Geoffrey Plank, author of the new book John Woolman’s Path to the Peaceable Kingdom: A Quaker in the British Empire, will be giving a series of talks in the Philadelphia area in early October.  His complete schedule follows:

October 4, 7:00 p.m., Swarthmore College Science Center 199: “The Other Woolmans: Family Life and the Ideals of an Eighteenth-century Abolitionist”

October 6, 2:00 p.m.,  Mount Holly Friends Meeting, 81 High Street, Mount Holly, New Jersey: “The Other Woolmans” (as above)

October 7, 3:00 p.m., The Barn at the Pendle Hill Conference Center, 338 Plush Mill Road, Wallingford, Pennsylvania: “John Woolman and the Utility or Futility of History”

October 8, 4:30 p.m., Special Collections, Magill Library, Haverford College: “The Other Family Living with the Woolmans: African-Americans and Quakers Living Together, and the Process of Gradual Emancipation”

For more information you may contact Geoff at g.plank@uea.ac.uk

Welcome class of 2016, and all others who may stumble upon this post! My name is Karl Moll, and I am a rising Junior who works as the Archivist’s Assistant in the Haverford College Quaker and Special Collections in the Library, which houses the College Archives (and a great place to look for a job once you get to campus!). I thought it might be interesting to take a look at what incoming freshman at Haverford were experiencing 100 years ago when they came to campus. Now, the ‘Ford has undergone a lot of changes in the last century: for starters, we are no longer an all-male school, the class size was about 1/10th the size it is now (167 students at the school, 48 of them freshman), the Morris Infirmary was still under construction, and the college was officially Quaker.

When freshmen entered the college, they were given a handbook:

This book was designed to introduce the new students to the customs of the college, and was funded by the Y.M.C.A. (which was still very much the Young Men’s Christian Association). The main goal in publishing the guide was to “call…attention to an organized effort for the development of Christian character amongst us”. Though, since this is Haverford, the organization “lays no emphasis on creeds or dogmas, and in no way tries to exert sectarian influence”. To me this sounds reminiscent of the second part of the oft-quoted segment of the 1888 Commencement Speech by President Isaac Sharpless:

Every time I read this, I get chills

It seems to fit into the tradition of being one’s own person.

One of the more interesting sections of any of the class handbooks from years past are the Rules for Freshman. Unfortunately, 1912-1913 seems to have been a reasonable year, and there are only “Points for Freshman”. Most of these are still pretty sound advice, though many are outdated:

Some useful information for incoming freshman, plus advice

In other years, there are rules banning freshmen wearing mustaches and carrying canes. Freshmen were also required to move out of paths to make way for upperclassmen, and not lighting an upperclassmen’s cigarette could lead to a fine. Maybe this year the Officer of Hazing (yes, that was an actual title) decided to take it easy. The sophomores were traditionally in charge of Hazing (or teaching the school’s customs). To see some funny rules from earlier years check here or here (feel free to browse around the site that the link brings you to, these are the digitized images from Haverford Special Collections and the Archives of the College!).

One of my favorite parts of historical Haverfordiana are the songs that freshman were expected to learn and sing at sporting events (failure to learn the songs resulted in punishments which ranged from midnight head shavings to monetary fines to being thrown in the duckpond). The major sporting events on campus were soccer and football (“Undefeated Since 1972″), but many of the songs could be sung during alumni events, or seniors could just make the underclassmen sing in the dining hall if they felt like it:

Various publications on campus and College Songs

I wish we still had songs like these...

More Songs!

The rest of the handbook provided the new student with reference material to all the resources on campus. These range from train schedules, telephone and telegraph services, the various clubs on campus, student publications, secret societies, and more…

Customs and the “Honor System”:

College Customs and the Honor System

The Honor Code of today seems very similar to the Honor System of old, but at the same time very different. And while we still have a “Customs” period for Freshman like in the post above, it is far removed from what these old newspapers show us:

So a lot has changed over the years, but there is still that Haverfordian feel through it all

If you have any questions about this, or other aspects of Haverford History, feel free to shoot me an email at kmoll@haverford.edu, or email Haverford Special Collections (hc-special@haverford.edu) where you can get some more expert advice. If I were writing “Points for Freshman” for the incoming class of 2016, one that I would stress would be to stop in and visit Special Collections in the back of the Library. The collection is really one of the gems of the college. You can find the historical materials for the club you get involved in, genealogical records of famous Quakers, old sports photos, anti-slavery materials, maps,  yearbooks from years past, rare books (Copernicus, Darwin, Shakespeare… no big deal), records for the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, and much more.

