: Antiochiana :

04.27.2012   Ohio’s own Aaron Burt Champion (1842–1895) entered the Preparatory Department of Antioch College in 1856 when Horace Mann was still its president. Champion’s meteoric rise in the legal world led to a life in baseball, by that time fast developing into the national game.   › MORE

03.29.2012   In 1892, Arthur met a young woman of culture involved in the state Republican Party named Anne Maddison Bradley. The two developed a friendship that by 1900 had become a torrid romance, much to the pain and humiliation of Isabel Cameron Brown, Arthur’s second wife.   › MORE

02.23.2012   Written nearly three months after H.L. Mencken penned a screed to him about Antioch College, Professor of History Hendrik Van Loon’s letter to his famously acerbic friend may not be in direct response, but it is the closest thing to it in the Antioch College Archives.   › MORE

01.26.2012   Among the first hires in the Arthur Morgan era, Professor Hendrik Willem Van Loon came to Antioch College to teach history in 1921. Despite his academic credentials, Van Loon's career in higher education would prove all too brief.   › MORE

11.17.2011   Helen French Greene worked at Antioch College, mostly securing co-op jobs for women in the 1920s. She reflected on how co-op enhances the classroom, and vice versa.   › MORE

11.03.2011   Thomas and Mary Gove Nichols had managed to defeat Horace Mann at his own game—the war of words—and by early 1857 he represented a distinct minority opinion on the subject of whether they should be permitted to remain in Yellow Springs or not. Despite their victory, however, before the season was out they would suspend operation of the Memnonia Institute, renounce their long held belief in free love, leave town and, ultimately, the country, never to return.   › MORE

10.23.2011   Following the withdrawal of William Hambleton from Antioch College in March 1856 over his association with Thomas and Mary Gove Nichols, reformer proprietors of the Memnonia Institute, and the subsequent dismissal of his classmate Jared Gage a few weeks later, Horace Mann's war with the Nichols' entered a new stage.   › MORE

10.07.2011   William Neal Hambleton of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, was already 32 years old when he entered the Antioch Preparatory Department in 1855. Prior to entering school, he'd been a farmer, cabinetmaker, and teacher. He was already a physician, a graduate of the American Hydropathic Institute that Thomas and Mary Gove Nichols had operated in Cincinnati previous to the establishment of the Memnonia Institute of Yellow Springs. As an adherent to the Nichols' already unpopular ways, at least as far as the president and faculty of Antioch College were concerned, it would not take Hambelton long to run afoul of them both. In his statement to the faculty he writes: "I cant conceive of your right to dictate to young men, who's beards indicate mature manhood, what sciences they may study, what fountains of truth they may drink from, and facts and philosophy they may not investigate." (Photograph: male classmates of Hambleton's vintage)   › MORE

09.25.2011   Thomas and Mary Gove Nichols were already notorious for their reform activities when they issued the following prospectus in 1856 announcing their proprietorship of the Yellow Springs Water Cure. Water cure, also known as hydropathy, was a popular form of alternative medicine that employed techniques known today as homeopathic and followed regimens modern observers would recognize as wellness.   › MORE

09.10.2011   Horace Mann was so enamored of phrenology that he tells his schoolteacher sister, Lydia, to study it, as it would be the basis for education reform.   › MORE

08.25.2011   Though long since discredited as pseudoscience and worse, in the mid-19th century phrenology was all the rage among the learned, with Mann among its greatest adherents. Here, two of Antioch College's first graduates get their head bumps "read."   › MORE

08.11.2011   Paid government witness Harvey Matusow had yet to admit his perjuries when a subcommittee of three from the the US House of Representatives Committee on Un-American Activities conducted hearings in downtown Dayton in September 1954. Within a year his revelations would become public, which probably should have ended HUAC's interest in Antioch College right then and there. Due to a variety of other voices calling for its investigation such as The Yellow Springs American, HUAC sent a special investigator to Antioch, who uncovered an informal Marxist discussion group on the College's faculty during the mid 1940s. Despite the fact that Antioch's educational philosophy of free inquiry had been explained rather plainly in similar hearing by two of its presidents, this was deemed enough evidence to call Professor of Art and Aesthetics Robert Metcalf, a reknowned stained glass artist, to appear as a witness. His testimony, reprinted here, is exemplary of the kind of reasoned, principled resistance to the pressures of the Red Scare that ultimately contributed to its end. Metcalf refuses to name the names of any of his associates, and along with his expert counsel Telford Taylor, a staunch opponent of McCarthyism who had served as Counsel for the Prosecution at the Nuremberg Trials, successfully fought a contempt of Congress charge for that refusal.   › MORE

07.28.2011   For about three years in the early 1950s, the name ‘Harvey Matusow’ was of the household variety. Beginning in the late 1940s, Harvey went from Army veteran to Communist party member to FBI informant to special investigator on youth communism for Senator Joseph McCarthy. In that capacity he managed to ruin around 200 lives by lying under oath about peoples’ ties to the Communist Party of the USA. For instance, Matusow’s testimony against Pete Seeger got the legendary folk singer blacklisted, even as his band the Weavers’ recording of “Wimoweh” climbed to the Billboard top ten list. No one was safe from the smear of Harvey’s broad brush, and Antioch College was no exception.   › MORE

07.14.2011   Douglas McGregor of Detroit, Michigan, became the 12th president of Antioch College in 1948. One of the first ever industrial psychologists and a theorist of business management, he applied his training in psychology toward creating the most collaborative workplace possible. He inherited a college under fire from forces of anticommunism at a time when they were perhaps at their most powerful. By the early 1950s, investigation of so called Un-American activities by federal legislators was well established, having been in place since the HUAC led by Martin Dies in the late 1930s. In the age of McCarthyism state legislatures began to conduct their own investigations, and in 1951 the Ohio House formed its own committee to ferret out Un-American activities in its own backyard. In 1952, McGregor appeared before the Ohio House Un-American Activities Committee.   › MORE

