Rauner Exhibit: "Let's Get Lunch"

This term we are proud to promote an exhibit by our current Edward Connery Lathem '51 Special Collections Fellow, Jaime Eeg '18, titled "Let's Get Lunch: An Exhibit for the Discerning Palate." The exhibit will be on display in the Class of 1965 Galleries from April 5th through June 7th, 2019.

We all need food. Without it, we cannot survive. Yet the human relationship with food is intricate, complex, and varies widely across individuals and cultures. Our relationship with food can be at once deeply personal and private while also serving as a bridge to connect with others, sometimes meaningfully and sometimes just superficially. We've all heard the old platitude, "let's get lunch sometime," a statement upon which potential connections can either flourish or wither. Given the opportunity, food has the power to draw us in and connect us with each other, just as cookbooks can connect us to the people and cultures who created them.

Food can also help us build communities. Shared experience helps create strong foundations between individuals and larger groups of people, and shared meals are a common avenue for those experiences. Just as food helps us build meaningful connections across groups, an understanding of the food from another culture or time helps foster deeper, meaningful understanding of those cultures and times. Cookbooks can offer a valuable way to access that potential for understanding.

And food can simply be fun! Cooking and cookbooks can be artistic or experimental, and cooking or eating together complements and strengthens existing relationships. Meals are an excellent excuse to spend quality time with people we care about. After all, we all need food.

If you're hungry for more about food and Dartmouth, come  take a look at the cookbooks at Special Collections. Also, stay connected on social media for updates about opportunities to sample some actual treats made from the recipes in the exhibit. If you can't make it to the exhibit in person, you can read more about it online here.

Pulling Out the Rugg (Curriculum)

Given that we're a library, we are naturally biased towards librarians. We've mentioned former Dartmouth librarian Harold G. Rugg, member of the class of 1906, several times before. However, today we're going to take a different tack and talk about at Harold O. Rugg, a member of the class of 1908. Rugg graduated from Dartmouth with a B.S., which he followed a year later with a degree in civil engineering from Dartmouth's Thayer School of Engineering. He then worked for the Missouri Public Railroad before going to the University of Illinois to teach in their engineering department.

This story sounds like that of many other alumni: get a degree from Dartmouth, then possibly complete a grad degree, and then land a respectable upper-middle-class industry job. However, during his time at Illinois, Rugg departed from this well-trodden path. It was there that he began working on a PhD in sociology and education, primarily because of his fascination with the quantification of the learning process and how it works. From there, Rugg went on to serve with his Illinois faculty advisor in World War I on a committee that was the first group to make widespread use of intelligence and aptitude tests on adults.

After the war, Rugg became a faculty member at the Teachers College of Columbia University, where he began work on a social studies textbook series published in pamphlets and titled "Man and His Changing Society." The 14-book series was published between 1929 and 1940. Although initially very successful, selling over 5.5 million copies, in the early 1940s Rugg's work was labeled as subversive by various American conservative groups because it intentionally delineated the weaknesses of American society as well as the strengths. As a result, sales dropped, reactionary pamphlets outlining his philosophy were published and distributed, and there was at least one instance of an actual book-burning of Ruggs's educational series. Although Rugg's direct influence in the school system may have waned since the 1930s, he is still credited with unifying the social sciences into a cohesive curriculum.

To learn more about Harold O. Rugg '08, come to Rauner and ask to see his alumni file.

On Translating the Divina Commedia

We made another nice find this week in the collections. For a class on Dante in translation, we were digging around our various English language editions of Dante. The catalog record for the first printing of Longfellow's translation tipped us off that it would be something special.

Our copy was one of the first ten printed and belonged to Longfellow's publisher, James Fields. It has a little inscription "from the Translator" in one volume. That is pretty impressive, but it has a bonus feature: a holograph copy of Longfellow's sonnet, "On Translating the Divina Commedia," laid in and dated March 29, 1864. Longfellow didn't publish the poem until December of 1864, so this manuscript is an early one that he wrote out for Fields.

It shows Longfellow's stance toward Dante. He compares himself to a laborer, and Dante's work a cathedral. As he works, he stops to pray:

Oft have I seen at some cathedral-door
A laborer, pausing in the dust and heat,
Lay down his burden, and with reverent feet
Enter, and cross himself, and on the floor
Kneel to repeat his pater-noster o'er;
Far off the noises of the world retreat;
The loud vociferations of the street
Become an undistinguishable roar.
So, as I enter here from day to day,
And leave my burden at this minster-gate,
Kneeling in prayer, and not ashamed to pray,
The tumult of the time disconsolate
To inarticulate murmurs dies away,
While the eternal ages watch and wait.

If you want to have your own little holy moment with Dante and Longfellow, ask for Fields 16.

