New to the Collection: Scrapbook of the Corona Rolling Devils—Pioneering Wheelchair Basketball Team

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

Team photographs of the Corona Rolling Devils. Dr. Gerald Gray, who introduced wheelchair basketball to Corona Naval Hospital, is kneeling on the left.

“Tonight will bring … one of the most unique athletic contests ever witnessed” wrote the Riverside Enterprise newspaper in March 1947 before a wheelchair basketball game between the local Riverside College basketball team and the Rolling Devils from the Corona Naval Hospital in Corona, California, on the outskirts of Los Angeles. 

This is one of many clippings from a significant new acquisition by the Joyce Sports Research Collection—a scrapbook documenting the short career of the Corona Rolling Devils, one of the first successful and popular wheelchair basketball teams in the country. The 12×15 inch scrapbook features about 20 double-sided leafs and contains newspaper clippings, ephemera, and about 30 original photographs documenting the career of the Rolling Devils during the spring and summer of 1947.

As recounted in the recent book Wheels of Courage by David Davis, wheelchair basketball was originally devised in 1946 by Bob Rynearson, the Assistant Athletic Director at the Birmingham Veterans Administration (VA) Hospital in Van Nuys, California, to provide recreation and rehabilitation for World War Two veterans who were paralyzed. Due to medical advances during the 1940s, it became increasingly common for soldiers to survive spinal cord injuries, and, in the aftermath of the war, the VA rushed to provide care for an unprecedented number of veterans with paralysis. Rynearson’s adaptation of rules for wheelchair basketball was an immediate hit among veterans at the hospital.

In early 1947, Dr. Gerald Gray, a reconstructive surgeon at the Corona Naval Hospital, visited colleagues at the nearby Birmingham VA hospital and happened to see patients there playing the new wheelchair basketball game. After conferring with Rynearson, Dr. Gray immediately introduced wheelchair basketball at the Corona Naval Hospital and organized a team, who dubbed themselves the “Rolling Devils.”

In February 1947, the wheelchair basketball team from the Birmingham VA traveled to Corona to play the Rolling Devils. The visiting team was victorious in one of the first recorded wheelchair basketball games in American history. The Rolling Devils quickly recovered from this loss, however, and went undefeated for the rest of 1947, garnering significant public attention in the process.

#8 Kent McKnight takes a shot
#3 “Pistol” Pete Simon passes the ball over two defenders
A St. Mary’s player has fallen over as #8 Kent McKnight watches

The newly acquired scrapbook documents the Rolling Devils impressive winning streak. Most of their opponents were teams composed of non-disabled players who had to quickly adapt to playing basketball while in a wheelchair. The Rolling Devils’ victories over teams like Riverside College, the La Verne American Legion, the Pomona Veterans, and the Bonita All Stars are documented in newspapers stories, programs, advertisements, and photographs. The Devils also convincingly won a return match with the Birmingham VA hospital 41-10.

Newspaper Advertisement for game between the Rolling Devils and the Bonita All Stars.

As recounted in the scrapbook, in the spring of 1947, the Rolling Devils made two trips to  Northern California. The Devils beat the varsity basketball teams from St. Mary’s College and the University of California. In a game in May sponsored by the Oakland Tribune, the Devils also defeated the semi-pro Oakland Bittners, a top AAU team led by former Stanford star and future Minneapolis Laker Jim Pollard. The Devils even invited California governor Earl Warren to their sold-out game against the Oakland Bittners, but he telegraphed his regrets.

Telegram from California Governor Earl Warren to Dr. Gerald Gray about the Rolling Devils.

Throughout their winning streak, the Rolling Devils received praise for their skill. After beating St. Mary’s, a local reporter enthused, “The veterans, who learned to use the chairs through necessity, scooted around the floor like a bunch of spiders, while the college boys gave the spectators a three-ring circus by running into everything in sight and alternating between falling on their noses and backs.”

Rosters and special rules for the Rolling Devils and University of California game.

