Charles Calhoun, Independent Scholar ( Maine Humanities Council), “Going British: The Anglicizing of American Hunting with Hounds, 1865-1930.”

Pia Cuneo, Ph.D., Professor of Art History, University of Arizona, “Early Modern Horsemanship Manuals: A Comparative Study.”

 Elisabetta Deriu, Ph.D., Doctoral Graduate in History ( University of Paris), “The International Fortune of an Early 17th c. Handwritten Horsemanship Treatise: Valerio Piccardini's Scritti di Cavaleria.”

Horace Laffaye, M.D., Independent Writer, “The Evolution of Polo in the United States.”

Glenye Cain Oakford, Journalist/Writer (Daily Racing Form), “The Golden Thread.”

Dorothy Ours, Journalist/Writer, “The American Pony: Battleship and the Grand National Quest.”

Samuel Snyder, Ph.D., Visiting Lecturer in Religion, Kalamazoo College, “Motivating the Flows of Angling Environmentalisms: from Utilitarian Conservation to Ecological Restoration.”

Return to fellowship page.

A Splendid Field: Library Announces 2009-2010 John H. Daniels Fellows (April 7, 2009; story adapted from Spring 2009 NSL Newsletter)

 The John H. Daniels Fellowship Committee selected seven fellows for the 2009-2010 year from a pool of twenty applicants. The selected fellows will visit the Library in the coming year to research a diverse variety of topics on horse and field sports, including a rare 17 th-century horsemanship manuscript, the history of polo in America, and conservation in American fly fishing.

“I am delighted with the quality and variety of applicants for the Daniels Fellowship. This is just what Mr. Daniels would have wanted,” said President and CEO Nancy H. Parsons. “Thanks to this program, the Library’s collection will provide the foundation for compelling new scholarship.  As a result, the Fellowship will significantly advance the mission of preservation and sharing and the chosen scholars will carry the message of the Sporting Library to an international audience.  This is one of the most important projects at the Library and I am proud of its success.”

Jacqueline B. Mars, Vice Chairman of the Board of Directors, commented that, “We are so very proud to be able to offer these fellowships, thanks to the generosity of the Daniels Foundation that both expand the horizons of the researchers and exhibit to an international audience what a wonderful resource there is in the collections of the NSL.”

The Fellowship program originated in 2007 in memory of John H. Daniels (1921-2006), a member of the Board of Directors and avid book collector and Library supporter. John H. Daniels’ daughter Marty, who serves on the Daniels Fellowship Committee, said “This is what Dad dreamed about while collecting rare books and manuscripts. Research was foremost in his thinking. He envisioned the Library with scholars from around the world. We’re impressed with the contribution the Daniels fellows are making, and that it fits so well with the Library’s collection in diverse areas of sport, art, history and the preservation of wild spaces and wildlife.” 

Committee members had the enjoyable but difficult task of selecting fellows from a talented applicant pool. The National Sporting Library received twenty applications in all from senior university professors, prolific journalists and independent writers, as well as graduate students. The applicants hail from twelve states and one foreign country.

For the first time, the Library has awarded a fellowship for an angling topic. Dr. Samuel Snyder, who received his doctoral degree last year in the Religion and Nature program at the University of Florida, will explore the history of environmental concern in American angling. In his dissertation, “Casting for Conservation: Religion, Popular Culture, and the Politics of River Restoration,” Snyder explored the role religious and cultural values have played in the restoration of rivers and native fish species. Snyder will investigate the roots of modern-day conservation through angling literature, from the treatises on angling by Izaak Walton and Juliana Berners to contemporary works by fly fishing authors such as John Gierach. “While conservation organizations such as Federation of Fly Fishers or Trout Unlimited did not emerge until 1965 and 1959 respectively, the language of conservation began to surface at least in print in the late 1800s,” writes Snyder. A devoted fly fisherman himself and contributor to the American Fly Fisher journal, Snyder is a member of several conservation organizations. He currently teaches Environmental Ethics in the Religion Department at Kalamazoo College.

