No cookies this week but a little more on researching aspects of women’s lives–this time looking for Jane Austen in the college’s curriculum. Given that full coeducation came late to Davidson (unofficially co-eds have been on the scene since the 1850s, officially since the 1970s ), it would not be surprising to find women writers, including Austen, slow to appear on class reading lists.

A little searching turned up that should Davidson students in 1888 have made it to Chapter 6 “Our First Great Novelists” in their assigned textbook Nicoll’s Landmarks of English Literature, they would have encountered some faint praise of her work. Naming her “a greater novelist” than either Fanny Burney or Miss Edgeworth, Nicoll brief summary of her work concludes “In her chosen walk of fiction,  truthful pictures of the 0rdinary, middle-class society we see around us, Miss Austen has not equal; and the extent to which she succeeds in interesting us in her annals of humdrum, commonplace English life is the highest tribute to her genius.”

Title page for English textbook used in 1880s and 1890s.

English literature first invaded the classical curriculum of Davidson in the 1870s; John Milton and Francis Bacon opened the way to survey classes for prose and poetry; Shakespeare soon earned classes of his own.  By the 1930s, the English department had expanded sufficiently in number of faculty and course listings to provide students with deeper encounters with novelists.

1929 Catalog listing announcing the new course The English Novel to Hardy.

Changing course numbers and faculty (James Purcell succeeded William Cumming), the English Novel to Hardy remained a department fixture into the 1970s.  Purcell added to the number of women writers being taught with his Women in American Fiction course introduced in 1973. The course readings included both male and female writers while focusing on women as characters. Four years later, Assistant Professor Georgiana Ziegler offered a course focusing on women as writers.

1977 course description returning Austen to the classroom.

The course description identifying the instructor as “Miss Ziegler” was not a slight but a reflection of the era when all faculty were listed as Mr. or Miss. A decade later, Ziegler’s replacement in the course was Ms. Mills, who kept women writers before students into the 1990s.

Ziegler and students in an outdoor class session – perhaps discussing the English countryside of Austen

The British Novel returned to the curriculum by 2000 and in 2001-02 the list of advanced English seminars included ENG 472 Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy: Sex, Politics and the Novel.

In 2010, Austen jumped from the confines of English into Theatre with a production of Pride and Prejudice.

Playbill for fall 2010 production

This search for Austen was not exhaustive. Despite the best efforts of archivists to document curriculum, there are limitations.  At Davidson, we have a full run of catalogs which provide listings of course titles and brief descriptions but very few syllabi before 1994.  If the course listing doesn’t name an author, we can’t know for certain what was taught. Fortunately for this search, our catalogs are online and searchable. And another library has done the work of digitizing Nicoll’s Landmarks, giving us a way to look at what the students of the era saw.

We might have a notion of what students thought about Austen but the literary magazines of the day are not quite as accessible yet.  If the Davidson Monthly has articles on Austen, it will take a longer and slow search to find them!

Around the D is back!  A technical glitch kept us off-line for a week (but happily not one we caused.)  While we haven’t been blogging, we’ve been busy with student projects – focusing on scrapbooks.

Cover of Roy Perry’s scrapbook. He was a member of the class of 1916.

Archivists love them and hate them. On one hand scrapbooks can be wonderful documentation of an event, organization or even student life. On the other, they are a mass of glue, photographs, cut up original documents , pins, ribbons, and other odd bits. They can be difficult to store and preserve (all those odd bits falling out of place or photos sticking together). Digitizing them, which seems at first glance a good option, can be amazingly complicated.

Ribbons adorning invitations in Marshall Doggett’s (1922) scrapbook.

At Davidson, we mostly love them and have collected a wide variety. The oldest dates from 1898 and is a collection of cartoons related to the Spanish-American War and the most recent covers the Davidson Historical Society up to 2011.

Cutting photos into shapes isn’t a new phenomenon, Davidson students did in the 1920s.

In between, there are scrapbooks from student organizations – YMCA, Eumenean Society, fraternities and eating houses; from academic departments (Library, ROTC, Theatre); from local organizations (book clubs, DAR, church groups) and from alumni. The alumni ones date from 1908 to 1994 with the 1920s and 1930s being the prime scrapbooking eras for Davidson.

One of 2 scrapbooks from the Battle of Cowan’s Ford chapter of the DAR.

In the last 2 weeks, our scrapbooks have been coming off the shelf and into student hands. Students in Introduction to Digital Art, searched the scrapbooks for images to use in learning new techniques for manipulating photographs. The students in Digital History of American Knowledge used the same books – plus a few more – to practice their metadata skills. Metadata being the current term for cataloging and indexing – coming up with terms to describe items. They will be creating online exhibits around historical documents –moving history into the digital age.

2015 student with 1925 scrapbooks

More Art students will be using the scrapbooks for projects related to Digital Storytelling. In the coming weeks, as the projects for all these classes are completed, we’ll be sharing links to show how something old and can new again and why we keep making space for those messy, complicated and always fun scrapbooks.

The archives and special collections staff have previously written here in Around the D about our enthusiasm for and collaborations with the college’s budding Digital Studies initiative. At the end of 2013, Davidson was awarded an $800,000 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant in order to “create a curricular model of digital studies that can be replicated by other small liberal arts colleges.” According to the 2014 – 2015 College Catalog, Digital Studies at Davidson “gives students an opportunity to pursue coursework and research related to the digital tools, cultures, and practices that permeate everyday life” by focusing on three areas: digital creativity, digital culture, and digital methodology.

As we prepare to work with several digital studies and digitally-inflected courses this upcoming semester, we’d like to share a peek into the history of academic computing at Davidson. One of our volunteers in the archives, Loretta Wertheimer (mother of history professor John Wertheimer), came across this October 11, 1962 memorandum from President David Grier Martin (Class of 1932) to all faculty members as she worked on President Martin’s papers:

President D. Grier Martin’s 1962 memorandum on acquiring an IBM 1620 for academic use.

President Martin’s closing remark, “that computers will inevitably influence thinking in many fields and therefore it is highly desirable that Davidson students and faculty should have first hand experience with one,” seems particularly apt. We’re looking forward to another semester of the Davidson community experimenting and learning using our now numerous computers – just as we have been for over 50 years!