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Ty Seidule, a visiting professor of military history and retired brigadier general, is an expert on Confederate memorialization and the Lost Cause — the notion that the Confederacy was a doomed but noble undertaking is particularly attuned to the ways in which the war and its aftermath shaped American culture.

You never know what you’re going to find in the Hamilton College Archives. With a collection as extensive and varied as Hamilton’s, it can sometimes be months or even years before documents in the collection are fully processed and understood. For example, Special Collections Coordinator Mark Tillson recently unearthed a file of letters from noted suffragist Charlotte Wilbour, wife of Egyptologist Charles Edwin Wilbour, whose papers the College also possesses.

“This room holds many ghosts,” Tony Award-winning playwright Richard Nelson ’72 said as he began his talk in the Chapel on Tuesday, March 11. “Ghosts in every corner.” Nelson delivered the Tolles lecture titled “The Peculiarity of Theater.”

In publishing circles, “essential” isn’t a word to be tossed around lightly. Although every academic book advances our understanding of its subject in some way, there are not many books that are so vital to a field that scholars can’t work without them. 

Some 120 students and community members recently spent the day working on their mojo—but there wasn’t much voodoo or magic involved. Instead, the group participated in the third iteration of the Career Center’s Interview Mojo program, which is aimed at helping students increase their facility with and confidence in professional interviews.

For many people, the words “history class” conjure up images of dusty books, and it’s true that American Communal Religious Societies, co-taught by Professor of History Doug Ambrose and Director of Special Collections Christian Goodwillie, does have most of its weekly class meetings in Burke Library. Most, but not all.

During his talk on November 20, London-based museum and heritage consultant Crispin Paine introduced an intriguing idea: in a secular society, have museums become, in their own way, temples? Both visitors to museums and temples, Paine observed, follow a set route through the building and pause to reflect before certain objects. The religious visitor leaves with a renewed faith, the museum visitor with edification.

During the spring semester of her junior year, Emma Laperruque ’14 went to a place few students go: the basement kitchens of the Soper Commons Dining Hall. She was down there to complete a photography project of her own design focused on how students and the dining hall staff respectively view the space.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton delivered the 2013 Sacerdote Great Names address on Oct. 4 to a capacity crowd of 5,800 Hamilton students and community members in the Margaret Bundy Scott Field House. This was Clinton’s first public speech after stepping down as President Barack Obama’s Secretary of State in January. During the course of her hour-long speech, Clinton touched on three main themes: “Gridlock, Growth and Global Leadership.”

On September 15, David Smallen became the Vice President for Libraries and Information Technology, a position that allows him to create new pathways of collaboration between the traditional functions of both the Burke Library and Information Technology (IT). Smallen has been at Hamilton since 1972 — “I sometimes joke that I handed out the pistols at Hamilton’s duel,” he said — and has been involved with the Information Technology department since 1974.