Passages of Time, Narratives in the History of Amherst College - Hardcover

Editor

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0943184118 ISBN 13: 9780943184111

Publisher: Amherst College Press, 2007

Synopsis

Most of the selections in this anthology are narrative chapters of Amherst College history from the earliest days to recent time. They describe the unsightly college of the first decades and-more than a century later-the tree-shaded campus known as The Fairest College. Writings by 21 authors take the reader chronologically from the 1820s, when students learned the rudiments of Vulgar Arithmetic, up to a 1990 colloquium on quantum mechanics. Essay titles include The Coeducation Debate of 1871, The Mischief of Robert Frost, The Civil Disobedience of John Ward.

Here one can also read about student anti-slavery efforts, Civil War casualties, college dealings with the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, baseball glories, faculty deliberations, and a black student's sensitive view of his undergraduate experience in the 1970s. The editor opens each selection with a short introduction to give it further context. There are accounts of memorable teaching, and portraits of prominent educators and alumni-among them Robert Frost, Alexander Meiklejohn, Calvin Coolidge (1895), Joseph Hardy Neesima (1870), and Charles Hamilton Houston (1915).

Such a volume is long overdue. Together these articles form the first wide-ranging book about Amherst history to be published in more than 50 years.

About this title

About the Author:

The editor, Douglas C. Wilson, who contributed several of the articles in this collection, worked for 27 years in the publications office at Amherst, retiring in 2002. For most of that time his responsibilities included editing Amherst magazine, where most of the selections in this volume first appeared. After graduating from Amherst in 1962 with honors in American history, he spent 13 years with The Providence Journal-first as a reporter in Rhode Island and then as a correspondent in Washington D.C., where his reporting in 1974 won the Merriman Smith Memorial Award from the White House Correspondents Association. He returned to take his job at the college in 1975. He and his wife, Cheryl B. Wilson, live in South Amherst, where they raised their three children.

About this edition

• Publisher: Amherst College Press
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0943184118
• ISBN 13: 9780943184111
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 312
• Editor: Douglas C. Wilson