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This collection contains letters written by Hiram S. Wilson to his wife, Elizabeth, from 1861 to 1864 with the majority of the letters dating between 1862 and 1863. While most letters were addressed to his wife, there are a few letters written to other family members including his daughter, Stella. Most of the letters were written while he was stationed at various army camps in Virginia and Maryland. He writes about family and home issues but also talks about military activities. Wilson expresses confidence about the army’s abilities and writes about his trust in General McClellan and other Generals. He includes discussions about camp life, troop movement, and general war news. For instance, several letters discuss the passage by Congress of the Militia Act of 1862 and the Confiscation Act of 1862 that allowed the enlistment of African Americans.
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Celebrate Indigenous People's Day by discovering some of our books in the catalog about Indigenous People. Click on each of these books to find out more, and to find them in our catalog!
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The diaries of Jane Tunis Poultney Bigelow (1829-1889) are found in the John Bigelow papers (SCA 0022) in the department of Special Collections and Archives in Union College's Schaffer Library. Even though Jane was a dedicated wife and mother, she was fiercely independent and was just as respected and loved as her husband in literary and social circles in the United States and Europe. She was a gracious and energetic hostess to Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde during their visits to New York, and her visits with Walt Whitman, Wilkie Collins, and William Thackeray were wildly successful as she charmed and entertained her guests with her high intelligence, wit, and unconventional language. A gifted writer and speaker, she published prose under the pen name of Jenny P. Bigelow and spoke several languages fluently. Part of the Diaries and Journals (1850 - 1911) series, Jane's diaries detail her life and travels from 1850 to 1873 and make up the majority of the Diaries and Journals series.
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The John Bigelow Papers consist of the extensive correspondence of Bigelow and his family, his scrapbooks and his writings, records and correspondence detailing his professional activities, diaries and journals belonging to Bigelow and other family members, genealogical documents and records of the Bigelow family, and a variety of photographs. The Correspondence series includes around 24,000 letters from prominent cultural and political titans, including Andrew Carnegie, Charles Dickens, John Jay, J.P. Morgan, Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and Thurlow Weed. The letters detail Bigelow’s activities such as the U.S. Consul to France during the Civil War, his position on the boards of the New York Public Library and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the founding of the Panama Canal, and Lincoln’s assassination. Letters are also from family members and friends. The diaries of his wife, Jane Tunis Poultney Bigelow, make up the majority of the Diaries and Journals series. Just as respected and loved as her husband, Jane was an important figure in the New York literary and social scene. Her diaries details their life and travels. Some especially delightful tidbits are her entries wherein she writes about Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde when they stayed with the family during their trips to New York City.
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John Bigelow (November 25, 1817 - December 19, 1911), Union College class of 1835, lived a dynamic life during a period where there was rapid social and industrial change. During his long life, he was fortunate enough to have traveled extensively around the world for leisure and for business. This digital exhibit aims to delight audiences by showcasing various trips Bigelow and his family made between 1850 and 1873. Through his letters and other collection materials from the John Bigelow papers (SCA-0022), visitors can accompany Bigelow around Europe and the Caribbean to learn more about global travel during the nineteenth century.
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The Osmond D. Putnam photographs (ARL-081) provide a glimpse into the close of the 19th century as the Adirondacks moved from an isolated wilderness to a permanently settled part of the state.
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This exhibit features selections from John James Audubon’s Birds of America, a collection of 435 life-size watercolors reproduced from hand-engraved plates and printed between 1827 and 1838. Eliphalet Nott acquired Union College’s copy of Birds of America directly from Audubon himself in 1844.
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This collection contains primarily letters written by Captain John McConihe to his business partner, John B. Kellog. The letters date from April 1, 1862 to May 21, 1864. The letters give descriptions of military maneuvers, people and places he encountered during his military service, camp life, his finances, his duties as an officer, his health and his recovery from a shoulder wound sustained at Shiloh. There are some receipts that detail purchases he made during his military service. The collection also contains a carte-de-visite or small photograph of McConihe and one of his calling cards.
