Collection highlights, news about acquisitions, events and exhibits, and behind-the-scenes looks at the work and services of Rare Books & Special Collections (RBSC) at Notre Dame.
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!
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.”
National Women’s Football League CollectionA Revised Martyrology for 16th Century German CatholicsWomen in Irish Prisons: Autographs of Prisoners in 1923Influencing Opinion by Mapping the Early American Civil WarSome 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).
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.
“Welcome to Gay Sports. As we all know—sports are an integral part of American society. This love of competition is as exciting to the Gay Community as it is to the Straight Community. In the months to come, this publication will bring you information about Gay men and women athletes competing in sporting events locally and nationally. Gay Sports is your publication. Keep us informed of what you are doing.”
—Gay Sports Nov. 1982 (vol. 1, no. 1), page 4.
Publisher Mark Brown’s introductory note in the inaugural 1982 issue of the San Francisco-based Gay Sports announced the purpose of the new publication to readers. The monthly publication—one of the earliest serials devoted to sports in the gay community—would cover national sports news, but the focus of the magazine was on publicizing and building community among gay and lesbian athletes and their allies. In honor of LGBTQ Pride Month, Rare Books & Special Collections (RBSC) highlights the recent acquisition of two issues (vol 1, no. 1 – November 1982; and vol 2, no. 7 – September 1983) of this scarce publication.
The cover story in the first issue of Gay Sports—then called Bay Area Gay Sports—was a feature by Duke Joyce (Nov. 1982, p. 5) about former major league baseball player Glenn Burke, who had recently publicly acknowledged that he was gay. Burke played for the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Oakland A’s from 1976 to 1979, but he had struggled with his identity as a gay man while playing professional baseball. As the article explains, he “endured subtle, yet cruel innuendos” and discrimination from management. In the end, he wanted to be “truthful to himself” and not lead a “double life,” so he retired from baseball.
Joyce wrote that “being a homosexual in any homophobic environment is agonizing enough, but in the revered Major League, it is damn near sacreligious,” and he observed that there would likely be no room for “Baseball, Hot Dogs, Apple Pie, and Queers” any time soon. He applauded Burke’s courage in going public and hoped that he had “managed to further erode the stereotypical image of gays.” In closing, Glenn Burke, himself, observed: “It’s your life, and nobody else is going to live it for you. You’ve got to have self respect.”
Pictures from the 1983 Gay World Series in Chicago. (Gay Sports September 1983, pp. 12-13)
Glenn Burke’s coming out was a prominent national news story, but most of the articles in Gay Sports focused on local and community-based sports leagues or competitions for gay athletes. The annual Gay World Series softball tournament routinely received lots of attention, as did the quadrennial Gay Games. (For more information about the Gay Games, please see also the Gay Games Collection, MSSP 10070, in RBSC or the recent digital exhibit “Papers Alight: Contextualizing Mike Curato’s Flamer“).
Images from the 1983 Bay Area Women’s Softball League. (Gay Sports September 1983, pp. 6-7)
Most articles focused on local leagues and organizations that helped build communities and networks of support for gay and lesbian athletes in the Bay Area or in other cities around the country. These two issues are replete with articles about local softball leagues, tennis tournaments, swimming competitions, hiking outings, bicycling groups, billiards leagues, bowling tournaments, flag football teams, and many other types of sports and athletics.
Members of the San Francisco Different Spokes Cycling Club pose on the cover of the September 1983 issue of Gay Sports.
These sporting activities served a variety of roles and were an important part of many people’s lives. The organizer of an overseas bicycling trip described, for example, “the ease and comfort of traveling with an all gay group” (Sept. 1983, p. 8). The leader of a San Francisco cycling club noted the value in “informally representing a portion of the gay community to the bicycling world” (Sept. 1983, p. 10). But, for the most part, the various sports leagues were about safe spaces for friendship and community. The author of an article about bowling leagues simply wrote that competitors “come together not only to enjoy the sport, but also more importantly, to enjoy each other . . . . for therein lies the magic!” (Sept. 1983, p. 18).
These issues of Gay Sports are available to researchers. RBSC welcomes new donations of Gay Sports magazine to expand our holdings of this important title.
Major League Baseball (MLB) recently announced that it has updated its official record book to include Negro Leagues statistics from the years 1920–1948. MLB has belatedly recognized that the highest levels of African American baseball during the era of segregation constituted “major league” competition.
The expanded inclusive record book now counts player statistics from the Negro Leagues on an equal basis with those from the National League and the American League. In these years, organized white baseball leagues notoriously excluded Black players from the playing field until Jackie Robinson’s debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947 (read a recent RBSC blog post about Jackie Robinson).
MLB’s rewritten record book now officially recognizes the statistical accomplishments of legendary African American baseball players like power-hitting catcher Josh Gibson, MLB’s new all-time leader in batting average and slugging percentage, and pitcher Satchel Paige, who now boasts MLB’s the third-lowest single-season earned run average.
In recognition of this announcement and in honor of the upcoming Juneteenth holiday, Rare Books & Special Collections highlights material from its collections that document the history of African American baseball. These resources will allow researchers to better contextualize and understand the statistics and the history of the Negro Leagues.
The Birmingham Black Barons Records (MSSP 0001) is a unique and important collection that documents the financial operation of the Black Barons, an influential Negro National League team. The collection includes a thick financial ledger book that lists the debits and credits—including salaries, fines, advances, expenses, etc.—for players from the 1926 through the 1930 seasons, a span which includes Leroy “Satchel” Paige’s rookie year. The Black Barons ledger book allows a rare opportunity for researchers to see the day-to-day finances of a major Negro League team. The complete ledge book has been fully digitized and is available to view through Marble.
The Birmingham Black Barons ledger book pages for Leroy “Satchel” Paige in 1928 show monthly salary credits of $80.00 and include debits on April 7th for shoes from Gray’s Sporting Goods ($7.50); unidentified debits on June 21st and June 30th to “Dr. Bradford” ($10.00 and $15.00); and fines on July 30th for “Not appearing in uniform in St. Louis” ($5.00) and “Staying out all night at Chicago” ($10.00).
The Negro Leagues Pennant Collection (MSSP 10079) contains nine vintage (c. 1930s-1940s) felt pennants advertising African American baseball teams. These rare original souvenirs document the fan experience and the iconography of the Negro Leagues.
MSSP 10079-02 and 10079-03: The Negro League Pennant Collection includes two variants of pennants for the Homestead Grays, Josh Gibson’s primary Negro Leagues team.The Negro League Pennant Collection includes pennants from numerous important teams, including the New York Black Yankees (MSSP 10079-05), the Baltimore Elite Giants (MSSP10079–01), the Newark Eagles (MSSP10079-04), and the Philadelphia Stars (MSSP10079-007).
RBSC holds a scarce original copy of Sol White’s History of Colored Base Ball [Special Coll.Vault • GV 863 .A1 W45 1907], an incredibly important 1908 book by manager and former player Sol White. One of the first comprehensive histories of African Americans in baseball, White’s research documented the early experiences of Black baseball players before the establishment of the formal Negro Leagues. Since it original publication, this book has been an essential source for the historiography of African American baseball. The profusely illustrated 120-page volume has been digitized and is available to be viewed via Marble.
Photograph and biography of Sol White, Baseball Hall of Famer and pioneering historian of African American baseball.The champion 1902 Philadelphia Giants team picture is one more than 50 photographs printed and preserved in Sol White’s book.
The advertising pamphlet for the Illinois Giants of Chicago declared that “Our team attained almost unbeatable form at that period and bowled over the leading semi-pro teams of Michigan and Wisconsin in rapid succession.” As an indication of the complicated racial politics of the era, the flier emphasized that the Giants were “under WHITE MANAGEMENT” perhaps to make games against the team more palatable to white fans.
The Negro Baseball Yearbook [Rare Books Large • GV 875 .N34 N46], published annually in the mid-1940s, celebrated and recorded the yearly accomplishments of African American baseball players.
This collage of team pictures and individual photographs from the 1945 Negro Leagues season prominently features an image of Homestead Grays third baseman Howard Easterling in his military uniform. The publishers likely hoped to emphasize to readers the service and patriotism of African Americans.
These and other sources are all open to the public and available to researchers who would like to learn more about and to better understand the Negro Leagues and the experiences of African American baseball players during the age of segregation.
Rare Books and Special Collection recently acquired a Civil War broadside (a.k.a., poster) that was published very early in the conflict, probably in August or September 1861. Produced and printed in Boston, the map provided a Northern perspective on the war as it had unfolded to that point and offered reassurance about the conflict’s ultimate outcome. First, the broadside’s creators remind viewers that despite the Confederacy’s initial victories—at Fort Sumter in April and the Battle of Bull Run in July—the Union had prevailed in a battle for continued control of Fort Monroe, near Norfolk, Virginia, in May. The stronghold was strategically significant for Union designs on the Confederate’s capital at Richmond. Secondly, the broadside’s authors convey confidence that the North’s superior population and larger economy would ultimately prevail.
Distance Maps. Map of the Atlantic States, Showing 50 Mile Distances from Washington. Map of the Battleground [at Manassas] Showing 5 Mile Distances from Washington. Map of the Fortress Monroe, Showing 1 Mile Distances from the Fortress. L. Prang & Co.: Boston, 1861.
The broadside’s most prominent feature is its three distance maps. The largest is a railroad map of the United States that shows distances from Washington, D.C. One of two smaller maps indicates distance from Washington to an unnamed battle ground, which people at the time would have understood as the Battle of Bull Run, just 30 miles from the capital. The Confederates had recently routed Union forces there, an outcome that worried many Northerners who had, until that point, expected a quick and decisive end to the war.
The third distance map shows a detail of Norfolk Harbor and Fort Monroe, the site of a recent Union victory. The fortress remained in Union control throughout the war.
Finally, this broadside provides population figures for the nation’s cities and towns, and states, as well as the number of enslaved people in states and territories. This data reinforced what even a glance at the railroad map implied: the North’s more developed industrial and economic infrastructure along with its superior numbers pointed to an eventual Union victory.
A happy Memorial Day to you and yours from all of us in Notre Dame’s Special Collections!
Rare Books and Special Collections is closed today (May 27th) for Memorial Day and will be closed on July 4th for Independence Day. Otherwise, RBSC will be open regular hours this summer — 9:30am to 4:30pm, Monday through Friday.
Please note that the 14th floor of the Hesburgh Library is under renovation from May 20 to August 9. The Library Circle, East, and South Entrances will be blocked off intermittently during this time. See the logistics map for additional details.
