Current Exhibit at Hatcher Graduate Library: 200 Years of Cookies

The Clements Library and the Hatcher Graduate Library present an exhibit giving an overview of the history of cookies in "200 Years of Cookies." The exhibit showcases cookbooks from both collections, as well as 19th century American cookie cutters and cookie molds from the Clements.

The exhibit is now open in Hatcher's North lobby and Gallery, and will be there through January 15th.

The history of cookies is probably impossible to trace back to its beginnings. The Roman writer Apicius gives a description of a wheaten paste that was cooked, cooled, and fried, then served with honey and pepper. This technique was used in the Middle Ages to make small sweetened biscuits called cracknels, which continued to be made into the 19th century. Another early form of cookie was sweetened and spiced dough made up into as flat gingerbread cakes, often decorated or baked in elaborate forms such as those pictured in these cases. Traditional forms of gingerbread and its relatives lebkuchen and leckerli are still made for festivals in northern European countries, notably Germany and Switzerland.

The books and recipes shown in this exhibit follow the career of cookies through 200 years of publication, beginning with recipes dating from 1805 with The art of cookery made plain and easy (the 1st American imprint of a work originally published in London in 1747) and continuing to cookbooks of the present day, all drawn from the collections of Hatcher Library and the Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive at the William L. Clements Library.

National Letter Writing Day: The Lost Art of the Handwritten Letter

While the origins of this obscure December 7 holiday are unclear, the tradition of having letter-writing days can be traced back to a time when handwritten letters were the most common form of communication. Before the invention of the telegraph, the typewriter, or the computer, handwritten letters were both an art form and an essential part of everyday business. To illustrate this history, we present the following examples from the Book and Manuscript Divisions of the Clements Library.

Numerous books offered advice on the etiquette of writing letters, improving one's penmanship, and using handwriting analysis to learn about a person's character.

The universal letter-writer; or, Whole art of polite correspondence: containing a great variety of plain, easy, entertaining, and familiar original letters, adapted to every age... (1808)

Image caption: "MINERVA Recommending YOUTH of BOTH SEXES to acquire a knowledge of Writing Letters on the various Occurrences of Life, while Genius attends with a Crown of Laurel, and Ignorance, ashamed of being seen, is trampled under foot."

Etiquette books like this one provided aspiring letter-writers with samples of letters to write for every occasion. This particular book includes such varied and useful examples as "From a young Gentleman to his Father claiming a promised Increase of Allowance," "From a Gentleman to a young Lady of superior Fortune," "From a Gentleman, who had long neglected a Correspondence to his Friend," and "An ironical Letter to a Slanderer."

If you would like to know how to properly issue a challenge for a duel, see page 120:

"Sir,
The epithets which you were pleased to bestow upon my late conduct, being, in my opinion, illiberal and impertinent, I demand that satisfaction due to injured honor, -- and, therefore, insist upon your meeting me tomorrow, with whatever friend you may think proper, in order to settle this business according to the laws of honor.

I am, Sir,
Your humble servant."

Dean's analytical guide, to the art of penmanship (1805)

This book by Henry Dean offered, according to the title page, "a variety of plates in which are exhibited a complete system of practical penmanship made easy and attainable in much less time and greater perfection than by any other method in present use."

The ornamental flourishes on the title page attest to the author's own skill and dexterity. Good penmanship was an important consideration at this time for many people. It was an essential skill for aspiring businessmen to enter the world of commerce. Women of leisure were expected to develop a more delicate, feminine style of handwriting for social correspondence. Gentlemen of higher status, by contrast, sometimes affected an illegible scrawl to show that they did not have to work for a living.

Handwritten letters make up a large part of the manuscript collections at the Clements Library. Courtship letters, letters home from soldiers on the battlefront, business letters, and many other types of correspondence found in these collections can provide a glimpse into people's lives in the past. These three examples illustrate the great variety of handwriting that can be found in such collections.

Platt R. Spencer to Victor Rice. January 31, 1848.

In the 1840s, Platt Rogers Spencer (1800-1864) and Victor M. Rice (1818-1869) developed a system of cursive handwriting, to facilitate the quick and legible authorship of letters and documents (for business and personal use). The Clements Library's Victor M. Rice papers contain around 380 incoming letters to Mr. Rice, including a large selection of Platt Spencer's correspondence. In the decades following their initial 1848 publications, "Spencerian penmanship" was integrated into schools across the country.

George Manor Davis Bloss manuscript. Unknown date.

