Introduction

The material comprising this collection of "Tristania" arrived at Pius XII Memorial Library on 27 October 1986, the gift of Helene Munch, widow of Dr. Peter A. Munch, the creator of the collection. The material was then housed in the Saint Louis Room of the Saint Louis University Archives. In September 1991 Dr. Charles E. Marske, Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and a former student of Munch who had been instrumental in Mrs. Munch's donating her husband's papers to the University, requested a more thorough processing of the collection. On 10 September 1991 student worker Angela Dietsch was assigned to process the material to newly established Archives standards. Dietsch departed in 1993, and processing was resumed by Archives Assistant Christine Froechtenigt Harper in May 1996, being completed in August of that year.

This collection includes field notes and manuscripts by Munch, correspondence, scholarly papers, clippings, copies of documents and published materials regarding Tristan, ephemera, and financial records evincing sociologist Munch's fascination with the people and culture of Tristan da Cunha, an island dependency of Great Britain in the South Atlantic Ocean.  The material constitutes a remarkable summary of Tristan history and culture from its discovery in the sixteenth century to the mid-1980s, when Munch died, although the bulk of the collection dates from 1937 to 1970, roughly Munch's years of professional involvement with Tristan.  This material thus also documents Munch's own research into the relationship between culture and personality as he observed it among the Tristan islanders, especially in the areas of intergroup relations and acculturation.

Biographical Sketch

Peter A. Munch (1908-1984)

When Erling Christophersen, the leader of the Norwegian Scientific Expedition to Tristan da Cunha in 1937 and 1938, first called youthful sociologist Peter Munch to his office to ask him whether he was interested in traveling to Tristan, Munch immediately replied, "Yes. Where is it?"  That the world at large is aware at all of the history and culture of this tiny island in the South Atlantic is in large part due to Munch, who with his popular and scholarly treatments of the Tristan community enriched the world view of all who came into contact with his work.

Peter Andreas Munch was born in Nes, Hedmark, Norway on 19 December, 1908.  He was descended from the noted Norwegian historian of the same name, as well as from musician Ole Bull, and another of his relatives was the artist Edvard Munch.  Peter Munch was educated mainly at the University of Oslo, from which he received the degree of Candidatus theologiae in 1932 and that of doctor of philosophy in 1946, the latter being the first doctorate in sociology awarded by that school.  Between 1933 and 1936 he also received research scholarships in Semitic languages and literature from Oxford University and in the social history of the ancient Near East from the University of Halle in Wittenberg, Germany.  In 1946 and 1947 he pursued a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship at such prestigious American universities as Chicago, Harvard, and Yale.

Munch was imprisoned in 1943 and 1944 at the German concentration camp Grini near Oslo while the University of Oslo, where he was a teaching fellow in sociology, was closed by order of the Nazis.  In 1948 he began his American academic career by becoming a research associate in rural sociology at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.  Thereafter he served as associate professor of sociology at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota (1949-1951); professor and head of the department of sociology and anthropology at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks (1951-1957), where he was also the director of the Social Science Research Institute; and as professor (later emeritus) of sociology at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale (1957-1984).

Munch was active in the Illinois Folklore Society and the Norwegian-American.

Historical Association as well as the Midwest Sociological Society, where he was a member of the Executive Committee (1952-1954) and editor of _The Sociological Quarterly_ (1960-1964).  He was elected to the Norwegian Academy of Science for his contributions to the field of sociology, and received support for his research from the Social Science Research Council and the National Science Foundation.

Munch first went to Tristan in 1937 with the Norwegian Expedition to that island.  He himself described his relationship with Tristan this way, revealing a deep-seated empathy for the islanders that would not be denied: "Was invited to join Norwegian scientific expedition to Tristan da Cunha in 1937, took my PhD (University of Oslo, Norway) on the report, and dropped the subject.  Then came the volcanic eruption 1961 and the  evacuation--and complete involvement on my part."  He spent the summer of 1962 with the exiled islanders at Calshot, England and returned to a resettled Tristan in November of 1964 for a six-month stay.  In 1966 he contacted the descendants of old Tristan emigrants to New London, Connecticut, and in the summer of 1967 he met with those islanders who had elected either to remain in England or to return there after the resettlement of Tristan.

Munch emphasized that, in contrast to the work of "people who have never set their foot on Tristan da Cunha, and who had only a superficial contact with the Islanders while they were in England," his own research reflected the insight of "altogether twelve months participation in the social life of the community."  Appended is a bibliography of Munch's writings on Tristan published in the January-February 1984 Ice Cap News, the journal of the American Society of Polar Philatelists, as well as an accompanying tribute to him upon his death by John R. Gardner.

