History Commons^™

Ms-116: 1864 Diary Of Corporal Robert Ridge, Thomas P. Lester

All Finding Aids

The diary contains information on the activities of Robert Ridge during 1864, and the first two months of 1865. It contains daily entries, list of proverbs, important events and dates, mail sent, mail received, members of Company B 95th Illinois Volunteers, money sent home, clothing acquired, addresses, rations, and Army Corps commanders.

Special Collections and College Archives Finding Aids are discovery tools used to describe and provide access to our holdings. Finding aids include historical and biographical information about each collection in addition to inventories of their content. More information about our collections can be found on our website https://www.gettysburg.edu/special-collections/collections/ …

Colonel Utley's Emancipation - Or, How Lincoln Offered To Buy A Slave, Jerrica A. Giles, Allen C. Guelzo

Civil War Era Studies Faculty Publications

The reputation of Abraham Lincoln has see-sawed over the last half-century on the fulcrum of race, and the results have not been happy for that reputation. As Gerald Prokopowicz has written, "the big question" about Lincoln and slavery runs today like this: "Was Lincoln really the Great Emancipator that we have traditionally been brought up to admire, or was he just a clever, lying, racist, white male politician who had no interest in the well-being of black America other than when it served his political interests?" No longer is it necessary, as one historian has wryly remarked, for politicians to …

Ms-114: Elizabeth Peeling Lyon Collection, Laura Heffner

All Finding Aids

This collection consists primarily of 75 letters Betty wrote to her family during her two years at Gettysburg College. They date from September 18, 1950 through May 19, 1952, excluding the summer holiday. The letters chronicle Betty’s college activities, showing specifically her participation in band, choir, the Independent Women, Kappa Delta Rho (her brother’s fraternity), and dorm life. This collection also contains one scrapbook sheet of four photographs taken on campus and Lyon’s freshman name sign.

Special Collections and College Archives Finding Aids are discovery tools used to describe and provide access to our holdings. Finding aids include historical and …

Triangulating A Modernization Experiment: The United States, France And The Making Of The Kossou Project In Central Ivory Coast, Abou B. Bamba

History Faculty Publications

Toward the end of the 1960s, authorities in the Ivory Coast decided to build the Kossou Dam, a hydro-electric dam on the Bandama River near the geographic center of the Francophone country. Initially conceived as a technopolitical measure to meet the growing energy demand of the most economically successful country of France's former colonies, the damming experiment soon emerged as a multipurpose regional development project aimed at correcting the regional disparities that tarnished the Ivory Coast's phenomenal economic growth.

This article focuses on the Kossou modernization experience and the sociopolitical transformations that it caused. I argue that the nationalist enthusiasm …

Ms-115: The Notarangelo Collection Of The Louis A. Parsons Papers, Elizabeth M. Johns

All Finding Aids

The collection was created from two different sets of letters and papers related to Louis A. Parsons, obtained from Thomas Notarangelo in 2008. Notarangelo purchased the papers at auction. Both sets consisted of correspondence of both professional and personal nature; one set consisting of correspondence from Parsons’ life before he became a professor at Gettysburg, and the other focusing mainly around the issue of his dismissal from Gettysburg College in 1925. The entire collection consists primarily of the correspondence written and received by Parsons.

Special Collections and College Archives Finding Aids are discovery tools used to describe and provide access …

Farmville, 1963: The Long Hot Summer, Jill Ogline Titus

Civil War Institute Faculty Publications

On July 9, 1963, a reporter for the Richmond Times-Dispatch informed his readers that black protesters had attempted two sit-ins in the college town of Farmville, the hub of rural Prince Edward County. Obviously shocked by these developments, he termed the events at the College Shoppe restaurant and the State Theater "the first reported Negro movement in this Southside Virginia locality, which has gained prominence in recent years as the focal point of a struggle over the closings of Prince Edward County's schools." In this writer's mind, and perhaps many of his readers' as well, social movements were synonymous with …

"The Last Full Measure Of Devotion": The Battle Of Gettysburg And The New Museum In Schmucker Hall, Bradley R. Hoch, Gerald Christianson

Adams County History

Schmucker Hall offers an unprecedented opportunity to interpret the role of religion in the Civil War and the American expenment in democracy. In particular it can give palpable expression to major themes in Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address concerning the battle itself, the conflict as a time of testing, the sacrifices of those who fought here, and the hope these sacrifices bring to the young nation for a new birth of freedom.

Built in 1832 and named for an abolitionist and founder of Gettysburg Seminary, Samuel Simon Schmucker, it is the original structure on the oldest continuously-operating Lutheran seminary in the …

Mapping Gettysburg: Baltimore Street In 1910, Danielle C. Hiss, Megan L. Gray

Adams County History

In 1910, the town of Gettysburg was a thriving, bustling place. The Civil War was long over, and the town had begun to profit from tourists who wished to see the site of the famous battle. Business boomed. Merchants moved in and out of buildings and young families set up housekeeping in their own homes, raising their children and getting off to a running start in their chosen professions. There were cars in the streets next to the old horse-drawn buggies and electricity had begun to replace the gas lamps and candles of the Victorian era. For all that the …

March Into Oblivion: A Footnote, Larry C. Bolin

Adams County History

In the above-titled work in 2006, this writer briefly discussed the possibility that President George Washington traversed present Adams County in October 1794, during his return from Bedford to Philadelphia, a belief long and widely held locally. No credible assertion of the President's presence here in 1794 was possible at that time. Recently however, a forgotten narrative was "rediscovered"; its author, Jacob Eyster, gives some substance to the previous mere speculation. After extensive research, this writer was graciously requested to produce a sequel to his prior speculative writing. [excerpt]

Adams County History 2010

Adams County History

No abstract provided.

“There Was Nothing In Sight But Nature, Nothing...”: Nineteenth-Century Gendered Perceptions Of The Overland Trail, Andrea J. Savadelis

The Gettysburg Historical Journal

One hundred and seventeen years ago, between 1841 and 1867, the Overland Trail saw approximately 350,000 Oregon and California bound North Americans traverse its landscape. This westward migration painted the American frontier with a white sea of wagon covers, spotted the grassy plains with brown patches of oxen herds, and lighted the night sky with open cooking fires. Men and women Overlanders experienced this life-changing event in different ways, which are crucial to understanding the dynamics and interaction between these people and their frontier context. Gender-specific roles and social standards of masculinity and femininity carried from emigrants’ previous lives influenced …

Ms-112: Deborah H. Barnes Papers, Katherine Downton

All Finding Aids

The collection contains papers accumulated by Deborah Barnes while she was a graduate student at Howard University and a professor at Gettysburg College. The bulk of the collection consists of course materials, including syllabi, handouts, course readings, and other resources used for course preparation and research.

Special Collections and College Archives Finding Aids are discovery tools used to describe and provide access to our holdings. Finding aids include historical and biographical information about each collection in addition to inventories of their content. More information about our collections can be found on our website https://www.gettysburg.edu/special-collections/collections/.

'A Little Bit Of Love For Me And A Murder For My Old Man': The Queensland Bush Book Club, Robin Wagner

All Musselman Library Staff Works

This paper addresses rural book distribution in an era before free public libraries came to Australia. Well-to-do, city women established clubs, which solicited donations of “proper reading matter” and raised funds for the purchase of books for their “deprived sisters” in the Outback. They took advantage of a well-developed rail system to deliver book parcels to rural families. In New South Wales and Queensland they were known as Bush Book Clubs.

Testimonials found in the Clubs’ annual reports provide a snapshot of the hard scrabble frontier life and the gratitude with which these parcels were received. This paper looks at …