This manuscript, written by George M.D. Bloss (1827-1876), lawyer, editor of the Cincinnati Enquirer, and Democratic political writer, shows the importance of penmanship by negative example. So poor was his handwriting that only one compositor at his Cincinnati office was supposed to have been able to read it - and this employee was apparently retained for that purpose.

Sargeant and Martha Beach to Reverend Joseph P. Fessenden. September 29, 1838.

This image shows part of the first page of an extensive letter respecting a family move from Bridgton, Maine, to Sharon Centre, Ohio, jointly written by Sargeant and Martha Beach.

Cross-writing was a letter-writing technique employed to conserve space on costly paper and to minimize postal fees. The writer or writers would fill their paper, then return to the first page and continue by writing over the original text at a 90 degree angle. The practice was generally disliked for the difficulties it posed for the recipient, as cleverly noted by Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) in his 1888 booklet Eight or Nine Wise Words About Letter Writing: "When you get to the end of a note-sheet, and find you have more to say, take another piece of paper – a whole sheet, or a scrap, as the case may demand; but, whatever you do, don't cross! Remember the old proverb, 'Cross-writing makes cross reading.'"

If these examples from the Clements Library collections have inspired you, consider writing a letter to someone today to celebrate this little-known holiday. Even in the age of electronic communication, sometimes a handwritten letter still says it best.

Today in History: Thanksgiving during the Civil War, November 24, 1864

Although we traditionally trace the origins of this holiday to the Pilgrims' first Thanksgiving celebration in 1621, it did not become an annual celebration in the United States until 1863 and a federal holiday in 1941. In the colonial era, days of thanksgiving were designated throughout the year by individual colonies as a time for prayer and fasting. After the Revolutionary War, Thanksgiving days were occasionally proclaimed by American presidents or governors of individual states. During the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation on October 3, 1863, proclaiming a national Thanksgiving to be celebrated on the last Thursday of November.

The Clements Library collections include a wide array of materials related to Thanksgiving in American history, beginning with early colonial observances and continuing through the 19th century. To offer a glimpse of these rich holdings, the following items from the collection all describe a single date: Thanksgiving, November 24, 1864. Through printed materials and manuscripts centering on this particular date, we can see how Americans experienced this holiday in the midst of the Civil War.

The Union League Club's "Report of the committee on providing a Thanksgiving Dinner for the soldiers and sailors, presented December 14th, 1864." Includes copies of correspondence among the organizers, a description of the event, lists of those who contributed money or food for the dinner, and a summary of the expenses ($57,102.33).

During the Civil War, the Union League Club of New York determined to provide a Thanksgiving dinner to every soldier and sailor in the Union Army on November 24, 1864. They solicited donations from Northern citizens and distributed shipments of food for the dinner to as many of the army regiments and navy vessels as they could reach. The main challenges were to organize the donations pouring in from every Northern state, and keep the food from spoiling during transport by ship or railway to the different encampments. It was estimated that at least 373,586 lbs. of poultry was provided for the occasion, in addition to "an enormous quantity of cakes, doughnuts, gingerbread, pickles, preserved fruits, apples, vegetables, and all the other things which go to make up a Northern Thanksgiving Dinner." The organizers declared the effort a "grand success."

Benjamin C. Lincoln to Dora F. Lincoln, November 26, 1864

Writing to his wife from his post in Key West, Florida, during the Civil War, Benjamin Lincoln described the Thanksgiving dinner he had on the 24th. At that time, Benjamin Lincoln was a major with the 2nd United States Infantry Regiment (Colored).

"Thanksgiving night we had a first rate supper which Mrs. French & Weeks prepared. Some most excellent cakes and other things which I did not think possible to manufacture on this Island. We had a very pleasant time after supper all our officers were together and had a social chat.

I wished you were here but then wishes did not bring you, so I shall have to remain content until you can come, whenever that happy event may be."

On the same day, at the Second Presbyterian Church, Brooklyn, New York, the Rev. N. West delivered a sermon titled "Victory and Gratitude. A Thanksgiving Discourse." His was one of many Thanksgiving sermons delivered on November 24, 1864. The Clements Library has an extensive collection of American sermons, of which there are several hundred such Thanksgiving day addresses, dating from 1690 to the end of the 19th century.

From the Stacks: Two Hollow Books

In the Clements Library book collection, one small shelf of books has the call number "Curiosa." Here may be found oddities that fit nowhere else in the collection, including these two hollowed-out books. The smaller one is the Oeuvres choisies de Bossuet, volume 24 (1824), and the larger one is the Historie ecclesiastique par Monsieur l'Abbe Fleury, volume 1 of 20 (1722). Books like these provide an intriguing glimpse into the history of the book as an artifact. While most books are intended to be read, people have also used them for many other purposes such as decoration, furniture, or even storage.

Such book boxes, also known as "book safes," have a long history of use. They have been used to hide valuables from theft, smuggle weapons, drugs, and other contraband, and camouflage recording equipment and explosive devices. When backgammon was banned in England during the time of Henry VIII and all backgammon boards were ordered to be burned, people crafted them inside hollow books to conceal them. Hollow books were used during Prohibition to smuggle bottles of alcohol. Hiding an object in a book is also a popular plot device in fiction and film, including the movies From Russia with Love, The Shawshank Redemption, and The Matrix.

These book boxes were made by gluing the pages together, then cutting out the center of the text block and lining the interior. While hollow books may be considered delightful curiosities or useful hiding places by many, some book lovers can only regard the destruction of the book itself with horror. In The Anatomy of Bibliomania (2001), Holbrook Jackson eloquently writes:

"But what shall we say of those ghouls, chiefly in France, who scour the auction rooms, the booksellers' shops and the stalls, for choice and ancient bindings which they turn into boxes by gluing the pages together, cutting out the type area, and so translating books into receptacles for cigarettes, cigars, liqueurs, jewels, chocolates, bon-bons, or note-paper? And what of those who encourage this ghoulish trade? They are no better than body-snatchers, desecrators of the temple, vain, tawdry, callous, whether sellers of such monuments of destruction or buyers of them, biblioclasts and dolts to boot, necrophils of a sort..."

A typewritten note inside the Histoire ecclesiastique, presumably written by a past book curator at the Clements Library, reads, "This shell, once a book, is not placed here as a curiosity, but as a shameful example. The existence of this kind of thing is the reason some people may not share in the joys of this library."

If you want to try this at home, please don't use a library book. Better yet, create a faux book by decorating a box to look like a book. Almost as good, but without the guilt, and then you can have fun making up imaginary titles to use for your faux book collection. Charles Dickens had a collection of such books, with entertaining titles like The Corn Question by John Bunyan, Dr. Kitchener's Life of Captain Cook, and Mr. J. Horner on Poets' Corner. Another fake library, described by Aldous Huxley, included such titles as Biography of Men who were Born Great, Biography of Men who Achieved Greatness, Biography of Men who had Greatness thrust upon Them, and Biography of Men who were Never Great at All.

Playing Ball with Legends: An Afternoon with Don Lund, Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Tuesday, November 17, 2009, 4:00 p.m.
in the Main Room of the Clements Library
909 S. University Ave., Ann Arbor, MI 48109

Enjoy never-before published personal stories about famous sports legends.

Please join us to hear noted local businessman Jim Irwin and legendary University of Michigan athlete Don Lund. Jim will be discussing his new book, Playing Ball with Legends: The Story and the Stories of Don Lund. This is an exciting biographical look at one of Michigan’s most talented and honored athletes.

Don Lund is the winner of 9 varsity letters at UM, a member of the University of Michigan Hall of Honor and the Michigan Sports Hall of Fame and a Major League baseball player. He will speak about his years as an athlete and a coach with the University of Michigan and his career as a Major League baseball player. Don is admired by thousands and this will be an entertaining and interesting look at his career.

This event is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served. For additional information, please contact the Clements Library at (734) 764-2347 or clements.library@umich.edu.

An Exhibition and Symposium: "Reframing the Color Line: Race and the Visual Culture of the Atlantic World"

Exhibit dates: October 19, 2009 - February 19, 2010
Exhibit location: William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan
Curated by Martha S. Jones, Associate Professor of History and Afroamerican and African Studies, University of Michigan, and Clayton Lewis, Curator of Graphics, Clements Library.

Symposium dates: October 30, 31, 2009
Symposium location: 1014 Tisch Hall, 435 S. State St., University of Michigan, Department of History

The William L. Clements Library presents "Reframing the Color Line: Race and the Visual Culture of the Atlantic World." This exhibition and symposium explore the origins of American racism in visual culture by examining original 19th century engravings, lithographs, watercolors, and books. Through an interdisciplinary approach, "Reframing the Color Line" explores the interplay between visual culture and U.S. race politics of the early nineteenth century. Visitors will come away with a better understanding of racism's past. They will also acquire a new, critical vantage point on how race continues to be constructed by the visual culture of today. Many images we confront in our everyday lives have long histories that imbue them with social meanings.

"Reframing the Color Line" centers on the work of Philadelphia artist Edward W. Clay. The artist’s most notorious series, "Life in Philadelphi"” was published in the late 1820s. Clay deployed caricature to pose questions about who African Americans, many of them former slaves, could be in a nation that relied upon race and slavery to signal inequality and difference. Clay invented black figures that uttered malapropisms, wore clothing of exaggerated proportions, struck ungraceful poses, and thereby failed to measure up to the demands of freedom and citizenship. His ideas were cruel, yet enduring.

