War Games: Playing Propaganda in World War One

by Greg Bond, Sports Archivist and Curator, Joyce Sports Research Collection

In honor of Veterans Day, Special Collections is pleased to highlight its recent acquisition of two British World War One-era patriotic board games. Marketed to the public to generate support for the war effort and to improve morale on the home front, the two manual dexterity marble-based maze games imagined the progress of battles in Europe and reflected British wartime propaganda against Germany. 

The two games, manufactured by British toy company R. Farmer & Sons, are encased in wood and under glass, and players must navigate a small metal ball around a recessed playing board and avoid holes distributed around the course.

The first game which dates from about 1914 is titled “The Silver Bullet, or the Road to Berlin,” (MSSP 10091) and the playing board depicts the route of a military campaign through Germany with players winning by advancing to Berlin. Along the way, competitors must avoid their ball dropping in holes that depict obstacles like “entrenchments,” “bridge destroyed,” and “road mined,” while also bypassing German cities including Cologne, Leipzig, Magdeburg, Dresden, Hanover, Hamburg, Spandau, and Potsdam.

The reverse side of the board promotes this “new war game” and includes the rules for players. “Amateur Strategists,” the manufacturers wrote, “will soon discover the methods whereby the danger zones may be successfully evaded, but the ever present difficulties tend to make the game of fascinating interest to players and onlookers.”

Perhaps as a warning to the public to be cautious about the progress of the war, the rules concluded that: “Beginners will be encouraged to know that the proficiency generally begets over-confidence, and the expert often fails amidst the hearty laughter of the company when he least expects to.”

Following up on the success of “The Silver Bullet, or the Road to Berlin,” R. Farmer & Sons published its second game “Trench Football” (MSSP 10092) in about 1915. Probably in reference to the informal Christmas Truces of 1914 that saw German and Allied soldiers mingling and playing soccer, the “Trench Football” game simulates trench warfare in the guise of a soccer match. Players start at “kickoff” and must navigate their ball around trenches and holes manned by caricatures of German military and political leaders. Competitors win the game by completing the course, avoiding the oversized mouth of the Kaiser, and maneuvering their ball into the “goal.”

The reverse of the playing board calls “Trench Football the great international game,” and the instructions, labeled “mode of attack,” mock and parody the German leaders on the game board. The instructions, for example, describe the first two defenders that players have to bypass, German Crown Prince Kaiser Wilhelm and Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, the head of the German Navy, who supported unrestricted submarine warfare:

You have a feeble opponent in “Little Willie” at “Outside Right.” Loot Ball is his speciality and passing the outsider with the contempt he deserves, you negotiate the skulker Von Tirpitz (notorious for his foul play) on his first ever appearance in the open as “Centre Forward.”

Other German military figures came in for similar ridicule by the makers of the game:

  • “Although Von Kluck is now used to being ‘left outside’ he is an honest thruster but is not clever, and in an important match of recent date he lost his nerve and broke down badly when within shooting distance of goal.”
  • “Von Hindenburg at ‘Inside Right’ has not been played regularly of late, the Grand Duke having badly shaken his confidence. Competent critics are of opinion that he was greatly overrated, and is not likely to re-gain his form or to give trouble on this or any future occasion.”
  • “Count Zeppelin at ‘Right Back’ is the gas-bag of our opponents, he has been badly pricked of late, and is far less dangerous than he appears on paper.”
  • “Von der Goltz, stiff and stodgy at ‘Right Half’ has never been able to think clearly since the Belgian International outwitted him.”

The game reserved its harshest criticisms—and accusations of foul play—for Germany’s Emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II:

“Lord High Everything, Canting Bully Bill” in “GOAL” you must keep your eye on, he holds the record for mouth, and foul play.

To obtain a goal you must dodge his mouth, it is the chief difficulty. He has proved himself mentally incapable of understanding the rules of the game or the meaning of fair play. Many complaints have been lodged against him, and it is probable that he will in the near future be “suspended indefinitely.”

Vigour and decision is necessary in dealing with him.

The Silver Bullet and Trench Football games are both open to researchers and available to the public.

An Irish Story Produces a Halloween Icon

by Sara Weber, Special Collections Digital Project Specialist

As with many other aspects of our modern Halloween celebrations, we owe the ubiquitous jack-o’-lantern to the Irish immigrants who brought their traditions with them to the United States.

In the January 16, 1836, issue of The Dublin Penny Journal we find the tale of “Jack o’ the Lantern.” Here the author relates how he learned from his uncle (a “kind, generous soul … deeply imbued with superstition”) the legend explaining the lights they see from the edge of an Irish shaking bog. Our more scientifically minded narrator insists the lights are merely ignis fatuus, a “gaseous vapour arising from putrid vegetable bodies,” but his uncle attributes them to “that misguided traveler, Jack o’ the Lantern.”

Read on to learn just who Jack is and how he came to haunt the bogs of Ireland.

Other versions of the story end with the Devil giving Stingy Jack a coal to light his way, after he is refused entry to both Heaven and Hell. Jack carries that coal not in a pumpkin but rather in a turnip. The Irish carved faces into a variety of fruits and vegetables with the intent of scaring off the restless souls thought to return to the living world on the eve of the Celtic festival of Samhain—traditionally November 1, though celebrations often began the evening before. When Irish immigrants arrived in the Americas, they discovered that pumpkins (a plant native to the Americas and thus more readily available) are rather easier to carve than turnips.

The post’s header image comes from the front page of the November 23, 1867, issue of Harper’s Weekly, which features both an illustrated story of “The Pumpkin Effigy” and a poem titled simply “The Pumpkin.” The illustration is one of the earliest in a major American serial to depict a carved pumpkin. The article relates a tale not of Halloween, however, but rather of a “quaint old custom” of “mischievous urchins” using a jack-o’-lantern to spook the unwary. The article credits the English with the origin of this pastime and laments its abandonment by the “rising generation”.

Happy Halloween to you and yours
from all of us in Notre Dame’s Special Collections!

Halloween 2023: Demon Horses and How to Tame Them
Halloween 2022: A Halloween Tale: “John Reardon and the Sister Ghosts”
Halloween 2021: A Welsh Witch in the Woods
Halloween 2020: Headless Horsemen in American and Irish Legend
Halloween 2019: A Halloween trip to Mexico
Halloween 2018: A story for Halloween: “Johnson and Emily; or, The Faithful Ghost“
Halloween 2017: A spooky story for Halloween: The Goblin Spider
Halloween 2016: Ghosts in the Stacks

Upcoming Events: November 2024

Please join us for the following public events and exhibits being hosted in Rare Books and Special Collections:

Thursday, November 7 at 5:00pm | Italian Research Seminar: “Literary Celebs: Amalia Guglielminetti, Guido Gozzano and the Price of Fame” by John Welle (University of Notre Dame).

Thursday, November 21 at 5:00pm | Italian Research Seminar: “The Activism of Imagination: Fictions of Europe Between Utopia and Disenchantment” by Nicoletta Pireddu (Georgetown University).

The exhibition Notre Dame Football Kills Prejudice: Citizenship and Faith in 1924 is now open and will run through the end of January 2025.

Curators Gregory Bond and Elizabeth Hogan will host exhibit open houses on select Friday afternoons before Notre Dame home football games, including on November 8 and November 15. The drop-in open houses will run from 3:00–4:30pm and will feature brief remarks by the curators at 3:15pm.

Tours of the exhibit may be arranged for classes and other groups by contacting Greg Bond at gbond2@nd.edu.

The current spotlight exhibits are Wollstonecraft: Revolution & Textual Evidence (September – December 2024) and A Fourteenth-Century Chanson de Geste Fragment (September – November 2024).

RBSC will be closed during the University of Notre Dame’s Thanksgiving Break, November 28 – 29.

