Stewarded by a team of specialists, Rauner Special Collections Library houses over 100,000 rare books, millions of manuscripts, and the extensive Dartmouth College Archives. The team collaborates and partners with students, faculty, staff, and the archive-curious at Dartmouth—and across the globe—to accelerate research and advance scholarship. Come and get hands on with us!

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Drawing of a geometric shape as a Civil War pup tent
In 1871, Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth officially opened for business. The fledgling school boasted just three students and one professor but also a proud lineage and a bright future. General Sylvanus Thayer, a member of Dartmouth's class of 1807 and the fifth superintendent of the United States Military Academy at West Point, had turned his sights back to Hanover in 1867 at the ripe old age of eighty-one.
Beyond punishment for social wrongs, imprisonment has long functioned to silence or remove voices from the public forum. As we have seen with figures from Cervantes to Martin Luther King Jr., however, prison can also give inmates copious time to articulate their thoughts and the fame or notoriety necessary to draw attention to them.
Title page of Wealth of Nations
We have a lovely first edition of Adam Smith's An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations published 250 year ago in March of 1776. A lot happened that year and the Enlightenment was having a pretty dramatic (one might say revolutionary) impact across Europe and into the colonies. Oddly, it had never occurred to me to think of Wealth of Nations as a product of the Enlightenment until about ten years ago when a faculty member in the Economics department asked me to talk about the book next to Diderot's Encyclopédie.

Exhibits

Illustration of a man on a white horse blowing a long trumpet with a woman and another figure behind. Trees, hedges, and a rendering of the US capitol in background, right.
January 07, 2026 - March 13, 2026
Rauner Library, Class of 1965 Galleries
map of eastern United States with red line denoting Appalachian Trail running from Georgia to Maine
September 15, 2025 - December 12, 2025
Rauner Library, Class of 1965 Galleries
A sepia photograph of a cross-dressing individual in an early 20th century dress with text: "Let the Old Traditions Fail" and information about the exhibit.
July 09, 2025 - September 12, 2025
Rauner Library, Class of 1965 Galleries