The Exhibition reframes "Life in Philadelphia" in two new contexts. The series was influenced by parallel developments in Europe’s visual culture. The exhibition contrasts the series with the work of British and French caricaturists and reveals the trans-Atlantic roots of racism in visual culture. "Life in Philadelphia" also had a local context. In Philadelphia, Clay was only one of numerous artists to portray African Americans. Others, including Patrick Reason, Charles Willson Peale, James Akin, and John Lewis Krimmel, portrayed black Philadelphians as respectable, sympathetic and at times unremarkable figures on the urban landscape.

Visitors will be challenged to consider how these works, which drew upon well-established, fine arts techniques, also perpetuated derogatory ideas. The core materials are as provocative as they are important. Great care has been taken to ensure that their presentation teaches about their origins and meanings, while never perpetuating the pernicious stereotypes they contain. To meet this challenge, an interdisciplinary team from university programs in History, Museum Studies, American Culture, History of Art, and Afroamerican Studies has advised the production of this project. This exhibit will appeal to scholars, students, and members of the general public who have an interest in American history and culture, art history, ethnic studies, and graphic satire.

The symposium, scheduled for October 30, 31, 2009, will discuss issues related to race and 19th century visual culture, and the role of archives and museums in the construction of historical memory. The symposium panelists are:

Corey Capers, University of Illinois, Chicago.
Jasmine Cobb, University of Pennsylvania.
Erica Armstrong Dunbar, University of Delaware.
Martha S. Jones, University of Michigan.
Phillip Lapsansky, Library Company of Philadelphia.
Elise Lemire, SUNY Purchase.
Clayton Lewis, Clements Library, University of Michigan.
Samuel Otter, University of California, Berkeley.

The symposium events will be held at Tisch Hall on the University of Michigan central
campus and will be free and open to university faculty, students, and the public. There
will be a reception at the Clements from 4:30 - 6:00 pm on Friday October 30.
Symposium email contact: reframingthecolorline@umich.edu

SYMPOSIUM SCHEDULE

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 30. 1:00 P.M. – 4:30 P.M.
HISTORY DEPARTMENT, 1014 TISCH HALL.

PANEL I. PARODY AND PUBLIC CULTURE.

Samuel Otter. University of California, Berkeley. Department of English.
'Have You Any Flesh Coloured Silk Stockings?' : Re-Viewing Edward W. Clay's 'Life in Philadelphia.'

Corey Capers. University of Illinois, Chicago. Department of History.
Reading Bobalition: Toward a Genealogy of Satiric Public Blackness.

PANEL II. SEEING GENDER AND SEXUALITY.

Erica Armstrong Dunbar. University of Delaware. Department of History and Black American Studies Program.
Reading, Writing, and Womanhood: Representations of African American Women in the Antebellum City.

Elise Lemire. SUNY at Purchase. Department of Literature.
Edward Clay's "Practical Amalgamation" Series.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 30. 4:30 – 6:00 P.M.
CLEMENTS LIBRARY.

RECEPTION AND VIEWING OF REFRAMING THE COLOR LINE.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 31. 9:30 A.M. – 1:00 P.M.
HISTORY DEPARTMENT, 1014 TISCH HALL.

PANEL III. TRANS-ATLANTIC MIGRATIONS.

Jasmine Nicole Cobb. University of Pennsylvania. Annenberg School for Communications.
Race in the Trans-Atlantic Parlor: Diffusions of "Life in Philadelphia."

Martha S. Jones. University of Michigan. Department of History, Center for Afroamerican and African Studies, and Law School.
Trans-Atlantic Visions: The Case of Haiti's Faustin Soulouque.

PANEL IV. CURATOR’S ROUNDTABLE: ARCHIVING RACE AND VISUAL CULTURE.

Phil Lapsansky, Curator of African American History, Library Company of Philadelphia.

Clayton Lewis. Curator of Graphic Materials, William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan.

SPEAKERS

COREY CAPERS teaches Early American History and African American Studies from the Seventeenth to the mid-Nineteenth Century. Among the courses he has recently taught are: Ritual, Print and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Anglo-America; Authority, Resistance and Power in Early America; Black Lives in Revolution; and A History of Punishment: From Early Modern Europe to the Nineteenth-Century U.S. His primary areas of interest are in racial practice, print culture and citizenship during the Revolution and Early Republic as reflected in his dissertation, Black Voices/White Print: Race-making, Print Politics and the Rhetoric of Disorder in the Early National U.S. North. He is currently working on his book project entitled Public Blackness: Racial Practice, Publicity and Citizenship in the U.S. North, 1776 - 1828 as well an article entitled "Reading Bobalition: Racial Publicity and the Shaping of Democratic Order, 1816 - 1834."

JASMINE NICHOLE COBB is a doctoral candidate in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation, "Racing the Trans-Atlantic Parlor," considers representations of Black women in popular culture of the early nineteenth century. More broadly, her writing and research focuses on race, gender, and visual culture.

ERICA ARMSTRONG DUNBAR specializes in 19th century African American and Women's History. She received her B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1994 and her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2000. Her first book is entitled: A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City (Yale University Press, 2008). She is currently working on her next book length project that focuses on African Americans and mental illness in the 19th century.

MARTHA S. JONES is Associate Professor of History and Afroamerican Studies, and Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Jones is the author of All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830-1900 (2007), which examines nineteenth-century debates over the rights of women. She directs the Law and Slavery and Freedom Project, an international research collaborative with Rebecca J. Scott (Michigan) and Jean Hébrard (EHESS). Her current book length project is Overturning Dred Scott: Everyday Life at the Intersection of Race and Law in an Antebellum City. Jones is co-curator of the exhibition "Reframing the Color Line," with Clayton Lewis of the Clements Library.

ELISE LEMIRE is the author of two books on race in the antebellum Northeast. "Miscegenation": Making Race in America, originally published in 2002, was recently reissued in paperback by the University of Pennsylvania Press. Black Walden: Slavery and Its Aftermath in Concord, Massachusetts was published this past spring, also by the University of Pennsylvania Press. She is the recipient of several fellowships, including two year-long fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Educated at Yale and Rutgers and now Associate Professor of Literature at SUNY Purchase, Dr. Lemire is currently working on a book about the largest mass arrest in Massachusetts history, which took place when Vietnam Veterans Against the War attempted to camp on the Lexington Battle Green.

SAMUEL OTTER has taught in the English Department at the University of California at Berkeley since 1990. His research and teaching focus on nineteenth-century United States literatures. He is particularly interested in the relationships between literature and history, the varieties of literary excess, and the ways in which close reading also can be deep and wide. He has published Melville's Anatomies (1999), in which he analyzes Melville's concern with how meanings, particularly racial meanings, have been invested in and abstracted from human bodies. He recently finished a book entitled Philadelphia Stories, in which he examines the narratives about race, character, manners, violence, and freedom that unfold across a range of texts written in and about Philadelphia between 1790 and 1860.

Clements on the Air: 1949 Radio Show Featured Dramatizations of Library Materials

Did you know the Clements Library had a radio program in 1949? "Treasures Off the Shelf" was a 13-episode show on the Michigan radio station WUOM that featured dramatizations of materials from the collection. The subjects of the episodes were:

1. Columbus returns to Spain & reports to the King and Queen
2. Benedict Arnold offers West Point to the British
3. Washington plans to trap Cornwallis at Yorktown
   
4. Invasion from the north! General Burgoyne at Saratoga
   
5. Sebastian Cabot in England
6. Captain Thomas Morris prevents a second Pontiac War
7. The Declaration of Independence is delivered to George III
8. The siege of Fort Detroit, 1763
9. Valley Forge, winter of 1777-78
10. Battle of Quebec & death of General Wolfe
11. The preliminaries at Yorktown
12. Thomas Paine and the Battle for Trenton
13. The surrender at Yorktown
    

Each episode focused on a document or book from the Clements Library and recreated the historical events surrounding it. The scripts were written by William Bender of WUOM, in cooperation with Clements Library staff, and read by actors recruited from the University of Michigan campus. Each Thursday evening the shows were recorded in front of audiences at the WUOM studios.

Highlights of the transcripts include this imagined conversation between William L. Clements and a book dealer:

Clements: Is that what I think it is?

Quaritch: The “Columbus Letter.” Printed in 1493 by Stevan Plaanck.

Clements: I am definitely interested.

Quaritch: Splendid. I have it right over here.

The transcripts and other materials from this radio show have been archived by the Bentley Historical Library in the records of the WUOM radio station. The collection includes a sound recording of episode 8, "The Long Siege," based on the diary of Jehu Hay.

No recordings of the other episodes are known to have survived. In 1950, tape copies were distributed to schools by the Audio-Visual Education Center at the University of Michigan. If you have any information about their whereabouts, please leave a comment on this post to let us know.

Citation: WUOM Records, 1914-1982, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.