The Library selected Dr. Horace Laffaye for its first project on the sport of polo. Laffaye is completing the research for a book, The History of Polo in the United States, which will be published by McFarland & Co. in 2010. The first comprehensive work on American polo in decades, Laffaye’s book will examine the development of polo in the U. S. beginning with its introduction in 1876. “The long-standing dogma is that James Gordon Bennett brought the game to New York City after watching polo matches in England,” Laffaye remarks. “However, there is a strong oral tradition that the game was started in Texas by Englishmen ranching in Boerne.”

Laffaye, a retired surgeon, chaired the Department of Surgery at Norwalk Hospital and served on the faculty at the Yale University School of Medicine for more than twenty years. He has pursued the sport of polo in his native Argentina and the U.S., and has composed six books on the subject, including the Diccionario de Polo (1991) and The Polo Encyclopedia, and contributes to such magazines as Polo Magazine, Polo Times, and Sidelines. The Evolution of Polo, which traces the origins of the sport in Central Asia to the present day, will appear in print this May. Laffaye has served on the Board of Directors of the Museum of Polo and Hall of Fame (located in Lake Worth, Fl.) since 2004.

Dr. Elisabetta Deriu, an Italian-born historian from the University of Paris, is investigating Valerio Piccardini, the riding master for the powerful Florentine family, the Medici. During the course of researching her doctoral dissertation on horsemanship at Renaissance and Early Modern courts, Deriu examined an illustrated manuscript, “Scritti di Cavalleria” [“Writings on Horsemanship”] in the collections of the British Library in London. Through an online advertisement for the Daniels fellowship, Deriu discovered that the National Sporting Library owned an original copy of Piccardini’s text (for more on the treatise, see article in Winter 2007 newsletter).

“You can imagine my astonishment when I ‘discovered’ the NSL’s manuscript,” said Deriu. “I just couldn’t keep myself from gazing open‑mouthed at the picture of its frontispiece on the [Library’s] website!” Deriu knows of only one other copy of the Piccardini manuscript in a private collection. According to Deriu, it was customary of the time period for riding masters to circulate handwritten treatises, as attested by the inscription on the frontispiece, which reads that Piccardini’s instructions have been “briefly explained, in order to be given to his students.” Deriu is preparing a critical edition and translation of Piccardini’s manual.

Like Deriu, art historian Dr. Pia Cuneo studies early horsemanship manuals, and is preparing a book on the topic, Horsemanship and the Performance of Identity in Early Modern Germany. Cuneo, who teaches Northern and Italian Renaissance Art History at the University of Arizona in Tucson, has published multiple articles and delivered numerous papers on horses and equestrian imagery in the history and art of Northern Europe. During several summers in Germany, Cuneo examined 16 th and 17 th century German horsemanship manuals at research libraries in Wolfenbüttel and Munich. Many of these texts demonstrate 16 th-century writers’ awareness of their dependence upon the horse for transportation, war, and pleasure. “For the sixteenth-century reader,” Cuneo states, “engaging with these questions would have only reinforced what was a clearly foregone conclusion: that early modern life without the horse was unthinkable if not impossible.” Cuneo will look at other early horsemanship texts by Italian and English writers in the Daniels, Lonsdale, Hünersdorf, and Littauer collections in order to determine how the German authors drew upon these other texts yet formulated their own ideas.

Dorothy Ours of Stockton, N.J., will be the first Daniels fellow to explore steeplechasing as she researches a book about Battleship, the first American-bred and -owned winner of the famed Grand National Steeplechase (which is held annually at Aintree Racecourse in Liverpool, England). Ours is the acclaimed author of Man o’War: A Legend Like Lightning (reviewed in the Spring 2008 newsletter) and has written extensively for the Thoroughbred Times and other racing publications. Man o’War’s diminutive son, Battleship, has his own compelling story. According to Ours, the horse’s owner, Marion duPont Scott, “chose Battleship for her next attempt [at the National] because of his particular character – even though to most people the small stallion did not look like an Aintree horse.” Ours’ proposed book on Battleship will chronicle his racing career and the lives of his connections, including Mrs. Scott; trainer/rider, Carroll K. Basset and trainer, Reginald Hobbs; and jockey, Bruce Hobbs.

