Newberry Library Research Articles

The Imperial Map: Cartography and the Mastery of Empire (review)

Reviewed by: The Imperial Map: Cartography and the Mastery of Empire Lucy Chester The Imperial Map: Cartography and the Mastery of Empire. Edited by James R. Akerman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. 384 pp. $60.00 (cloth). This valuable edited collection of essays originally presented at the University of Chicago's Newberry Library in 2004 examines the relationship between cartography and imperialism in a range of contexts, from military mapping to journalistic cartography and from the South Pacific to the Qing Empire. Three chapters cover the early modern era, while two essays deal with modern cartography; Matthew Edney's opening chapter, "The Irony of Imperial Mapping," ranges over both time periods. The authors have taken care to identify points of intersection between their essays, which cohere well. The book is lavishly illustrated with high-quality images in both color and black and white, as is necessary for a work on cartographic history. In terms of geographical range, the book covers Africa, China, Eurasia, North and South America, and the South Pacific. However, with the exception of Laura Hostetler's article, "Contending Cartographic Claims? The Qing Empire in Manchu, Chinese, and European Maps," the collection deals primarily with Western imperialism in these regions, which may leave teachers and scholars of world history wishing for a broader scope. [End Page 168] James Akerman's clear introduction provides useful context, both historical and historiographical. The contributions are all engaging and thought-provoking, with enough background to orient readers new to the material and enough substance and innovation to intrigue experts in the field. Each chapter summarizes its relationship to the existing literature, explaining how it draws from the work of cartographic historians such as Brian Harley, David Woodward, and Thongchai Winichakul, from imperial historiography, and from relevant subfields. A particular strength of these essays is their willingness to confront nuance and ambiguity. Edney's chapter, for example, deals forthrightly with the problem of defining empire and the "imperial map," arguing that states and empires practice similar kinds of cartography. The difference, he maintains, lies in audiences' emotional reaction to imperial maps, which generate both a sense of community among their readers and a feeling of distance and antagonism between those readers and the territory and its inhabitants. Valerie Kivelson's essay, "'Exalted and Glorified to the Ends of the Earth': Imperial Maps and Christian Spaces in Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century Russian Siberia," follows nicely upon these observations, for it examines the relationship between imperial map readers and the indigenous peoples of Siberia, arguing that the Russian empire's maps celebrated religious diversity (while, to be sure, subjugating and exploiting these "lesser faiths") rather than seeking to suppress it. As Kivelson notes, this approach stands in marked contrast to the methods of other European empires, such as the Spanish effort to convert the peoples of the New World. In addition to intriguing substantive content, each chapter engages vigorously with the relevant historiography. Hostetler's essay is particularly stimulating, asserting that Manchu, Chinese, and European maps of the Qing empire all worked, in different ways, to reify Qing territorial claims. Maps based on indigenous methods established the Qing dynasty as patrons of traditional Chinese scholarship, while European maps lent credibility to Qing claims on the international level. The combination worked so powerfully that it continues to affect present-day perceptions of China. Hostetler goes further, challenging conventional divisions between "Western" and "Eastern" mapping and arguing convincingly that scholars must also consider the existence and impact of hybrid cartographic forms drawing on multiple traditions. Similarly, Neil Safier's chapter, "The Confines of the Colony: Boundaries, Ethnographic Landscape, and Imperial Cartography in Iberoamerica," adds valuable nuance to Harley's famous discussion of "cartographic silences." Safier argues that, although Harley presented the absence of Amerindian populations from North American maps as tantamount to [End Page 169] eliminating those communities, the "cartographic evacuation" visible on Portuguese maps was part of a process wherein demographic information was reincorporated into other imperial records, such as population maps (p. 156). In other words, the Portuguese imperial archive reabsorbed those whom it had displaced cartographically, via other media that served its purposes more effectively. Safier concludes that mapping and other emerging...