She was born into the “weighty” Quaker Elkinton family of Philadelphia. Her parents, Howard (Haverford, class of 1914) and Katharine Wistar Elkinton, both descendants of notable Quaker families, were among the first to work for the newly-formed American Friends Service Committee as relief workers in France during World War I, then again in Germany during World War II, he as director of their Berlin office, while she enabled over 1,000 professional Jewish women to emigrate to Australia. They witnessed Kristallnacht and wrote letters describing it. That’s just going back one generation from the vibrant Theodora Elkinton Waring, who was born in 1927 to Howard and Katharine. She lived a comfortable life in the bosom of her loving family, attending Germantown Friends School, making friends, but when her father was sent to Germany, she and her brother, Peter, were sent to a Quaker school in Holland for the duration. After their return to America, “Dody” went back to Germantown Friends, then to Smith for two years. In the meantime, she met and married Thomas Waring after his two-year duty as a conscientious objector, 1944-46.

As a couple, they went to do relief work in Finland for refugees in Karelia in 1947. After returning to America, with a family now consisting of five children, having always been solicitous of her husband’s career needs, Dody finally went back to school, finishing her undergraduate degree, then a master of divinity from Harvard, and finally a doctorate from Boston University School of Theology in the 1980s. This education prepared her to serve as a chaplain at the New England Baptist Hospital and later at the Danbury State Hospital. Although her family life changed, she is today still surrounded by loving family and friends.

About five years ago, Rev. Elkinton Waring began sorting through a box of WWI letters from her mother, and since 2010, she says she became totally preoccupied with her family papers. Primarily, these are from her grandmother, Katharine Evans Mason, her mother, Katharine Wistar Mason Elkinton and her mother-in-law, Grace Warner Waring. The large topics are the relief work in France and later in Berlin in which her parents were engaged, and her husband, Tom Waring’s correspondence as a conscientious objector.

Theodora Elkinton Waring and her family papers. Courtesy of Jim Roese, photographer

We were contacted in November 2011 about the potential of receiving these family treasures. Dody had by that time processed them in their entirety, including genealogical charts, photographs, documents of all sorts, and, of course, the letters. Dody came down from Massachusetts this past weekend with her granddaughter, Sarah Waring (Haverford 2001) in a mini-van packed with the 13 cartons of her treasures which were received in Special Collections. In the afternoon, there was a celebratory event with some of Dody’s family in attendance as well some staff of the college. On the following day, we were privileged to conduct an oral history interview with Rev. Elkinton Waring, which will soon be available from our website. All in all, an extraordinary weekend tied to a treasure trove collection of Elkinton and Waring family papers, which have such great potential for future scholarly use.

As I mentioned in a previous post, a few weekends ago was alumni weekend. On that Friday, an alumnus came in and asked to see an item that caused most work in the library to stop. All of the student interns came to see the book the alumnus requested, namely a copy of Shakespeare’s first folio.

Oooh. Ahhh. I was really surprised that we had something as rare and precious as a first edition Shakespeare work. There are 228 still in existence of the approximately 1,000 originally printed. A copy stolen from Durham University was valued at 15 million pounds or approximately 25 million U.S. dollars. I was astounded that I could read through this book just for fun.

Then John Anderies, the Head of Special Collections, told me that this was only one of a few astounding works that we had in special collections. Apparently we also have a 1472 Foligno edition of Dante’s Divine Comedy. This astounding book is even rarer than Shakespeare’s first folio; there are only 14 copies of the Foligno edition in the world, and it is the first printed edition of the book. It is so old that the book still has illuminations, ornate pictures or letters done in gold leaf and painted.