Some accounts of the Rolling Devils exploits, though, were tinged with a patronizing sentiment towards the wheelchair athletes. Before the game against the Bittners, for example, Alan Ward, a sports columnist for the Oakland Tribune, melodramatically recounted “the moral courage which prompts 10 young men to perform a collective feat which verges on the impossible.”

In mid-June, the Rolling Devils visited Sacramento for what would prove to be their final hurrah.  They beat a local college all-star team in a fundraising game to record, reportedly, their 22nd consecutive victory. After the game, the Devils visited the California legislature and finally met Governor Earl Warren who presented the players with honorary scrolls. Upon returning home, however, the Rolling Devils abruptly disbanded. As the United States military began discharging or transferring patients out of the Corona Naval Hospital, players on the team went their separate ways.

Members of the Rolling Devils relax in a swimming pool during the trip to northern California.
#1 Jerry Fesenmeyer smiling for the camera

Despite the team’s relatively short existence, the Rolling Devils had been instrumental in popularizing the sport of wheelchair basketball and educating the public about expanded athletic opportunities for people with disabilities. Author David Davis explains in Wheels of Courage that, “Thanks to the publicity generated by events like the Rolling Devils’ groundbreaking road trips, the spread of adaptive sports beyond the VA hospitals was on the horizon.”

The Rolling Devils scrapbook is available to the public in the Joyce Sports Research Collection.

Enlightenment and Other Influences in an 18th Century German Serial

by Julia A. Schneider, Ph.D, German Language & Literature Subject Liaison

“Most journalists have the intractable purpose of reshaping the times according to their system, not reshaping their system according to the times.” 1

This two-line manifesto by Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart (March 24, 1739-October 10,1791), the publisher of the Vaterländische Chronik (also known as the Deutsche Chronik and Teutsche Chronik in its earliest incarnation), shows how his approach to both journalism and “the times” of the late eighteenth century may have differed from that of other, contemporary publishers. Contents of the Chronik, from the beginning, were not limited to simply reporting in dispatches, narrative descriptions, or just-the-facts observations, but included opinions, commentary, poetry, and other types of prose. Published from 1774-1778 and again from 1787-1791, the Chronik had a circulation of about 4000 per issue at its height.2

Schubart had been a schoolmaster, was considered a keyboard virtuoso, and had influence on Enlightenment poets like Goethe and Schiller. He considered himself a patriot, and provided incisive commentary on the way that rulers wielded their power, as well as the way that some authority figures used superstition to maintain or increase their own positions. As a patriot himself and a believer in a freer society, he also took a great interest in the conflict in the colonies that became the American Revolution.3 He was imprisoned in 1777 in the fortress of Hohenasperg on the orders of the Duke of Wurttemberg, in part due to Schubart’s printing of the rumor (as “legend”) that the duke was lending 3000 troops to England to fight the revolutionaries in North America; Schubart had already reported the selling of troops by other nobles to the British. He remained imprisoned, initially under deplorable conditions—without a trial—for more than ten years. Although he continued to write poetry from prison, even while subject to a re-education program under the tutelage of a pietist and archenemy (“Intimfeind” in German) whom Schubart had frequently criticized in print.4

Notre Dame’s copy (Rare Books Small DD 193 .S35 1787/1788), was published under the title used after his imprisonment, Vaterländische Chronik. It covers the last half of 1787, including the July and December quarterly issues. Perusing this later segment of the Chronik allows the reader entry into Schubart’s perspective and publishing program after his imprisonment. By choosing several pieces, we can see examples of the way his views did and did not alter during this time of extreme stress and so-called “re-education.”

In the piece at the beginning of the July issue (erstes Stück) “In mein Vaterland” shows, where Schubart draws a comparison between the pillars of flame and cloud that led the Israelites from their imprisonment to their homeland and his own experience of prison and release into the type of freedom among his fellow citizens that awaited him in his own homeland. Unlike mere metaphorical, poetically emotional understanding of restraint presented in the work of Romantics, Schubart provides experience of the outside world that only someone who had experienced imprisonment could understand.