Another accomplished journalist, Glenye Cain Oakford of Lexington, Ky., is writing a book called The Golden Thread about the longstanding relationship between humans and hounds. A journalist by profession, Oakford serves as the Daily Racing Form’s bloodstock business correspondent and author of The Home Run Horse: Inside America’s Billion-Dollar Racehorse Industry and the High-Stakes Dreams that Fuel It. Hounds and hunting have been a particular passion for Oakford, who owns beagles and has hunted with the Iroquois Hunt and the Clear Creek Beagles in Kentucky. Over centuries, humans and canines have achieved a sophisticated communication with each other in the hunt field, an accomplishment that Oakford contends to be “...all the more astonishing considering that huntsmen must forge this mutually trusting partnership with their hounds using few tools in the field beyond voice and horn.” Oakford will consult the Library’s classic works on hunting as well as the papers and hunting diaries of noted hound experts Alexander H. Higginson, Alexander Mackay-Smith, Sterling Larrabee, and Joseph B. Thomas.

Charles Calhoun will also make use of the Library’s extensive archival collections on foxhunting in researching “Going British: The Anglicizing of American Hunting with Hounds, 1865-1930.” Calhoun theorizes that during the years between 1865 and 1930 there was a “...transformation of rough-and-ready hunting with hounds in the eastern United States into a highly stylized, ritualized sport that Beckford and Meynell would indeed have recognized.” He plans to write a history of the development of foxhunting in America, placing the sport within a cultural context and examining how foxhunting was among one of many British social institutions that Americans emulated.

Calhoun hunted with the Old North Bridge Hounds in Mass., a hunt descended from the historic Milwood Hunt in Concord. He has written four historical books, including a history of Bowdoin College and Longfellow: A Rediscovered Life, about the American poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (for which he received a prestigious National Endowment for the Humanities Research Fellowship). Currently, Calhoun is a Scholar in Residence with the Maine Humanities Council in Portland, Maine and edits Maine Humanities magazine.

The fellowship program is not unlike those at other research centers such as the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Conn. Fellows receive complimentary housing in Middleburg and a modest stipend to cover living and travel expenses, and in exchange, are encouraged to credit the Library in any published books and articles. Throughout the year, fellows will share their research at special Roundtable lectures– please check the website for upcoming events.

The Library is grateful to Mrs. Jacqueline Mars, Ms. Marty Daniels, and Mr. Angus Trumble of the John H. Daniels Fellowship Committee for their participation in choosing this group of exceptional scholars.

The next deadline for applications is February 1, 2010. For more information, contact Elizabeth Tobey, Director of Communications and Research, at 540-687-6542 x 11 or fellowship@nsl.org.

Return to fellowship page.

Discussions of fly fishing ethics date back to Izaak Walton and beyond. Engraving after Samuel Wale. From Izaak Walton. The Complete Angler. 1808 edition. Daniels Collection.

Dr. Elisabetta Deriu is preparing a scholarly edition of the Library's early 17th century manuscript on horsemanship by Valerio Piccardini, "Scritti di Cavaleria." Piccardini was the riding master to the Medici family of Florence, and the NSL's manuscript is one of three known in the world.

Horace Laffaye is writing a history of polo in America. The American Team in 1909, 1911 and 1913 (Left to Right): Mr. D. Milburn on Tenby, Mr. H.P. Whitney on Balada, Mr. J.M. Waterbury on Acushla, Mr. L. Waterbury on Cinderella. From F. Gray Griswold. The International Polo Cup. 1928. Daniels Collection.

Glenye Cain Oakford will explore the centuries-old relationship between humans and hounds. From George Turberville. The Noble Art of Venerie or Hunting . 1611. Daniels Collection.