RARE 1817 Document Signed Samuel Fowler Dickinson - Emily's Grandfather- Amherst

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Seller: dalebooks ✉️ (8,797) 100%, Location: Rochester, New York, US, Ships to: WORLDWIDE & many other countries, Item: 265019087606 RARE 1817 Document Signed Samuel Fowler Dickinson - Emily's Grandfather- Amherst.
RARE Early American Document
 
 
 
Manuscript statement -  Signed by Emily Dickinson's Grandfather 
& Amherst College Founder
Samuel Fowler Dickinson
 
1817
 

For offer, a nice old piece of ephemera! Fresh from a prominent estate in Upstate NY. Vintage, Old, Original, Antique, NOT a Reproduction - Guaranteed !!

Document, signed by Samuel Fowler Dickinson while he was Justice of the Peace in 1817. Manuscript statement signed Samuel F. Dickinson. He was a founder of Amherst college, where his granddaughter Emily would attend. He also built the house she lived in. Legal document deed for land transfer from Horatio Graves to Selah Graves. Perhaps related to Rufus Graves. Also signed by Hooker Leavitt, registrar of deeds. Deed for land in Sunderland, Franklin County, Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Also signed by Mary and Pamela Graves. In very good condition. Fold marks - found folded in half - NOTE: will be sent folded in half, as found. Please see photos. If you collect 18th century Americana history, Colonial American documents, United States of America, ink signatures, autograph, etc. this is a treasure you will not see again! Add this to your image or paper / ephemera collection. Important genealogy research importance too. Combine shipping on multiple bid wins! 2439

Husband of Lucretia Gunn Dickinson, son of Nathan & Esther Fowler Dickinson. Senator Deacon Samuel Fowler DICKINSON was born on October 9, 1775 in Amherst, Massachusetts Bay Colony. He was educated about 1785 in Amherst, MA. He graduated from Dartmouth College in 1795 in Dartmouth, MA. After 1795 he was a Legal Aid. The Law Office of Judge Simeon Strong. Where he studied until he was admitted to the bar. He lived in Amherst, MA after 1795. He was Congregationalist after 1796. At the age of twenty-one he was elected deacon and was a church officer all his active life. He was elected as District Representative and Senator about 1820. He was one of the ablest lawyers in western Massachusetts. He was a natural leader of men and quite naturally became prominent in politics. He served his district in the general court in the house and senate for twelve years. His public career was brilliant and he became well known throughout the state. He was an influential Whig leader . Perhaps his greatest public service was the part he took as founder of Amherst Academy and Amherst College. For the college he sacrificed his property, his time and his professional opportunities, and the friends and alumni of that institution held him in the highest regard and his memory is cherished there for his generous and distinguished service to the college. He was for many years the college treasurer. About 1825 he was a Town Clerk in Amherst, MA. He lived in Amherst, MA before 1833. He lived in Cumberland, OH after 1833. Practiced law here but became interested in Lane Seminary and acted as its steward. Later he filled the office of steward for the Western Reserve University. He exercised his benevolence there repeatedly in helping deserving boys through college. His memory is cherished at Western Reserve University with the same affectionate regard and honor as at Amherst. He helped both institutions in the trying days of their early lives. He died on April 22, 1838 in Hudson (grandfather of Emily Dickinson) Samuel Fowler Dickinson and Lucretia Gunn Dickinson were Emily Dickinson’s paternal grandparents. Fowler, or “Squire,” his honorary title, was a prominent Amherst lawyer, and a man of rare public spirit. Though his life overlapped with Emily’s for only a short time, Fowler Dickinson built a brick house on Main Street that would become Emily’s home and sanctuary for most of her life. A deeply religious man, Squire Dickinson became deacon of the church in 1798 at the unusually young age of 23. A farmer and major land-owner in the country, he served the community into which he had been born with legendary determination and energy. He was Town Clerk, served twelve years as a state Representative (1803-1827), and spent one as a Senator (1828). He planted trees. He represented the town in legal matters. Edward Hitchcock, President of Amherst College from 1845 to 1854, recalled Fowler as “one of the most industrious and persevering men that I ever saw” (Reminiscences of Amherst College, Northampton, Mass.: Bridgman & Childs, 1863, p. 5). Lucretia Gunn of Montague, whom Fowler married in 1802, kept their home, raised nine children, and supported her husband’s work. A driving force behind the creation of Amherst Academy in 1814, Fowler Dickinson was one of the first to subscribe to the charitable fund that served as the foundation for Amherst College (opened in 1821). He expressed his fervent belief in the virtue of education for both sexes, evident in the admission policy of the Academy, in a public address in 1831: “A good husbandman will also educate well his daughters…daughters should be well instructed in the useful sciences; comprising a good English education: including a thorough knowledge of our own language, geography, history, mathematics and natural philosophy. The female mind, so sensitive, so susceptible of improvement, should not be neglected….God hath designed nothing in vain.” (address given to the Hampshire, Hampden and Franklin Agricultural Society on October 27, 1831, in Northampton, Massachusetts. Cited in The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson, ed. Jay Leyda, Vol. I, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960, pp.17-18) His support of these educational endeavors came at great personal cost. By 1833, he was bankrupt. Fowler had “sacrificed his property, his time and his professional opportunities” for the College (The History of the Town of Amherst, Massachusetts, Amherst: Carpenter & Morehouse, 1896, p. 187). Although his son Edward, the poet’s father, tried to mitigate the situation by purchasing half of the family’s Homestead, eventually Fowler Dickinson was forced to leave Amherst with his wife and two youngest daughters and move to Cincinnati, where he became Steward of the Lane Theological Seminary. He later served as Treasurer of Western Reserve College in Hudson, Ohio. By April 22, 1838 he was dead of “lung fever” at age 62. His Ohio obituary, reprinted in the Hampshire Gazette on June 6, 1838 noted: “…his piety consisted much in a deep laid principle of active, yet meek and unostentatious beneficence. The grand practical maxim of his life seemed to be to ‘esteem others better than himself’—to lead him to neglect his own interests, and attempt to make all others within his sphere comfortable and happy” (Leyda, Vol. I, p. 49). After her husband’s death, Lucretia returned east. She died in Enfield, Massachusetts, on May 11, 1840. Both Samuel Fowler and Lucretia Gunn Dickinson were reinterred in the family plot in the Amherst burying ground in the 1840s. Samuel Fowler Dickinson and Lucretia Gunn Dickinson’s most lasting legacy for their granddaughter was the home she lived in, the academy she attended as a child, and the college that was her family’s community for decades. Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (December 10, 1830 – May 15, 1886) was an American poet. Little known during her life, she has since been regarded as one of the most important figures in American poetry.[2] Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts into a prominent family with strong ties to its community. After studying at the Amherst Academy for seven years in her youth, she briefly attended the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary before returning to her family's house in Amherst. Evidence suggests that Dickinson lived much of her life in isolation. Considered an eccentric by locals, she developed a penchant for white clothing and was known for her reluctance to greet guests or, later in life, to even leave her bedroom. Dickinson never married, and most friendships between her and others depended entirely upon correspondence.[3] While Dickinson was a prolific writer, her only publications during her lifetime were 10 of her nearly 1,800 poems, and one letter.[4] The poems published then were usually edited significantly to fit conventional poetic rules. Her poems were unique to her era. They contain short lines, typically lack titles, and often use slant rhyme as well as unconventional capitalization and punctuation.[5] Many of her poems deal with themes of death and immortality, two recurring topics in letters to her friends, and also explore aesthetics, society, nature and spirituality.[6] Although Dickinson's acquaintances were most likely aware of her writing, it was not until after her death in 1886—when Lavinia, Dickinson's younger sister, discovered her cache of poems—that the breadth of her work became public. Her first collection of poetry was published in 1890 by personal acquaintances Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd, though both heavily edited the content. A 1998 New York Times article revealed that of the many edits made to Dickinson's work, the name "Susan" was often deliberately removed. At least eleven of Dickinson's poems were dedicated to sister-in-law Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson, though all the dedications were obliterated, presumably by Todd.[7] A complete, and mostly unaltered, collection of her poetry became available for the first time when scholar Thomas H. Johnson published The Poems of Emily Dickinson in 1955. Life Family and early childhood The Dickinson children (Emily on the left), ca. 1840. From the Dickinson Room at Houghton Library, Harvard University. Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born at the family's homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts, on December 10, 1830, into a prominent, but not wealthy, family.[8] Her father, Edward Dickinson was a lawyer in Amherst and a trustee of Amherst College.[9] Two hundred years earlier, her patrilineal ancestors had arrived in the New World—in the Puritan Great Migration—where they prospered.[10] Emily Dickinson's paternal grandfather, Samuel Dickinson, was one of the founders of Amherst College.[11] In 1813, he built the Homestead, a large mansion on the town's Main Street, that became the focus of Dickinson family life for the better part of a century.[12] Samuel Dickinson's eldest son, Edward, was treasurer of Amherst College from 1835 to 1873, served in the Massachusetts House of Representatives (1838–1839; 1873) and the Massachusetts Senate (1842–1843), and represented Massachusetts's 10th congressional district in the 33rd U.S. Congress (1853–1855).[13] On May 6, 1828, he married Emily Norcross from Monson, Massachusetts. They had three children: William Austin (1829–1895), known as Austin, Aust or Awe Emily Elizabeth Lavinia Norcross (1833–1899), known as Lavinia or Vinnie[14] By all accounts, young Emily was a well-behaved girl. On an extended visit to Monson when she was two, Emily's Aunt Lavinia described Emily as "perfectly well & contented—She is a very good child & but little trouble."[15] Emily's aunt also noted the girl's affinity for music and her particular talent for the piano, which she called "the moosic".[16] Dickinson attended primary school in a two-story building on Pleasant Street.