Schubart later reports the case of the well known robber Hannikel, whose gang was responsible for multiple thefts and murders over the period of decades, resulting in their execution by hanging in July of 1787. Hannikel eventually became a character who appears in the costumed festival Fasching which occurs before the beginning of Lent. Schubart’s report shows that, even before his death, Hannikel may have been thought of in a somewhat positive light, because Schubart’s short piece includes admonishing commentary about the creation of a “legend” about the thief when, in reality, those who leave the path of goodness, preferring to take the road of lies and degradation, are not to be commended, especially when that degradation includes the plunder, injury, and murder of unsuspecting travelers. Following this report is his own poem “Freundschaft,” on the ideal of friendship.

Finally, in the seventh part of the July 1787 issue (Siebentes Stück), we see his thought-piece, “Aufklarung” (“On the Enlightenment”), where he draws on contemporary poetry about the spirit of enlightenment to discuss the principles of enlightened thought. This allowed Schubart to return to the intellectual point of mediation between the Sturm und Drang proponents of the Enlightenment and their severest critics, forging a position which embraced lofty ideals but wished to harness them in educational and political reality, to the benefit of his fellow citizens. This and the foregoing examples from Notre Dame’s volume of the Chronik provide insight into the thought and work of a now lesser-known German poet and journalist, one whose own life was also worthy of observation and report.

 

Footnotes

1. “[D]ie meisten Journalisten haben die hartknäckigen Vorsatz, die Zeiten nach ihrem System und nicht ihr System nach den Zeiten umzubilden.” Christian Friedrich Schubart, ed. Deutsche Chronik, Jahrgange 1774-1777 (4 Bde), Heidelberg, 1975, 1:3, cited in Wolfgang Albrecht, “Aufklärungstrategien in Schubarts Chronik, 1774-1776 (in Potthast, ed., Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart- Das Werk, Heidelberg, 2016, pp.171-94), 172, n. 7.

2. Hartmann, Alexander. “Christian Daniel Friedrich Schubart Jounalist, Musiker, und Dichter der Freiheit,” in Neuen Solidarität, 51 1999 (https://www.schiller-institut.de/jahr2005/essays/schubart.pdf, accessed January 13, 2023), translated by Daniel Platt as “Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart- Journalist, Musician, and Poet of Freedom,” October 2014, https://archive.schillerinstitute.com/educ/hist/2014/hartmann-schubart_bio.html (accessed January 13, 2023).

3. The German public was intensely interested in the goings on in North America, especially due to the involvement of former Prussian army advisor, Major General Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, who was in great part responsible for the professionalization and training of the colonial troops at Valley Forge and remained an advisor to George Washington after the war, serving as inspector General of the Military. He was the author of Regulations for the Order and Discipline of the Troops of the United States.

4. Hartmann, op. cit.

Welcome to Spring 2023 in Rare Books & Special Collections

Upcoming Events: January

Please join us for the following event being hosted in Rare Books and Special Collections:

Thursday, January 26 at 5:00pm | Italian Research Seminar: “The ‘Literary Canon’ of Early Venetian Humanism (1374-1446) between the Classics and the Moderns “ by Rino Modonutti (University of Padova). Sponsored by the Center for Italian Studies.

Spring Semester Exhibits

The spring exhibit Printing the Nation: A Century of Irish Book Arts will feature selected books from the Hesburgh Libraries’ Special Collections to demonstrate the art and craft of the Irish book since 1900. The exhibit, curated by Aedín Ní Bhróithe Clements, will open in January and run through the semester.

The current spotlight exhibits for are Hesburgh Library Special Collections: A Focus on W. B. Yeats (November 2022 – January 2023) and The Ladies Flower-Garden of Ornamental Annuals (December 2022 – January 2023). Later in the month, we will be installing the spring semester spotlight, which will explore changes in language within select Middle English manuscripts and early printed books from the 15th through 17th century (January – April 2023).

Classes in Special Collections

Throughout the semester, curators teach sessions related to our holdings. If you’re interested in bringing your class or group to work with our curators and materials, please contact Special Collections.

