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Hands on Hamilton History will debut on Thursday, Sept. 22, with an exhibit related to Samuel Kirkland.  Each month, Hands on Hamilton History will feature a small group of documents, artifacts and visual materials relating to a specific period in the history of the College. A brief discussion of these materials will take place at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. in the Patricia Pogue Couper Research Room, third floor Burke Library.

Two hundred years of learning is undoubtedly cause for celebration. Yet the charter that Hamilton received in 1812 merely continued a quest for knowledge that had begun two decades earlier with Samuel Kirkland and his Hamilton-Oneida Academy, a secondary school that focused on educating local Iroquois youth. Like so much at Hamilton, the Academy began with a piece of writing: Kirkland’s 1791 “Plan of Education for the Indians,” a 15-page document in which Kirkland outlined his ideas for the new school.

Director of Special Collections Christian Goodwillie has published two articles and a book this spring. Hancock Shaker Village: A History and Guidebook (co-authored with John Harlow Ott) presents new research into the former village site of the Hancock Shaker community, now a museum in western Massachusetts.

The story of Eunice Chapman is not an especially famous one. In fact, many have never even heard of her struggle against 19th century society in search of her kidnapped children. Ilyon Woo’s book, The Great Divorce: A Nineteenth-Century Mother's Extraordinary Fight against Her Husband, the Shakers, and Her Times, chronicles this dramatic story with an unbiased perspective and a flair for storytelling. In a recent lecture at Hamilton, Woo discussed her research, the process of writing a book, and the incredible account of Eunice Chapman.  

The Burke Library held a formal re-opening of the Emerson Rare Book Room, honoring Patsy Couper W'44 and Dr.Walter Brumm, with a dedication of the Patricia Pogue Couper Research Room on April 14.

The Burke Library will hold a formal re-opening of the Emerson Rare Book Room, honoring Patsy Couper W'44 and Walter Brumm, with a dedication of the Patricia Pogue Couper Research Room on Thursday, April 14, at 4:15 p.m. on the second floor landing of the library. The public is invited to attend.

Ilyon Woo, author of The Great Divorce: A Nineteenth-Century Mother's Extraordinary Fight against Her Husband, the Shakers, and Her Times, will discuss her book in a lecture at Hamilton on Thursday, April 14, at 7:30 p.m., in the Science Center’s Kennedy Auditorium. Woo used materials from Hamilton’s Burke Library Special Collections in doing research for the book, which is the true story of a 19th-century mother’s fight to recapture her children from the celibate Utopian sect of the Shakers. The lecture is free and open to the public.  

Hamilton librarians Glynis Asu and Carolyn Carpan and ITS staff members Maureen Scoones and Nikki Reynolds presented a poster at the biannual Association of College & Research Libraries conference in Philadelphia on March 31.

A collection of 300 audio interviews with jazz musicians, arrangers, writers and critics, the jazz greats and the supporting cast from the 1930s to the present, is now available online and free to the public courtesy of the Hamilton College Jazz Archive. Listeners can click on a link and read the transcripts or listen to interviews with some of jazz’s most well-known musicians, including Dave Brubeck, Lionel Hampton, Oscar Peterson and George Shearing as well as former members of bands led by Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Woody Herman, Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman, Stan Kenton and the Dorsey Brothers.

Works from Hamilton’s art collection are currently on view at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, Italy, as part of the exhibition, The Vorticists: Rebel Artists in London and New York, 1914-1918. The Emerson Gallery lent four paintings by English artist Dorothy Shakespear (1886-1973), wife of Ezra Pound, Class of 1905, to the exhibition