National Hispanic Heritage Month 2024

We join the Library of Congress, National Archives and Records Administration, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Gallery of Art, National Park Service, Smithsonian Institution, and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in celebrating National Hispanic Heritage Month.

Reading Beisbol: Semanario Especializado

by Greg Bond, Sports Archivist and Curator, Joyce Sports Research Collection and Payton Phillips Quintanilla, Latin American & Iberian Studies Librarian and Curator

“Todas las competencias deportivas, no solamente las internacionales o las interestatales, sino también las interpoblaciones, deben servir para estrechar los lazos de amistad y nunca para distanciar a los pobladores o fanáticos.”

“All sporting competitions, not only international or interstate ones, but also local ones, should serve to strengthen the bonds of friendship and never to distance the residents or fans.”

The September 3, 1953, issue (page 1) of the Mexico City-based magazine Beisbol: Semanario Especializado (Baseball: Weekly Special) published this article lamenting the increasingly bitter and antagonistic rivalries between baseball teams and spectators in Mexico. The editors encouraged their readers to find common ground through sports and urged fans to temper their intensity.

The magazine did acknowledge the centrality of fan participation during baseball games, but it urged moderation in cheering:

“Un encuentro de beisbol sin gritos ni alaridos, es como una cerveza sin espuma; ésta es indispensable para que la cerveza se apetezca… pero tampoco gustará usted de tomarse una cerveza que sea pura espuma.”

“A baseball game without shouts and screams is like a beer without foam; the foam is essential for the beer to be appetizing… but you would not like to drink a beer that is pure foam.”

The editors concluded dramatically: “… después de un encuentro beisbolero, cuando se haya disipado el olor de la pólvora, los contrincantes deben darse la mano y seguir siendo amigos.” (“…after a baseball game, when the smell of gunpowder has dissipated, the opponents must shake hands and continue being friends.”)

Baseball fans, including a man wearing a mask and holding a flag, watch the “Coastal Classic” between teams from Mazatlán and Culiacán, two cities in the state of Sinaloa, on Mexico’s Pacific coast. Source: Beisbol January 14, 1954, page 17.

Rare Books and Special Collections recently acquired nine issues of Beisbol: Semanario Especializado dating from 1953 and 1954. Beisbol, edited by Salvador Mondragón, a prominent Mexican baseball administrator and booster, was published from about 1946-1957. Mondragón was involved for many years with running the country’s professional leagues, as well as organizing Mexico’s amateur teams for international competitions.

Beisbol covered all aspects of the sport. Many issues focused on the professional Mexican Leagues in both the summer and winter seasons. But the magazine also covered other subjects of interest to Mexican baseball fans, including semi-pro and amateur baseball, Mexican and Latin American players who competed in other leagues, news from the American major leagues, foreign teams that visited Mexico, historical baseball stories, and many other topics. 

A small sampling of articles from the profusely illustrated magazine gives a good sense of the range of subjects covered in Beisbol. 

The November 12, 1953, issue (pages 8-9 and 18-19), for instance, provided in-depth coverage of the recent visit of Jackie Robinson’s Stars, a barnstorming club of American major leaguers, minor leaguers, and Negro Leaguers led by the Dodgers’ Jackie Robinson and Cleveland Indians outfielder Luke Easter. The magazine featured a two-page spread of photos of the American players.

The magazine printed a two-page article “El Parque ‘Carta Clara’ Recibe Maquillaje” (“The Park ‘Carta Clara’ Receives a Makeover”) in its September 3, 1953 (pages 28-29), issue about renovations at Carta Clara Park in Mérida. The author of the article extensively interviewed the field manager/groundskeeper, Carlos “Licho” Ponce, about the changes and improvements being made to the stadium.

Beisbol also routinely featured a small “Sección de Softbol” (“Softball Section”). The coverage usually focused on men’s softball, but the April 8, 1954, issue included a lengthy story about a new amateur women’s softball league (that was sponsored, in part, by the Hipódromo de las Américas, a prominent Mexico City horse racing track). According to Beisbol, the organizers of the Asociación Femenil de Softbol (Women’s Softball Association):

“… han realizado una magnífica labor, llena de penalidades, para organizar este campeonato en la cual se han abierto los brazos a las jovencitas que tuviesen deseos de jugar a la pelota y no contasen con elemento para hacerlo…” (page 30).

“…have done a magnificent job, full of hardships, to organize this championship in which they have opened their arms to the young girls who had wanted to play ball and did not have the resources to do it…” (page 30).

The issue featured numerous photographs (pages 32-34) of opening day and action from the first games.

Each issue of Beisbol: Semanario Especializado featured remarkable full-color cover illustrations drawn by artist Guillermo Ley. Ley’s eye-catching images humorously commented on important current events in Mexican baseball. 

The August 20, 1953, cover illustration, for example, depicted the in-season travels of Cuban pitcher Aristónico Correoso. Correoso had been released by two teams in La Liga Mexicana (Mexican League) during the 1953 season before signing with Tuneros de San Luis in La Liga Central (Central League) and leading his new team to the top of the standings.

The cover of September 24, 1953, editorialized about outfielder Humberto Barbón’s recent decision to leave the Campeche Pirates of la Liga Peninsular de Yucatan (the Yucatan Peninsular League) to play for a team in Havana, Cuba. The illustration shows “el tesoro de los piratas” (“the treasure of the pirates”) waving goodbye and departing Mexico in a boat rowed by the manager of the Havana team.

Ley’s intricate and attractive illustrations and caricatures commented on many different topics of the day and likely helped to draw readers’ attention to the magazine. On November 12, 1953, his cover illustrated the race between the six teams of the Veracruz Winter league vying for the championship, and on April 6, 1954, Ley’s cover showed underdog Venezuela bursting the Mexican team’s balloon by winning the baseball gold medal at the 1954 Central American and Caribbean Games. 

Beisbol: Semanario Especializado is an important source documenting the post-World War Two history of baseball in Mexico and throughout Spanish-speaking Latin America. These scarce issues—Worldcat finds only one other institution with any holdings of Beisbol—are open and available to researchers in Rare Books and Special Collections.

Previous Hispanic Heritage Month Blog Posts:

Upcoming Events: October 2024

Please join us for the following public events and exhibits being hosted in Rare Books and Special Collections:

Thursday, October 3 at 5:00pm | Italian Research Seminar: Dante’s Chorographies: From the Territory to the Comedy” by Giovanna Corazza (Cà Foscari University of Venice).

The exhibition Notre Dame Football Kills Prejudice: Citizenship and Faith in 1924 is now open and will run through the end of January 2025.

Curators Gregory Bond and Elizabeth Hogan will host exhibit open houses on select Friday afternoons before Notre Dame home football games, including on October 11, November 8, and November 15. The drop-in open houses will run from 3:00–4:30pm and will feature brief remarks by the curators at 3:30pm in October and 3:15pm in November.

Tours of the exhibit may be arranged for classes and other groups by contacting Greg Bond at gbond2@nd.edu.

The October spotlight exhibits are Wollstonecraft: Revolution & Textual Evidence (September–December 2024) and A Fourteenth-Century Chanson de Geste Fragment (September–November 2024).

RBSC will be open regular hours (9:30am–4:30pm) during the University of Notre Dame’s Fall Break, October 19 – 27.

A Rare Monograph on Divine Revelation by an 18th Century Irish Franciscan in Prague

by Alan Krieger, Theology and Philosophy Librarian

Hesburgh Libraries has been able to recently acquire a rare 18th-century monograph about Divine Revelation authored by an Irish Franciscan residing in Prague, now in the Czech Republic. Anthony O’Brien lived and taught at the College of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary of the Irish Franciscans of the Stricter Observance when he wrote De Divina Revelatione: seu Naturali ac Revelata Religione Tractatus Primus (Vetero-Pragae, 1762).

Following Elizabeth I’s expulsion of the Franciscans from Ireland at the end of the 16th century, a number of friars established themselves first in Louvain and then, from 1629, in Prague where the College flourished for 150 years until its dissolution under the Habsburg monarch (and Holy Roman Emperor) Joseph II in 1786.

As Brendan Jennings has noted, “While doing its important work for the education of the Bohemian clergy, the college did not neglect its primary purpose of educating priests for Ireland. It is not possible to give precise statistics for the early years of its existence, but in all probability Prague supplied the Irish Franciscan Province with a much greater number of missionaries than either of their colleges at Louvain and Rome. It was a much larger institution and often housed, from the middle of the seventeenth century, between sixty and eighty members.” (Jennings, “The Irish Franciscans in Prague,” Studies: an Irish Quarterly Review, v. 28 (1939), p. 221)

Supplementing the texts which had already appeared in the “dissertation” versions of O’Brien’s work, printed between 1759-1762, we find here Quaestio IV (on miracles) extended by a further 40 pages. An entirely new Quaestio V addresses the problem of whether divine revelation is truly limited only to the Christian religion, including an extensive discussion on Islam (p. 473-499) and an even longer treatment of Judaism (p. 500-597). Although the title-page mentions “Tomus Primus” (“first book”), no further volumes were published.

We have found only two other North American library holdings of this edition.

Labor Day 2024 – Perspectives from the Catholic Pamphlet Collection

by Rachel Bohlmann, American History Librarian and Curator

In honor of Labor Day, when the United States celebrates the achievements of workers and their contributions to the nation, Rare Books and Special Collections highlights sources about Labor Day, labor, and labor organizing held in the Catholic Pamphlets Collection.

During the 1970s Rev. George G. Higgins, a long-time staff member for the National Catholic Welfare Conference (NCWC), now known as the United States Catholic Conference of Bishops (USCCB), published an annual “Labor Day Statement.” Known as the “Labor Priest,” Higgins spent his career supporting workers, their unionization, and calls for economic justice. Higgins worked particularly closely with César Chávez and the United Farm Workers during the 1960s and 1970s. The priest also assisted workers in other parts of the economy who wanted to organize, including health care service workers in Catholic hospitals. In his “Labor Day Statements” across the decade, Higgins expressed hope in the promise of American democracy and in the Catholic Church’s social justice teaching for workers’ to achieve economic justice. 

George G. Higgins, Labor Day Statement from 1973, 1976, and 1979.
(Catholic Pamphlet Collection, Box 41)

In addition to Higgins’ Labor Day tracts, the Catholic Pamphlet Collection holds publications by other “Labor Priests,” a small group of American Catholic clergy who, over the twentieth century, advocated for workers. One of these progressives was Higgins’ mentor, Rev. John A. Ryan. He published a series of pro-union pamphlets in the 1930s and supported the social welfare programs created through President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal.

John A. Ryan, Capital and Labor and The Catholic Teaching on Our Industrial System.
(Catholic Pamphlet Collection, Box 79)

Of course, not all Catholics agreed with Ryan’s position on labor and the New Deal during the Great Depression; RBSC’s Catholic Pamphlet Collection represents these views also. Father Charles Coughlin’s popular radio campaign against FDR and the New Deal is well known. The priest’s virulent anti-union and anti-communist views appear here in a number of pamphlets.  

Charles E. Coughlin, Appeal to the Laboring Man and,
with David Brann, The Chrysler-C.I.O Industrial Strike
(Catholic Pamphlet Collection, Box 21)

The Catholic Pamphlet Collection also holds related, non-Catholic publications as well, like this anti-Congress of Industrial Organizations and anti-communist booklet, Join the C.I.O. and Build a Soviet America from 1937. The CIO was an inter-racial union for primarily unskilled workers that Coughlin and other conservatives believed was a communist front.  

