History
Hamilton began in 1793 as the Hamilton-Oneida Academy, a seminary founded by Samuel Kirkland as part of his missionary work with the Oneida tribe. The seminary admitted both European-American and Oneida boys. Kirkland named it in honor of Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, who was a member of the first Board of Trustees of the Hamilton-Oneida Academy.
The institution was chartered as Hamilton College in 1812, making it the third oldest college established in New York after Columbia and Union. It had expanded to a four-year college curriculum.
In 1978, the all-male Hamilton College merged with the women's Kirkland College, founded by Hamilton in the 1960s and located adjacent to it. The primary public reason for the merger was Kirkland's imminent insolvency, as women's colleges had become less popular after the rise of the women's movement and other social changes. It took nearly 7 years to complete the merger; women students were given the option of receiving a Kirkland diploma instead of a Hamilton diploma until 1979.
The original Hamilton campus is referred to by students and some school literature as the "light side" or "north side" of the campus. Formerly, the original side of campus was referred to as the "Stryker Campus" after its former president, Melancthon Woolsey Stryker (or incorrectly "Striker Campus"). On the other side of College Hill Road, the original Kirkland campus is referred to as the "dark side" or as the "south side."
Since the 1970s, Hamilton has been a member of the New England Small College Athletic Conference (or the NESCAC) (despite technically being located outside of New England). This conference also includes Amherst, Bates, Bowdoin, Colby, Connecticut College, Middlebury, Trinity, Tufts, Wesleyan, and Williams. Rivalries with many of these schools, Middlebury in particular, predate the establishment of the conference.
Read more about this topic: Hamilton College (New York)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“It is my conviction that women are the natural orators of the race.”
—Eliza Archard Connor, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 9, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“The true theater of history is therefore the temperate zone.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept.... For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)