[17] Her education was "ambitiously classical for a Victorian girl".[18] Her father wanted his children well-educated and he followed their progress even while away on business. When Emily was seven, he wrote home, reminding his children to "keep school, and learn, so as to tell me, when I come home, how many new things you have learned".[19] While Emily consistently described her father in a warm manner, her correspondence suggests that her mother was regularly cold and aloof. In a letter to a confidante, Emily wrote she "always ran Home to Awe [Austin] when a child, if anything befell me. He was an awful Mother, but I liked him better than none."[20] On September 7, 1840, Dickinson and her sister Lavinia started together at Amherst Academy, a former boys' school that had opened to female students just two years earlier.[17] At about the same time, her father purchased a house on North Pleasant Street.[21] Emily's brother Austin later described this large new home as the "mansion" over which he and Emily presided as "lord and lady" while their parents were absent.[22] The house overlooked Amherst's burial ground, described by one local minister as treeless and "forbidding".[21] Teenage years They shut me up in Prose – As when a little Girl They put me in the Closet – Because they liked me "still" – Still! Could themself have peeped – And seen my Brain – go round – They might as wise have lodged a Bird For Treason – in the Pound – Emily Dickinson, c. 1862[23] Dickinson spent seven years at the Academy, taking classes in English and classical literature, Latin, botany, geology, history, "mental philosophy," and arithmetic.[24] Daniel Taggart Fiske, the school's principal at the time, would later recall that Dickinson was "very bright" and "an excellent scholar, of exemplary deportment, faithful in all school duties".[25] Although she had a few terms off due to illness—the longest of which was in 1845–1846, when she was enrolled for only eleven weeks[26]—she enjoyed her strenuous studies, writing to a friend that the Academy was "a very fine school".[27] Dickinson was troubled from a young age by the "deepening menace" of death, especially the deaths of those who were close to her. When Sophia Holland, her second cousin and a close friend, grew ill from typhus and died in April 1844, Emily was traumatized.[28] Recalling the incident two years later, Emily wrote that "it seemed to me I should die too if I could not be permitted to watch over her or even look at her face."[29] She became so melancholic that her parents sent her to stay with family in Boston to recover.[27] With her health and spirits restored, she soon returned to Amherst Academy to continue her studies.[30] During this period, she met people who were to become lifelong friends and correspondents, such as Abiah Root, Abby Wood, Jane Humphrey, and Susan Huntington Gilbert (who later married Emily's brother Austin). In 1845, a religious revival took place in Amherst, resulting in 46 confessions of faith among Dickinson's peers.[31] Dickinson wrote to a friend the following year: "I never enjoyed such perfect peace and happiness as the short time in which I felt I had found my Savior."[32] She went on to say it was her "greatest pleasure to commune alone with the great God & to feel that he would listen to my prayers."[32] The experience did not last: Dickinson never made a formal declaration of faith and attended services regularly for only a few years.[33] After her church-going ended, about 1852, she wrote a poem opening: "Some keep the Sabbath going to Church – / I keep it, staying at Home".[34] During the last year of her stay at the Academy, Emily became friendly with Leonard Humphrey, its popular new young principal. After finishing her final term at the Academy on August 10, 1847, Dickinson began attending Mary Lyon's Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (which later became Mount Holyoke College) in South Hadley, about ten miles (16 km) from Amherst.[35] She stayed at the seminary for only ten months. Although she liked the girls at Holyoke, Dickinson made no lasting friendships there.[36] The explanations for her brief stay at Holyoke differ considerably: either she was in poor health, her father wanted to have her at home, she rebelled against the evangelical fervor present at the school, she disliked the discipline-minded teachers, or she was simply homesick.[37] Whatever the reasons for leaving Holyoke, her brother Austin appeared on March 25, 1848, to "bring [her] home at all events".[38] Back in Amherst, Dickinson occupied her time with household activities.[39] She took up baking for the family and enjoyed attending local events and activities in the budding college town.[40] Early influences and writing When she was eighteen, Dickinson's family befriended a young attorney by the name of Benjamin Franklin Newton. According to a letter written by Dickinson after Newton's death, he had been "with my Father two years, before going to Worcester – in pursuing his studies, and was much in our family."[41] Although their relationship was probably not romantic, Newton was a formative influence and would become the second in a series of older men (after Humphrey) that Dickinson referred to, variously, as her tutor, preceptor or master.[42] Newton likely introduced her to the writings of William Wordsworth, and his gift to her of Ralph Waldo Emerson's first book of collected poems had a liberating effect. She wrote later that he, "whose name my Father's Law Student taught me, has touched the secret Spring".[43] Newton held her in high regard, believing in and recognizing her as a poet. When he was dying of tuberculosis, he wrote to her, saying he would like to live until she achieved the greatness he foresaw.[43] Biographers believe that Dickinson's statement of 1862—"When a little Girl, I had a friend, who taught me Immortality – but venturing too near, himself – he never returned"—refers to Newton.[44] Dickinson was familiar with not only the Bible but also contemporary popular literature.[45] She was probably influenced by Lydia Maria Child's Letters from New York, another gift from Newton[28] (after reading it, she gushed "This then is a book! And there are more of them!"[28]). Her brother smuggled a copy of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's Kavanagh into the house for her (because her father might disapprove)[46] and a friend lent her Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre in late 1849.[47] Jane Eyre's influence cannot be measured, but when Dickinson acquired her first and only dog, a Newfoundland, she named him "Carlo" after the character St. John Rivers' dog.[47] William Shakespeare was also a potent influence in her life. Referring to his plays, she wrote to one friend, "Why clasp any hand but this?" and to another, "Why is any other book needed?"[48] Adulthood and seclusion In early 1850, Dickinson wrote that "Amherst is alive with fun this winter ... Oh, a very great town this is!"[39] Her high spirits soon turned to melancholy after another death. The Amherst Academy principal, Leonard Humphrey, died suddenly of "brain congestion" at age 25.[49] Two years after his death, she revealed to her friend Abiah Root the extent of her sadness: some of my friends are gone, and some of my friends are sleeping – sleeping the churchyard sleep – the hour of evening is sad – it was once my study hour – my master has gone to rest, and the open leaf of the book, and the scholar at school alone, make the tears come, and I cannot brush them away; I would not if I could, for they are the only tribute I can pay the departed Humphrey.[50] The Evergreens, built by Edward Dickinson, was the home of Austin and Susan's family. During the 1850s, Emily's strongest and most affectionate relationship was with her sister-in-law, Susan Gilbert. Emily eventually sent her over three hundred letters, more than to any other correspondent, over the course of their relationship. Susan was supportive of the poet, playing the role of "most beloved friend, influence, muse, and adviser" whose editorial suggestions Dickinson sometimes followed.[51] In an 1882 letter to Susan, Emily said, "With the exception of Shakespeare, you have told me of more knowledge than any one living."[52] The importance of Emily's relationship with Susan has widely been overlooked due to a point of view first promoted by Mabel Loomis Todd, Austin Dickinson's longtime mistress, who diminished Susan's role in Emily's life due to her own poor relationship with her lover's wife.[53] However, the notion of a "cruel" Susan—as promoted by her romantic rival—has been questioned, most especially by Susan and Austin's surviving children, with whom Emily was close.[54] Many scholars interpret the relationship between Emily and Susan as a romantic one. In The Emily Dickinson Journal Lena Koski wrote, "Dickinson's letters to Gilbert express strong homoerotic feelings."[55] She quotes from many of their letters, including one from 1852 in which Emily proclaims, "Susie, will you indeed come home next Saturday, and be my own again, and kiss me ... I hope for you so much, and feel so eager for you, feel that I cannot wait, feel that now I must have you—that the expectation once more to see your face again, makes me feel hot and feverish, and my heart beats so fast ... my darling, so near I seem to you, that I disdain this pen, and wait for a warmer language." The relationship between Emily and Susan is portrayed in the film Wild Nights with Emily and explored in the TV series Dickinson. Sue married Austin in 1856 after a four-year courtship, though their marriage was not a happy one. Edward Dickinson built a house for Austin and Sue naming it the Evergreens, a stand of which was located on the west side of the Homestead.[56] Until 1855, Dickinson had not strayed far from Amherst. That spring, accompanied by her mother and sister, she took one of her longest and farthest trips away from home.[57] First, they spent three weeks in Washington, where her father was representing Massachusetts in Congress. Then they went to Philadelphia for two weeks to visit family. In Philadelphia, she met Charles Wadsworth, a famous minister of the Arch Street Presbyterian Church, with whom she forged a strong friendship which lasted until his death in 1882.[58] Despite seeing him only twice after 1855 (he moved to San Francisco in 1862), she variously referred to him as "my Philadelphia", "my Clergyman", "my dearest earthly friend" and "my Shepherd from 'Little Girl'hood".[59] In September 2012, the Amherst College Archives and Special Collections unveiled this daguerreotype, proposing it to be Dickinson (left) and her friend Kate Scott Turner (ca. 1859); it has not been authenticated.[60] From the mid-1850s, Emily's mother became effectively bedridden with various chronic illnesses until her death in 1882.[61] Writing to a friend in summer 1858, Emily said she would visit if she could leave "home, or mother. I do not go out at all, lest father will come and miss me, or miss some little act, which I might forget, should I run away – Mother is much as usual. I Know not what to hope of her".[62] As her mother continued to decline, Dickinson's domestic responsibilities weighed more heavily upon her and she confined herself within the Homestead. Forty years later, Lavinia said that because their mother was chronically ill, one of the daughters had to remain always with her.[62] Emily took this role as her own, and "finding the life with her books and nature so congenial, continued to live it".