I and a few other students came to the archives the next day to study the Foligno copy.

I was thrilled and astounded to be able to handle amazing manuscripts like the Foligno Dante and Shakespeare’s first folio. These pieces are part of the William Pyle Philips collection. Philips was the class of 1902, and donated a number of priceless artifacts to the library including a first edition of Paradise Lost, the famed Descartes letter, and a copy of Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus Orbium Caelestium. Seeing and leafing through these pieces reminded me of the amazing hidden resources that our library holds, and wish that more students availed themselves of the absolutely unique opportunities that Special Collections provides.

In 1979, a junior history major at Haverford named Conrad Turner, chose as the subject of a research paper a letter from Special Collections by philosopher René Descartes from 1641. Turner’s paper was written for the Junior Seminar in Historical Evidence (History 361), a ground-breaking program begun in 1969 in order to inject the study of material culture and the use of primary sources into the undergraduate history curriculum. In one assignment, students selected an unidentified object and were asked to determine the object’s identity, provenance, use, and social context. In another assignment students selected a document from Special Collections, and were assigned to prepare a transcription and in-depth analysis of its content.

Over thirty years later, the Descartes letter was discovered to be unknown to the scholarly world and—even more surprising—to have been stolen from a French library in the mid-nineteenth century. This exciting news was widely reported in the media in early 2010. On June 8, in a ceremony held in Paris, France, Haverford returned the letter to its rightful owner, the Institut de France. At the reception that followed, Conrad Turner ’81—the alum who wrote the paper on the Descartes letter—gave this moving speech about working with the Descartes document, Haverford’s decision to return the letter, and the potential for education to inspire and engender integrity.

Steve Emerson, Mr. Anderies, Members of the Board, Scholars, Distinguished ’Fords and guests: while Rene Descartes, Count Libri and “father of the Internet” Vinton Cerf have made today’s ceremony possible, we have come here because we have a spiritual connection to Haverford, and also of course because many of us happen to live in Europe. It says something about Haverford that a 370-year-old letter is the reason for my trip from Belgrade to Paris, allowing me to visit my senior year roommate Mark Sadoff and his wife Sheila. I have been on the wrong side of the Atlantic and in some cases deep in the Eurasian continent for every reunion for most of the last 23 years, so being part of this one is special for me, and being invited to say a few words is a real honor.

The Turner paper, as it has come to be known, is a footnote in the story of the Descartes letter. But as someone who, as Chris Mills put it, “spent some quality time cuddled up with that document back during the Carter administration,” I’m happy to share some thoughts on what this letter, and its return to l’Institut de France, symbolize. It has to do with the obligation universities have to educate not only their students, but also society at large.

Real education inspires. For too many of the world’s undergraduates, the reality is different. Information is force-fed into the brain, causing a brief rearranging of a few neural networks before being swept off to make room for the next brutal infusion of facts. What remains is a grade on a transcript. Inspiration, on the other hand, turns the brain into a magnet not just for facts but reason, purpose and values. That is what makes the difference between a good college and a great one.

The other day I spoke to Serbian university students about Diversity in the United States. Students there complain that professors lecture at them while keeping a studied distance. They’ve learned to expect worse from foreign diplomats, so I love to smash those stereotypes: as I addressed those students I paced the room, stepping forward and back, gesturing, asking open-ended questions, encouraging a lively give-and-take… In other words, I worked hard to inspire them.

Some of you will recognize a style mastered by Professor Emeritus Roger Lane. I sat quietly during his year-long American History course, but that didn’t prevent me from admiring, and one day imitating, his inspirational teaching style. It just seemed like the right way to do it. (I don’t mean to contradict myself, and please don’t tell Roger, but that’s the only thing I remember from his class.)

As a student then I thought it bizarre that some people could get worked up over the Honor Code. What was the big deal? Yet 21 years later I was on the lecture circuit, addressing thousands of students at a dozen universities in Kyrgyzstan on the subject of academic integrity, helping them write honor codes, and leading seminars using abstracts provided by Haverford’s Honor Council. Concepts that seemed pretty mundane to me as a student turned out to be excellent tools for helping universities, through their students, to come to terms with problems that threatened their country’s development.

And then there’s the Descartes letter, which over a few weeks forced a sleepless young man to think of the great philosopher and mathematician as a real human being.

It’s not unusual for a student to see the extraordinary as ordinary, as I did the Honor Code, Roger Lane, and even exclusive access to an original letter penned three centuries ago by one of mankind‘s greatest thinkers. And really, isn’t that a goal of education? We should enter the workforce taking for granted that inspiration and integrity are the ideals we’re supposed to strive for. Embracing these values is what grounds us throughout our careers, as we engage in the struggle between our desire to hold to the values of our profession, and our need to navigate the politics governing that profession.

This struggle is evident in the letter itself, which if you read between the lines is really a scene from a political drama. Descartes’ challenge was to be true to scientific values while avoiding offending the religious figures who could have been his undoing. It wasn’t easy, and makes you wonder where he got his inspiration and integrity.

My stories from Haverford days are only a small part of the picture, and I’m sure many of you have similar ones. But colleges have a responsibility to educate that transcends even their duty toward their students. Returning the Descartes letter to its owner should be an obvious step. We might even take it for granted. Others do not. A close colleague of mine, whose opinions I respect, was incredulous when I shared the news. “Why give it away? Who cares how it got there, it’s Haverford’s now.” I understand this point of view. Many people would agree, maybe a majority. It was stolen a long, long time ago, and stuff happens.

But stuff doesn’t just happen. We make it so, as individuals and as institutions. Seen in another way, Haverford’s power to confer a prestigious degree carries certain rights and privileges, as well as obligations. Just as I was allowed 31 years ago to connect with history by staring at original ink marks, a great college must be aware of its historical role, and through its actions improve on history by taking a public stand on behalf of integrity. In this case, Haverford’s obligation – to educate us by inspiring us – was simply to do the right thing and return the letter to its home, giving up any perceived benefit the college might have had by clinging to it.

And your decision has inspired us, the news rippling through academic networks worldwide in multiple languages, all the way to my daughter’s high school in Belgrade, where the librarian, on learning my humble connection to the story, gaped at me as if I were a rock star and said, “That was you???”

View of the US in 1790

This year the 23rd US Federal Census is being conducted. Since 1790 this enumeration of individuals has been taken every decade. What categories of peoples have been counted? What other censuses exist? What else is counted?

Stop by Special Collections each day this week for a changing display of census materials from Haverford’s Rare Book Collection.

Also, learn how to search for ancestors or famous people in past census records during on-demand mini-tutorials in Special Collections!

• Monday, May 3, 2010 – Census of Quirinus – The Holy Bible, 1611
• Tuesday, May 4, 2010 – The First US Federal Census – Return of the whole number of persons within the several districts of the United State [1790]
• Wednesday, May 5, 2010 – Copernicus’ Census – De revolutionibus orbium caelestium
• Thursday, May 6, 2010 – The Philadelphia African-American Census, 1838 - The present state and condition of the Free People of Color of the City of Philadelphia, 1838
• Friday, May 7, 2010 – Shakespeare’s Census of Quartos – Merchant of Venice, Henry the Fifth, King Lear, Titus Andronicus, Richard II

William Penn, Founder of Pennsylvania, 2006

Penn's Excellent Priviledge of Liberty & Property

Rare Books from the Haverford Collection and their most Modern Renditions

Haverford’s rare book collection is exceptional.  The rarity and beauty of  the books are assets that enhance enjoyment of the texts and exemplifies the best values of a liberal arts education.

A broad appreciation of literature today, however, includes graphic books. The literary experience is of a condensed account presented through intense illustration and is in striking contrast to that of the more traditional text-based book.

Experience and consider these differences for yourself. Each day during exam week, December 14-18, 2009,  a rare book and its graphic counterpart will be on display in Special Collections. Take a study break and be intrigued and challenged!

In the fall of 2008, during the first semester of my freshman year here at Haverford,  I started working in Special Collections with Digital Collections Librarian David Conners to finish the Cope Evans project.  Started in 2002, the project was to digitize the Cope Evans Family Papers collection in order to make each item available on the web.  This involved reading, scanning, and transcribing almost 3,000 items dating from the 18th to the 20th century.  I had very little knowledge of the Society of Friends before coming to Haverford, and working with this collection of papers was a great way for me to really understand the essence of Quakerism.

At the culmination of the project in the spring of 2009, an event was organized to unveil the work that all of the students, interns, fellows, and librarians had been doing for the project.  Members of the Cope and Evans families were invited, as well as other members of the community, and anyone who had worked on the project in the past.  I spoke on the student panel at the event, and wrote a couple of pieces about some themes that arose from the letters, which were the compiled into a booklet about the collection.

Currently, I am working with Manuscripts Librarian and College Archivist Diana Franzusoff Peterson as the student archivist. I plan to major in Anthropology with a minor in Spanish. I also study Arabic, and plan to spend my junior year abroad in Egypt.

Special Collections was open on Saturday, October 24th, and we had about 35 visitors for Family and Friends Weekend.  Some came with very specific interests, including viewing the 1711 charter of the William Penn Charter School signed by Penn and with his great seal, but others came in as family clusters and were drawn to the displays we made available for them.  There was a good bit of ooh-ing and ahh-ing, as they inspected:

• The 1711 King James Bible and its miniature version
• A 1683 plat survey of Philadelphia by William Penn’s surveyor, Thomas Holme (see illustration), which is essentially the  lay-out of Philadelphia even today

• Amos Nattini’s lithographic illustrations of all 100 cantos of Dant’e Divine Comedy, along with a miniature version of the famous text
• The Germantown Quaker Protest Against Slavery, 1688, the first such protest in North America
• Maxims by William Penn published in the Select Works of William Penn, 1771, along with a miniature of the maxim on Time
• A photograph of a dorm in Barclay with army gear in evidence in the 1940s when a percentage of the students were army men
• A pointed letter by Supreme Court Justice, William O. Douglas to his friend Fred Rodell, class of 1926, indicating dismay at a meeting of the other justices while he (Douglas) was away that overturned his vote for a stay of execution in the Rosenberg spy case
• And last, but by no means least, the extraordinary illustrated chemistry notebook of Maxfield Parrish while a student at Haverford in 1890.

The event by all counts was most satisfactory.

As mentioned last week, text from a letter in Special Collections is featured in the new film, Bright Star. Jane Campion’s period piece tells the story of the tragic love between sickly poet John Keats and fashionable girl-next-door Fanny Brawne.

Following the death of John Keats in Italy, Fanny Brawne spent several years in mourning, “wandering the Heath,” as the film tells us. But eventually she did marry, and she bore three children. She never told her husband of her relationship with John Keats, but she did keep his letters-over three dozen of them.

After both she and her husband had died, Fanny’s children decided to sell the letters at auction. The news of this sale shocked the literary world. The letters, of course, are intensely personal and many believed they showed the poet in a desperate and pitiful state. One commentator on the sale was none other than Oscar Wilde, who, one day before the auction, penned this sonnet:

On the sale by auction of Keats’ love-letters

These are the letters which Endymion wrote
To one he loved in secret, and apart.
And now the brawlers of the auction mart
Bargain and bid for each poor blotted note,
Ay! for each separate pulse of passion quote
The merchant’s price. I think they love not art
Who break the crystal of a poet’s heart
That small and sickly eyes may glare and gloat.

Is it not said that many years ago,
In a far Eastern town, some soldiers ran
With torches through the midnight, and began
To wrangle for mean raiment, and to throw
Dice for the garments of a wretched man,
Not knowing the God’s wonder, or His woe?

A first batch of letters was sold by Sotheby, Wilkinson & Hodge on March 2, 1885 and fetched a sum total of 543 pounds. While Oscar Wilde was offended by the sale the day before, he found it in him to attend the auction and purchased one of the letters himself.

In a future blog post, we will describe how our particular letter made its way from this auction to Haverford and we’ll present a facsimile of this most famous billets-doux.