Recent Acquisitions

Special Collections acquires new material throughout the year. Watch our blog for announcements about recent acquisitions.

Happy Holidays from Special Collections!

Due to OIT infrastructure work being done in the Hesburgh Library, Special Collections is closed today, Monday, December 19, 2022.

Rare Books and Special Collections is open Tuesday through Thursday this week (December 20-22, 2022). After that, we will be closed from Friday, December 23, 2022, through Monday, January 2, 2023, in participation with the campus-wide holiday break for all faculty, staff, and students. Special Collections will reopen on Tuesday, January 3, 2023.

This is the last blog post for 2022.
Happy Holidays to you and yours from
Notre Dame’s Rare Books and Special Collections!

A Prayer for Christmas Morning by Henry Van Dyke, donated by American poet Raymond E. F. Larsson (London & New York: Ernest Nister & E. P. Dutton, n.d.).
Special Collections, Rare Books Small BV 45 .V32

The Pantomime — an Irish Christmas Tradition

by Aedín Ní Bhróithe Clements, Irish Studies Librarian

Generations of Irish children first experienced the theatre at the Christmas Pantomime. This year’s panto offerings in Ireland include The Jungle Book, Sleeping Beauty, and a number of variations on Jack and the Beanstalk such as Olly, Polly and the Beanstalk.

The tradition probably found its way from Britain to Ireland in the eighteenth century, and has delighted children since then. Peculiarly, its popularity has not spread across the Atlantic.

The typical pantomime has a basic story, presented with an abundance of song and dance, great hilarity, and often with predictable gender cross-over as we shall see below. Scenes of slapstick comedy are interspersed with witty dialogue for the grown-ups in the audience. Pantomimes are peppered with current political references, from the setting and characters to the scripted or perhaps ad-libbed asides in the performance.

A selection from our extensive Irish Theatre Program collection gives us a glimpse of the genre in Ireland, as we look at a handful of Dublin theatre programs.

Cover of the program for Dick Whittington, the annual pantomime at the Theatre Royal, 1904.

The 1904 pantomime at Dublin’s Theatre Royal was Dick Whittington. According to the program, it was written specially for this theatre by William Wade. In the tradition of pantomime, Dick Whittington is played by a female, Carlotta Levey.

An Irish Times review includes particular praise for Carlotta Levey: “Miss Levey has proved herself to be one of the very best Principal Boys we have had in Dublin for very many years, and has made a host of friends for herself…”

Ninth Annual Christmas Pantomime: Mother Goose, Theatre Royal, January 31st, 1907. Book of Songs.

The above program is also a Book of Songs, and includes pages of songs in addition to photographs of some of the cast. Once again, Carlotta Levey plays the principal boy, while Mother Goose is played by a male actor, Martin Adeson. 

A newspaper review tells us that local references ‘largely directed against Dublin Corporation, and many of which provoked a good deal of laughter, are furnished.’ (Irish Times 22 Jan 1907, p. 7)

John MacDonagh’s Grand Christmas Pantomime, Cinderella. Program for the Olympia Theatre, 1928.

The Olympia Theatre’s annual pantomime in 1928 was Cinderella, a perennial pantomime favorite. The Irish Times review praised almost every element of the show: the scenery, costume, lighting, music, songs, and indeed the actors. The reviewer provides an example of a witty (at that time) local reference: ‘“There are two gentlemen at the door,” says Chris Sylvester as Buttons. “How do you know they are gentlemen?” asks Dick Smith, as Baron Touch. “They have Cork accents,” says Buttons.’ (IT 10 January 1928, p. 4.) 

Turfyella (The Emergency “Cinderella”) By Brighidín NIc an Bháird and Eamon Byrne. Sunday, 15, February, 1942 (left); and “Gone with the Glimmer” by Eamon Byrne, Sunday 14th February 1943 (right).

An Óige, the Irish Youth Hostel Association, held their pantomimes in the Olympia theatre from 1941. Our two programs of their pantomimes staged during the “Emergency” (World War II) suggest shows loaded with commentary on the scarcity and rationing of the Emergency years.

From the 1942 program for Turfyella, we can be confident that the reference to turf in the title is connected to the fact that all fuels, among other commodities, were rationed during the Emergency—but as turf, also known as peat, could be cut from the ground in Ireland’s bogs, there was much activity cutting and gathering turf.

In an article written recently during the COVID pandemic, Éanna Brophy helpfully describes aspects of the earlier ‘Emergency’:

Turf was harvested at a frantic rate. The main avenue of the Phoenix Park was eventually flanked on both sides by ton upon ton of turf destined for the fires of the people of Dublin. The avenue was soon christened The New Bog Road.

The same article tells us a little about the ‘glimmer’ of the following year’s an Óige pantomime Gone with the Glimmer, by Éamon Byrne. During the Emergency, the use of gas was limited to certain times of the day. A small flow had to be maintained in the pipes, but people were forbidden to turn on their stoves to use this tiny flow of gas.

Hence the arrival of that fearsome figure who still haunts Dublin folklore – the Glimmer Man. Emergency or no emergency there were babies’ bottles to be warmed, and many mothers used the glimmer in desperation to soothe a crying baby. The Glimmer Man had extraordinary powers: he could legally enter your house and check for recent illegal usage of gas by placing his hands on the cooker ring. Guilty parties could have their supply cut off forthwith.

Cinderella by Dick Forbes, at the Theatre Royal, 1946 (program cover) and Mac ‘Q’ Productions’ pantomime, Cinderella at Saint Anthony’s Theatre, 1957 (program cover).

As we glance over the years of programs, we find Cinderella repeated often, from major city theatres such as the Theatre Royal (no longer in existence), the Gaiety (still staging a popular Christmas pantomime), to smaller theatres and local dramatic societies. The above covers are from programs for the Theatre Royal in 1946 and St. Anthony’s Theatre in 1957, while the program below is from the Gaiety’s 1956 pantomime.

Howard and Wyndham’s Cinderella. Gaiety Theatre, 1956. Program cover.
Cast list from the program of the Gaiety Theatre’s Cinderella, 1956.

While the Gaiety’s pantomime has been a regular event since 1873, it was only during the mid-twentieth century, under the management of Louis Elliman, that their pantomime became home-produced rather than imported. The cast list here shows Jimmy O’Dea playing Buttons, a very important role in the pantomime Cinderella, and Maureen Potter playing the maid, Dolores.

Mícheál Mac Liammóir and Milo O’Shea, must have been a great sight as the sisters Marigold and Myrtle, while the valet Dandini is played in another gender cross-over by Maureen Toal.

Clár Fuireann na Mainistreach, Amharclann na Mainistreach/ Program of the Abbey Theatre Company, Abbey Theatre, 1961.

Our theatre program collection began with some two hundred Abbey theatre programs, and has expanded to include programs of many theatres throughout Ireland. The Abbey, Ireland’s National Theatre, began its Irish-language pantomimes in 1945 with Muireann agus an Prionsa by Mícheál Ó hAodha, based on The Golden Apple by Lady Gregory.

Our program for the 1961 Abbey pantomime, or geamaireacht, is for another tale with a princess and a magical kingdom. In An Sciath Draíochta, Princess Clíona is banished from Tír na nÓg by the witch, Muiregáin. The hero, Aonghus, rescues her with the help of the magical shield of the title, and after many adventures.

In some later pantomimes, the magical setting takes the form of an overt parallel to Ireland. The plot of the Abbey’s Flann agus Cleimintín (1963) would not be clear to a very young audience. The mythical land of youth, Tír na nÓg, is partitioned and therefore vulnerable. However, the opportunistic sea-god and the emperor of China are foiled in their tracks when the border is abolished. The synopsis provided in the program was probably essential to follow this plot.

Synopsis of Flann agus Cleimintín, Abbey Theatre program, 1963.

Partition is once again the subject of the 1964 pantomime, Aisling as Tír-na-nÓg. The story begins with dissatisfaction with the Irish Partition, and a request to an ancient king to come from Tír na nÓg and reunite the country. The call is answered by the king’s son Conall who travels the land and ends up crowned king of Ireland, along with his queen, the heroine of the title, Aisling.

The examples selected here are from a very large collection of programs of many kinds of performance in theatres throughout Ireland, over a century and more. They are currently being cataloged, and these titles will eventually be added to the existing list of programs on our archival finding aid.

Due to OIT infrastructure work being done in the Hesburgh Library, Special Collections will be closed on Monday, December 19, 2022.

A Byzantine Coin and a Prayer for an Emperor

by David T. Gura, Ph.D., Curator, Ancient and Medieval Manuscripts

Rare Books and Special Collections possesses a small collection of Greek coinage donated largely by Robert (ND ’63) and Beverly (SMC ’63) O’Grady. The collection is mainly Hellenistic (ca. 323 BC – 31 AD) with an emphasis on the coins of Alexander the Great and Lysimachus, but there are also numerous Seleucid types and coins of other major Hellenistic personages. However, four Byzantine coins were also donated by the O’Grady’s which stand in stark contrast to the Hellenistic examples because they feature Christian imagery.

One such coin is this “two-thirds miliaresion” struck in Constantinople under Constantine X Doukas, the Byzantine emperor from 1059 to 1067 AD and the founder of the Doukid Dynasty. He lost much of the Byzantine territories in Italy and the Balkans, and was also defeated by Alp Arslan, the second sultan of the Seljuk Empire, resulting in the loss of the Armenian capital.

Obverse: Theotokos orans. Constantine X Doukas Silver 2/3 miliaresion (1.72 g)

The obverse of the coin depicts Mary as the Theotokos (i.e. Mother of God) in the orans pose (praying with outstretched arms). The miliaresion (μιλιαρήσιον) was the name given to various Byzantine silver coins, most of which were made during the 8th-11th century. During the 11th century, the miliaresion was minted in fractions of one third and two thirds (shown here). This denomination ceased to be used after 1092 and was replaced by the Komnenian emperors.

Reverse: Inscription. Constantine X Doukas Silver 2/3 miliaresion (1.72 g)

The text on reverse of coin contains the inscription:

ΘΚΕ ΒΟ
ΗΘΕΙ ΚΩΝ
ΣΤΑΝΤΙΝΩ
ΔΕΣΠΟΤΗ
ΤΩ ΔΟΥΚΑ

Θεοτόκε βοήθει Κωνσταντίνῳ
δεσπότῃ τῷ Δουκᾳ

Mother of God, help
the emperor Constantine Doukas

Upcoming Events: December 2022

Please note that the corridor outside RBSC is temporarily narrowed to a pedestrian tunnel due to ongoing library renovations, but we generally remain open during our regular hours.

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

Thursday, December 1 at 5:00pm | Italian Research Seminar: “Fellini, Film, and the Proliferation of Petroculture in Postwar Italy” – Lora Jury (University of Notre Dame).

Daughters of Our Lady: Finding a Place at Notre Dame, an exhibition of materials from the University of Notre Dame Archives curated by Elizabeth Hogan and reflecting on the 50th anniversary of coeducation at Notre Dame, will run through December 16th.

The current spotlight exhibits are Hesburgh Library Special Collections: A Focus on W. B. Yeats (October – December 2022) and The Ladies Flower-Garden of Ornamental Annuals (December 2022 – January 2023).

Due to OIT infrastructure work being done in the Hesburgh Library, Special Collections will be closed
on Monday, December 19, 2022.

Rare Books and Special Collections will be closed for Notre Dame’s Christmas and New Year’s Break
(December 23, 2022, through January 2, 2023).

We otherwise remain open for our regular hours during Reading Days and Exams, and welcome those looking for a quiet place to study.

Turkey for the People

by Rachel Bohlmann, American History Librarian and Curator

The painting of a wild turkey featured in this Thanksgiving post is also displayed in pride of place in the book in which it was printed: opposite the title page in Audubon’s American Birds, from Plates by J.J. Audubon, published in 1949 in London and New York by a British publisher, Batsford. As the title indicates, this is a book of reproductions of fewer than two dozen of John Audubon’s paintings from his monumental work of natural history and painting, Birds of America, published in London between 1827 and 1838.

Batsford, the publisher that produced this modest, post-war volume, wished to place Audubon’s accomplished paintings within reach of nearly everyone. The publisher asked Sacheverell Sitwell to write the introduction, which makes up (excluding the illustrations’ captions) the book’s text. Sitwell was a poet and a prolific writer, mostly on artistic themes and as an art critic. In this book on Audubon’s birds, Sitwell places Audubon’s work firmly within the history of British and American art.

Sitwell also underscored the publisher’s populist intent. The writer noted that books like Audubon’s original work, which was produced in the largest possible format—elephantine, was the “modern equivalent of the illuminated missals of the middle ages. They were accessible only in the houses of the rich and in public libraries.” (p. 10) Sitwell (who was himself both wealthy and titled) and Batsford made Audubon’s great nineteenth-century achievement accessible to popular audiences in Britain and the United States. Turkey for the people.

RBSC will be closed during Notre Dame’s Thanksgiving Break (November 24-25, 2022). We wish you and yours a Happy Thanksgiving!

Thanksgiving 2021: The Thanksgiving that Gave Us a Song, a Movie … and a Cookbook!
Thanksgiving 2020: Happy Thanksgiving to All Our Readers
Thanksgiving 2019: “Thanksgiving Greetings” from the Strunsky-Walling Collection
Thanksgiving 2018: Thanksgiving from the Margins
Thanksgiving 2017: Playing Indian, Playing White
Thanksgiving 2016: Thanksgiving Humor by Mark Twain
Thanksgiving 2015: Thanksgiving and football

Due to renovation-related work being done in the department, on November 28-29 Special Collections will be closed to visitors, except for previously scheduled classes.

An Annotated 17th Century Handbook on Excommunications

by Alan Krieger, Theology and Philosophy Librarian

Hesburgh Libraries has recently acquired an interesting and extremely rare early modern work, Alessandro Ludovisi’s Catalogus Excommunicationum, quae extra Bullam Coenae Domini sunt reservarae Papae, vel Episcopo, vel Nemini, iussu illustrissimi… (Bononiae, 1613). Ludovisi (1554-1623), a native of Bologna who would later become Pope Gregory XV from 1621-1623, compiled what is essentially a handbook that details which types of persons—religious and secular—can be excommunicated, for what reasons, and who has the particular authority to do so.

For example, chapter one concerns the excommunication of prelates (cardinals, bishops, nuncios, etc.) by the Pope himself; chapter two covers lesser clerics, chapter four, nuns and chapter six, Inquisitors. Chapter seven deals with secular lords and nobility, while chapter eight discusses various professions, including magistrates, university rectors, governors, and scholars. Chapter ten concerns all those who can be excommunicated by a bishop alone.

In addition, manuscript annotations add interest to this particular copy, attesting perhaps to various canon law interpretations prevalent during this period.

Manuscript annotations on the beginning pages of Chapter 3 (left) and Chapter 8 (right).

We have found no other copies of this title held by other North American libraries.

Fall, Fruit, and American History in Edward Lee Greene’s Library

by Jacob Swisher, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of History, University of Notre Dame

As fall comes to a close and leaves blanket the landscape, there are still apples fit for picking and ideal carving pumpkins throughout much of Michiana. You may not find any such apples or pumpkins rolling around Rare Books and Special Collections this fall, but a journey into the books from Edward Lee Greene’s personal library is certain to furnish you with some fruity history about the connection between fruit and identity in American history. Edward Lee Greene (1843-1915) was an American botanist whose personal library of over 3,000 volumes is held in Rare Books and Special Collections. Though you won’t encounter a botanical history that explains the pumpkin spice latte in the stacks, Greene’s library does contain an intriguing manual that helps us to think about the role of fruit in American history and our daily lives from the perspective of a state well-known for its horticulture: California.

Written by Edward J. Wickson in 1889, The California Fruits and How to Grow Them is a manual that covers nearly every topic a novice California horticulturist would seemingly need to learn to begin cultivating fruit, whether in the late-nineteenth century or today. Wickson’s handbook begins with an overview of California’s climate and soils before moving into descriptions of the range and histories of various wild and introduced plant species, such as the California crabapple, the wild gooseberry, and the California jujube. Those eager to introduce their own varieties of common fruits could find more than enough help in the second half of Wickson’s The California Fruits and How to Grow Them. From recommendations for growing specific plants to guides on how to implement certain cultivation techniques, such furrow irrigation or grafting, an important method for propagating certain species like apple trees, Wickson’s volume contains an array of horticultural tips and tricks to help the aspiring horticulturist to get their backyard orchard up and running.

The California Fruits and How to Grow Them, however, is much more than just a horticultural manual. Wickson’s volume, like many others contained in the Edward L. Greene Collection, reveals much about the intersections between science, human-nature relationships, and American identity in the late-nineteenth-century United States. For Wickson’s readers, the scientific knowledge they gleaned from The California Fruits and How to Grow Them rendered history visible in the form of the very fruit they plucked from the California environment. Crabapple trees and evergreen shrubs such as manzanita became reminders of California’s indigenous histories as Wickson informed readers that these fruit-bearers were “highly esteemed by the Indians.” Other fruits conjured images of Spanish California, including “orange, fig, palm, olive and grape,” all of which, according to Wickson, Jesuit priests established at the Spanish missions that spread across the region in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 

In Wickson’s view, however, “these early efforts at improvement of California fruits were but faint forerunners of the zeal and enterprise which followed the great invasion by gold seekers.” For Wickson, specific techniques typified this pioneer “zeal” and ushered California not only into a new historical period but a new era of fruit cultivation, such as grafting. Grafting is a technique of propagating a variety of fruit by inserting a bud of the chosen variety into the trunk of an existing tree (usually of a different species). Though grafting is an old technique for food production, one likely present in California since at least the Spanish colonial period, Wickson omits this detail in text instead associating grafting with other American technical innovations such as the use of railroad transportation to move fresh fruit in and out of the state. Instead, grafting and railroad transportation embodied the ways in which Wickson imagined Californians as ushering in a new and, by implication, better era of fruit cultivation throughout the state. Deploying nineteenth-century notions of progress and improvement to chart the place of American migrants in California’s natural and human histories, Wickson’s book transformed horticultural practices into metaphors that signified how and why California fit into American history, grafting Wickson, other Californians, and their recent possession of the California landscape onto the fruits of the California environment in the process.

Nineteenth-century Californians like Wickson understood fruit as more than simply a thing to cultivate. Fruit trees, vines, and shrubs were also botanical texts through which Californians could read themselves into the history of the state. Much like the apple orchards, pumpkin patches, or corn mazes many Americans will wander through this fall, orange groves and hillsides covered in gooseberries provided nineteenth-century Californians with experiences that may have helped them to anchor themselves in new places, communities, or environments. Fruit, as Wickson’s volume reveals, was central to being Californian–a thing California is not only known for, but through which people have historically come to know themselves and the state. Perhaps, with our autumn strolls through apple orchards or pumpkin patches, Americans today are not so different? Food for thought, I suppose. Happy fall everyone!

 

Further reading:

Sackman, Douglas. Orange Empire: California and the Fruits of Eden. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.

Nash, Linda. Inescapable Ecologies: A History of Environment, Disease, and Knowledge. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.

Ott, Cindy. Pumpkin: The Curious History of an American Object. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012.

Pollan, Michael. The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World. New York: Random House, 2001.

Bolton Valencius, Conevery. The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land. New York: Basic Books, 2002.