Interior Turkey Reminiscences

As a cataloging librarian, one of the questions I’m often asked about my job is “do you have to read a lot of the book (thesis, script, video…) when you catalog it?” The answer is usually “no” because most published materials have helpful indexes, tables of contents, blurbs, or external reviews to help sort out the subject matter. (Most librarians will tell you that a very long “to read someday” list is an occupational hazard, because we don’t have time to read all the cool things we see every day.) Cataloging unpublished manuscripts is a little different, requiring more skimming and historical detective work (of the type I discussed in a blog post from last year). Last week I cataloged an unpublished manuscript that was entirely hand-written. Deciphering that much handwriting was a first for me, and fascinating!

Rev. Royal Merriman Cole graduated from Amherst College in 1866 at the age of 27.¹ In the summer of 1868 he graduated from Bangor Theological Seminary, married Eliza Cobleigh (who had attended Mt. Holyoke Seminary), was ordained by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, and set sail from New York on August 15. They arrived in Erzroom (Erzurum), Turkey, on Sept. 30, 1868. Cole wrote in an 1873 letter to an Amherst professor: “I was able to take hold of the language with great earnestness, and have, I feel, succeeded beyond my best expectations. In six months I preached my first regular sermon…written in full, in the Armenian character. From that time on I have used simple notes and have now come to speak with about as much freedom, I think, as I should in English. Of course I have not so wide a range of words.”

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Body Parts

This is a call to arms.  And to eyes and eyebrows and chin dimples and a certain curve of lip.

The Archives and Special Collections has known for several years about the “new” daguerreotype proposed and hoped to show Emily Dickinson and Kate Scott Turner Anthon, and yet we still go back and forth about it.  Like other people, we can feel one way on Monday and another on Tuesday, Wednesday, and so on.  If only we knew for certain who’s in that photograph…

In reviewing the available evidence, we noticed that most of the static images online are too small to facilitate comparisons.  In order to address this problem, we dismembered a few high-resolution images so that people can see more detail in a given photograph and then compare one part of a photograph to the corresponding part in another photograph.  We can’t put all the body parts in a single blog post, but we’ll make a start.  The point of this exercise is not to tell anyone what to think, but to provide more tools for discussion of the “new” daguerreotype.  When clicked on, all images will expand to full size.

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A stereoscopic view of Amherst

The first decades of photography were a period of continual innovation. One of the more curious inventions to come from that time was the stereograph or stereoview. Invented in the 1840s and first presented to the public in 1851, the stereograph was the first time three dimensional perception was created using two dimensional images. Stereographs gained widespread popularity in the United States beginning in 1859 with invention of an improved viewer, or stereoscope, by Oliver Wendell Holmes, and remained popular through the early 20th century. A stereograph is composed of two photographs taken with two cameras an eye’s width distant from each other and presented side by side, one to each eye, thus simulating binocular vision. As Keith Davis describes in his The Origins of American Photography, 1839-1885, “the result is a compelling, if slightly curious, sense of visual depth in which objects appear as flat cut-outs occupying discrete planes in space”. This new way of seeing distant places and people was very appealing in a time when travel was difficult and photography the main medium for learning about the world. By the 1870s, tens of thousands of stereographs were offered for sale by various photographic firms in the United States. The visual interest of the medium is such that it is still used by some fine artists and there is even a recently developed smartphone app using the same principles.

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On the “momentous question of the Constitution for the United States”

Archives and Special Collections staff regularly work with classes to show how rare books and manuscripts offer interesting perspectives on contemporary life, as well as shedding light on past events. As we approach the 225th anniversary of the signing of the Constitution of the United States this September 17, even a quick survey of ongoing political debates reveals the continued relevance of this historical document. These clashes are not new.

The text of the new Constitution, printed in the Massachusetts Gazette, September 28, 1787. So that citizens would be able to read the Constitution, the text was printed in papers throughout the Republic. Amherst College Archives and Special Collections.

Debate over the substance and meaning of the Constitution is part of the document’s legacy. The text submitted to the states for ratification was itself  the product of great compromise by the representatives present at the Constitutional Convention. At the close of the convention, Benjamin Franklin said, “…when you assemble a number of men to have the advantage of their joint wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those men, all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views. From such an assembly can a perfect production be expected? It therefore astonishes me, Sir, to find this system approaching so near to perfection as it does.”

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A Vermont Poet Under the Bo Tree

A poet’s hope: to be,

like some valley cheese,

local, but prized elsewhere.

— James Hayford

A day trip to Vermont recently got me thinking about the poet James Hayford, Amherst Class of 1935. Hayford was that other Vermont poet, the one you’ve probably never heard of.  At Amherst — indeed, throughout his entire life — Hayford was an admitted “disciple” of the more famous New England bard, Robert Frost. 

It is odd that Hayford, a Vermont boy with literary aspirations, had never even heard of Robert Frost until the fall of his sophomore year, when his parents gave him  a copy of Collected Poems (1930) for his birthday. Hayford tells of how first reading Frost was a thrilling revelation: “In Frost’s book I found myself.  This was my country; these were my people, my ways of thinking and feeling, my tones of voice.” (Preface to Star in the Shed Window:  Collected Poems, xi.)  Hayford had found his touchstone.

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