Scholarship

In her keynote address at the second annual Barry Lawrence Ruderman Conference on Cartography: Gender, Sexuality, Cartography, at the David Rumsey Map Center at Green Library, Stanford University, October 10-12, 2019, Professor Susan Schulten of the University of Denver will discuss a manuscript geography book compiled by one of the first few women in America to receive a higher education under the tutelage of pioneer educator Emma Willard: Eliza Henshaw. Professor Schulten writes, "My lecture will focus on the proliferation of map drawing in the decades after the revolution, particularly among young women. Eliza Henshaw’s geography journal, part of the Dobkin Collection, illuminates those practices well, especially since she was a start pupil of Emma Willard at the Middlebury Female Academy." As part of her presentation, Professor Schulten will provide a reproduction of a page from Eliza Henshaw's journal. "I hope to join Eliza’s image with a geography journal most likely made by her younger sister, Frances, in 1823. You can see the images from that journal (quite different from Eliza’s made under Willard’s direction!) here in the Rumsey Collection within Stanford University Library."

Thomas Wild, Wout Cornelissen, and Barbara Hahn, for The Critical Edition of Hannah Arendt, reviewed the Collection's holdings of Arendt's literary executor Jerome Kohn, including significant Mary McCarthy correspondence and Arendt's annotated copy of The Origins of Totalitarianism. They will be publishing a digital edition of our early typescript of Rahel Varnhagen in 2020.

The Collection's letters by Willa Cather - over 250, largely to her publisher Alfred A. Knopf - have been included by editors Andrew Jewell and Janis P. Stout in their comprehensive scholarly digital edition, The Complete Letters of Willa Cather (2018-2019) as part of The Willa Cather Archive; and selectively included in The Selected Letters of Willa Cather (NY: Knopf, 2013).

Dr. Wilma Peebles-Wilkins worked with the Collection's Janie Barrett Archive to substantially update her online essay, "Janie Porter Barrett," for the Encyclopedia of Social Work (Oxford University Press, 2016). She writes, "Much of my work involves social welfare biographical essays of pioneering African American women who were dedicated to social justice and uplift in the historic African American community."

Blake Wilder, at the University of Maryland, examined the Collection's copy of Sarah Collins Fernandis's 1925 Poems in researching "Black Motherhood and the Politics of Fulfillment in the poetry of Sarah Collins Fernandis" - a working paper to be presented at the American Literature Association conference in Boston in May 2019. Wilder writes, "This work on Fernandis is part of the early stage research of a book project about black women in the Baltimore and Washington D.C. area in the early twentieth century who were actively engaged in community building and social work but who were also authors. This project is interested in how these women understood literary and imaginative writing as part of or related to the civic work that they also did."

Food historian Stephen Schmidt analyzed manuscript cookbooks in the Collection, at times dating material to a period of just a few years and locating its point of origin based on recipes and ingredients. Six of our cookbooks fit the criteria for the Manuscript Cookbook Survey, a Pine Needles Foundation Project spearheaded by Szilvia Szmuk-Tanenbaum.

Hugh Sebag-Montefiore quoted from Marjorie Beeton's diary in Somme: Into The Breach (Penguin 2016), mentioning some of her comments from July 1916 as the Battle of the Somme began. "She was describing what she witnessed when working at a hospital in Rouen France during the days following that first terrible day (I July 1916) when approaching 60,000 Allied soldiers were killed and wounded. She was describing how the fall out from the unsuccessful 1 July attack affected those like her who had to care for the wounded."

Ann Brubaker Greenleaf Wirtz is the great-granddaughter of Mary Ursula Kessler Vandivert, who co-founded the Tuesday P.M. Club in 1895 with Annie Pillsbury Young. For her book Daughter of the Greatest Generation, An American Memoir, Wirtz called upon the Collection's Anthony letter addressed to Mrs. Annie Pillsbury Young, The Tuesday P.M. Club, Manhattan, Kansas, dated Jan. 13, 1903.

Sue Fox fact-checked one of the Collection's Carrington letters - against a previously published transcription - for a new edition of Carrington’s Letters edited by Anne Chisholm  (Chatto & Windus 2017).

Catherine Morana included the Collection's photograph of Dr. Annie Ramborger in "Rarer than Hens' Teeth - Women Dentists in the 19th Century" (Your Oral Health, Supplement Ontario Dentist (Summer/Fall 2017), p.15). She notes, "While Dr Annie Ramborger was not the first woman to become a dentist, her case was useful to explore as it offered specifics as to the reasons why some men objected to women being trained as dentists. ... [She] addressed the prejudice about women in dentistry front on – eventually challenging these prejudices in open court, which is where the objections were publicly aired." She notes, "Due to space limitations the article couldn’t mention everything I wanted to include about 'Fannie.'  But there is a wonderful note you can add to Ramborger’s story:  She graduated third in her class and opened up a very successful dental practice, earning $6,000 US per year – a sizeable sum.  Her practice focused on treating female patients.  And she enjoyed her money – working nine months a year and travelling the remaining 3 months!   (A real fire-cracker!)." A download of Morana's article is available through this link: https://www.dobkinfeminism.org/item-page/?id=4655858

Breanne Fahs reviewed the Collection's correspondence between Ti-Grace Atkinson and Valerie Solanas for Valerie Solanas: The Defiant Life of the Woman Who Wrote SCUM (and Shot Andy Warhol) (NY: Feminist Press, 2014).

Matthew Geyer worked with artist Buffie Johnson's letters to Ruth Ford in researching Johnson's voice and character for his novel about the life of Mark Rothko, who met Johnson in Los Angeles in 1943.  She introduced Rothko to Peggy Guggenheim later that year in New York, which led to his first one-man exhibition at Art of This Century on 57^th Street.  Johnson and Rothko remained friends until his death in 1970, and she figures as prominently in the manuscript as she did in his life.