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Jonathan Pearson (1813-1887) was a notable Union College graduate, instructor and administrator. He received his early education in New Hampshire. He graduated first in his class in 1835 and returned to the school in the fall of 1836 as a tutor. In 1839 he became a professor of chemistry and natural history, and later taught botany and agriculture. He served as the college's librarian for more than 40 years and was also the school treasurer from 1854 to 1883. Along with his career at Union and maintaining his diary, Pearson produced five works on local history, most notably “The History of the Schenectady Patent.” This collection includes 16 diaries with enclosures written between 1828 and 1875 totaling 2,500 pages in length. They start with the scribblings of a young man, detailing his experiences and travels, and continue through his college years and his employment at the College. The diary holds accounts of Pearson’s travels in New England and through parts of the United States, and documents his time as a member of the College administration. Interestingly, the diary becomes critical of the longtime president of Union College, Eliphalet Nott, and Pearson discusses what he exposes as incompetence in the administration as it waxes and wanes. In addition, Pearson, a devout Baptist, reflects on many aspects of the society of his day, such as slavery, as he records his impressions of historical events. Pearson himself suffers illness, engages in many travels, and lives as a father through the travails of family life.
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Joseph Jacques Ramée was a well-known architect and an itinerant designer in Europe, whose work could be seen in Belgium, Germany, and Denmark. The style which developed in his designs was a product of his nomadism: to the Neoclassicism of his training in France, he eclectically adopted elements from the architectural pallet of whatever locale he was working in. His tendency was to work with basic shapes and spare forms, suitable to versatile settings. In January 1813, Nott came into contact with Joseph Ramée, as the architect traveled south through New York State on his way to Philadelphia. Nott had a unique vision for higher education, coupling a modern and practical focus in the curriculum with the ideal of a college community as an extended family. To embody this vision, the campus itself had to be more than just a functional space. Nott apparently found a practical match for his ideas in Ramée, whom he contracted to draw plans for the Union campus. While Ramée’s vision is evident in the Union College of today, its influence was felt throughout the collegiate world in its time. The Union College plan became a model for what a campus could be and what kind of values a college could embody. This is a collection of Union College architectural plans which includes Schaffer Library and the Nott Memorial, drawn by Joseph Jacques Ramée in 1813.
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Katherine (Kay) Flickinger Dockstader (1910-1995) was a lifelong resident of the Schenectady, New York area who worked for General Electric. She was one of the first women to hike the 46 Adirondack High Peaks and was an active member of the Adirondack Mountain Club (ADK), Mohawk Valley Hiking, and Otyokwa Clubs. Kay took extensive scenic photographs, detailing many of them with personal notes about the locations and participants. The images reflect Flickinger’s opinion that “up here, everything is beautiful!"
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From Stillman ablum 4, page 22.
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This exhibition of Luristan bronzes was generously donated by Professor Emeritus Carl George. It features almost one hundred objects from the Luristan bronze tradition of the Zagros region of northern Iran.
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Lucille Brown began this project by sitting down with her own parents, Sol and Sonia Wernick, in her dining room on Highland Park Road in Schenectady, New York in 1970. She used a small cassette tape recorder and dove in with questions about the town they had left in the Ukraine in 1920, how and why they left and what life was like in their "old world". The project grew to include her brother Robert's in-laws, Fan and Jack Koenigsburg, and other members of the bungalow colony where the Koenigsburgs summered in the Catskills. The interviewees were all individuals who left Eastern Europe in the 1910s and 1920s. As her project grew in scope, LWB joined forces with Dr. Stephen Berk, a professor of Russian History at Union College where she was a librarian. Together they shaped the interview questions to get a clearer picture of life in the Pale of Settlement at the turbulent time following World War I and into the revolutionary period in Russia and Eastern Europe. Lucille Brown received funding for her project from Union College and from YIVO. She wrote several papers and gave talks on her work. Her collection of tapes and transcripts are held in the archives of both Union and YIVO. I am Lucille's daughter. During the time Mom was working on this project, I was in high school and college. I was present at the original interview with my grandparents and at many subsequent interviews. During the 70s, Lucille had me help her transcribe many of the taped interviews using her IBM Selectric typewriter. Since that time, the typed pages of the transcripts have sat in loose-leaf binders in my and my sisters' basements. The pages have started to dry out and get brittle but the stories they hold are compelling and deserve to be kept alive. It is my pleasure to revisit these interviews as I re-type them in a digital format. "Listening" to the stories, I see my grandparents and their friends and am transported to another time and place. I have taken the liberty of "cleaning up" the original transcripts - editing them for clarity and readability. I have also hyper-linked to explanatory geographical, historical, and non-English language references wherever possible and I have asked my sisters, cousins and descendants of the subjects to contribute pictures if they have them. Peggy Brown Brunswick, Maine 2019