The History of Lapland

This book is just so cool. It is the first English translation of John Scheffer's The History of Lapland (1674). The frontispiece shows the title printed on an unfurled reindeer skin flanked by two Laplanders in their exotic headdress with their even more exotic modes of transportation (skis!). Below, another figure sews together a skin boat. The book is filled with early ethnographic information and woodcuts illustrating the customs and manners of a people that the author finds far more interesting than those newly encountered peoples of America.

We won't vouch for its accuracy, but the book boasts of its scholarly credentials. Written by a "professor of law and rhetoric" at Uppsala and based on his direct observations and interviews, it is an example of early anthropology. But, it has a second claim for scholarly significance: the imprint is "At the Theater in Oxford." Purportedly, this the first anthropological text published by Oxford University Press.

It is a beautiful book that is worth your time. Come in and ask for Stefansson DL 971.L2 S5 1674.

Charles to Wilkie

For a class today we were looking at how nineteenth-century novels were serialized in popular periodicals. One of the examples we had out was All the Year Round, edited by Charles Dickens, because the early volumes featured his A Tale of Two Cities. Well, what else did we find? Right after the final installment of A Tale of Two Cities in the November 1859 issue was the first chapter of Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White. They were friends, so it is no surprise that Dickens would find space in his magazine for Collins.

What happened next was a bit of magic. Seeing the first chapter of The Woman in White reminded us that we had a letter from Dickens to Collins in the collection. We plucked it out and discovered it was from the "Office of All the Year Round," and was written in late August 1859. For the most part, it is a chatty letter about the business of writing, but two things jumped out. First, the line:

Wills has shown me your note received this morning. I have not the slightest doubt that The Woman in White is the name of names and the very title of very titles.

Pretty cool, as this is the letter that confirms the title of what would become a classic. But then we read another bit where Dickens says that he had just "slided back in the Tale of Two Cities and [had] been doggedly at it." What? A Tale of Two Cities started serialization in April, and it wrapped up in November! Dickens was still finishing it in August.

Can you imagine the stress of finishing a novel four months after you published the first chapter?

Oh, by the way, the letter also discusses the details of a proposed American tour--it is a good one.

To see the letter, ask for MS 001151. To see volume 2 of All the Year Round, ask for Rare AP4.A4 v. 2.

Twisted Travels

Most of us who were educated in the West will recognize at least the name of Don Quixote, the titular character of Miguel Cervantes's monumental novel. Published partially in 1605 and then completely in 1615, Don Quixote is arguably one of the most important works of literature in the Western canon. Cervantes's influence stretches beyond the debt owed to him by other later writers to affect vernacular vocabulary: words like "quixotic" and "Lothario" have their origin in this Spanish masterpiece. As we've blogged before, Special Collections has a world-class Quixote collection, and so we are always finding new amazing little treasures within its rows upon rows of books.

This week, Professor Paul Carranza, a senior lecturer in in the Spanish and Portuguese deparment, shared one of his recent finds with us: a beautiful map of Spain tipped into a late 18th-century edition of Don Quixote. Although we all may be aware that the beleaguered man from La Mancha traveled a long and sometimes tortuous path across Spain in pursuit of chivalric glory, it's not often that one sees the fictional character's route marked out in detail on a contemporary map of the Iberian peninsula. The thin red line that traces the knight errant's course though his country is a wonderful and vivid complement to the long and engaging text of the novel that relates his doomed adventures.

To see the map, ask for volume one of Quixote PQ6323 .A1 1787.

The Hand of Lincoln

We had the distinct pleasure of welcoming the administrative unit from the Thayer School of Engineering to Special Collections this week. In the process of looking for materials that might be of interest to them, we discovered a thrilling item that we hadn't previously realized was in the stacks: nineteen original signatures by Abraham Lincoln. The autographs are written consecutively on a sheet of stationery from the "Executive Mansion" in Washington, D.C., and date from December 20th, 1861. At the top of the page is written the statement, "I certify that the signatures written below are genuine. John Hay."

John Milton Hay served as one of Lincoln's private secretaries and personal assistants for the entirety of his presidency, and it is likely that this sheet of signatures was generated at Hay's request to fill a high demand for the president's signature by autograph-hunters. Autograph collecting was a hugely popular pursuit during the 19th century; famous people in particular were asked for their signature ad nauseam. John Hay not only had the distinction of serving as a private secretary to Abraham Lincoln until the bitter end. He also served under President Garfield as Assistant Secretary of State and under both President McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt as Secretary of State. This career statesman's long tenure in the corridors of power finally ended in the summer of 1904, when he died in Newbury, New Hampshire.

To see Abraham Lincoln's signature nineteen times in a row, come to Special Collections and ask for Codex 002138.