Ma(r)king Popol Vuh

In their introduction Ma(r)king the Text: The presentation of on the literary page, Joe Bray, Miriam Handley, and Anne C. Henry point out that to mark a text is also make it; [and] features such as punctuation, footnotes, epigraphs, white space and marginalia, marks that traditionally have been ignored in literary criticism, can be examined for their contribution a text's meaning (XVII). The Newberry Library recently disbound and digitized the oldest surviving text of Vuh. (1) In its disbound state, one may plainly observe a number of paratextual markers that have not been addressed in print editions, but that call into question the popular perspective that is Indian auto-ethnography. This paper seeks raise awareness of these marks and their for traditional assumptions of Vuh's survival and its narrative/textual boundaries. To give a brief background, is a mythistory of the Quiche Maya of central highland Guatemala. (2) Once subjugated by Pedro de Alvarado in 1524, the task of pacification largely fell the Catholic monastic orders who, in their zeal, often destroyed or suppressed much of the culture. Traditional evangelical approaches proved less effective among the Maya where native culture and religion were seemingly indivisible from language itself. But the Dominican Order was arguably suited for this challenge because it had embraced target-language competency as a core tenet since the thirteenth century, and, given the inter-relatedness of culture and language, some missionaries seized upon learning the native (hi)stories for this purpose. Nevertheless, such practices carried some risk as evidenced by the Inquisition's scrutiny of Franciscan missionary Bernardino de Sahagun concerning his Florentine Codex. Today, writings from the colonial period that deal with Indian culture are mainly seen either as missionary apologetics or as Indian subversion. (3) The position most commonly taken on is that a missionary-educated Indian used his knowledge of European alphabetic writing capture and preserve the oral recitation of an elder sometime in the 1550s. Roughly a century and a half later, Dominican missionary Father Francisco Ximenez is thought have obtained this phonetic redaction from a parishioner, which he then transcribed and translated in parallel columns of Quiche and Spanish. What is not generally understood is that Ximenez incorporated the mythistory within a broader ecclesiastical treatise written expressly for priests. This treatise, titled Tratado segvndo de todo lo qve deve saber vn ministro, superintends Popol Vuh and an appended scholium. In turn, Tratado segvndo is bound with and preceded by a Quichean grammar, Arte de las tres lengvas. (4) The modern editorial presentation of can be traced French cleric Charles Etienne Brasseur de Bourbourg whose 1861 French edition first coined the title and divided the content into parts and chapters. But more importantly, Brasseur published apart from Ximenez's adjoining material that, together with the exuberant Americanism of the nineteenth century, emphasized as an Indian auto-ethnography rather than as a missionary exposition. The construction and presentation of Ximenez's manuscript went unrecognized for the following eight decades. Even after Ximenez's manuscript resurfaced in the 1940s, Vuh's narrative and textual boundaries seem be defined by its nineteenth-century parameters, which were the co-incidence or co-presence of the parallel Quiche and Spanish. Imposing rigid textual and narrative boundaries on the manuscript is problematic because Ximenez is always present by way of his translation and the contextual permeation of his leading and trailing discourse. Assuming that the Quiche transcription controls the narrative boundaries dismisses Ximenez's involvement and disinherits his paratextual contributions. …

In Appreciation of Henry Farmer Dobyns, 3 July 1925 to 22 June 2009

This is a tribute published in the journal Ethnohistory for Dr. Henry F. Dobyns in 2010. This piece was written by one of his former colleagues that he worked with at the Newberry Library in Chicago, IL.

The American West: Sources from the Everett D. Graff Collection of Western Americana at the Newberry Library, Chicago2010247The American West: Sources from the Everett D. Graff Collection of Western Americana at the Newberry Library, Chicago. Marlborough: Adam Matthew Digital Last visited March 2010. $4,100 URL: www.amdigital.co.uk/collections/American‐West/Default.aspx

The American West: Sources from the Everett D. Graff Collection of Western Americana at the Newberry Library, Chicago2010247<i>The American West: Sources from the Everett D. Graff Collection of Western Americana at the Newberry Library, Chicago</i>. Marlborough: Adam Matthew Digital Last visited March 2010. $4,100 URL: www.amdigital.co.uk/collections/American‐West/Default.aspx

Contesting Knowledge: Museums and Indigenous Perspectives (review)

