Propaganda posters have been somewhat of a sexy topic recently. Historians like Stefan Landsberger have written extensively about Chinese propaganda posters, noting that they were a central part of Communist party mass campaigns. They have also proven a fertile ground of inquiry for art historians who use the posters to gain some insight into the artistic demands that the party placed on the artists it sponsored. They have even gained some cachet among tourists and art collectors seeking to take home a piece of Communist paraphernalia; I myself bought a few in the old city district of Shanghai in 2008 when I was doing a film there. Can you spot the communist propaganda in my freshman year common room?

Less examined, however, are the posters and propaganda of the Republic of China period. This is for a few reasons: the mass campaigns of that period are more varied and scattered than the enormous nation-wide projects that the Communists launched. In addition, there is more variation in pre-1949 art. It is less easy to make the kind of sweeping conclusions about the relation of art and politics that were made easy by the universal dominance of Socialist Realism after they took control. I remember a talk by Dr. Ying Li (at a special collections exhibit no less), a Haverford professor of fine art, in which she recalled her own art education in Anhui province in the 1970s. As I recall from her talk, the party had artists brought in from the Soviet Union, and decided to establish Socialist Realism as the only legitimate (e.g. non-bourgeoisie) kind of art and certainly the only kind of art that would be used in official propaganda. Propaganda adopted the ubiquitous figures like the worker, the soldier, and the peasant whose facial features were largely institutional, not artistic.

While I was exploring the William Warder Cadbury collection, I came across a number of fascinating pre-communist propaganda posters. The posters addressed a huge diversity of topics and styles, a marked change from the regularity found in the communist posters I had had experience with. The artists who created these works were not all trained under the party line, but rather reflected a diversity of styles and training. Some, like this follow piece reminded me of Qing Dynasty style woodblock printing (caveat: I am no art historian; these are just sort of general observations).

Others, like the poster below use traditional Chinese iconography in ways that were never seen once Communists rule was established. Communists believed that Chinese culture was backwards and that “feudalistic” elements of their culture had to be purged. The poster below, issued by the Shanghai Worker’s Association, features a traditional Chinese demon figure labeled as “English Imperialism” throttling the lifeless body of the Chinese people.

These posters are really under-appreciated and offer a valuable look into the maelstrom that is the political and artistic landscape that is early 20th century China. Come by and check them out (they’re all in Box #71), and if I’m around I’ll be happy to give you mediocre translations of what’s going on in them.

Photo of Haviland Meeting House from "The American Friend" (First Month, 1897; p.79).

For the past few weeks, I have been scanning and cataloging pictures of meeting houses from all over the United States. Photographs, newspaper clippings, and post cards document the many variations of these buildings. Although they share the same function, meeting houses varied in their locations, materials, and styles.

The meeting houses that I have found were spread all over the country from Philadelphia to Seattle. Their locations in time varied too. The earliest I worked on was the High Street or Great Meeting House in Philadelphia from the 1690s!

Trying to find the histories for the meeting houses can be a daunting task, but it is very interesting to learn about how they evolved over time. Many meeting houses started out as log structures. As time passed, more permanent stone or brick structures replaced these earlier buildings.

A unique example of a more ephemeral meeting house is one in Kansas. Dating to 1885, the Haviland Friends Church started out as a building constructed of sod!

Buildings featured many different styles. Most of them were simple one or two-story buildings; however, there were some exceptions to the rule. There were several large Greek Revival buildings and a few that had Gothic details.

Working with these images has been really interesting so far. The most challenging ones are the unknown meeting houses, but it is fun to be a detective!

For more information and images of meeting houses, see Triptych.

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.

Hello, library fans!

Now that you’ve heard from Patrick a couple of times about our work with the William Warder Cadbury and Catharine Jones Cadbury papers, I thought I’d give you an idea of what goes on from my side of the desk.  While Patrick’s expertise is East Asian history, mine deals with the more technical aspect of processing a collection and creating a finding aid.  I’m pretty sure our pairing for the summer was somewhat orchestrated by the powers that be (i.e. the wonderful staff of Special Collections), whose mysterious ways I have always admired.