06.30.2011   Once again “Songs” features the dulcet tones of Algo Henderson, 12th president of Antioch College. Here he defends the College against accusations that it promotes Communism. By 1946, when this statement was made in a joint session of the College Board of Trustees and the policy making body of its faculty called Administrative Council, he had become well practiced at it. Henderson first had to publicly refute these criticisms in 1940 when a local judge took exception to student members of the Young Communists League circulating a petition signed by Antioch College faculty in favor of civil liberties for “any minority group,” including Communists. Henderson rebuked the judge’s statements by public letter in the local newspapers, and the debate soon died down.   › MORE

06.16.2011   Meet Ralph Shupe, for most of his career a West Virginia radio newscaster, but for a brief time in 1954 the editor of a local weekly called The Yellow Springs American. The American was a reaction to liberalism in general and Antioch College in particular that began in 1953 under the auspices of a civic improvement organization to counter the progressive reputation of the Antioch College community. For most of its brief existence it reported the facts of daily life, avoiding controversy in a way common to small town newspapers. But having heard that an Antioch faculty member with ties to Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party was a Boy Scout Troop leader, he saw the need for an exposé. The College had charges of communism levied against it since the early 1940s, but during the McCarthy era, the accusations gained a particular momentum, and Shupe’s is just one of the voices calling loudly for a Congressional investigation of its alleged activities.   › MORE

06.02.2011   A memorial to Antiochian Lucy Doolittle by a fellow Antiochian Jennie Scudder.   › MORE

05.23.2011   The story of the marble tablet that memorializes the Antioch College alumni who died in the Civil War.   › MORE

05.06.2011   Judge Hosea remembers two fellow Antioch College classmates who died in the Civil War.   › MORE

04.21.2011   More on "The Great American Literary Association" and how Weston and the faculty responded to the fraud.   › MORE

04.07.2011   Former professor G. Stanley Hall recounts in his memoirs breaking up a term paper writing scam and his meetings with Rebecca Rice, class of 1860.   › MORE

03.24.2011   Jane Cape, the second curator of Antiochiana, reminisces in a letter about her stint in Bagdad as a Fulbright Award recipient.   › MORE

03.10.2011   Bessie Ladley Totten, class of 1900, gives a speech at her retirement as the librarian of Antioch College that sounds more than a little prescient.   › MORE

02.24.2011   Nina Anthony presents to the November 1946 Antioch College Board of Trustees meeting about being an African American woman on campus and on co-op.   › MORE

02.10.2011   An excerpt from student Cornelia “Nellie” Van Mater's journal in 1864 illuminates both a feminine culture in transition and also the Antiochian value of speaking out against ignorance and racism.   › MORE

01.27.2011   Though obscure during his lifetime, inventor, philosopher, and avant-garde composer Harry Partch (1901-1974) is now widely recognized as a significant (if eccentric) force in 20th century American music. According to biographer Bob Gilmore, Harry Partch discovered Antioch College and Yellow Springs, Ohio not long after his influential book Genesis of Music, released in 1949, received a favorable review from a memorable Antioch College faculty member, longtime Professor of Philosophy Keith McGary. At the invitation of McGary, an aficionado of modern music, Partch would move to town in the summer of 1957, renting a room at Ernest Morgan’s apartment building on Glen Street.   › MORE

12.16.2010   One of Reverend Thomas Hill’s biographers said of him that “he was admired by scientists for his theology and by theologians for his science.” An outstanding undergraduate student at Harvard and a member of the class of 1843, Hill resisted both his mathematics professor’s wish that he pursue a career in mathematics, and his biology professor’s hope that he become a botanist. Instead, he followed his lifelong dream to be a minister, entered Harvard Divinity School upon graduation, and received his ordination in 1845. By the late 1850s he was comfortably ensconced in the pulpit at the Unitarian First Church of Waltham, Massachusetts. His connections with Antioch College were tangential at best when, during the summer of 1859, he became a candidate for president.   › MORE

12.03.2010   One of the most interesting figures ever to serve on the Antioch College Board of Trustees, Charles F. Kettering knew a thing or two about research. He held over 140 patents, most of them while head of research for the General Motors Corporation. In the Fall of 1943, with nearly all the world engulfed in savage war, he spoke of research at a modest but propitious event that took place at Antioch College: a ceremony to formally retire a very important loan.   › MORE

11.15.2010   Edwin R Roberts came to Antioch College from Loveland, Ohio, at the southern terminus of the bike path that runs through Yellow Springs. He entered in 1909, graduated in 1913 and became an insurance agent in Indianapolis. What follows is his account of the College during the presidency of Daniel Albright Long, incidentally the longest tenure of any president in Antioch College history. Roberts could not have witnessed most of the events that he describes, leaving the purpose of this document as something of a mystery. Originally written in pencil, it reads a lot like homework. If indeed it is a term paper, perhaps he found the back issues of The Antiochian he frequently cites on the bookshelf in the old College Library known as “Antiochiana.”   › MORE

10.28.2010  

This installment of “Stacks” might be subtitled: Ode to a Forgotten Financial Hero.

Born near Boston in 1813, Artemas Carter joined the Board of Trustees of Antioch College in 1859. He was a prominent merchant and a leading member of the American Unitarian Association. His older brother, James Gordon Carter, had been an important education reformer in Massachusetts, served in state legislature with Horace Mann, and helped established the first ever State Board of Education that hired Mann as its first secretary. By the time Artemas Carter came of age, supporting the work of Horace Mann was already sort of the family business.   › MORE