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The Mohawk Watershed is a unique and distinctive drainage basin that has major tributaries that empty the Adirondacks to the north and the Catskill Mountains to the south. The main trunk of the river occupies a natural topographic gap in the Appalachian mountain chain, which provides a unique and distinctive link between Atlantic and the interior of the continent. This aspect of the geography of the river played a crucial role in the westward expansion by early settlers and eventually was the primary reason the Erie Canal was positioned, in part, along the spine of this key waterway. The mission of the Mohawk River Basin Program is to act as coordinator of basin-wide activities related to conserving, preserving, and restoring the environmental quality of the Mohawk River and its watershed, while managing the resource for a sustainable future. Vital to the success of the program is the involvement of stakeholders and partnerships with established programs and organizations throughout the basin. An important emerging consensus is that integrated watershed management is the key to our future success. Ecosystem Based Management is a clear and explicit guiding principal that now appears to be integrated and fully woven into the fabric of our future direction. With the NYS Department of State’s decision to support the Mohawk River Watershed Coalition of Conservation Districts’ proposal to implement a Comprehensive Watershed Management Plan for the Mohawk Basin.
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This website is an historic guide to Union College as it stood at the turn of the twentieth century. It is based upon information and stories gleaned from the recent donation to the College of a treasure trove of over 700 letters written between 1895 and 1904 by Anne Dunbar Potts Perkins, beloved campus resident, creator of Mrs. Perkins’ Garden, and wife of Maurice Perkins (Union College Professor of Chemistry, 1865-1901).
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Under the Global Challenges & Social Justice curriculum, this course counts for the Global Challenges area of inquiry through the Data & Quantitative Reasoning (DQR) perspective. This course will cover various global challenges in which differential equations are used to study. Some of these included Populations Modeling and Species Conservation, Pollution/global warming (Mixing Problems), Safety in engineering designs (Tacoma Narrows Bridge) and Turbulence.
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This faculty initiated website project uses interactive Omeka components to collect student submissions and allows them to comment on each other's submissions easily without logging into the Omeka backend.
The goals of this course on differential calculus are as follows:
Creating short real-time videos aimed at classmates on a topic, learning target, or assigned problem, they will construct a personal understanding of the concept and develop problem solving skills. Improve critical thinking, creative thinking, and practical thinking skills. Articulate, communicate, and evaluate ideas to structure a more enduring understanding of the material and depth of content knowledge.
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Night of the Living Radio: WRUC Past and Present celebrates the 101st anniversary of WRUC. The exhibit showcases materials from the WRUC collection and includes vinyl records, radio equipment, ephemera, and recordings of broadcasts that visitors may listen to on their phones.
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This website encourages other students and those from the community to recreate the Nott building as a painting or a drawing, a poem or a story, a sculpture or a photograph.
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This exhibition seeks to highlight the stories and experiences of LGBTQ+ people at Union College, using the archival material available at Special Collections and Archives. Featuring materials identified in the 2023 Ruth Anne Evans Research Fellowship, the goal is to uncover and bring to light queer history at Union that has either been buried or that has yet to be recognized as queer.
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Union College holds over 2,800 works of art and material culture in the Permanent Collection, including significant cultural resources from internationally recognized artists and objects from Eastern and Ancient cultures.
As a cultural resource at Union College, the Permanent Collection’s mission is to enhance the cultural life and the academic programs of the College community and the public at large. Selections of the collection are on view in public and in administrative areas campus wide. Our strongest holdings are: works on paper from the 14th to 21st century, contemporary art, Asian collections, Luristan bronzes, 19th century portraits, and historical scientific instruments, including the largest collection of Olivier models held by one institution.
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From Stillman ablum 6, page 22.
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This exhibit was inspired by the 50 year anniversary of coeducation and celebrates the impact women have made throughout the course of Union's history. Women have long been involved in the history of this institution, influencing its structure through contributions to areas such as labor, finances, and educational developments, among others. These contributions have not always been at the forefront of the historical record, but they have been instrumental, visible or not.