The last students to work on this project left us with a Microsoft Word document version of an almost-completed finding aid for the WWC collection.  At that point, we were not yet using Archivists’ Toolkit, which is an open-source archival data management program used to create finding aids. It has also been my best friend for the past year, since I’ve been using it to create (from scratch!) a finding aid for the Haverford College History Collection, a daunting yet wildly fascinating task.

In fact, much of what goes on in Special Collections on any given day can be described as “daunting yet wildly fascinating,” but usually it’s more of the latter and less of the former. This holds true for the WWC collection, which, at first glance, looks like an amassing of letters, photographs, and pamphlets.  But as you get to know the collection, you realize that, yes, it is many decades’ worth of papers, but it tells a story rife with history, and breathes life back into what most of us only read about in textbooks.

As you might have noticed from Patrick’s blog posts, some of the seemingly most pedestrian details can be of significant importance to a researcher.  It is our job to make those details available for potential researchers, giving the pedestrian a chance to become paramount. Less poetically, our job is to use Archivists’ Toolkit to create a finding aid that can be posted online, and easily found by a Google search. This required first that we be trained in AT through a boot camp led by Holly Mengel and Courtney Smertz, who are currently part of the team that is working on the PACSCL’s “Hidden Collections” project. Having worked with AT before, I felt at ease with most of what Holly taught us, but she was still able to teach me a few tricks that make inputting data considerably easier and faster (rapid data entry, anyone?).

We hope to finish processing the last few boxes and be able to complete a finding aid for this collection by the end of the summer. We will continue blogging about our progress along the way, so stay tuned!

Questions or comments about the project can be emailed to me (dbailey@haverford.edu) or Special Collections (hc-special@haverford.edu).

-Deanna

This past weekend was Alumni weekend, and the campus was filled with alumni remembering their college days.  Among other things, there was an art exhibit in the campus center, a luncheon for alumni and crafty students who found their way in, and a bunch of other social events.  Special Collections also set up an exhibit for anyone interested in visiting that included a little something from the collections that students have been working on.  I selected the following very nifty document from the Cadbury collection along with the following description:

The William Warder Cadbury and Catharine J. Cadbury Collection

William Warder Cadbury was a Quaker medical missionary who, along with his wife Catharine, spent forty years in China between 1909 and 1949. While in China he was the superintendent of the Canton Pok Sai Hospital, a professor at Lingnan University, and the Canton Chairman of the International Red Cross. Cadbury witnessed and worked against the violent effects of two revolutions, a civil war, and Japanese invasion. This document, preserved in Cadbury’s papers, provides interesting insight into the geopolitical forces at work in the Japanese invasion and the lives that foreigners in occupied China lived. The Battle of Shanghai was one of the first large scale battles of the war, and represented a hope on the part of Chinese Generalissimo Chiang-Kai-Shek that foreign powers would intervene to prevent Japanese aggression. This hope was not fulfilled until much later, and upon taking control of the city the Japanese army tried to mollify those living in the international settlement while still projecting a sense of Japanese prestige and superiority. The measures in this document such as the imposed discount in foodstuffs, the promise of 2 free liters of sake per day to those who would toast the emperor, and the cryptic promise that “all single men will be supplied with mates” represent a part this effort.

I though the last section of this document that contained the measures catering to foreigners was especially interesting, especially the part of it that contained possible sexual undertones. The sexual politics of war is an especially hot topic in reference to the Japanese during World War II, especially with the increasing awareness of the comfort women. Comfort women were women, often Korean, who were forced to perform sexual services to Japanese soldiers during the war. Is Nei San (a bastardization of the Japanese word for older sister) a reference to comfort women? Is it just a reference to employing maid servants that was poorly translated or is only understood to be sexual because of a naturally anachronistic reading? Regardless, this document provides a unique look into Japanese military politics and the mechanics of occupation.

More about the cool stuff from Alumni weekend in my next post. I really enjoy blogging.

