Photo Hunters: My Choice!

Today’s Photo Hunters is a photo of our own choice. I have about 1,500 photos of all our travels online, so the choice was difficult to make! But I chose to post a photo of one of our most-beloved Founding Fathers and New Yorkers, Alexander Hamilton. Upstate New York is a mighty historical place. This statute stands watch over the chapel at Hamilton College in Clinton, NY. The college was founded by Reverend Samuel Kirkland, and Alexander Hamilton was appointed as a trustee. Due to its history and strong Christian missionary ties to the region, this college is near and dear to our hearts. Kirkland is buried here, as is his very close friend Skenandoah and numerous other heroes from America’s founding days.

I blogged about a wonderful new development going on with some history professors at the college; the organization is called The Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Culture. It is an earth-shaking development and their mission has repercussions for Ivy League universities and all of academia! I suppose this is why the opposition has been so fierce. You can read all about the mission here. My daughter The Historian and I attended the first annual colloquium dinner of the AHI, thanks to the very gracious Bob Pacquette (!), and heard a terrific presentation by Harvard professor John Stauffer, “Liberty and Slavery: The Civil War between Gerrit Smith and George Fitzhugh.” The video of Mr. Stauffer’s presentation and those of others is online for the public to view! The speeches are outstanding, and I recommend you watch them.

The forming of the AHI constitutes a global shift in academe. This is a group to watch, and support, if you can. If you’d like to read a little more about the history of the AHI and the massive resistance against it, read Professor Robert Pacquette’s excellent essay, “The World We Have Lost: A Parable on the Academy.”