Rebellion Revealed

Half the students studying at Yale in 1830 were summarily expelled for one grievous, not-to-be-tolerated offense: They refused to accept or use the blackboard — the new technology that was being introduced to teach math. That event — the biggest student revolt that Yale had experienced to date — went down in history as The Conic Sections Rebellion.

That fact emerges in ​“An American Orientalist: the Life and Legacy of Edward E. Salisbury (1814 – 1901),” a fascinating new exhibition in the memorabilia room of Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library.

The Conic Section rebels, it seems, did not want to go to the newfangled blackboard to demonstrate their geometry or trig knowledge by actually drawing pictures. They wanted to point to it in their textbooks, and in so doing, perhaps conceal some ignorance.

The more dutiful Edward Salisbury, scion of a wealthy Bostonian family, was not among the 43 tossed out for their insubordination. After graduating in 1832, he came back to Yale for three more years of study to certify himself as a minister. Then he sailed off on the Grand Tour with his new wife, and in Europe he utterly fell in love with the study of Arabic, Hindustani, and Sanskrit. He even took a gander at a collection of inscriptions in Phoenician, all of which languages were then the rage and being introduced in academic circles in Berlin, London, and Paris.

Except for Hebrew, which was an elective at Yale at the time, Arabic was considered only a kind of useful comparison language, said Roberta Dougherty, the Middle East Studies librarian who organized the exhibition. The other Oriental languages had received scant if any attention at Yale.

That’s why in 1841, Salisbury — by then an avid teacher and collector of books and manuscripts in these languages — was appointed professor of Arabic and Sanskrit languages and literature at Yale.

This was the first such department in any American university, not that there were very many universities at this early stage of higher education in the evolving American republic. No surprise, the study of Sanskrit evolved in America not only as a way to access ancient literature and life in India, but also as a means to translate the Bible into that ancient tongue, and go off, translation of the Gospels in hand, to do missionary work.

On the occasion of the 175th anniversary of Salisbury’s appointment, Dougherty has assembled books from Salisbury’s collections, pages of his diaries, letters, and other paper ephemera in 17 well-stocked vitrines in the Sterling Library’s memorabilia room, which is most easily accessed off of High Street. Of the 103 items in the exhibition, more than 90 percent have never been on exhibition before. They come principally from the various Yale libraries — Manuscripts and Archives, the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts, and the general collections. There are also items from the Yale University Art Gallery and the Near East School of Theology in Beirut.

The items trace Salisbury from his days as a non-Conic Rebel to his later career as a collector and his benefactions to Yale and beyond, which included his 4,000 book library and his participation in the recently founded American Oriental Society.

For the non-Orientalists among us, the exhibition’s pleasures include views of not only the elegant scripts of these languages — Sanskrit, in print, always features a horizontal line, from which the letters and words dangle, said Dougherty — but also aspects of 19th-century academic life that Salisbury’s 87 years illuminate.

Salisbury’s Grand Tour letters from London, Paris, and Berlin feature quick, graphic descriptions of the European teachers he met and admired along the way and how they contrasted with the profs at Yale.

In several he commented that professors like Horace Hyman Wilson, who was teaching Hebrew and Sanskrit at Oxford, dressed with style and panache. This seemed a welcome contrast to the disheveled profs Salisbury had experienced. Maybe this sartorial interest helped solidify his choice for a career.

And dare we overly psychologize by suggesting that dressing more debonairly might have become Salisbury’s own tamer version of a rebellion?

Dougherty, who brings to her job knowledge of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, has been working on the exhibition since 2013, a year after she arrived at Yale. She said she had known of the red-letter significance of the date, 1841, as the creation of America’s first Arabic and Sanskrit department at an American university. But she had known little about Salisbury himself.

Now she knows a lot, and her palpable enthusiasm comes through in her lively captions of the objects.

And there’s a lot she could not include, she said.

For example, Dougherty was struck by Salisbury’s letters and diaries on how Germans celebrated Christmas during his travels.

“It’s amazing to read his eyewitness” comments on the purchase of trees and their decoration, she said, as Salisbury’s experience of Christmas in New England was nothing like the German version.

“Americans, especially Congregationalists, didn’t mark Christmas Day,” at all, Dougherty said. ​“Maybe they took the day off, but there were no trees, and no gift giving. The exchanging of presents was on New Year’s Day,” she added.

It took the arrival of waves of German immigrants, and then the marketing campaigns of the newfangled department stores, to establish our Christmas celebration habits of today.

Meanwhile, Salisbury never forgot the Conic Sections Rebellion. Toward the end of his life, he wrote that he wanted to ​“heal the wound” of that experience. In 1879, as a distinguished philanthropist and member of the Yale elite, he made strenuous efforts to find all the still-living members of his class of 1832 who had been tossed out. He gathered them together and made sure they received honorary master’s degrees.