Monthly Archives: June 2013

Stereoscopic images of World War I

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The Paul Jean Gaston Darrot papers (MS 591) consist of 210 photographic prints and 100 stereoscopic glass slides made during World War I.Together they provide a rich and fascinating look into military life in France during the war.

Soldiers sleeping in a church, Marne, 1914. A plane seen from another plane. Soldiers standing in a town. Location not identified. A burial procession at the front. Born in 1892, Darrot studied art before joining the army in 1912. During the war he served in the infantry, the artillery, and the communications section of the engineers. Most of the photographs in the collection were probably made while Darrot was with the engineers.

After the war, Darrot moved to the United States, where he worked for the Seth Thomas Clock Company in New York. Drawing on his photograph collection, he gave lectures to various audiences about his experiences during the war.

Darrot’s stereoscopic slides are particularly noteworthy, both for the range of subjects they cover and for the type of object they are. Stereographs show two images of the same scene that, when looked at through a special viewer, appear to merge into a single three dimensional image. Many stereographs were printed on cards, but Darrot’s are on glass, which makes them particularly fragile.

In order to make the content of the slides available to the public, and at the same time reduce the amount of handling the physical slides are subject to, we have just completed a project to digitize all one hundred slides in the Darrot papers. These are being added to the Manuscripts and Archives Image Database (MADID) and can be viewed as a group by following this link (or by searching the database for the keyword “Darrot”). For more information on the Darrot papers as a whole, see the online finding aid.

Carter Harrison and Yale’s Campus (the Old Brick Row) in 1843

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The letters of Carter Henry Harrison (Class of 1845) of Lexington, Kentucky, written to his mother, Caroline E. Harrison, while he was a student at Yale College, provide a fascinating glimpse into student life at Yale in the middle of the 19th century. Carter’s letters, a small part of the Yale Miscellaneous Manuscripts Collection (MS 1258, Box 9, Folder 343), comprise eight letters written between 1842 and 1845.

The letter dated 15 January 1843 is especially poignant because it reports the death in the college the previous week of an unnamed student who was Carter’s “only intimate acquaintance at this place … one of the most amiable boys [he] ever saw.” The student had “been sick eleven days (that is in bed) with the billious fever.” He discusses his own feelings about this sudden death of a fellow student, and reports that the boy’s father had not yet even arrived at Yale following notification of his son’s illness. Carter’s sentiments and his reassurances to his mother about his own well being are reminders of the profound physical and emotional distances from home experienced by many Yale College students in past centuries.

Carter also discusses at length the preaching and religious considerations that were a part of the Yale College curriculum at the time, reflecting a very different educational and social environment than that encountered by Yale students from the latter 19th century to the present. The first page of the letter contains a contemporary woodcut of the Yale campus, the Old Brick Row, to which Carter has added a legend identifying the buildings. He closes his letter with information to his mother about how some of these buildings function in his daily routine as a student. While his labels under the buildings in the woodcut are correct, he has gotten north and south reversed in his listing of the buildings in the legend. A typed transcription of the letter is available.