Summer students, interns, and staff take a workshop on using "Archivist's Toolkit" from PACSCL archivist Holly Mengel

Summer is a special time in Special Collections.  Gone are the regular Haverford student and faculty researchers that we work with during the school year.  And instead we keep busy with a steady stream of visitors, including faculty and graduate students from other institutions. And we’ll soon be welcoming a group of Gest Fellows to study in the Quaker Collection.  It’s also a time when we employ a team of student assistants to do intensive work on a variety of special projects we don’t usually have time for during the school year.  This summer we have a terrific team of seven students.  Together they work about 245 hours a week, and it’s always exciting to see how much gets accomplished during this time.  Our students this summer are working on several projects: Deanna Bailey and Patrick Lozada are processing papers from the William Warder Cadbury and Catharine J. Cadbury papers; Janela Harris and Jon Sweitzer-Lamme are processing the Morris-Shinn-Maier Collection; Christina Hurley is working on the Meeting House digitization project; Abdullah Ali Khan is working on the Friendly Association records conservation and digitization project; and Karl Moll is our “jack-of-all-trades,” helping out with a number of projects including our Online Finding Aids and learning the ropes of processing College Archives materials. Like summers past, they will be meeting regularly with Professor Emma Lapsansky to discuss the historical aspects of their work.  New this summer, they will be posting regularly on this New and Noteworthy blog (some have already started!) to tell you, dear reader, about their work as they go along.  Comments are open on the blog, so we invite you to join in the conversation!

I just started my work on the William Warder Cadbury papers, and in order to be able to work with the collection effectively I have been taking some time to do background reading on Cadbury’s work in Canton.  William Cadbury spent around forty years in Canton as a medical missionary chiefly working at Lingnan University and at the Boji (Pok Sai in Cantonese) hospital there.  To celebrate that institution’s centennial, Cadbury along with Mary Hoxie Jones wrote a book entitled At the Point of a Lancet: One Hundred Years of the Canton Hospital 1835-1935. This book is a valuable insight into one of the most interesting eras in Chinese history.  For better or for worse (the Chinese refer to these years as the 100 years of humiliation), the second half of the 19^th century and the first half of the 20^th century were some of the most transformative in Chinese history.  No social, economic, or political institutions was left untouched by the changes wrought through western influence in China, and the Canton hospital played an essential role in this process.

The Canton Hospital was founded in 1835 by a young missionary named Peter Parker.  After being bitten by a radioactive spider, [1] Parker travelled to China in 1834 to preach the gospel.

Dr. Parker Getting Ready for Surgery

Dr. Peter Parker

Parker believed that by serving the medical needs of the Chinese people he would be able to minister to their spiritual ones as well.  At this time, Westerners were believed to be “foreign devils” （番鬼）and  “barbarians” （夷）；their movements were strictly limited by the government. Parker and the other physicians and surgeons who would follow after him would help to change this impression, if only by degrees.  The early Canton hospital treated patients free of charge and was enormously effective especially in treating patients who required surgery, an art almost unheard of in China.  The young Dr. Parker saw as many as 600 patients a day and performed countless operations, crediting God for his skill and refusing rewards or payments.[2] His efforts were enormously effective, and the hospital grew spreading goodwill as well as the gospel among a population initially resistant to the “barbarian” faith.    No less a historian than Jonathan Spence wrote that, “it was the medical missionaries who had the greatest early success in gaining converts.”  Dr. Cadbury agreed with Spence (60 years before Spence too) quoting another source wrote that Dr. Parker, “opened the gates of China at the point of a lancet when the European cannon could not open it a single bar.”

Cadbury writes with a reverential and admiring about Dr. Parker’s work.  He clearly admired Dr. Parker and his dream of conversion not through coercion but through living life as a testament to God.  Charity and good works were at the center of both of these men’s vision of Christian mission work.  Cadbury helped to carry on Dr. Parker’s dream as he help steward the hospital through two revolutions, warlord rule, and Japanese occupation.   I’m looking forward to delving further in to Cadbury’s time at the hospital and learning more.