[62] Withdrawing more and more from the outside world, Emily began in the summer of 1858 what would be her lasting legacy. Reviewing poems she had written previously, she began making clean copies of her work, assembling carefully pieced-together manuscript books.[63] The forty fascicles she created from 1858 through 1865 eventually held nearly eight hundred poems.[63] No one was aware of the existence of these books until after her death. In the late 1850s, the Dickinsons befriended Samuel Bowles, the owner and editor-in-chief of the Springfield Republican, and his wife, Mary.[64] They visited the Dickinsons regularly for years to come. During this time Emily sent him over three dozen letters and nearly fifty poems.[65] Their friendship brought out some of her most intense writing and Bowles published a few of her poems in his journal.[66] It was from 1858 to 1861 that Dickinson is believed to have written a trio of letters that have been called "The Master Letters". These three letters, drafted to an unknown man simply referred to as "Master", continue to be the subject of speculation and contention amongst scholars.[67] The first half of the 1860s, after she had largely withdrawn from social life,[68] proved to be Dickinson's most productive writing period.[69] Modern scholars and researchers are divided as to the cause for Dickinson's withdrawal and extreme seclusion. While she was diagnosed as having "nervous prostration" by a physician during her lifetime,[70] some today believe she may have suffered from illnesses as various as agoraphobia[71] and epilepsy.[72] Is "my Verse ... alive?" In April 1862, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a literary critic, radical abolitionist, and ex-minister, wrote a lead piece for The Atlantic Monthly titled, "Letter to a Young Contributor". Higginson's essay, in which he urged aspiring writers to "charge your style with life", contained practical advice for those wishing to break into print.[73] Dickinson's decision to contact Higginson suggests that by 1862 she was contemplating publication and that it may have become increasingly difficult to write poetry without an audience.[74] Seeking literary guidance that no one close to her could provide, Dickinson sent him a letter, which read in full:[75] Thomas Wentworth Higginson in uniform; he was colonel of the First South Carolina Volunteers from 1862 to 1864. Mr Higginson, Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive? The Mind is so near itself – it cannot see, distinctly – and I have none to ask – Should you think it breathed – and had you the leisure to tell me, I should feel quick gratitude – If I make the mistake – that you dared to tell me – would give me sincerer honor – toward you – I enclose my name – asking you, if you please – Sir – to tell me what is true? That you will not betray me – it is needless to ask – since Honor is it's own pawn – This highly nuanced and largely theatrical letter was unsigned, but she had included her name on a card and enclosed it in an envelope, along with four of her poems.[76] He praised her work but suggested that she delay publishing until she had written longer, being unaware she had already appeared in print. She assured him that publishing was as foreign to her "as Firmament to Fin", but also proposed that "If fame belonged to me, I could not escape her".[77] Dickinson delighted in dramatic self-characterization and mystery in her letters to Higginson.[78] She said of herself, "I am small, like the wren, and my hair is bold, like the chestnut bur, and my eyes like the sherry in the glass that the guest leaves."[79] She stressed her solitary nature, saying her only real companions were the hills, the sundown, and her dog, Carlo. She also mentioned that whereas her mother did not "care for Thought", her father bought her books, but begged her "not to read them – because he fears they joggle the Mind".[80] Dickinson valued his advice, going from calling him "Mr. Higginson" to "Dear friend" as well as signing her letters, "Your Gnome" and "Your Scholar".[81] His interest in her work certainly provided great moral support; many years later, Dickinson told Higginson that he had saved her life in 1862.[82] They corresponded until her death, but her difficulty in expressing her literary needs and a reluctance to enter into a cooperative exchange left Higginson nonplussed; he did not press her to publish in subsequent correspondence.[83] Dickinson's own ambivalence on the matter militated against the likelihood of publication.[84] Literary critic Edmund Wilson, in his review of Civil War literature, surmised that "with encouragement, she would certainly have published".[85] The woman in white In direct opposition to the immense productivity that she displayed in the early 1860s, Dickinson wrote fewer poems in 1866.[86] Beset with personal loss as well as loss of domestic help, Dickinson may have been too overcome to keep up her previous level of writing.[87] Carlo died during this time after having provided sixteen years of companionship; Dickinson never owned another dog. Although the household servant of nine years, Margaret O'Brien, had married and left the Homestead that same year, it was not until 1869 that the Dickinsons brought in a permanent household servant, Margaret Maher, to replace their former maid-of-all-work.[88] Emily once again was responsible for the kitchen, including cooking and cleaning up, as well as the baking at which she excelled.[89] A solemn thing – it was – I said – A Woman – White – to be – And wear – if God should count me fit – Her blameless mystery – Emily Dickinson, c. 1861[90] Around this time, Dickinson's behavior began to change. She did not leave the Homestead unless it was absolutely necessary and as early as 1867, she began to talk to visitors from the other side of a door rather than speaking to them face to face.[91] She acquired local notoriety; she was rarely seen, and when she was, she was usually clothed in white. Dickinson's one surviving article of clothing is a white cotton dress, possibly sewn circa 1878–1882.[92] Few of the locals who exchanged messages with Dickinson during her last fifteen years ever saw her in person.[93] Austin and his family began to protect Emily's privacy, deciding that she was not to be a subject of discussion with outsiders.[94] Despite her physical seclusion, however, Dickinson was socially active and expressive through what makes up two-thirds of her surviving notes and letters. When visitors came to either the Homestead or the Evergreens, she would often leave or send over small gifts of poems or flowers.[95] Dickinson also had a good rapport with the children in her life. Mattie Dickinson, the second child of Austin and Sue, later said that "Aunt Emily stood for indulgence."[96] MacGregor (Mac) Jenkins, the son of family friends who later wrote a short article in 1891 called "A Child's Recollection of Emily Dickinson", thought of her as always offering support[clarification needed] to the neighborhood children.[96] When Higginson urged her to come to Boston in 1868 so they could formally meet for the first time, she declined, writing: "Could it please your convenience to come so far as Amherst I should be very glad, but I do not cross my Father's ground to any House or town".[97] It was not until he came to Amherst in 1870 that they met. Later he referred to her, in the most detailed and vivid physical account of her on record, as "a little plain woman with two smooth bands of reddish hair ... in a very plain & exquisitely clean white piqué & a blue net worsted shawl."[98] He also felt that he never was "with any one who drained my nerve power so much. Without touching her, she drew from me. I am glad not to live near her."[99] Posies and poesies Scholar Judith Farr notes that Dickinson, during her lifetime, "was known more widely as a gardener, perhaps, than as a poet".[100] Dickinson studied botany from the age of nine and, along with her sister, tended the garden at Homestead.[100] During her lifetime, she assembled a collection of pressed plants in a sixty-six-page leather-bound herbarium. It contained 424 pressed flower specimens that she collected, classified, and labeled using the Linnaean system.[101] The Homestead garden was well known and admired locally in its time. It has not survived, but efforts to revive it have begun.[102] Dickinson kept no garden notebooks or plant lists, but a clear impression can be formed from the letters and recollections of friends and family. Her niece, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, remembered "carpets of lily-of-the-valley and pansies, platoons of sweetpeas, hyacinths, enough in May to give all the bees of summer dyspepsia. There were ribbons of peony hedges and drifts of daffodils in season, marigolds to distraction—a butterfly utopia".[103] In particular, Dickinson cultivated scented exotic flowers, writing that she "could inhabit the Spice Isles merely by crossing the dining room to the conservatory, where the plants hang in baskets". Dickinson would often send her friends bunches of flowers with verses attached, but "they valued the posy more than the poetry".[103] Later life On June 16, 1874, while in Boston, Edward Dickinson suffered a stroke and died. When the simple funeral was held in the Homestead's entrance hall, Emily stayed in her room with the door cracked open. Neither did she attend the memorial service on June 28.[104] She wrote to Higginson that her father's "Heart was pure and terrible and I think no other like it exists."[105] A year later, on June 15, 1875, Emily's mother also suffered a stroke, which produced a partial lateral paralysis and impaired memory. Lamenting her mother's increasing physical as well as mental demands, Emily wrote that "Home is so far from Home".[106] Though the great Waters sleep, That they are still the Deep, We cannot doubt – No vacillating God Ignited this Abode To put it out – Emily Dickinson, c. 1884[107] Otis Phillips Lord, an elderly judge on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court from Salem, in 1872 or 1873 became an acquaintance of Dickinson's. After the death of Lord's wife in 1877, his friendship with Dickinson probably became a late-life romance, though as their letters were destroyed, this is surmised.[108] Dickinson found a kindred soul in Lord, especially in terms of shared literary interests; the few letters which survived contain multiple quotations of Shakespeare's work, including the plays Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet and King Lear. In 1880 he gave her Cowden Clarke's Complete Concordance to Shakespeare (1877).[109] Dickinson wrote that "While others go to Church, I go to mine, for are you not my Church, and have we not a Hymn that no one knows but us?"[110] She referred to him as "My lovely Salem"[111] and they wrote to each other religiously every Sunday. Dickinson looked forward to this day greatly; a surviving fragment of a letter written by her states that "Tuesday is a deeply depressed Day".[112] After being critically ill for several years, Judge Lord died in March 1884. Dickinson referred to him as "our latest Lost".[113] Two years before this, on April 1, 1882, Dickinson's "Shepherd from 'Little Girl'hood", Charles Wadsworth, also had died after a long illness. Decline and death Although she continued to write in her last years, Dickinson stopped editing and organizing her poems. She also exacted a promise from her sister Lavinia to burn her papers.[114] Lavinia, who never married, remained at the Homestead until her own death in 1899. Emily Dickinson's tombstone in the family plot The 1880s were a difficult time for the remaining Dickinsons. Irreconcilably alienated from his wife, Austin fell in love in 1882 with Mabel Loomis Todd, an Amherst College faculty wife who had recently moved to the area. Todd never met Dickinson but was intrigued by her, referring to her as "a lady whom the people call the Myth".[115] Austin distanced himself from his family as his affair continued and his wife became sick with grief.[116] Dickinson's mother died on November 14, 1882. Five weeks later, Dickinson wrote, "We were never intimate ... while she was our Mother – but Mines in the same Ground meet by tunneling and when she became our Child, the Affection came."[117] The next year, Austin and Sue's third and youngest child, Gilbert—Emily's favorite—died of typhoid fever.[118] As death succeeded death, Dickinson found her world upended. In the fall of 1884, she wrote, "The Dyings have been too deep for me, and before I could raise my Heart from one, another has come."[119] That summer she had seen "a great darkness coming" and fainted while baking in the kitchen. She remained unconscious late into the night and weeks of ill health followed. On November 30, 1885, her feebleness and other symptoms were so worrying that Austin canceled a trip to Boston.[120] She was confined to her bed for a few months, but managed to send a final burst of letters in the spring. What is thought to be her last letter was sent to her cousins, Louise and Frances Norcross, and simply read: "Little Cousins, Called Back. Emily".[121] On May 15, 1886, after several days of worsening symptoms, Emily Dickinson died at the age of 55. Austin wrote in his diary that "the day was awful ... she ceased to breathe that terrible breathing just before the [afternoon] whistle sounded for six."[122] Dickinson's chief physician gave the cause of death as Bright's disease and its duration as two and a half years.[123] Lavinia and Austin asked Susan to wash Emily's body upon her death. Susan also wrote Emily's obituary for the Springfield Republican, ending it with four lines from one of Emily's poems: "Morns like these, we parted; Noons like these, she rose; Fluttering first, then firmer, To her fair repose." Lavinia was perfectly satisfied that Sue should arrange everything, knowing it would be done lovingly.[124] Dickinson was buried, laid in a white coffin with vanilla-scented heliotrope, a lady's slipper orchid, and a "knot of blue field violets" placed about it.[103][125] The funeral service, held in the Homestead's library, was simple and short; Higginson, who had met her only twice, read "No Coward Soul Is Mine", a poem by Emily Brontë that had been a favorite of Dickinson's.[122] At Dickinson's request, her "coffin [was] not driven but carried through fields of buttercups" for burial in the family plot at West Cemetery on Triangle Street.[100] Publication Despite Dickinson's prolific writing, only ten poems and a letter were published during her lifetime. After her younger sister Lavinia discovered the collection of nearly 1800 poems, Dickinson's first volume was published four years after her death. Until Thomas H. Johnson published Dickinson's Complete Poems in 1955,[126] Dickinson's poems were considerably edited and altered from their manuscript versions. Since 1890 Dickinson has remained continuously in print. Contemporary "Safe in their Alabaster Chambers –," titled "The Sleeping," as it was published in the Springfield Republican in 1862. A few of Dickinson's poems appeared in Samuel Bowles' Springfield Republican between 1858 and 1868. They were published anonymously and heavily edited, with conventionalized punctuation and formal titles.[127] The first poem, "Nobody knows this little rose", may have been published without Dickinson's permission.[128] The Republican also published "A Narrow Fellow in the Grass" as "The Snake", "Safe in their Alabaster Chambers –" as "The Sleeping", and "Blazing in the Gold and quenching in Purple" as "Sunset".[129][130] The poem "I taste a liquor never brewed –" is an example of the edited versions; the last two lines in the first stanza were completely rewritten.[129] Original wording I taste a liquor never brewed – From Tankards scooped in Pearl – Not all the Frankfort Berries Yield such an Alcohol! Republican version I taste a liquor never brewed – From Tankards scooped in Pearl – Not Frankfort Berries yield the sense Such a delirious whirl! In 1864, several poems were altered and published in Drum Beat, to raise funds for medical care for Union soldiers in the war.[131] Another appeared in April 1864 in the Brooklyn Daily Union.[132] In the 1870s, Higginson showed Dickinson's poems to Helen Hunt Jackson, who had coincidentally been at the Academy with Dickinson when they were girls.[133] Jackson was deeply involved in the publishing world, and managed to convince Dickinson to publish her poem "Success is counted sweetest" anonymously in a volume called A Masque of Poets.[133] The poem, however, was altered to agree with contemporary taste. It was the last poem published during Dickinson's lifetime. Posthumous After Dickinson's death, Lavinia Dickinson kept her promise and burned most of the poet's correspondence. Significantly though, Dickinson had left no instructions about the 40 notebooks and loose sheets gathered in a locked chest.[134] Lavinia recognized the poems' worth and became obsessed with seeing them published.[135] She turned first to her brother's wife and then to Mabel Loomis Todd, her brother's mistress, for assistance.[125] A feud ensued, with the manuscripts divided between the Todd and Dickinson houses, preventing complete publication of Dickinson's poetry for more than half a century.[136] Cover of the first edition of Poems, published in 1890 The first volume of Dickinson's Poems, edited jointly by Mabel Loomis Todd and T. W. Higginson, appeared in November 1890.[137] Although Todd claimed that only essential changes were made, the poems were extensively edited to match punctuation and capitalization to late 19th-century standards, with occasional rewordings to reduce Dickinson's obliquity.[138] The first 115-poem volume was a critical and financial success, going through eleven printings in two years.[137] Poems: Second Series followed in 1891, running to five editions by 1893; a third series appeared in 1896. One reviewer, in 1892, wrote: "The world will not rest satisfied till every scrap of her writings, letters as well as literature, has been published".[139] Nearly a dozen new editions of Dickinson's poetry, whether containing previously unpublished or newly edited poems, were published between 1914 and 1945.[140] Martha Dickinson Bianchi, the daughter of Susan and Austin Dickinson, published collections of her aunt's poetry based on the manuscripts held by her family, whereas Mabel Loomis Todd's daughter, Millicent Todd Bingham, published collections based on the manuscripts held by her mother. These competing editions of Dickinson's poetry, often differing in order and structure, ensured that the poet's work was in the public's eye.[141] The first scholarly publication came in 1955 with a complete new three-volume set edited by Thomas H. Johnson. Forming the basis of later Dickinson scholarship, Johnson's variorum brought all of Dickinson's known poems together for the first time.[142] Johnson's goal was to present the poems very nearly as Dickinson had left them in her manuscripts.[143] They were untitled, only numbered in an approximate chronological sequence, strewn with dashes and irregularly capitalized, and often extremely elliptical in their language.[144] Three years later, Johnson edited and published, along with Theodora Ward, a complete collection of Dickinson's letters, also presented in three volumes. In 1981, The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson was published. Using the physical evidence of the original papers, the poems were intended to be published in their original order for the first time. Editor Ralph W. Franklin relied on smudge marks, needle punctures and other clues to reassemble the poet's packets.[143] Since then, many critics have argued for thematic unity in these small collections, believing the ordering of the poems to be more than chronological or convenient. Dickinson biographer Alfred Habegger wrote in My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson (2001) that "The consequences of the poet's failure to disseminate her work in a faithful and orderly manner are still very much with us".[145] Poetry Main article: List of Emily Dickinson poems Dickinson's poems generally fall into three distinct periods, the works in each period having certain general characters in common. Pre-1861. These are often conventional and sentimental in nature.[146] Thomas H. Johnson, who later published The Poems of Emily Dickinson, was able to date only five of Dickinson's poems before 1858.[147] Two of these are mock valentines done in an ornate and humorous style, and two others are conventional lyrics, one of which is about missing her brother Austin. The fifth poem, which begins "I have a Bird in spring", conveys her grief over the feared loss of friendship and was sent to her friend Sue Gilbert.[147] 1861–1865. This was her most creative period—these poems represent her most vigorous and creative work. Johnson estimated that she composed 86 poems in 1861, 366 in 1862, 141 in 1863, and 174 in 1864. He also believed that during this period, she fully developed her themes of life and mortality.[148] Post-1866. It is estimated that two-thirds of the entire body of her poetry was written before this year.[148] Structure and syntax Dickinson's handwritten manuscript of her poem "Wild Nights – Wild Nights!" The extensive use of dashes and unconventional capitalization in Dickinson's manuscripts, and the idiosyncratic vocabulary and imagery, combine to create a body of work that is "far more various in its styles and forms than is commonly supposed".[5][149] Dickinson avoids pentameter, opting more generally for trimeter, tetrameter and, less often, dimeter. Sometimes her use of these meters is regular, but oftentimes it is irregular. The regular form that she most often employs is the ballad stanza, a traditional form that is divided into quatrains, using tetrameter for the first and third lines and trimeter for the second and fourth, while rhyming the second and fourth lines (ABCB). Though Dickinson often uses perfect rhymes for lines two and four, she also makes frequent use of slant rhyme.[150] In some of her poems, she varies the meter from the traditional ballad stanza by using trimeter for lines one, two and four; while using tetrameter for only line three. Since many of her poems were written in traditional ballad stanzas with ABCB rhyme schemes, some of these poems can be sung to fit the melodies of popular folk songs and hymns that also use the common meter, employing alternating lines of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter.[151] Familiar examples of such songs are "O Little Town of Bethlehem" and "Amazing Grace'". Dickinson scholar and poet Anthony Hecht finds resonances in Dickinson's poetry not only with hymns and song-forms but also with psalms and riddles, citing the following example: "Who is the East? / The Yellow Man / Who may be Purple if he can / That carries in the Sun. / Who is the West? / The Purple Man / Who may be Yellow if He can / That lets Him out again."[149] Late 20th-century scholars are "deeply interested" by Dickinson's highly individual use of punctuation and lineation (line lengths and line breaks).[134] Following the publication of one of the few poems that appeared in her lifetime – "A Narrow Fellow in the Grass", published as "The Snake" in the Republican – Dickinson complained that the edited punctuation (an added comma and a full stop substitution for the original dash) altered the meaning of the entire poem.[129] Original wording A narrow Fellow in the Grass Occasionally rides – You may have met Him – did you not His notice sudden is – Republican version[129] A narrow Fellow in the Grass Occasionally rides – You may have met Him – did you not, His notice sudden is. As Farr points out, "snakes instantly notice you"; Dickinson's version captures the "breathless immediacy" of the encounter; and The Republican's punctuation renders "her lines more commonplace".[134] With the increasingly close focus on Dickinson's structures and syntax has come a growing appreciation that they are "aesthetically based".[134] Although Johnson's landmark 1955 edition of poems was relatively unaltered from the original, later scholars critiqued it for deviating from the style and layout of Dickinson's manuscripts. Meaningful distinctions, these scholars assert, can be drawn from varying lengths and angles of dash, and differing arrangements of text on the page.[152] Several volumes have attempted to render Dickinson's handwritten dashes using many typographic symbols of varying length and angle. R. W. Franklin's 1998 variorum edition of the poems provided alternate wordings to those chosen by Johnson, in a more limited editorial intervention. Franklin also used typeset dashes of varying length to approximate the manuscripts' dashes more closely.[143] Major themes Dickinson left no formal statement of her aesthetic intentions and, because of the variety of her themes, her work does not fit conveniently into any one genre. She has been regarded, alongside Emerson (whose poems Dickinson admired), as a Transcendentalist.[153] However, Farr disagrees with this analysis, saying that Dickinson's "relentlessly measuring mind ... deflates the airy elevation of the Transcendental".[154] Apart from the major themes discussed below, Dickinson's poetry frequently uses humor, puns, irony and satire.[155] Flowers and gardens: Farr notes that Dickinson's "poems and letters almost wholly concern flowers" and that allusions to gardens often refer to an "imaginative realm ... wherein flowers [are] often emblems for actions and emotions".[156] She associates some flowers, like gentians and anemones, with youth and humility; others with prudence and insight.[156] Her poems were often sent to friends with accompanying letters and nosegays.[156] Farr notes that one of Dickinson's earlier poems, written about 1859, appears to "conflate her poetry itself with the posies": "My nosegays are for Captives – / Dim – long expectant eyes – / Fingers denied the plucking, / Patient till Paradise – / To such, if they sh'd whisper / Of morning and the moor – / They bear no other errand, / And I, no other prayer".[156] The Master poems: Dickinson left a large number of poems addressed to "Signor", "Sir" and "Master", who is characterized as Dickinson's "lover for all eternity".[157] These confessional poems are often "searing in their self-inquiry" and "harrowing to the reader" and typically take their metaphors from texts and paintings of Dickinson's day.[157] The Dickinson family themselves believed these poems were addressed to actual individuals but this view is frequently rejected by scholars. Farr, for example, contends that the Master is an unattainable composite figure, "human, with specific characteristics, but godlike" and speculates that Master may be a "kind of Christian muse".[157] Morbidity: Dickinson's poems reflect her "early and lifelong fascination" with illness, dying and death.[158] Perhaps surprisingly for a New England spinster, her poems allude to death by many methods: "crucifixion, drowning, hanging, suffocation, freezing, premature burial, shooting, stabbing and guillotinage".[158] She reserved her sharpest insights into the "death blow aimed by God" and the "funeral in the brain", often reinforced by images of thirst and starvation. Dickinson scholar Vivian Pollak considers these references an autobiographical reflection of Dickinson's "thirsting-starving persona", an outward expression of her needy self-image as small, thin and frail.[158] Dickinson's most psychologically complex poems explore the theme that the loss of hunger for life causes the death of self and place this at "the interface of murder and suicide".[158] Death and morbidity in Dickinson's poetry is also heavily connected to winter themes. Critic Edwin Folsom analyzes how "winter for Dickinson is the season that forces reality, that strips all hope of transcendence. It is a season of death and a metaphor for death".[159] Gospel poems: Throughout her life, Dickinson wrote poems reflecting a preoccupation with the teachings of Jesus Christ and, indeed, many are addressed to him.[160] She stresses the Gospels' contemporary pertinence and recreates them, often with "wit and American colloquial language".[160] Scholar Dorothy Oberhaus finds that the "salient feature uniting Christian poets ... is their reverential attention to the life of Jesus Christ" and contends that Dickinson's deep structures place her in the "poetic tradition of Christian devotion" alongside Hopkins, Eliot and Auden.[160] In a Nativity poem, Dickinson combines lightness and wit to revisit an ancient theme: "The Savior must have been / A docile Gentleman – / To come so far so cold a Day / For little Fellowmen / The Road to Bethlehem / Since He and I were Boys / Was leveled, but for that twould be / A rugged billion Miles –".[160] The Undiscovered Continent: Academic Suzanne Juhasz considers that Dickinson saw the mind and spirit as tangible visitable places and that for much of her life she lived within them.[161] Often, this intensely private place is referred to as the "undiscovered continent" and the "landscape of the spirit" and embellished with nature imagery. At other times, the imagery is darker and forbidding—castles or prisons, complete with corridors and rooms—to create a dwelling place of "oneself" where one resides with one's other selves.[161] An example that brings together many of these ideas is: "Me from Myself – to banish – / Had I Art – / Impregnable my Fortress / Unto All Heart – / But since myself—assault Me – / How have I peace / Except by subjugating / Consciousness. / And since We're mutual Monarch / How this be / Except by Abdication – / Me – of Me?".[161] Reception Dickinson wrote and sent this poem ("A Route of Evanescence") to Thomas Higginson in 1880. The surge of posthumous publication gave Dickinson's poetry its first public exposure. Backed by Higginson and with a favorable notice from William Dean Howells, an editor of Harper's Magazine, the poetry received mixed reviews after it was first published in 1890. Higginson himself stated in his preface to the first edition of Dickinson's published work that the poetry's quality "is that of extraordinary grasp and insight",[162] albeit "without the proper control and chastening" that the experience of publishing during her lifetime might have conferred.[163] His judgment that her opus was "incomplete and unsatisfactory" would be echoed in the essays of the New Critics in the 1930s. Maurice Thompson, who was literary editor of The Independent for twelve years, noted in 1891 that her poetry had "a strange mixture of rare individuality and originality".[164] Some critics hailed Dickinson's effort, but disapproved of her unusual non-traditional style. Andrew Lang, a British writer, dismissed Dickinson's work, stating that "if poetry is to exist at all, it really must have form and grammar, and must rhyme when it professes to rhyme. The wisdom of the ages and the nature of man insist on so much".[165] Thomas Bailey Aldrich, a poet and novelist, equally dismissed Dickinson's poetic technique in The Atlantic Monthly in January 1892: "It is plain that Miss Dickinson possessed an extremely unconventional and grotesque fancy. She was deeply tinged by the mysticism of Blake, and strongly influenced by the mannerism of Emerson ... But the incoherence and formlessness of her — versicles are fatal ... an eccentric, dreamy, half-educated recluse in an out-of-the-way New England village (or anywhere else) cannot with impunity set at defiance the laws of gravitation and grammar".[166] Critical attention to Dickinson's poetry was meager from 1897 to the early 1920s.[167] By the start of the 20th century, interest in her poetry became broader in scope and some critics began to consider Dickinson as essentially modern. Rather than seeing Dickinson's poetic styling as a result of lack of knowledge or skill, modern critics believed the irregularities were consciously artistic.[168] In a 1915 essay, Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant called the poet's inspiration "daring" and named her "one of the rarest flowers the sterner New England land ever bore".[169] With the growing popularity of modernist poetry in the 1920s, Dickinson's failure to conform to 19th-century poetic form was no longer surprising nor distasteful to new generations of readers. Dickinson was suddenly referred to by various critics as a great woman poet, and a cult following began to form.[170] In the 1930s, a number of the New Critics – among them R. P. Blackmur, Allen Tate, Cleanth Brooks and Yvor Winters – appraised the significance of Dickinson's poetry. As critic Roland Hagenbüchle pointed out, their "affirmative and prohibitive tenets turned out to be of special relevance to Dickinson scholarship".[171] Blackmur, in an attempt to focus and clarify the major claims for and against the poet's greatness, wrote in a landmark 1937 critical essay: "... she was a private poet who wrote as indefatigably as some women cook or knit. Her gift for words and the cultural predicament of her time drove her to poetry instead of antimacassars ... She came ... at the right time for one kind of poetry: the poetry of sophisticated, eccentric vision."[172] The second wave of feminism created greater cultural sympathy for her as a female poet. In the first collection of critical essays on Dickinson from a feminist perspective, she is heralded as the greatest woman poet in the English language.[173] Biographers and theorists of the past tended to separate Dickinson's roles as a woman and a poet. For example, George Whicher wrote in his 1952 book This Was a Poet: A Critical Biography of Emily Dickinson, "Perhaps as a poet [Dickinson] could find the fulfillment she had missed as a woman." Feminist criticism, on the other hand, declares that there is a necessary and powerful conjunction between Dickinson being a woman and a poet.[174] Adrienne Rich theorized in Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson (1976) that Dickinson's identity as a woman poet brought her power: "[she] chose her seclusion, knowing she was exceptional and knowing what she needed ... She carefully selected her society and controlled the disposal of her time ... neither eccentric nor quaint; she was determined to survive, to use her powers, to practice necessary economics."[175] Some scholars question the poet's sexuality, theorizing that the numerous letters and poems that were dedicated to Susan Gilbert Dickinson indicate a lesbian romance, and speculating about how this may have influenced her poetry.[176] Critics such as John Cody, Lillian Faderman, Vivian R. Pollak, Paula Bennett, Judith Farr, Ellen Louise Hart, and Martha Nell Smith have argued that Susan was the central erotic relationship in Dickinson's life.[177] Legacy In the early 20th century, Martha Dickinson Bianchi and Millicent Todd Bingham kept the achievement of Emily Dickinson alive. Bianchi promoted Dickinson's poetic achievement. Bianchi inherited The Evergreens as well as the copyright for her aunt's poetry from her parents, publishing works such as Emily Dickinson Face to Face and Letters of Emily Dickinson, which stoked public curiosity about her aunt. Bianchi's books perpetrated legends about her aunt in the context of family tradition, personal recollection and correspondence. In contrast, Millicent Todd Bingham's took a more objective and realistic approach to the poet.[178] Emily Dickinson is now considered a powerful and persistent figure in American culture.[179] Although much of the early reception concentrated on Dickinson's eccentric and secluded nature, she has become widely acknowledged as an innovative, proto-modernist poet.[180] As early as 1891, William Dean Howells wrote that "If nothing else had come out of our life but this strange poetry, we should feel that in the work of Emily Dickinson, America, or New England rather, had made a distinctive addition to the literature of the world, and could not be left out of any record of it."[181] Critic Harold Bloom has placed her alongside Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, and Hart Crane as a major American poet,[182] and in 1994 listed her among the 26 central writers of Western civilization.[183] Dickinson is taught in American literature and poetry classes in the United States from middle school to college. Her poetry is frequently anthologized and has been used as text for art songs by composers such as Aaron Copland, Nick Peros, John Adams and Michael Tilson Thomas.[184] Several schools have been established in her name; for example, Emily Dickinson Elementary Schools exist in Bozeman, Montana;[185]Redmond, Washington;[186] and New York City.[187] A few literary journals — including The Emily Dickinson Journal, the official publication of the Emily Dickinson International Society — have been founded to examine her work.[188] An 8-cent commemorative stamp in honor of Dickinson was issued by the United States Postal Service on August 28, 1971, as the second stamp in the "American Poet" series.[189] Dickinson was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1973.[190] A one-woman play titled The Belle of Amherst appeared on Broadway in 1976, winning several awards; it was later adapted for television.[191] Dickinson's herbarium, which is now held in the Houghton Library at Harvard University, was published in 2006 as Emily Dickinson's Herbarium by Harvard University Press.[192] The original work was compiled by Dickinson during her years at Amherst Academy, and consists of 424 pressed specimens of plants arranged on 66 pages of a bound album. A digital facsimile of the herbarium is available online.[193] The town of Amherst Jones Library's Special Collections department has an Emily Dickinson Collection consisting of approximately seven thousand items, including original manuscript poems and letters, family correspondence, scholarly articles and books, newspaper clippings, theses, plays, photographs and contemporary artwork and prints.[194] The Archives and Special Collections at Amherst College has substantial holdings of Dickinson's manuscripts and letters as well as a lock of Dickinson's hair and the original of the only positively identified image of the poet. In 1965, in recognition of Dickinson's growing stature as a poet, the Homestead was purchased by Amherst College. It opened to the public for tours, and also served as a faculty residence for many years. The Emily Dickinson Museum was created in 2003 when ownership of the Evergreens, which had been occupied by Dickinson family heirs until 1988, was transferred to the college.[195] The Dickinson Homestead today, now the Emily Dickinson Museum   Emily Dickinson commemorative stamp, 1971 Modern influence and inspiration "Yesterday is History" as a wall poem in The Hague (2016) Emily Dickinson's life and works have been the source of inspiration to artists, particularly to feminist-oriented artists, of a variety of mediums. A few notable examples are as follows: The feminist artwork The Dinner Party, by Judy Chicago, first exhibited in 1979, features a place setting for Dickinson.[196][197] Jane Campion's film The Piano and its novelization (co-authored by Kate Pullinger) were inspired by the poetry of Emily Dickinson as well as the novels by the Brontë sisters.[198] A character who is a literary scholar at a fictional New England college in the comic campus novel by Pamela Hansford Johnson Night and Silence Who Is Here?[199] is intent on proving that Emily Dickinson was a secret dipsomaniac. His obsession costs him his job. The 2012 book The Emily Dickinson Reader by Paul Legault is an English-to-English translation of her complete poems published by McSweeney's.[200] Dickinson's work has been set by numerous composers including Aaron Copland,[201] Samuel Barber, Elliot Carter, Libby Larsen, Peter Seabourne, Michael Tilson Thomas, Judith Weir, and Norma Wendelburg.[202] A public garden is named in her honor in Paris: 'square Emily-Dickinson', in the 20th arrondissement.[203] Jazz saxohphonist Jane Ira Bloom released 2017 double album Wild Lines: Improvising Emily Dickenson inspired by the poet's works.[204] Translation Emily Dickinson's poetry has been translated into languages including French, Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, Persian, Kurdish, Georgian, Swedish, and Russian. A few examples of these translations are the following: The Queen of Bashful Violets, a Kurdish translation by Madeh Piryonesi published in 2016.[205][206][207] French translation by Charlotte Melançon which includes 40 poems.[208] Mandarin Chinese translation by Professor Jianxin Zhou[209] Swedish translation by Ann Jäderlund.[210] Persian translations: Three Persian translations of Emily Dickinson are available from Saeed Saeedpoor, Madeh Piryonesi and Okhovat.[205][211] See also Biography portal icon Poetry portal List of Emily Dickinson poems Amherst College (/ˈæmərst/ (About this soundlisten)[5] AM-ərst) is a private liberal arts college in Amherst, Massachusetts. Founded in 1821 as an attempt to relocate Williams College by its then-president Zephaniah Swift Moore, Amherst is the third oldest institution of higher education in Massachusetts.[6] The institution was named after the town, which in turn had been named after Jeffery, Lord Amherst, Commander-in-Chief of British forces of North America during the French and Indian War. Originally established as a men's college, Amherst became coeducational in 1975.[7] Amherst is an exclusively undergraduate four-year institution; the school enrolled 1,855 students in fall 2018.[8][9] Admissions is highly selective, and it frequently ranks at or near the top in most rankings of liberal arts schools. Students choose courses from 38 major programs in an open curriculum[10] and are not required to study a core curriculum or fulfill any distribution requirements; students may also design their own interdisciplinary major.[11] Amherst competes in the New England Small College Athletic Conference. Amherst has historically had close relationships and rivalries with Williams College and Wesleyan University, which form the Little Three colleges. The college is also a member of the Five College Consortium, which allows its students to attend classes at four other Pioneer Valley institutions: Mount Holyoke College, Smith College, Hampshire College, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Among its alumni and affiliates are six Nobel Prize laureates (with its five alumni giving it one of the highest proportions of Nobel laureates among graduates out of any undergraduate institution worldwide),[12] 20 Rhodes Scholars,[13] numerous Pulitzer Prize recipients, MacArthur Fellows, winners of the Academy, Tony, Grammy and Emmy Awards, a President of the United States, a Chief Justice of the United States, three Speakers of the U.S. House of Representatives, and notable writers, academics, politicians, entertainers, businesspeople, and activists. History Founding and 19th century The Amherst graduating class of 1850, including William Austin Dickinson (second row, far left), brother of poet Emily Dickinson Main Quad Fayerweather Hall Frost Library College Row, consisting of Williston, South, North, and Appleton Halls, with Johnson Chapel at center Founded in 1821, Amherst College developed out of the secondary school Amherst Academy. The college was originally suggested as an alternative to Williams College, which was struggling to stay open. Although Williams survived, Amherst was formed and diverged into its own institution.[14] In 1812, funds were raised in Amherst for a secondary school, Amherst Academy; it opened December 1814.[15] The academy incorporated in 1816.[16] The institution was named after the town, which in turn had been named after Jeffery, Lord Amherst, a veteran from the Seven Years' War and later commanding general of the British forces in North America. On November 18, 1817, a project was adopted at the Academy to raise funds for the free instruction of "indigent young men of promising talents and hopeful piety, who shall manifest a desire to obtain a liberal education with a sole view to the Christian ministry."[17] This required a substantial investment from benefactors.[14] During the fundraising for the project, it became clear that without larger designs, it would be impossible to raise sufficient funds. This led the committee overseeing the project to conclude that a new institution should be created. On August 18, 1818, the Amherst Academy board of trustees accepted this conclusion and began building a new college.[14] Establishment Moore, then President of Williams College, however, still believed that Williamstown was an unsuitable location for a college, and with the advent of Amherst College was elected its first president on May 8, 1821. At its opening, Amherst had forty-seven students. Fifteen of these had followed Moore from Williams College. Those fifteen represented about one-third of the whole number at Amherst, and about one-fifth of the whole number in the three classes to which they belonged in Williams College. President Moore died on June 29, 1823, and was replaced with a Williams College trustee, Heman Humphrey. Williams alumni are fond of an apocryphal story ascribing the removal of books from the Williams College library to Amherst College.[18] In 1995, Williams president Harry C. Payne declared the story false, but many still nurture the legend.[17] Amherst grew quickly, and for two years in the mid-1830s it was the second largest college in the United States, second only to Yale. In 1835, Amherst attempted to create a course of study parallel to the classical liberal arts education. This parallel course focused less on Greek and Latin, instead focusing on English, French, Spanish, chemistry, economics, etc. The parallel course did not take hold, however, until the next century.[17] Amherst was founded as a non-sectarian institution "for the classical education of indigent young men of piety and talents for the Christian ministry," (Tyler, A History of Amherst College). One of the hallmarks of the new college was its Charity Fund, an early form of financial aid that paid the tuition of poorer students.[19] Although officially non-denominational, the initial Amherst was considered a religiously conservative institution with a strong connection to Calvinism. As a result, there was considerable debate in the Massachusetts government over whether the new college should receive an official charter from the state. A charter was not granted until February 21, 1825,[19] as reflected on the Amherst seal.. Religious conservatism persisted at Amherst until the mid-nineteenth century: students who consumed alcohol or played cards were subject to expulsion, and there were a number of religious revivals at Amherst where mobs of righteous students would herd less religious students into the chapel and berate them for lack of piety.[19] Towards the end of the nineteenth century, however, the college began a transition towards secularism, culminating in the demolishing of the college church in 1949.[20] Development and academic reform Academic hoods in the United States are traditionally lined with the official colors of the school, in theory so watchers can tell where the hood wearer earned his or her degree. Amherst's hoods are purple (Williams' official color) with a white stripe or chevron, said to signify that Amherst was born of Williams. Amherst records one of the first uses of Latin honors of any American college, dating back to 1881.[21] The college was an all-male school until the late 1960s, when a few female students from nearby schools in the Five-College Consortium attended on an experimental basis. In October 1974, the faculty voted in favor of coeducation and in November 1974 the board of trustees voted to admit female students starting in the 1975-1976 school year. This was done while John William Ward served as President.[22] In 1975, nine women who were already attending classes as part of an inter-college exchange program were admitted as transfer students. In June 1976, they became the first female graduates of the college.[23] The college established the Black Studies Department in 1969. In 1973, it launched the nation's first undergraduate neuroscience program. In 1983, it established a Department of Asian Languages and Literatures, which was later to become the Department of Asian Languages and Civilizations.[24] In 1984, on-campus fraternities were abolished. The former fraternity buildings, which were owned by the college, were converted into residence halls.[24] The Department of Women's and Gender Studies, which later became the Department of Sexuality, Women's, and Gender Studies, was established in 1987 and the Department of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought in 1993.[24] In March 2013 the faculty adopted an open-access policy.[25] Presidents Zephaniah Swift Moore, 1821–1823 Heman Humphrey, 1823–1845 Edward Hitchcock, 1845–1854 William Augustus Stearns, 1854–1876 Julius Hawley Seelye, 1876–1890 Merrill Edwards Gates, 1890–1899 George Harris, 1899–1912 Alexander Meiklejohn, 1912–1924 George Daniel Olds, 1924–1927 Arthur Stanley Pease, 1927–1932 Stanley King, 1932–1946 Charles Woolsey Cole, 1946–1960 Calvin Hastings Plimpton, 1960–1971 John William Ward, 1971–1979 Julian Gibbs, 1979–1983 G. Armour Craig, 1983–1984 (acting) Peter Pouncey, 1984–1994 Tom Gerety, 1994–2003 Anthony Marx, 2003–2011 Carolyn "Biddy" Martin, 2011– Rankings Johnson Chapel University rankings National Forbes[26] 28 THE/WSJ[27] 20 Liberal arts colleges U.S. News & World Report[28] 2 Washington Monthly[29] 3 Since the inception of the U.S. News & World Report rankings in 1987, Amherst College has been ranked ten times as the first overall among 266 liberal arts colleges in the United States,[30] and in 2016 ranked second, behind Williams.[31] In 2018, Amherst was ranked as the best liberal arts college in the country by The Wall Street Journal.[32] In 2018, Forbes ranked Amherst College as the 16th best college or university in the United States.[33] Kiplinger's Personal Finance places Amherst 11th in its 2016 ranking of best value liberal arts colleges in the United States.[34] Amherst ranked as having the second-highest graduation rate of any institution in the United States, second only to Harvard according to a 2009 American Enterprise Institute Study.[35] Amherst ranked 4th in the 2018 Washington Monthly rankings, which focus on contribution to the public good in three broad categories: social mobility, research, and promoting public service. According to The Princeton Review, Amherst ranks in the top 20 among all colleges and universities in the nation for "Students Satisfied With Financial Aid," "School Runs Like Butter," and "Top 10 Best Value Private Schools."[36] Amherst also participates in the University and College Accountability Network (U-CAN) developed by the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities (NAICU). Amherst's sustainability efforts earned it an overall grade of "A-" on the College Sustainability Report Card 2010 published by the Sustainable Endowments Institute.[37] Admissions Admission Statistics   2016[8] 2015[38][39] 2014[40] 2013[41] 2012[42] Applicants 8,406 8,568 8,478 7,927 8,565 Admits 1,161 1,210 1,173 1,132 1,110 Admit rate 13.8% 14.1% 13.8% 14.2% 13.0% Enrolled 471 477 469 466 463 SAT range 2040-2340 2040–2330 2020–2320 2020–2290 2010–2290 ACT range 31-34 31–34 30–34 30–34 30–34 Amherst has been dubbed one of the "most selective" liberal arts colleges in the United States;[43] the Carnegie Foundation classifies Amherst as one of the "more selective" institutions whose first-year students' test scores places these institutions in roughly the top fifth of baccalaureate institutions.[44] For the class first enrolled in Fall 2017, Amherst received 9,285 applications and accepted 1,198 (a 12.9% acceptance rate). 473 students ultimately enrolled; 82% were in the top 10% of their high school classes, and they on average scored a 2232 on the SAT and a 33 on the ACT. 38 states and 23 countries were reflected among the first-year class, 55% received financial aid and 11% were first-generation college students. In addition, 16 transfer students enrolled.[45] Amherst's comprehensive tuition, room, and board fee for the 2012–13 academic year is $55,510. Once miscellaneous expenses are factored in the total cost to attend for the 2012–13 academic year amounts to $60,809–$63,259.[46] The comprehensive tuition, room, and board fee for the 2019-20 academic year is $72,950.[47] Despite its high cost of attendance, Amherst College meets the full demonstrated need of every admitted student.[48] Sixty percent of current students receive scholarship aid, and the average financial aid package award amounts to $41,150; the average net price of attendance is $13,809 per year. College expenditures exceed $85,000 per student each year.[49] In July 2007, Amherst announced that grants would replace loans in all financial aid packages beginning in the 2008-09 academic year. Amherst had already been the first school to eliminate loans for low-income students, and with this announcement it joined Princeton University, Cornell University and Davidson College, then the only colleges to completely eliminate loans from need-based financial aid packages. Increased rates of admission of highly qualified lower income students has resulted in greater equality of opportunity at Amherst than is usual at elite American colleges.[50] In the 2008-2009 academic year, Amherst College also extended its need-blind admission policy to international applicants.[51] Academics Amherst College offers 36 fields of study (with 850 courses)[52] in the sciences, arts, humanities, mathematics and computer sciences, social sciences, foreign languages, classics, and several interdisciplinary fields (including premedical studies[53][54]) and provides an unusually open curriculum. Students are not required to study a core curriculum or fulfill any distribution requirements and may even design their own unique interdisciplinary major.[11] Freshmen may take advanced courses, and seniors may take introductory ones. Thirty-five percent of Amherst students in the class of 2007 were double majors.[55] Amherst College has been the first college to have undergraduate departments in the interdisciplinary fields of American Studies; Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought; and Neuroscience[56][57] and has helped to pioneer other interdisciplinary programs, including Asian Languages and Civilizations.[58] The Amherst library is named for long-time faculty member, poet Robert Frost.[59] Amherst College has been recognized for its commitment to quality teaching with professor-student interaction. The student-faculty ratio is 8:1 and 90% of classes have fewer than 30 students.[60] Notable faculty members include, among others, modern literature and poetry critic William H. Pritchard, Beowulf translator Howell Chickering, Jewish and Latino studies scholar Ilan Stavans, novelist and legal scholar Lawrence Douglas, physicist Arthur Zajonc, Pulitzer Prize-winning Nikita Khrushchev biographer William Taubman, African art specialist Rowland Abiodun, Natural Law expert Hadley Arkes, Mathematician Daniel Velleman, Biblical scholar Susan Niditch, law and society expert Austin Sarat, Asian American studies scholar and former Director of the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center Franklin Odo, and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Lewis Spratlan, professor emeritus of the music faculty.[61] Academic freedom debate The writings of Amherst College political science Professor Hadley Arkes about homosexuality led to a dispute in 2013 over whether a college seeking to create a diverse, respectful academic community should speak out when a faculty member disparages community members or should instead remain silent as a way to protect academic freedom.[62] The issue arose when a group of alumni petitioned the college trustees and President Biddy Martin to "dissociate the institution" from Arkes's "divisive and destructive" views,[63] focusing particularly on his May 2013 comparison of homosexuality to bestiality, pedophilia and necrophilia.[64][65] The alumni said, "Amherst College cannot credibly maintain its professed commitment to be an inclusive community as long as it chooses to remain silent while a sitting professor disparages members of its community in media of worldwide circulation and accessibility."[63] Martin disagreed, citing past debates over the college's position on the Vietnam War and apartheid in South Africa—issues on which the college initially remained silent but eventually took a public position. In such times, she said, colleges should "avoid taking institutional positions on controversial political matters, except in extraordinary circumstances" and should simultaneously both "protect their communities from discrimination and disrespect" and "cherish a diversity of viewpoints."[66] The Kirby Memorial Theater Five College Consortium Amherst is a member of the Five Colleges consortium, which allows its students to attend classes at four other Pioneer Valley institutions. These include Mount Holyoke College, Smith College, Hampshire College, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. In addition to the 850 courses available on campus, Amherst students have an additional 5,300 classes to consider through the Consortium (without paying additional tuition) and access to 8 million library volumes. The Five Colleges are geographically close to one another and are linked by buses that run between the campuses.[67] The Five Colleges share resources and develop common academic programs. Museums10 is a consortium of local art, history and science museums. The Five College Dance Department is one of the largest in the nation.[68] The joint Astronomy department shares use of the Five College Radio Astronomy Observatory, which contributed to work that won the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physics.[69] The Five College Coastal and Marine Sciences Program offers an interdisciplinary curriculum to undergraduates in the Five Colleges.[70] Campus [icon] This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. (October 2018) Amherst College is located in the town of Amherst in Western Massachusetts. Amherst College has a total of 34 residence halls, seven of which are strictly for first year students. Following their first year, sophomores, juniors, and seniors have the choice to live off campus and are offered options of Themed Houses including Arts House, Russian House, and French House, however this option is only available for two years of residence.[71] The College also owns the Dickinson Homestead, operated as a museum about the life and history of poet Emily Dickinson, and the Lord Jeffery Inn (to be renamed[72]), near to the main campus. Sustainability Amherst College is reducing its energy consumption through a computerized monitoring system for lighting and the use of an efficient cogeneration facility. The cogeneration facility features a gas turbine that generates electricity in addition to steam for heating the campus.[73] Amherst also operates a composting program, in which a portion of the food waste from dining halls is sent to a farmer in Vermont.[73] Student life Amherst's resources, faculty, and academic life allow the college to enroll students with a range of talents, interests, and commitments. Students represent 49 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and fifty-four countries.[74] The median family income of Amherst students is $158,200, with 51% of students coming from the top 10% highest-earning families and 24% from the bottom 60%.[75] Ninety-eight percent of students live on campus. Ninety-six percent of Amherst freshmen enrolled in Fall 2015 returned for their sophomore year; ninety-three percent of the most recent cohort graduated within six years.[8] There are more than 140 student groups at Amherst.[76] More than a third of the student body are members of a varsity athletics team.[77] Students pursue their interests through student-led organizations funded by a student fee and distributed by the student government, including a variety of cultural and religious groups, publications, fine and performing arts and political advocacy and service groups. Groups include a medieval sword-fighting club, a knitting club, and a club devoted to random acts of kindness, among others.[78] Community service groups and opportunities (locally—through the Center for Community Engagement, nationally, and internationally) have been a priority at Amherst and for former President Anthony Marx, who helped start a secondary school for black students in apartheid South Africa.[79] One of the longstanding traditions at the college involves the Sabrina statue. Even year and odd year classes battle for possession of the historic statue, often engaging in elaborate pranks in the process.[80] Sexual assault In 2012, President Biddy Martin began a community-wide review of the sexual misconduct and disciplinary policies at the College.[81][82] This review was sparked by several factors, including a fraternity's T-shirt design that critics alleged was misogynist[83] and an essay by Angie Epifano published in The Amherst Student, wherein she accused the college of inappropriate handling of a case of sexual assault.[84] In January 2013, a college committee published a report noting Amherst's rate of sexual assault as similar to other colleges and universities, and making recommendations to address the problem.[85] After a complaint was filed by Epifano and an anonymous former student in November 2013,[86] the US Department of Education opened an investigation into the college's handling of sexual violence and potential violations of Title IX. In May 2014, the Department of Education announced a list of 55 colleges and universities (including Amherst) currently under investigation.[87] A report from Amherst College stated that 2009 to 2011, Amherst reported 35 instances of "forcible sex offenses", a term that encompasses rape, attempted rape, and lesser forms of sexual contact.[88] Mascot The original unofficial mascot of Amherst College, Lord Jeffery Amherst, was a cause of concern in the Amherst community.[89] Many sought to separate the school from the problematic legacy of Lord Jeffery Amherst, in particular his advocacy of the use of biological warfare against Native Americans.[90] In May 2014, after a wild moose found its way onto the Amherst College campus and into the backyard of the house of the college president,[91] students organized a Facebook campaign to change the mascot of the school to a moose.[92] The page grew rapidly in popularity, receiving over 900 "likes" in under two weeks,[92] and inspiring both a Twitter and Tumblr account for the newly proposed mascot. At the Commencement ceremony for the class of 2014, the moose mascot was mentioned by Biddy Martin in her address, and the Dining Hall served Moose Tracks ice cream in front of an ice sculpture of a moose.[93] In February 2015, discussion of a mascot change continued when the editorial board of the Amherst Student, the college's official student-run newspaper, came out in favor of "the moose-scot".[92] In November 2015 the student body and the faculty overwhelmingly voted to vacate the mascot; the decision to drop the mascot was made official on January 26, 2016 after student anti-racism protests on campus.[94][95] In April 2017, Amherst announced that their official mascot would be the Mammoth.[96][97] Mammoths beat the other finalists "Valley Hawks", "Purple and White", "Wolves", and "Fighting Poets" in a ranked-choice election process.[98] The Mammoth is linked to Amherst due to the long standing presence of a woolly mammoth skeleton on campus dating back to the 1920s excavation of the skeleton by an Amherst professor. Athletics See also: Amherst Mammoths football Amherst participates in the NCAA's Division III, the Eastern College Athletic Conference, and the New England Small College Athletic Conference, which includes Bates, Bowdoin, Colby, Connecticut College, Hamilton, Middlebury, Trinity, Tufts, Wesleyan, and Williams College.[99] Amherst is also one of the "Little Three," along with Williams and Wesleyan. A Little Three champion is informally recognized by most teams based on the head-to-head records of the three schools, but three-way competitions are held in some of the sports. Amherst claims its athletics program as the oldest in the nation,[100] pointing to its compulsory physical fitness regimen put in place in 1860 (the mandate that all students participate in sports or pursue physical education has been discontinued).[101] Amherst and Williams played the first college baseball game July 2, 1859.[102] Amherst's growing athletics program has been the subject of controversy in recent years[when?] due to dramatic contrasts between the racial and socioeconomic makeup of its student athletes and the rest of its student body, the clustering of athletes in particular academic departments, and a perceived "divide" on campus between varsity athletes and other students. Athletic skill plays a factor in the admissions decisions of between 28% and 35% of each incoming class.[103] Amherst fields several club athletic teams, including ultimate, soccer, crew, rugby union, water polo, equestrian, mountain biking, fencing, sailing and skiing. Intramural sports include soccer, tennis, golf, basketball, volleyball and softball. The sport of Ultimate was started and named at Amherst College in the mid-1960s by Jared Kass.[104][105] Alumni Main article: List of Amherst College people Although a relatively small college, Amherst has many accomplished alumni, including Nobel, Crafoord Prize and Lasker Award laureates, MacArthur Fellowship and Pulitzer Prize winners, National Medal of Science and National Book Award recipients, and Academy, Tony, Grammy and Emmy Award winners; a U.S. President, the current Sovereign Prince of Monaco, two Prime Ministers and one Foreign Minister of Greece, as well as the fourth President of Kenya, a Chief Justice of the United States, three Speakers of the U.S. House of Representatives, a U.S. Poet Laureate, the legal architect of Brown v. Board of Education[106] and the inventor of the blood bank; leaders in science, religion, politics, the Peace Corps, medicine, law, education, communications, and business; and acclaimed actors, architects, artists, astronauts, engineers, human rights activists, inventors, musicians, philanthropists, and writers. There are approximately 20,000 living alumni, of whom about 60% make a gift to Amherst each year—one of the highest alumni participation rates of any college in the country.[107] Notable Amherst College alumni include: Calvin Coolidge, 30th President of the United States   Harlan F. Stone, 12th Chief Justice of the United States   Henry Thomas Rainey, 40th Speaker of the House   Chris Coons, U.S. Senator from Delaware   Robert Lansing, 42nd U.S. Secretary of State   Uhuru Kenyatta, President of Kenya   Harold E. Varmus, Nobel Prize-winning scientist   Jeffrey C. Hall, Nobel Prize-winning geneticist   Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize-winning economist   Edmund Phelps, Nobel Prize-winning economist   Henry Way Kendall, Nobel Prize-winning particle physicist   Melvil Dewey, librarian and inventor of the Dewey Decimal System   James Merrill, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet   David Foster Wallace, novelist, author of Infinite Jest   Dr. Drew, addiction specialist and television personality   Burgess Meredith, film and television actor   Jeffrey Wright, Tony and Emmy Award-winning actor   David O. Russell, Academy Award-nominated director Sunderland is a town in Franklin County, Massachusetts, United States, part of the Pioneer Valley. The population was 3,684 at the 2010 census.[1] It is part of the Springfield, Massachusetts Metropolitan Statistical Area. Sunderland was first settled in 1713 and was officially incorporated in 1718. It was first known as Swampfield, a name which is now honored by Swampfield Road, but the name was changed to attract more residents. It was renamed in honor of Charles Spencer, the Earl of Sunderland.[2] Historically, the land was largely used for farming. Before the incorporation of Leverett in 1774, that town was a part of Sunderland's territory. Nearby towns:  City Greenfield (traditional county seat) Towns Ashfield Bernardston Buckland Charlemont Colrain Conway Deerfield Erving Gill Hawley Heath Leverett Leyden Monroe Montague New Salem Northfield Orange Rowe Shelburne Shutesbury Sunderland Warwick Wendell Whately Census-designated places Deerfield Millers Falls Northfield Orange Shelburne Falls South Deerfield Turners Falls Other unincorporated communities Lake Pleasant Satans Kingdom Zoar

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PicClick Insights - RARE 1817 Document Signed Samuel Fowler Dickinson - Emily's Grandfather- Amherst PicClick Exclusive

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