The Junior Food Army in Stamford and Fairfield was among those trained by the Connecticut Agricultural College to can food for food preservation during World War I. (University Archives & Special Collections, UConn Library)<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n
The exhibition includes dozens of photographs, official military documents, artifacts, recruitment posters, military handbooks, personal correspondence, news reports, and memorabilia from life on campus in Storrs, in other parts of Connecticut, and on the European war front.<\/p>\n
Pittman developed the exhibition with Allison B. Horrocks \u201916 Ph.D., Draper Dissertation Fellow in the Humanities Institute, and Mary M. Mahoney \u201912 MA, a doctoral candidate in history. The UConn exhibition is part of a series of World War I centennial activities that are part of \u201cThe Yanks Are Coming: Connecticut\u2019s Centennial Commemoration of the U.S. Entry into World War I,\u201d coordinated by the Connecticut State Library.<\/p>\n
In the Dodd Center exhibition, the focus is life on the Connecticut Agricultural College campus and in Connecticut, recruitment posters for the war effort, and the experiences of Captain Dana T. Leavenworth, an estate councilor at Connecticut Mutual Life who was part of the American Expeditionary Force in France.<\/p>\n
On campus, Horrocks says once the U.S. entered the conflict, the Connecticut Agricultural College Agricultural Extension Service began training people in food conservation and canning methods, as well as military skills. About 500 women trained in Storrs, and an estimated 30,000 people throughout Connecticut learned such skills from those trained on campus.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019re having a lot of short courses to bring people in to train them for specific skills on things like canning and milk testing,” she says. “There was also some activity around military skills like working with radios.\u201d<\/p>\n
Horrocks says one of the biggest changes was a radical shift in the student population\u00a0within just a few months, with many young men leaving and more women arriving. The women were encouraged to learn specific skills that they were able to see as a wartime contribution.<\/p>\n
The promotion to start \u201cVictory Gardens\u201d throughout Connecticut and the nation is also part of the exhibition. There are news clippings describing the Junior Food Army, including children in Bridgeport, New Haven, and Stamford who grew corn and potatoes.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat really struck me is that is happening in both urban and rural environments,\u201d Horrocks comments. \u201cPeople were very active all over the state. They\u2019re in the cities like New Haven trying to get kids to grow gardens, sometimes in a very dense urban area.\u201d<\/p>\n
Recruitment posters from among the 55 in the exhibition include the famous James Montgomery Flagg image of Uncle Sam declaring \u201cI Want You for the U.S. Army,\u201d as well as those seeking specific skills for military service such as electricians, radio operators, and mechanics for repairing tanks. There are also American Red Cross posters \u2013\u201cOur Boys Need Sox: Knit Your Bit\u201d \u2013 and promotions for buying war bonds to fund the war effort.<\/p>\n
The Leavenworth memorabilia is from the archive of materials from one of Connecticut\u2019s prominent families. Included in the display are a small book titled \u201cFirst Lessons in Spoken French for Men in Military Service,\u201d a pamphlet on \u201cMilitary Map Reading,\u201d and a sheet of instructions dated April 9, 1918 titled \u201cDefensive Measures Against Gas.\u201d<\/p>\n
There are also handwritten letters from friends of Leavenworth. Carlton Redmond writes on Oct. 24, 1918, \u201cI am working very hard to aid in the production of Ordnance for you boys.\u201d Antoinette Pierce, writing on Nov. 14, 1917: \u201cYou don\u2019t know how you soldiers are the center of all our thoughts, nor how proud we are that our defenders in these hard times are of the sort we can safely rely upon in every need.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Babbidge exhibition focuses on a variety of select University Archives and Special Collections materials connected to World War I \u2013 including children\u2019s literature, sheet music, work of the Storrs Agricultural Experiment Station, photographs and nursing artifacts from the Josephine A. Dolan Collection \u2013 and the development of bibliotherapy during the war.<\/p>\n
\u201cBibliotherapy is the use of books as medicine,\u201d says Mahoney. \u201cWhile that\u2019s an idea that has existed as long as reading itself \u2013 that you can read a book and feel healed by it \u2013 World War I is the first moment we see librarians experimenting with books to apply them medicinally to treat specific ailments.\u201d<\/p>\n
The American Library Association and the Library of Congress joined to collect books initially just to entertain troops while they were serving in the trenches overseas. In the course of doing that, they established what would become the Hospital Library Service. Librarians working in hospitals found that in practice certain genres of books could be harmful to certain kinds of patients.<\/p>\n
\u201cFirst do no harm is the Hippocratic Oath that doctors take. It is not something you typically associate with librarians,\u201d Mahoney says. \u201cBut the war is when they say, we have a professional obligation to assert ourselves in people\u2019s health through what kind of books they\u2019re exposing themselves to and we can both heal and prevent people from harming themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hospital librarians found, for example, that when a detective story is given to someone who has tuberculosis or has a fever, the excitement of that story may raise their body temperature; or a patient suffering from shell shock could be helped by reading certain kinds of poetry or travel books.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey start to experiment on this wide range of patients that they had access to, to see how books might be used a medicine and how that might become its own science,\u201d she adds, noting that later formal research in this field was established by Louise Sweet, the hospital librarian at the U.S. Army General Hospital in New Haven.<\/p>\n
Websites with more information about \u201cCommemorating the Centennial\u201d have been established, including one on Bibliotherapy, Dana Leavenworth, and The Land-grant College at War: A Retrospective.<\/p>\n
The Homer Babbidge Library is located at 369 Fairfield Way, and is open from 7:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Friday and from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on weekends through May 6. After May 6, the hours are Monday through Thursday from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m., Friday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., and from noon to 5 p.m. on weekends. The Dodd Center is located at 405 Babbidge Road, and is open Monday through Friday from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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