Patrick Lozada

Library Assistant

[2] Cadbury, 47

Yesterday, I came across a box of Anna Morris Shinn Maier’s personal books. They are mostly diaries from her adult life, but included in the box were a guest book, and autograph book, and two sketchbooks, as well as an assortment of “Cookery Cards.” While the sketchbooks are largely blank, they are interesting because the pages Anna did fill hold careful sketches that are simple yet charming. 
Most of the drawings are pen and ink images of scenery; mountains,  trees, and lakes. I was curious about the forest-like setting  of the sketches, which were initialed “A.M.S.,” (Anna before she married Paul D.I. Maier), and dated. I spent a little time investigating the diaries in the box, found the year, 1896, and read several of the August entries. There, Anna wrote about a trip that she took with a number of family members and friends. Thanks to Anna’s detailed diary accounts,  I now know that their weather was nice and clear, even “splendid” on the third day. For five days, the party spent their time together or in groups, walking the mountains and boating. Anna recorded that she enjoyed spending a lot of time with “Nancy,” and when the others went fishing, she preferred to sit on the shore and read or draw.
Reading these accounts of what sounds like a delightful trip makes me simultaneously remember summer trips I’ve been on in the past, and muse about the possibility of someone else skimming one of my journals in the future, looking for clues to what my life is like now.

For more information on this (or other) collections, please feel free to come in to Special Collections, or email hc-special@haverford.edu.

Today marks my completion of going through half of all the links in the finding aid for Special Collections. This means that I have read the descriptions of, and checked the links for, HALF of all the collections in Special Collections. That is a lot of collections. And I have to say, there is some really interesting material in here. For instance, in the ” Baltimore Monthly Meeting Homewood records,” there are signed letters by Abraham Lincoln! Then, there are pictures of William Lloyd Garrison, noted abolitionist and newspaper editor, in the “Friends Historical Association” collection. Add to that documents from 1 A.D. (“Dean Putnam Lockwood”), correspondence with John Updike (“John R. Hawkins”), letters from Alexander Graham Bell (“Edward Drinker Cope”), documents from William Penn (“William Penn papers”), hundreds of recordings of concerts by Haverford students, faculty and others (“John Davison papers”), and a sampling of letters by U.S. Presidents (“William Pyle Phillips collection”)! And those are just the things that immediately jumped out at me! There are definitely some major gems for the curious explorer to find here. If one is interested in people standing up for there beliefs, there are multiple mentions of a Thomas Story (1670?-1742) who was a former fencer and musician turned Quaker, a friend of William Penn, discussed Quakerism with Tsar Peter the Great,and was arrested for preaching Quaker faith in Kilkenny (the warrant for his arrest is in the “British Friends’ letters”). For those interested in the history of the library, there are the “James Phineas Magill papers” (after whom our library is named) and the “Michael S. Freeman papers” (who was a major proponent of Tri-Co library cooperation). If your fancy is more American history, I would direct you to the “John Ewer letters” which are from one merchant to another regarding the early signs of the American Revolution.

If you aren’t necessarily interested in the above topics, but you are colored intrigued, you can always check out the Finding Aid (which I would generally recommend!). I’ve been working here for a semester, and I didn’t have any idea that this was all here. This leads me to believe that most of the college doesn’t even know what awesome resources are back here. So come check it out!

If you have any questions, you could email me at kmoll@haverford.edu, or, if you want the good help, email Haverford College Special Collections at hc-special@haverford.edu.

Margaret Abruzzo’s book, Polemical Pain : Slavery, Cruelty and the Rise of Humanism, has just been released by Johns Hopkins University Press. The author discusses the development of humanitarianism and how the slavery issue helped to shape modern concepts of human responsibility for the suffering of others.

Abruzzo was a Haverford Gest Scholar in 2003 and spent four weeks in Special Collections conducting research on this topic. She graciously acknowledges the help of Haverford and the staff of Special Collection in this, her latest, publication.

In 2003 Abruzzo was just starting her research for her dissertation at the University of Notre Dame in History. At the time of her residency at Special Collections she focused her work on examining the place of pain in the rhetoric of slavery, public and private and was interested in comparing Quaker anti-slavery writings to proslavery proponents. Her time was well spent at Haverford and later she wrote, “I had an extremely productive time at Haverford, in large part because of your expertise.”

In 2004 Margaret Abruzzo won a Charlotte W. Newcombe Fellowship awarded to doctoral students whose study will advance scholarship related to ethics and religion. This honor allowed her to continue her research full time and to complete her dissertation in 2005. Today Abruzzo is an assistant professor of history at the University of Alabama.