From the Director
Students? In Bancroft?
First, some statistics: Last year, the largest single category of Bancroft users —Cal undergraduates—accounted for 23% of the 16,207 visitors to Bancroft. Cal graduate students comprised the next largest category, 17.5%. Thus, just over 40% of Bancroft’s patrons were Berkeley students. All told, 58% were students from Cal or other institutions — 32% graduate students, 26% undergraduates. Not surprisingly, over half the visits to Bancroft were for the purpose of doing research on dissertations, theses, or term papers.
This is a far cry from the situation as recently as the 1970s. Undergraduates were not admitted to Bancroft on a regular basis until 1973, several years after professor of English James D. Hart became Bancroft’s new director. He was well aware of the importance of exposing students to primary source materials — the raw material of scholarship. Reading a sanitized, regularized printed text is simply not the same as working with an original manuscript.
One of the principle tasks of higher education is teaching how to exercise critical judgment, how to find and evaluate evidence.
Over the past 25 years, faculty and staff have made effective use of Bancroft’s collections to teach this lesson. Leon Litwack, for example, Pulitzer Prize-winning professor of history, regularly sends students from his introductory U.S. history course to work on term papers using Bancroft sources. The first time he did this, in 1989, 700 students descended on Bancroft’s 35- seat Heller Reading Room without prior notice (students and faculty being what they are). The resultant chaos has become legend. Currently we work with about 120 students from the class each time Professor Litwack teaches it, showing them the kinds of documentary materials we have on topics ranging from the opening of the American West to social protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s.
Other faculty members regularly schedule semester-long classes in Bancroft’s three seminar rooms. Professors Joseph Duggan (French) and Alan Nelson (English) teach French and English paleography and textual criticism using literary and documentary manuscripts ranging from 13th-century French Arthurian romances and the Roman de la Rose to the household records of Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey.
This past spring Professor Robert Brentano, one of Cal’s most distinguished medievalists, held several sessions of his upper division course on medieval English history in Bancroft in order to show some of our 15th-century English manuscripts, including both of our Wycliff Bibles. And the Classics Department offered, for the first time, a class on papyrology using Bancroft’s collection of ancient Greek papyri — the largest in the U.S. and an incomparable resource for the study of Hellenistic Egypt, especially now that many of these papyri have been digitized and made available on the internet (http://sunsite.Berkeley.EDU/APIS/).
One of the most interesting classes taking place in Bancroft these days is Engineering 24, a freshman seminar on “Sources in Engineering, Science, and Technology” organized by Deputy Director Peter Hanff and Professor James Casey, Associate Dean of the College of Engineering. Beginning engineering students are encouraged to think about problem- solving by looking at classical instances, using sources such as the treatises on calculus (originally called fluxions) by Leibnitz and Newton in the 17th century, a 19th-century steamship engineer’s diary of experiments to improve the performance of steam engines, the designs of steam car pioneer Abner Doble, and the papers of nuclear physicist E.O.Lawrence, creator of the cyclotron. (See the Spring 1998 issue of Bancroftiana, p. 12.)
Sometimes instruction takes place one-on-one, between a student with a question and a staff member behind the reference desk. Last spring a student came in to find out if we had any information on Rosy the Riveter, the World War II heroine of the home front. Circulation Supervisor Susan Snyder guided her to a large (and unfortunately still largely uncatalogued) collection of war posters. The result was a much more complex and interesting paper on the portrayal of women in the war effort. As Susan states, “she had come into Bancroft with trepidation, but she left as the devoted and grateful author of a smashing paper.”
At the graduate level, thanks to the generosity of Kenneth and Dorothy Hill of San Diego, we’ve been able to award two fellowships each year to students working on dissertations that require the consultation of source materials in Bancroft. This year Elizabeth Leavy (Art History, UC Berkeley) has been studying the social and intellectual context of John Muir’s Picturesque California (1888); while Rick Warner (History, UC Santa Cruz) has been working on the Cora Indian cultures of northwestern Mexico.
Bancroft’s two editorial offices, the Regional Oral History Office (ROHO) and the Mark Twain Project, have also been involved with instruction. This is the second year that ROHO has sponsored a Working Group on Oral History in collaboration with the Townsend Center for the Humanities. It brings together students and faculty from many departments to share insights and problems with ROHO staff. And for the past two years, Bob Hirst, general editor of the Mark Twain Project, has been sharing his knowledge of America’s favorite author with graduate and undergraduate students in the English Department.
Students? In Bancroft? You bet!
Volume 113
Fall 1998
Table of Contents
"Sinners & Pilgrims" Colonel Denny’s Journal and Photo Album
From the Director: Students in Bancroft?
Ovid’s Metamorphoses Metamorphosed
Bonnie Hardwick Follows Her Passions
Rube Goldberg: An American Genius
William P. Barlow, Jr.—A Friend Indeed
Plumbing the Depths of the Spring Valley Water Company
Basketball? At Bancroft? The Oral History of Pete Newell
Jean Stone Honored at Annual Meeting
New Prize for Undergraduate Book Collecting