Reviewed by: Contesting Knowledge: Museums and Indigenous Perspectives Kym S. Rice Contesting Knowledge: Museums and Indigenous Perspectives. Edited by Susan Sleeper-Smith. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009. 374 pages, $35.00. In his influential 1997 essay "Museums as Contact Zones," anthropologist James Clifford raised troubling questions about the unequal power relationships that existed between majority (read, white-run) museums and Native Americans inspired by an encounter he witnessed between tribal elders and staff at the Portland Art Museum. Among other things, Clifford argued for museums to adopt new strategies of representation that would accord greater recognition and respect to the meaning of sacred objects, as conveyed through living indigenous memory and perspective. Published more than a decade later, based on conference papers originally presented at the Newberry Library's D'Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian History, Contesting Knowledge features essays by scholars who study indigenous museums and material culture. The very readable volume, edited by Susan Sleeper-Smith of Michigan State University, speaks to the transformations as well as the complications that have occurred in the field since Clifford's piece originally appeared—precipitated, in part, by the continuing expansion of tribal museums, some with elaborate exhibition programs fueled by casino development. Although the book asserts a global perspective through its inclusion of essays by Hal Langfur on Brazil and Ciraj Rassool on the District Six Museum in Cape Town, South Africa, it focuses chiefly on North America. As one might expect, multiple essays critique the Smithsonian Institution's controversial National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), which opened its Washington, DC, facility in 2004. Miranda J. Brady, in "A Dialogic Response to the Problematicized Past," interrogates NMAI's placement within the Smithsonian Empire, which Brady finds not only obscures its efforts to construct a national indigenous identity within the museum but is further complicated by what she perceives as a lack of transparency in its relationships with political and corporate America. Of additional interest with respect to NMAI are Jennifer Shannon's "The Construction of Native Voice at the National Museum of the American Indian," which addresses the difficult issues related to community authority and representation, and Ann McMullen's sweeping "Reinventing George Heye: Nationalizing the Museum of the American Indian and Its Collections," which reconsiders the museum's vast 800,000-plus object [End Page 213] collection through a new scrutiny of Heye, the individual who collected them earlier in the twentieth century. Other essays analyze the role of tribal museums in revitalizing their communities, particularly through community-focused exhibition practices. Amy Lonetree's thoughtful "Museums as Sites of Decolonization: Truth Telling in National and Tribal Museums" concludes the volume. Lonetree has in the past criticized NMAI's lack of historical context, particularly with respect to colonization and genocide, while generally offering praise for the museum's efforts to effect close collaboration with Native communities. Here she evaluates the Saginaw Chippewa's Ziibiwing Center of Anishinabe Culture and Lifeways as an exemplar of what Lonetree terms the "decolonized" museum—standing in sharp contrast to NMAI. Her study calls our attention to the powerful, creative, and quite different new models for exhibition making now emerging from some indigenous museums. Regardless of one's ethnicity, affiliation or experience, museum professionals and public historians alike, especially those with little or no experience working with indigenous communities or other stakeholder audiences, will find this volume concerning an emerging aspect of museum practice valuable and worth exploring. Kym S. Rice George Washington University, Washington, DC Copyright © 2010 The Western Literature Association

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors

Modern Architecture and Complaints about the Weather, or, ‘Dear Monsieur Le Corbusier, It is still raining in our garage….’

Historians of Modern Architecture have cultivated the image of the architect as a temperamental genius, unconcerned by issues of politeness or pragmatics. Despite their indisputable place within the architectural canon, many of the most important works of Modern Architecture were heavily contested on pragmatic grounds, such as cost, briefs and particularly concerning issues of suitability and effectiveness in relation to climate and weather. This paper will discuss a number of famed instances in the history of Modern Architecture where climatic conditions have become a contested issue in the reception of ‘the masterpiece’.

The Genesis of African and Indian Cooperation in Colonial North America: An Interview with Helen Hornbeck Tanner

Dr. Helen Hornbeck Tanner, a senior research fellow at the Newberry Library, studied American Indian and colonial American history for over six decades. In this interview she discusses little-known themes including African and Indian coexistence and cooperation, beginning in 1619 in the Chesapeake Bay region, and spanning Louisiana, Minnesota, New York, Northern Mexico, Ohio, Spanish Florida, and Texas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including an Underground Railroad from Michigan into Canada. Also discussed are a system of inter-Indian diplomacy that stretched across the United States east of the Rocky Mountains and the long history of attempts by the U.S. government to assimilate American Indians.

The Testaments of Toluca

The Testaments of Toluca

In Memoriam: Mark Perlberg, 1929–2008

In Memoriam: Mark Perlberg, 1929–2008 Hilda Raz Poet Mark Perlberg was a regular contributor to Prairie Schooner and other journals, including the New Yorker, Atlantic, Chicago Review, and the New York Times. As a reporter, he was sent to Chicago in 1956 by Time magazine to cover the arts, and there he and his wife Anna stayed until his death on June 23, 2008. In 1968, Mr. Perlberg cofounded the Poetry Center of Chicago, now at the School of the Art Institute, and served as its president for thirteen years and as a longtime member of the board of directors. Mr. Perlberg also taught a poetry workshop at the Newberry Library. His own books of poems were The Burning Field, winner of the Robert L. Ferguson Memorial Award, The Feel of the Sun (Swallow/Ohio University Press), The Impossible Toystore (Louisiana State University Press) and, forthcoming, Waiting for the Alchemist (also LSU Press). He was a critic for the Chicago Daily News, where he reviewed books of poetry, novels, and plays, and he worked with Rose Kennedy on her memoirs. In addition, he was a writer and editor for the Encyclopedia Britannica, World Book, and Prism magazine. Our long friendship with Mr. Perlberg included regular telephone calls and later, personal visits with Mark and Anna, most recently in the company of poet Jehanne Dubrow at the time of our reading from the Prairie Schooner Jewish American Portfolio, published in our Spring 2007 issue, at the Spertus Institute in Chicago. Mark Perlberg was unfailingly courteous and generous. He will remain in our pages and long in our thoughts as a brilliant and brave participant in all human endeavors. Where he saw the necessity for change, he instigated change. We join his family and friends and the literary community in our grief at his absence. [End Page 167] Hilda Raz Glenna Luschei Endowed Editor-in-Chief Copyright © 2008 University of Nebraska Press

Teaching &amp; Learning Guide for: ‘Nowhere is a Place’: Travel Writing in Sixteenth‐Century England

Teaching &amp; Learning Guide for: ‘Nowhere is a Place’: Travel Writing in Sixteenth‐Century England

Lewis &amp; Clark and the Indian country: the Native American perspective

Lewis and Clark and the Indian Country broadens the scope of conventional study of the Lewis and Clark expedition to include Native American perspectives. Frederick E. Hoxie and Jay T. Nelson present the expedition’s long-term impact on the “Indian Country” and its residents through compelling interviews conducted with Native Americans over the past two centuries, secondary literature, Lewis and Clark travel journals, and other primary sources from the Newberry Library’s exhibit Lewis and Clark and the Indian Country. Rich stories of Native Americans, travelers, ranchers, Columbia River fur traders, teachers, and missionaries-often in conflict with each other--illustrate complex interactions between settlers and tribal people. Environmental protection issues and the preservation of Native language, education, and culture dominate late twentieth-century discussions, while early accounts document important Native American alliances with Lewis and Clark. In widening the reader’s interpretive lens to include many perspectives, this collection reaches beyond individual achievement to appreciate America’s plural past.

Mapping Manifest Destiny: Chicago and the American West: Exhibition at the Newberry Library November 3, 2007 – February 16, 2008

Mapping Manifest Destiny: Chicago and the American West: Exhibition at the Newberry Library November 3, 2007 – February 16, 2008

RONALD CORTHELL, FRANCES E. DOLAN, CHRISTOPHER HIGHLEY, and ARTHUR F. MAROTTI (eds). Catholic Culture in Early Modern England.

Catholic Culture in Early Modern England is a capacious title for an appropriately diverse collection of essays. Originating in a conference at Chicago's Newberry Library in 2002, this anthology discusses: a ‘range of Catholics—laymen and laywomen, a queen, a Benedictine nun, Jesuit missionaries, and Catholic exiles; recusants, church papists, and loyalists’ (p. 15). Catholic experience is accordingly shown to be multifarious and multifaceted, with essays exploring issues as varied as architecture, Latin literacy, court politics, antiquarianism, conversion, the role of the English colleges, relics, hagiography, and romance. This breadth in and of itself tells us something about the progress being made by revisionist work: the Catholics under consideration are not simplistically or exclusively defined as ‘victims’, but rather they are recognised as a heterogeneous group whose experiences are important in their own right and also significant for a larger understanding of early modern culture. The editors of the volume (themselves veteran revisionists whose work has been instrumental in redrawing the critical paradigms of Catholicism) firmly locate its contents in a project that is ‘questioning the assumption that the Reformation was a decisive and wholly positive change and reimagining Catholics as participants in, rather than obstacles to or exiles from, post-Reformation English history’ (p. 2). Their introduction provides a pithy overview of recent research in the field (and is an excellent bibliography for interested readers). The miscellaneous selection of essays that follows does much to augment and nuance such scholarship.

Your Chicago Dilemma May Be Too Many Great Choices

Your Chicago Dilemma May Be Too Many Great Choices

Historic Dance Resources at the Newberry Library

Historic Dance Resources at the Newberry Library

Marc Lescarbot Reads Jacques Cartier: Colonial History in the Service of Propaganda

Marc Lescarbot Reads Jacques Cartier: Colonial History in the Service of Propaganda Carla Zecher The Newberry Library The parliamentary lawyer Marc Lescarbot (ca. 1570-1641) lived at the tiny French settlement of Port-Royal in Acadia (present-day Annapolis, Nova Scotia) for 13 months, beginning in July 1606.1 The colony's commander, Jean de Biencourt, sieur de Poutrincourt, had invited Lescarbot to join the 1606 expedition as its chronicler. Poutrincourt, an impoverished Catholic nobleman and former soldier, hoped to re-make his family's fortune overseas. Lescarbot, a bachelor in his mid-thirties, disillusioned with corruption in Parliament, was pleased to escape Paris and embark on a colonial adventure.2 Funding for Port-Royal was provided by the Protestant merchant Pierre Du Gua de Monts, whom king Henri IV had named his lieutenant general for the "païs et territoires de la Cadie" in 1603, at the same time granting him a monopoly over the Canadian fur trade.3 During the summer of 1606, however, while Poutrincourt's group of new colonists was settling in at Port-Royal, Du Gua and his business associates suffered heavy losses in a skirmish with merchants from Amsterdam in the St. Lawrence valley. As a result, Du Gua's party disbanded, Henri IV revoked the fur trade monopoly, and the colonists were repatriated in September 1607. Back in Paris, Lescarbot amply fulfilled his duties as chronicler by drafting his remarkable Histoire de la Nouvelle France, an 888-page book printed in February 1609. Du Gua having now ceded the abandoned property at Port-Royal to Poutrincourt, the latter hoped to persuade the king to reinstate the colony, and Lescarbot's book therefore took on a promotional as well as a documentary function. The Histoire de la Nouvelle France represents an early example of what would soon become the standard French colonial handbook for the Americas: a work in two or three volumes, one devoted to the author's personal travel narrative, the other(s) presenting an ethnography and/or a natural history. Lescarbot's particular innovation was to combine this genre with another one, already favored in the later sixteenth century: the travel anthology. The first book of the Histoire presents a compilation of historical narratives of the sixteenth-century French voyages to Florida and Brazil. The Canadian voyages of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries follow, in the second book, culminating with Lescarbot's account of his year in Acadia. Book three presents an extensive ethnography of the Indians of North and South America. [End Page 107] Lastly, Lescarbot appended to the volume a 66-page collection of his own poetry titled Les Muses de la Nouvelle France, much of which he had composed in Acadia—what some have called the first text of Canadian literature.4 Throughout the 400 years since the first printing of the Histoire de la Nouvelle France, the travel anthology that opens the volume has consistently attracted less attention than the later sections. Translators, editors, historians, and literary scholars have, not surprisingly, gravitated to the more original material contained in the work: the account of the Acadia colony, the ethnography, and the poetry. They have also focused on the third edition of the Histoire (1617), which is the most comprehensive of the three, since Lescarbot's practice was to add material to successive editions, replacing or updating dedicatory epistles and inserting new chapters. This custom has tended to obscure the fact that Lescarbot did make revisions to the anthology portion of his book for the second edition—specifically, in the section devoted to the narratives of the sixteenth-century explorer Jacques Cartier, a historical figure whom Lescarbot particularly wished to highlight, as a forerunner to Poutrincourt, for the purpose of promoting the Acadia colony to Henri IV. The revisions were necessitated by the acquisition of new information regarding Cartier's voyages to Canada, and in some respects they weakened Lescarbot's initial portrayal of Cartier as a hero...

New Means to an Old End: Early Modern Maps in the Service of an Anti‐Ottoman Crusade

Three 1605 manuscript maps of Ottoman fortresses, held in the Newberry Library in Chicago, are beautiful and technically proficient. They were drawn during the Habsburg–Ottoman Long War (1593–1606) by one Christofaro Tarnowskij, who is otherwise unknown as a cartographer, apparently in the context of plans for an anti‐Ottoman uprising by Christian subjects in the western Balkans. While the maps help to illuminate decades of plotting against the Ottomans in the late‐sixteenth and early‐seventeenth centuries and the continuing relevance of the ideal of crusade in early modern Europe, they do much more; for they demonstrate the artificiality for the period of two of our own intellectual constructs of East as opposed to West and medieval as opposed to modern. They also reinforce the centrality of the history of cartography in understanding Europe's past.

Die erste Walpurgisnacht: Ballade von Goethe für Chor und Orchester, op. 60 (review)

Reviewed by: Die erste Walpurgisnacht: Ballade von Goethe für Chor und Orchester, op. 60 R. Larry Todd Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy. Die erste Walpurgisnacht: Ballade von Goethe für Chor und Orchester, op. 60. A Full-Color Facsimile of the Autograph Piano-Vocal Score Held in the Museum of Educational Heritage at Tamagawa University. Edited with commentary by Hiromi Hoshino. Tokyo: Yushodo Press Co., c2005. [Message (Yoshiaki Obara) in Eng., Jap., 2 p.; foreword in Eng., Jap., Ger., 3 p.; facsimile (color), 49 p.; commentary (Die erste Walpurgisnacht, history of the Tamagawa autograph, content of the Tamagawa autograph), p. 1–59; appendices (text, original sources), in Eng., Jap., p. 60–73; bibliography, p. 74–76. Cloth (in slipcase). ISBN 4-8419-0396-8. ¥47,500.] If the rediscovery of a major Felix Mendelssohn autograph is cause enough for celebration, then doubly so the publication in full color of the document in question, a source previously unknown to Mendelssohn research: the autograph piano-vocal score of the cantata Die erste Walpurgisnacht, op. 60 (1843). This is the composition Hector Berlioz praised for its "whirling momentum and sweep," its interweaving of voices and instruments "with an apparent confusion which is the perfection of art" (The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz, corr. ed., trans. and ed. David Cairns [New York: Norton, 1975], 294; reprint [New York: A. A. Knopf, 2002], 298), and the work Fanny Hensel was rehearsing in 1847 when she suffered her fatal stroke. Published with a detailed commentary by the Japanese musicologist Hiromi Hoshino, this handsome offering augments a relatively small number of facsimiles of Mendelssohn's manuscripts issued over the last sixty years, beginning with the first version of the Hebrides overture (Die Hebriden: First Version of the Concert-Overture, ed. Max F. Schneider [Basel: Amerbach, 1947]), now housed at the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York; the chorus Die Frauen und die Sänger (ed. Max F. Schneider and Karl-Heinz Köhler [Basel: Edition Bartholdy, 1959]); the ever-popular Octet in the Library of Congress (Octet for Strings, op. 20: A Facsimile of the Holograph in the Whittall Foundation Collection, ed. Jon Newsom [Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1976]) and Violin Concerto, once in the Berlin Staatsbibliothek and uncovered in 1988 in the Jagiellonian Library, Cracow (ed. Luigi Alberto Bianchi and Franco Sciannameo, Music in Facsimile, 4 [New York: Garland, 1991]); the cantata Jesu, meine Freude (ed. Oswald Jonas [Chicago: Newberry Library, 1966]); and most recently, the "Italian" Symphony (Sinfonie A-Dur op. 90, "Italienische": Alle eigenhändigen Niederschriften im Faksimile: Partitur 1833, "Oxforder Fragmente," Teil-Partitur 