Brunswick ME May 18, 2012, 4:45 am  38°F wind speed: 0 mph N |  Doris Kearns Goodwin
Presidential scholar and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Doris Kearns Goodwin will deliver a special keynote address at Bowdoin Reunion Convocation, Saturday, June 2, 2012, 10:30 a.m., in the Sidney J. Watson Arena. The event is open to all alumni and members of the Association of Bowdoin Friends, with registration required for non-Reunion participants. Register for Reunion Convocation (deadline: May 11, 2012).
Books by Bowdoin faculty members are continuing to shape disciplines and garner widespread recognition. Read about the latest publications by professors Jorunn Buckley, Nadia V. Celis, Michael Franz, Christian Potholm and Olufemi Vaughan.
Wallace Scot McFarlane ’09 has published his Bowdoin honors thesis about the pollution and cleanup of Androscoggin River in a journal considered to the best in the field of environmental history and among the top journals in history. The current edition of Environmental History features McFarlane’s article, “Defining a Nuisance: Pollution, Science, and Environmental Politics on Maine’s Androscoggin River,” along with two other articles. Continue reading Honors Thesis by Scot McFarlane ’09 Published in Top Academic Journal
In his latest column, John Cross ’76 is thinking baseball, and in particular the seven Bowdoin alumni who’ve played—or at least had a cup of coffee—in the big leagues. Each of us has a list of favorite movies that will cause us to stop “channel-surfing” when a familiar scene appears on the television screen, regardless of the number of times that we have seen it before. For me, Field of Dreams, a baseball fantasy based on the novel Shoeless Joe by W. P. Kinsella, is one of these. One of the characters in the book and movie is Archibald “Moonlight” Graham, a real-life, well-respected, small-town doctor in Chisholm, Minnesota, who had a one-game major league baseball career with the New York Giants in 1905. Graham played two innings in the field without touching the ball, and he was next in the batting order when a teammate made the final out. Armed with an undergraduate degree from the University of North Carolina, Graham mixed minor league baseball with his medical training, leading a teammate to suggest that Graham had been “moonlighting.” According to the 2009 biography Chasing Moonlight: The True Story of ‘Field of Dreams,’ Graham continued to play town ball in Minnesota until he was in his 50s. We could all take a cue from legendary filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock as he explains his definition of happiness, which includes part creativity, part kindness.
More than 80,000 documents from Albert Einstein’s personal and public life are being archived online by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which received the trove of papers according to instructions in Einstein’s will. So far, the site features about 2,000 documents. The collection includes a rare manuscript containing the scribbled formula e=mc2, as well as love letters, an idealistic proposal for a secret council of Jews and Arabs to bring peace to the Middle East, diplomas, travel diaries, notes on the general theory of relativity, and much more, The Guardian reports. Enter the collection here.  An undated portrait of Harriet Beecher Stowe, from the George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections and Archives.
One hundred sixty years ago, on March 20, 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s influential novel about slavery, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was first published in book form after being serialized. Stowe wrote much of the novel in her husband Calvin’s study in Appleton Hall. Calvin, a theology professor, was a member of the Class of 1824. Uncle Tom’s Cabin created a vivid and emotionally gripping account of the horrors of slavery. Its profound effect on attitudes toward African Americans and slavery in the U.S. is said to have intensified the conflict leading to the Civil War. In fact, the book’s impact was so great that when President Abraham Lincoln met Stowe at the start of the Civil War, he is often quoted as having referred to her as “the little lady who started this big war!” Uncle Tom’s Cabin is said to be the best-selling novel of the 19th century, and the second best-selling book of that century, following the Bible. The George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections & Archives has material relating to Harriet Beecher Stowe, including correspondence, editorials, transcripts of selected letters, newsclippings and more.  Kary Antholis '84 at 2011 Scholarship Appreciation Luncheon in Thorne Hall.
Kary Antholis ’84, president of HBO Miniseries and the man behind the acclaimed World War II miniseries The Pacific and the earlier John Adams, was one of five Greek Americans honored by the American Hellenic Institute with the advocacy group’s National Public Service Award. Upon accepting his award at the March 10 dinner in Washington, D.C., Antholis told the gathering of more than 30o, “As we sit here wearing our tuxedos and beautiful dresses, eating good food, as the people of Greece face intensifying hardship, we are reminded that during previous Greek calamities, many of our ancestors made their great voyage. They started with nothing,” notes The National Herald. The Greek-American weekly adds that Antholis concluded by saying that, for him, being Greek-American means standing in his fustanella, “with an American flag in one hand and a Greek flag in the other, and seeing the pride and the love and the hope in my mother’s eyes.”
It was on this day, March 15, 1820, that the District of Maine achieved statehood. With consent, it split from Massachusetts to become the 23rd state as part of the Missouri Compromise. History.com has the details, including the factoid that the Pine Tree State is “the most sparsely populated state east of the Mississippi.” |  | ||
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