Posted in Amherst College, Digital collections, Edward Hitchcock (President), Orra White Hitchcock on July 2, 2015| 2 Comments »
Classroom chart on linen drawn by Orra White Hitchcock, Amherst College.
This summer in the Library, we have four excellent Digital Humanities interns conducting research in the Edward and Orra White Hitchcock Collection. Working with these interns has been a great excuse for me to delve a bit more into this collection and fall in love with the artwork of Orra White Hitchcock, perhaps the Pioneer Valley’s earliest female botanical and scientific illustrator. (more…)
Posted in Digital collections, Edward Hitchcock (President), Walt Whitman on January 16, 2015| 1 Comment »
Our digital collections are growing with regular ingests of digitized material from the Archives & Special Collections. Past highlighted ingests have included our Emily Dickinson manuscripts, selections from the Younghee Kim-Wait/Pablo Eisenberg Native American Literature Collection, material from the Doshisha Collection, Amherst College Olios and Catalogs, and more.
This month marks the addition of the William E. Barton Walt Whitman Collection and more of the Edward and Orra White Hitchcock Collection.
Edward Hitchcock
Walt Whitman
Posted in Amherst College Alumni, Amherst College Faculty, Amherst College Presidents, College buildings, College History, Daguerreotypes, Edward "Old Doc" Hitchcock (AC 1849), Edward Hitchcock (President), Emily Dickinson, Photography, Uncategorized, tagged ambrotypes, Appleton Cabinet, Aztec Children, Charles Baker Adams, Charles Upham Shepard, Daguerreotypes, Edward Hitchcock, Emily Dickinson, Maximo and Bartola, natural history cabinets, science cabinets, Woods Cabinet on July 27, 2014| 1 Comment »
When Millicent Todd Bingham and Richard Sewall wrote their biographies of Emily Dickinson, they each included a section about the influence upon the poet of President Edward Hitchcock and Amherst College. Bingham and Sewall sought to show that one can see in Dickinson’s poems – in her ideas, imagery, and unexpected vocabulary – the effect of Hitchcock and the college he helped establish.
The science cabinets at the College were among Dickinson’s Amherst-related influences. They housed specimens of minerals, shells, fossils, and animals gathered by Hitchcock and his colleagues over the course of their careers and were important campus attractions. Edward Dickinson, the poet’s father, contributed $50 to the Woods cabinet and $100 to Appleton, and his children were no doubt part of the thousands of people who visited them over the decades. There is evidence that Emily attended the opening of the Woods Cabinet (mineralogy, meteorology, geology) in the Octagon in 1848, and she probably also visited the Appleton Cabinet (zoology and ichnology) when it opened in 1855.
Posted in Amherst College Faculty, College History, Doshisha Connections, Edward Hitchcock (President), John Burroughs, Manuscripts, Walt Whitman on May 10, 2013| 3 Comments »
We are delighted that so many people are using the Emily Dickinson manuscripts we made available through Amherst College Digital Collections. Over the past six months we have digitized other materials from the Archives and are pleased to announce that hundreds of new digital images have been uploaded and are now available to researchers the world over.
The development of Amherst College Digital Collections — ACDC for short — is a highly collaborative process. We work closely with the good folks in the Frost Library Digital Programs and Technical Services departments, and Amherst’s Information Technology to identify materials, image them, provide useful metadata, and get them uploaded to ACDC. The latest additions come from a wide range of collections in the Archives, including some great material from Dickinson’s contemporaries Edward and Orra White Hitchcock.
Posted in Amherst College Alumni, Amherst College Faculty, College History, Edward Hitchcock (President), Emily Dickinson, tagged Amherst College history, Amherst College Octagon, Class of 1857, Edward Hitchcock, Geological Cabinet, geology, Woods Cabinet on April 22, 2013| 2 Comments »
I really need to get out more. I mean out around campus. Despite having worked at Amherst for over a decade, I somehow never heard about the boulder sitting on the south side of the Octagon until recently. On the occasions I’ve gone past it, I’m sure I didn’t notice it.
A large bowlder and friends
This may seem like a minor offense – it is, after all, just a rock on campus, right? But knowing the history of the College is mandatory in the archives. It’s our raison d’être. We seek to know everything about our turf, and then to make it possible for others to know it too.
So when I heard about this boulder, I immediately reached into my bag of paranoias: surely I alone was ignorant of the facts surrounding the boulder. I would have to hide my ignorance from my colleagues. My stomach churned.
But perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps other people don’t know about the rock either. On the assumption, therefore, that my reader may also be ignorant of the facts, let me set them down here with the few relevant documents that remain to us.
The Consecrated Eminence 