Rauner Special Collections Library

We've posted previously about Dartmouth students Johan Liutkus '65 and Roger Daly '67 and how they answered the call of Martin Luther King, Jr., for white people of goodwill in the North to rise up in indignation over the treatment of Black Americans in the South.

Popular conceptions of folklore and mythology can be a funny game of telephone. In high school, for instance, you may have learned about the “hero’s journey”, a concept developed by Joseph Campbell (Dartmouth Class of 1925, non-graduate) to describe a "universal" narrative structure. It has a tendency to come up in English classes as a useful framework to apply to assigned texts, mapping well onto classics like the Odyssey. And it can be useful in that narrative context, but it’s terrible as any sort of comparative mythology.

If you are a woman of a certain age and your family of a certain social/political persuasion, at some point your mother or your most awesome aunt might have given you a copy of Our Bodies Our Selves. By the 1980s it was a huge book with hundreds of pages covering all aspects of women's health and sexuality, but it started out as a pretty humble, stapled mimeograph in 1971.

We recently received a generous gift of the eighth printing from July 1972, priced at only 35 cents. The printing history on the inside cover reveals a lot: