Stories of U is a Mellon Foundation-funded grant project inviting members of the Union community to explore who they want to be through the power of reflection. Our goal is for all members of the Union community to come together and make meaning, as we find purpose, share stories, and explore the transformative power of a Union education.
We have all heard the terms "global warming" and "climate change" before, and perhaps even used them interchangeably. Maybe you've noticed an increase in the use of the term "climate change" over "global warming" recently, which can even be seen by their swap in which one has been showing up more often in Google searches...
China has had a tumultuous history of struggling to solidify its position as a world power in the eyes of the West. However, over the course of history they have gone from being exploited by western powers to dominating the global economy and having one of the loudest voices on international issues.
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.
This site to displays in time and space what the course taught in term of Americans’ interactions with their environment over the past few centuries. Students contribute materials weekly over the course of the term, and contribute a set of items derived from their “hometown environmental history” research as part of the final project.
This course has students analyze contemporary texts from the Afrofuturist canon, travel the sonic byways, and explore other Black cultural production by creators who are grounded in the past and have a more inclusive view of the future.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The collection is comprised of a wide range of materials reflecting Stillman’s long and prolific career in journalism, as well as his intimate ties to literary, artistic and political circles of the nineteenth century. In addition to close to six hundred letters and documents between Stillman and family, friends, colleagues and associates, there are several unpublished manuscripts by Stillman: essays, articles, stories and poetry. Several large photograph albums contain Stillman’s photos of Greece, Italy, the Adirondacks, the countryside of Cambridge and the Charles River in Boston; and a smaller album contains Julia Mitchell Cameron’s costume photos of Stillman’s second wife Marie Spartali. Other loose manuscripts are Stillman’s own manual on the science of photography, personal photographs of Stillman, his first wife and his country home in Surrey, reminiscences of Stillman in old age by his granddaughter, and a woodblock drawing of Stillman by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
Transcripts and audio recordings of interviews with female Union College alumni conducted by students in History 16: Women in Modern America taught by Professor Andrea R. Foroughi in Spring of 2000. The interviews date from 2000-2002, and for this project students interviewed women who attended Union College in the earlier years of coeducation.
Sheldon Jackson was a Presbyterian minister and missionary as well as a political leader, and he was involved in establishing government agencies and Presbyterian community throughout the territory that became Alaska and the Western portions of the United States. The Sheldon Jackson Collection provides evidence of his work in Alaska and Colorado, including the establishment of the First Presbyterian Church of Sitka and the Museum of Alaskan Natural History and Ethnology. In addition, substantial family correspondence illustrates his personal life.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
This collection contains recordings and transcripts of oral history interviews conducted by students in the class titled Gender and Society taught by Professor Sharon Gmelch. The interviews were conducted in 1995, and interviewees consist of faculty members, wives of faculty members, staff and students in the Union College community regarding experiences before, during and after coeducation was adopted at Union College.
Newspaper clippings, ephemera, correspondence, publications, and other materials on Union College alumni compiled by the Alumni Office. Also includes files on nineteenth century faculty.
Curated from rare books found in the department of Special Collections and Archives, "Sex, Religion, and Politics: The Heterogeneous Library of John Bigelow" is a single case exhibit that presents a diverse assortment of books from the personal library of John Bigelow (1817-1911, UC 1835). The books on display range from 1700 to 1903, showcase eight different languages, and tell a story about how his personal and professional reading choices were partly responsible for shaping his open-mindedness and forward-thinking decision making.