1834, ed. John Michael Cooper and Hans-Günter Klein [Wiesbaden: L. Reichert Verlag, 1997]), with reproductions of the manuscripts of the 1833 version of the complete symphony and Mendelssohn's 1834 reworking of the last three movements in the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin—Preußischer Kulturbesitz, as well as the portions held by the Bodleian Library, Oxford, of the composer's revisions made in the prebound 1833 score; and the original a cappella version of the chorus Denn er hat seinen Engeln befohlen über dir, incorporated with orchestral accompaniment by Mendelssohn into the oratorio Elijah (Denn er hat seinen Engeln befohlen: Faksimileausgabe nach dem Autograph [End Page 358] in der Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin—Preußischer Kulturbesitz, ed. Thomas Schmidt-Beste [Stuttgart: Carus, 1997]). In the case of Die erste Walpurgisnacht, the new facsimile arrives at a propitious time, when scholarly interest in this composition is peaking, having been rejuvenated in 1997 by Christoph Hellmundt's study "Mendelssohns Arbeit an seiner Kantate Die erste Walpurgisnacht: Zu einer bisher wenig beachteten Quelle" (in Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy Kongreß-Bericht Berlin 1994, ed. Christian Martin Schmidt, 76–112 [Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1997]), and freshly stimulated by Cooper's engaging new monograph Mendelssohn, Goethe, and the Walpurgis Night: The Heathen Muse in European Culture, 1700–1850 (Eastman Studies in Music [Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2007]) and the pre-announcement of his forthcoming edition of the cantata's first version for A-R Editions. As is typically the case with Mendelssohn's major works, the compositional history of Die erste Walpurgisnacht is especially complex and tangled, extending for more than a decade (1830–43) from the...

Choreographing Identities beyond Boundaries: La Guiablesse and Ruth Page's Excursions into World Dance (1926–1934)

Before she dreamt of her mission to create the American bal let in Chicago, Ruth Page traveled the world in search of styles. She was already a highly proficient dancer, having toured South America with Pavlova, performed as Adolph Bolm's partner in his Ballet Intime in London, New York, Chicago, and Buenos Aires, successfully auditioned for Diaghilev in Monte Carlo, and been appointed as ballet director of the Ravinia Opera Festival, just out side Chicago. On her way to ballet Americana in the late 1920s and early 1930s, this native of Indianapolis went through a number of choreographic phases that mirrored larger currents in American society in general and the dance world in particular. The time was ripe for a feminist, a liberated and cultured woman, and most of all a dancer to travel to Asia. Invited to per form a series of concerts for the coronation ceremonies of Em peror Hirohito in Tokyo in October 1928, she proceeded with her mother and father on a five-month tour of Japan, China, Cambo dia, Siam, Java, Bali, Burma, India, and, on the way home, Spain. Like a budding dance anthropologist, or at least an American dancer in search of new choreographic material, Page took dance lessons wherever she could, kept notes from the field on classes around the world, and had films made of dance performances and learning practices. Her meticulous note-taking is clear in a collec tion she published in 1984, Class: Notes on Dance Classes Around the World, 1915-1980} Sixty-one pages are devoted to "ethnic dance," thirty pages to the German modern dance, specifically classes by Mary Wigman and Harald Kreutzberg (selected from more than seventy manuscript pages), and seventy-seven pages to ballet, from a cast of stars, both internationally known (Bolm, of course, and Enrico Cecchetti) and local (a number of Chicagoans) .2 Page saw