Joseph P. Kamp, Join the C.I.O. and Help Build a Soviet America: A Factual Narrative.
(Catholic Pamphlet Collection, Box 46)

From Labor Day Statements supporting farm workers in the 1970s to New Deal-era workers’ rights and anti-union fears in the 1930s, the Catholic Pamphlet Collection encourages and enables exploration about and around working people in the United States, and many other topics.

RBSC is closed Monday, September 2nd, for Labor Day.

Welcome Back! Fall 2024 in Special Collections

Rare Books and Special Collections welcomes students, faculty, staff, researchers, and visitors back to campus for Fall ’24! We want to let you know about a variety of things to watch for in the coming semester.

Fall 2024 Exhibition: Notre Dame Football Kills Prejudice: Citizenship and Faith in 1924

“Notre Dame football is a new crusade:
it kills prejudice and stimulates faith.”
— Rev. John F. O’Hara, C.S.C., Prefect of Religion,
Religious Bulletin, November 17, 1924

In the fall of 1924, the University of Notre Dame found great success on the football field and confronted a dangerous and divisive political moment. The undefeated Fighting Irish football team, cemented forever in national memory by Grantland Rice’s legendary “Four Horsemen” column, beat the best opponents from all regions of the country and won the Rose Bowl to claim a consensus national championship. Off the field, Notre Dame battled a reactionary nativist political environment that, in its most extreme manifestation, birthed the second version of the Ku Klux Klan. Sympathizers of this “100% Americanism” movement celebrated white, male, Protestant citizenship and attacked other groups—including Catholics and immigrants—who challenged this restrictive understanding of American identity.

In the national spotlight, Notre Dame leaders unabashedly embraced their Catholic identity. They consciously leveraged the unprecedented visibility and acclaim of the football team to promote—within the very real political constraints of the era—a more inclusive and welcoming standard of citizenship. Attracting a broad and diverse fan base, the 1924 national champion Fighting Irish discredited nativist politics and helped stake the claim of Notre Dame—and Catholics and immigrants—to full citizenship and undisputed Americanness.

Curators will host exhibit open houses on select Friday afternoons before Notre Dame home football games, including on September 6, September 27, and October 11. The drop-in open houses will run from 3:00–4:30 and will feature brief remarks by the curators at 3:30.

Other curator-led tours open to the public will be announced soon. Tours of the exhibit may be arranged for classes and other groups by contacting Greg Bond at gbond2@nd.edu.

This exhibition is curated by Gregory Bond (Curator of the Joyce Sports Research Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections) and Elizabeth Hogan (Senior Archivist for Photographs and Graphic Materials, University Archives).

Stop in regularly to see our Collections Spotlights

Currently on Display: Making Books Count: Early Modern Books in the History of Mathematics

Discover how books shaped science and our understanding of nature. The history of mathematics guides our understanding of astronomy, as revealed in works by Galileo, Copernicus, and others. Through ancient texts tracing the evolution of mathematical thought, visitors can explore the dialogue between mathematics and nature.

The last public spotlight tour is scheduled for August 28 at 1:30 pm.

This dual case spotlight is curated by Caterina Agostini (Indiana University Bloomington, Department of History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine). She previously served as a Postdoctoral Research Associate with the Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values and the Navari Family Center for Digital Scholarship. She is Co-PI in the Harriot Papers project.

Opening Soon: September Spotlights

RBSC spotlight exhibits will switch over for the fall during September. Two new exhibits will feature recently acquired editions of books by Mary Wollstonecraft and two manuscript fragments of French poetry. Stay tuned for more information!

These and other exhibits within the Hesburgh Libraries are generously supported by the McBrien Special Collections Endowment.

All exhibits are free and open to the public during business hours.

Special Collections’ Classes & Workshops

Throughout the semester, curators will lead instructional sessions related to our holdings to undergraduate and graduate students from Notre Dame, Saint Mary’s College, and Holy Cross College. Curators may also be available to show special collections materials to visiting classes, from preschool through adults. If you would like to arrange a group visit and class with a curator, please contact Special Collections.

Events

These programs are free and open to the public.

Thursday, October 3 at 5:00pm | The Fall 2024 Italian Research Seminar and Lectures will begin with a lecture by Giovanna Corazza (Università Ca’ Foscari), “Dante’s Chorographies: From the Territory to the Comedy.”

Learn more about Special Collections and other Hesburgh Library events, as well as other events in Italian Studies.

Recent Acquisitions

Special Collections acquires new material throughout the year. Watch this blog for information about recent acquisitions.

National Women’s Football League Collection
A Revised Martyrology for 16th Century German Catholics
Women in Irish Prisons: Autographs of Prisoners in 1923
Influencing Opinion by Mapping the Early American Civil War
Some of the recent acquisitions highlighted on the blog in the past year.

Anticipated Closures

Rare Books and Special Collections is regularly open 9:30am to 4:30pm, Monday through Friday. The department will be closed for the following holidays and events:

September 2, for Labor Day (Monday)
September 13, for Rev. Robert A. Dowd, C.S.C., Presidential Inauguration Events (Friday, afternoon only)
November 28-29, for Thanksgiving (Thursday and Friday)

Our last day open before the campus closure for Christmas Celebration will be December 20 (the Friday of final exams week).

Hours and other information for all Hesburgh Library locations can be found on the Library Website.

Remembering Louise Stokes and Tidye Pickett, African American Pioneers at the 1932 Olympics

by Greg Bond, Sports Archivist and Curator, Joyce Sports Research Collection

When they qualified for the 1932 Los Angeles games sprinters Louise Stokes and Tidye Pickett were the first African American women to make the United States Olympic team. Based on their strong times at the Olympic trials, Stokes and Pickett were named to the pool of six women that would be chosen for the 4×100 relay team (in those years the final official team was chosen a short time prior to the actual competitions).

The 18-year-old Stokes (from Malden, Massachusetts) and 17-year-old Pickett (from Chicago) were the only African Americans on the U.S. women’s team. But a large contingent of women athletes was, itself, relatively new. Only a few women had appeared in the first several Olympics. Starting with the 1928 games, though, the International Olympic Committee sanctioned women’s competition in a broader range of events, including more strenuous activities like track and field

The Fred L. Steers Papers in the Joyce Sports Research Collection holds manuscript material that documents the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics experience of Stokes, Pickett, and their teammates. Steers, a track athlete and 1911 graduate of Notre Dame, worked as a lawyer in Chicago and was a long-time administrator for the Amateur Athletic Union and the American Olympic Committee, the forerunner of the modern United States Olympic Committee. During the 1928, 1932, and 1936 Olympics, Steers was the Manager of the United States Women’s Track and Field Teams where he was in contact with the two African American women Olympians.

Historians who have written about Stokes and Pickett note that they frequently faced discrimination during their time on the Olympic team. Their own teammates sometime hazed them. They also routinely encountered the color line and were often not allowed to eat with the rest of the team—including in the dining room of the team hotel in Los Angeles.

Nevertheless, due to their fast qualifying times Stokes and Pickett had originally been expected to be members of the final American 4×100 relay team. Before the event, however, athletic administrators reshuffled the lineup and replaced the African Americans with two of their white teammates. The Chicago Defender, one of the country’s most influential African American newspapers blamed “this bit of back room treachery” on “lily-whiteism” and reported that “the injustice of this move is being placarded by track followers out here but to no avail” (“Tydia Pickett May Lose Olympic Spot,” Chicago Defender 30 July 1932, p. 8). 