In 1934 Peter Munch married Helene Stephansen.  The couple had three children: Cathrine, Mette, and Peter Andreas Jr.  Dr. Munch died on 10 January 1984 at his retirement home in Pleasant Hill, Tennessee.

Dr. Charles E. Marske, Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and a student of Munch at Southern Illinois University, says of his friend: "To students and colleagues, Peter Munch offered the finest example of caring and creative scholarship, clear thinking, and intellectual conviction.  The gift of this extraordinary collection of Tristan material to Saint Louis University by Helene Munch is an enduring honor to the life and work of her dear husband Peter."

The Archives of Saint Louis University is indeed proud to be the custodian of what in John R. Gardner's estimation "is surely the most comprehensive collection of Tristan material in the United States, and probably anywhere else."

Scope and Content Note

The Peter A. Munch/Tristan da Cunha Collection provides a nearly complete picture of the history and culture of the South Atlantic island of Tristan da Cunha from its discovery in the sixteenth century to about 1984, when the creator of the collection, Peter A. Munch, died. The bulk of the material dates from 1937 to 1970, the years of Munch's professional relationship with the Tristan people.  The items in the collection therefore also highlight Munch's own research interests in the areas of culture and personality, intergroup relations, and acculturation.

A large part of the collection consists of Munch's research materials on Tristan that include field notes, copies of documents and published materials relating to island history and culture, clippings on recent Tristan developments, and correspondence from Tristan islanders and English expatriates working there.  This material encompasses the following series: Tristan Government and Legal Documents; Tristan History; Clippings; Correspondence (Islanders subseries); Notes (with the Topics, Notebooks, Field Work, and File Cards subseries containing the direct results of Munch's on-site work with the islanders); Tristan Administration; Tristan Education and Language; Tristan Geography; Tristan Maritima; Tristan Music; Tristan Population and Genealogy; Tristan Social Sets; Newsletters; Pamphlets and Brochures; Philately; Publications; and Reports.

The Correspondence Series also includes many letters from Munch's professional colleagues, representatives of publishing houses considering his manuscripts, and the reading public.  The Manuscripts Series contains manuscript copies of papers and articles by Munch, while the Papers Series consists of copies of published work by Munch as well as published and manuscript copies of papers, essays, and book excerpts by other authors dealing either with Tristan or general sociological topics.

The Institutional Files Series contains correspondence, reports, papers, etc. from or about institutions such as the American Anthropological Association, the Kendall Whaling Museum, and the Medical Research Council in the United Kingdom.  The Foundation Files Series documents Munch's efforts to secure funds to aid his research, and the Projects Series contains research proposals, correspondence, and financial records related to his trips to visit the islanders at Calshot in 1962 and on Tristan in 1964.  The Scrapbooks Series contains material on the Norwegian Expedition to Tristan of 1937-1938 in which Munch took part as well as on Munch's later life and work.  (The Clippings Series also includes articles on Munch and his research endeavors.)

In arranging this collection an effort was made to keep as far as possible the original order imposed upon the material by Munch himself.  This was fairly easy to do in the case of the items found in his five-drawer file cabinet, but the material in the B series (the letter appended to a series number) was more problematical.  The B series contain material that, while it is an integral part of the collection, cannot be identified as to its original location within Munch's papers.  It was not found in his file cabinet but apparently was packed into cardboard boxes.  The B series contain types of material analogous to that in the series identified solely by number, which are composed of items from the file cabinet, as well as kinds of material not discovered at all in the cabinet.  Thus, Series 2, Tristan History, consists of items from the file cabinet in the general order in which Munch had arranged them; Series 2B, also Tristan History, represents the same kind of material found in disarray elsewhere. Series numbered 21B and above consist of types of material not found at all in the file cabinet. Thus, Series 23B, Publications, consists of whole issues of journals that contain single articles of interest; all of these items were packed in boxes, with no similar material to be found in the file cabinet.

A word on the items in Scandinavian languages is in order.  According to encyclopedias, Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish are mutually intelligible with varying degrees of difficulty.  Unless it was possible to establish with fair certainty through contextual evidence which language was being used, I resorted to slash marks to include all the possibilities.  Therefore, if an item is obviously in a Scandinavian language but I could not determine which one, I identified it as being in "Norwegian/Swedish," "Norwegian/Swedish/Danish," etc.

Series

The collection is divided into the following series: