Allan Appel photo
Please give your whip to the attendant. For god’s sake, don’t spit on the floor of the art gallery. Oh, and isn’t it about time someone installed a suitable women’s bathroom in the medical school?
Those reasonable requests are tidbits from the documentary history of Yale College and Yale’s Medical School, from 1867 and 1920 respectively. They emerge in a tasty tour down Yale’s memory lane.
The documents — photographs, facsimiles along with some originals of school notebooks, and other paper ephemera, along with a few objects — are part of Celebrating Yale History In Manuscripts and Archives, a new exhibition in the memorabilia room of Yale University’s Sterling Library, right off the Wall Street entrance.
For the last three years, Bill Landis, the Archives and Manuscripts division’s head of public service, has put up a small show “of visual interest to [incoming] students when they come back to campus.”
Likening the selection process to opening the family’s treasure chest or taking items from the family album, Landis has filled the room’s 14 small vitrines. There are graduation programs or certificates from 1718, a wonderful photograph of the six sets of twins in the incoming freshman class of 1956, and a photo of a shantytown erected on Beinecke Plaza as part of the student anti-apartheid protest movement.
I actually came to the exhibition on hunt for some John Calhoun (class of 1804) historical materials that might give some context to the ongoing controversy and issues surrounding Corey Menafee’s shattering of slave images on the windows of Calhoun College’s dining hall.
I didn’t find any. Landis says that student records, tests, and other materials from those early years were haphazardly kept.
Nor did I find, as was suggested in the abstract of the show, the actual minutes of 1701 when seven of Yale’s ten founding ministers sat down to found the school.
Still, I wasn’t at all disappointed. I enjoyed poring over the class notes of student Roger Sherman Baldwin; in this particular class he was taking notes on a lecture given by Timothy Dwight, professor and president of Yale College. His notes on the subject being taught surround quite an accomplished caricature of Dwight. He must have been pretty bored in class back in 1810. About 20 years later, he would become the Amistad captives’ attorney. If you enjoy learning that, then this show is for you.
If you take the time carefully to read through the manuscripts and other materials, you’ll be rewarded by many such details that magically time-travel you to where you can see, feel, and hear the details of daily life, which are not so different from our own experiences.
One of my favorites is a 1760 letter sent to Yale students by the president and powers that be. It seems the teachers were upset with students picking up and leaving at all times during the year, resulting in the parents contesting paying full tuition.
The students had to stay for the full course of study, it was determined. If parents sent a horse, there had to be a written explanation for why the young scholar was to be sent home.
As curator, Landis has taken pains to also have vitrines dedicated to Reverend Henry Roe Cloud, the first “full blooded Native American” to graduate from the college, and to the art historian Sylvia Arden Boone, the first African-American woman to receive tenure at Yale.
One of the accidental ironies of the exhibition is that Boone’s area of expertise was African art, and particular notions of aesthetic beauty among the Mende people, the West African tribal group to which the Amistad captives belonged.
Another of the most fetching portals to history is a dry-as-bones letter from Henry Farnam, a Yale economics professor in the 1920s, to Yale’s president mentioning that informally he’s heard that the medical school faculty is prepared to admit a “limited number” of woman provided they’re graduates of college and “provided funds can be raised to put in a suitable lavatory.”
He doesn’t ever appear to say directly that he is the proud father of Louise Whitman Farnam, one of the young women who are about to break this particular barrier. However, he implies it when he says he will take responsibility for raising the funds and making arrangements for the new lavatory. He signs his letter, “believe me.”
The show runs through Aug. 26 during regular library hours, and all the items are from the holdings of the Manuscripts and Archives division and the Yale Divinity Library Special Collections.