Unfortunately, the Steers Papers does not contain any additional information about the decision to bench Stokes and Pickett. But the collection does include documentation about their presence with the U.S. Olympic team. One of the most prominent items is a rare photograph of Stokes and Pickett posing together in street clothes (MSSP 5000-56: X Olympiad, Los Angeles. Photographs, 1932). A clipping from the Los Angeles Herald Express includes a large picture titled “American Girls’ Track Team Arrives” showing Stokes (standing, right) and Pickett (kneeling, second from left) with their teammates (MSSP 5000-57: X Olympiad, Los Angeles. Newspaper clippings, 1932).

The Steers Papers does contain an original manuscript item attesting to some of the discriminatory treatment encountered by the two African American women. A passenger list and reservations receipt for the train trip that the U.S. women’s Olympic track and field team took from Chicago to Denver en route to L.A. suggests that Steers racially segregated the athletes while they were on the train. The passenger card shows the lodging arrangements for the team and indicates that Steers placed Louise Stokes and Tidye Pickett in berths 11 and 12 of Pullman Car #341—separate from and two bunks away from the rest of their white teammates (MSSP 5000-54: X Olympiad, Los Angeles. Miscellaneous ephemera, 1932).

Other documents describe the presence of the two Black athletes as members of the U.S. contingent. A July 16, 1932, telegram from Fred Steers to the American Olympic Committee, for instance, lists the full official roster of the women’s track and field team. The handwritten telegram includes Louise Stokes and Tidye Pickett on line 5 as members of the relay team (MSSP 5000-52: X Olympiad, Los Angeles. Fred L. Steers correspondence, 1932). 

The collection contains a multitude of other ephemera related more generally to the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics. Significant items include a referee’s badge from the “Final Olympic Track & Field Tryouts for Women” held at Northwestern University’s Dyche Stadium on July 16, 1932 (MSSP 5000-55: X Olympiad, Los Angeles. Miscellaneous ephemera, 1932), and an unused ticket for events at the “Track and Field Olympic Stadium” on August 6, 1932 (MSSP 5000-54: X Olympiad, Los Angeles. Miscellaneous ephemera, 1932).

Louise Stokes and Tidye Pickett were again members of the U.S. team for the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Their trailblazing athletic careers helped pave the way for future generations of African American women Olympians.

The Fred L. Steers Papers contains plentiful records related to the United States Olympic Teams and other amateur sports from 1916–1967. The collection is open to the public and available for research.

A French Nun’s Chronicle of 16th Century Geneva

by Alan Krieger, Theology and Philosophy Librarian

Hesburgh Libraries has recently acquired the true first edition of one of the earliest French historical works written by a woman, Jeanne de Jussie’s Le Levain du Calvinisme, ou commencement de l’heresie de Geneve (Chambery, [1611]).

Jeanne de Jussie (1503-1561) was a French-Swiss nun who recounts her experiences living in Switzerland during the early years of the Swiss Reformation in this extremely rare work. Having entered the Convent of the Poor Clares in Geneva in 1521, Jeanne was appointed secretary of the Convent in 1530 and was responsible for its correspondence. Around the year 1535, she began writing in manuscript form what is now known as her “Short Chronicle,” intended to pass on current events and observations to future nuns, and which provides the basis for the book published here; an English translation of the manuscript (The Short Chronicle: a Poor Clare’s Account of the Reformation of Geneva, edited and translated by Carrie F. Klaus) was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2006.

The year 1535 also proved to be an important year in Jeanne’s life for another reason: religious opponents broke into the Convent and the sisters were threatened for weeks before obtaining permission to leave Geneva peacefully, and then moving to Annecy, where they lived in the Monastery of the Holy Cross. This and many other contemporary events are described in this work, one of the few efforts to offer a detailed look into life in the city of Geneva during this tumultuous period. Jeanne’s narrative has continued to interest scholars not only for its contemporary description of key events, but also for its female perspective; the author is clear in noting that female Catholics were often subjected to more abuse concerning their beliefs than men.

This is the first of two issues published in 1611 (ours lacks the printing date, while the second issue includes it and is four pages longer); we have found no other North American holdings of this true first edition.