barbara made the picture of teaching in China...unattractive."

Still, despite his decision to be a businessman instead of a teacher, Kong found other ways to lead and to educate those around him, especially with regard to international relations. He was both the director of the Santa Barbara chapter of the United Nations Association and the president of the Santa Barbara China Club, as well as participating in numerous civic organizations. He also published several magazine articles, one of which emphasized the importance of racial empathy and offered practical advice for how Americans from different communities and races could build cross-cultural relationships.

A copy of that article as well as a brief auto-biography, are housed here at Special Collections in Kong's alumni file. Rauner Library has an alumni file for every deceased previous student of the college, all the way back to the 1770s. Come explore the past lives of amazing alumni like Walter Y. L. Kong whenever we're open by walking into Webster Hall and asking our desk staff to help you get started.

In Memoriam: Stanley Brown '67

We are mourning the loss of Stanley Brown, retired Curator of Rare Books, who passed away earlier this week after a long illness. Stan graduated from Dartmouth in 1967, and returned three years later under the tutelage of Edward Connery Lathem '51 to help direct the Library's Special Collections Department. During his long tenure, he built up our rare book and fine presses holdings and ushered in several major book collections including the Edward P. Sine '51 Illustrated Book collection. He also authored a guide to our rare books collections that we still use today.

This image of Stan's loving hands cradling a selection of miniature books donated by Madelyn Hickmott best exemplifies the nurturing attention Stan devoted to the collections. The rare books were literally in good hands with him.

Stan retired from Dartmouth Library in 2004, but he stayed connected to Special Collections and was an avid reader of this blog. We will miss his meticulous fact checking, and his enthusiastic responses when we published a particularly meaty post. But we will always remember Stan through the collections that he grew and cultivated with a loving and skillful touch.

Dartmouth's First Gun Club

Next week, Special Collections will facilitate a Writing 3 class session that explores archival materials related to Dartmouth's historic relationship with the Second Amendment to the US Constitution. In preparation for the visit, we had the opportunity to explore letters and photographs documenting the founding of the Dartmouth Gun Club. Most of us are familiar with The Dartmouth Outing Club and may have even heard of its founder, Fred Harris, who was a member of the class of 1911. In addition to bringing alpine skiing to campus as a sport, Harris also introduced trap shooting. In a letter to the editors of the student newspaper, Harris stated that "Trap shooting has found favor among the students of this College. Its spectacular characteristics appeal to the undergraduate mind. There is a snap, a life, and vigor to it that can not help but make it flourish here in the future."

Alongside a photograph of Harris and the inaugural shooting team, a Dartmouth Gun Club scrapbook from 1910-11 also contains a handwritten set of three rules to govern the use of firearms in the club: first, no rifle or shotgun shall be fired when anyone is in front of the firing line; second, that no gun shall be loaded until the shooter steps to the firing line; and third, that "no gun shall be pointed toward any human being. Whether the gun is loaded or not does not affect this rule in the least." These rules seem sensible enough to us, and we trust that some version of them is still in effect today at the Dartmouth Outing Club's shooting range, located near the Dartmouth Organic Farm.

To look through the earliest scrapbook of the Dartmouth Gun Club, come to Special Collections and ask to see Box 6245 from the Dartmouth Outing Club's records (DO-1).

A "Robbery" at the Hanover Post Office

“We have had some great excitement in Hanover,” Frank Whitcomb, class of 1911, wrote to his sister during his first winter at Dartmouth, “which is a very rare thing I assure you.” Whitcomb goes on to relate that the Hanover postmaster had claimed just days ago that, while he was counting out money, a man broke the window beside him, pointed a gun through it, and forced him to hand over hundreds of dollars. The Boston Globe commented that the robber was “surprisingly daring” to have committed the robbery “in easy view of the back part of a drug store and a hardware store,” and that the terror of being robbed at gunpoint left the victim in a “fainting condition.” If this sounds too dramatic to be true—it was. The broken glass from the window was found on the outside of the building, suggesting it had been broken from the inside. Unable to explain this, the postmaster eventually confessed that he had recently taken some money himself and faked the robbery to cover up the shortage.

Aside from the crime taking place in Hanover, there was a commotion happening on campus. Whitcomb told his sister that Dartmouth student vigilantes heard about the “robbery” and took matters into their own hands, taking their “revolvers and shot guns” and running “about on [campus] shouting, here he is and there he goes, following their shouts with shots and yells” until it sounded like “the fourth of July.” Of course, they were chasing nobody, because the robber didn’t exist. But when the D gave its update on the “robbery” situation a few days later, it didn’t even mention the students’ response. It’s possible that in 1908, guns were so normalized on Dartmouth’s campus that students running around shooting them wasn’t considered newsworthy. It’s also possible that Whitcomb exaggerated this part of the story. It would not have been the wildest embellishment in Hanover that winter.

To read Whitcomb’s letters, come to Rauner and ask for MS-1438. (Or, ask about our other collections of student letters!)