Winter 2010: Alumni Ink

Cover of Cornerstone and Grove

A Record of Emory’s Birthplace

By Mallory Goldberg 10C

A college is shaped and defined by the landscape surrounding it, and this symbiotic relationship is the theme of a new book by Erik Oliver 93C 93G, Cornerstone and Grove: A Portrait in Architecture and Landscape of Emory’s Birthplace in Oxford, Georgia (Bookhouse Group, 2009).

The son of Oxford Emeritus Professor of Religion Hoyt Oliver 54OX 56C, Oliver grew up in the town of Oxford, where Emory College was originally founded in 1836 before it moved to the city of Atlanta in 1919.

“I grew up in Oxford and on the Oxford College campus, imbued with a strong sense of place by parents who taught and modeled that value, and by a nurturing network of elderly faculty and staff,” Oliver writes in the book’s introduction.

Oxford College, with an enrollment of around eight hundred, has created its own history, traditions, and campus life while playing an integral role within the larger University. The school, which focuses on a liberal-arts-intensive education, is an architectural embodiment of Emory’s heritage, with eight nineteenth-century buildings still standing.

Cornerstone and Grove illustrates Oxford’s place as the cornerstone of the University through a written and visual history of the campus and the town. Oliver, who left his hometown to attend Emory for his undergraduate and graduate degrees in history, worked with Emory and Oxford archivists and private individuals to select photographs for the book, then added his own line drawings.

The Battlefield of Adolescence

Through the eyes of eleven-year-old Katherine McConnell, Amanda C. Gable 92PhD shares a captivating, fictional story of a mother-daughter road trip through Civil War battlefields and historic sites. As a history buff, Katherine views this road trip as the perfect opportunity for adventure, but a stop in Gettysburg brings her to a new awareness of history and, ultimately, her family. The Confederate General Rides North (Scribner, 2009) follows Katherine’s adolescent struggles against the backdrop of Civil War history and the South in the 1960s. Gable’s short stories have appeared in the North American Review, the Crescent Review, Kalliope, Sinister Wisdom, Other Voices, and other publications.

Caring for Disabled Soldiers

Jeff Reznick 95G 99PHD, deputy chief of the History of Medicine Division of the National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, has written John Galsworthy and Disabled Soldiers of the Great War, with an Illustrated Selection of His Writings (Manchester University Press, 2009), offering new insight into the life of this Nobel Laureate and making Galsworthy’s humanitarianism and associated writings relevant to the current dialogue about the care of soldiers disabled in war.

Privacy and Domestic Violence

In Trivial Complaints: The Role of Privacy in Domestic Violence Law and Activism in the U.S. (Columbia University Press, 2009), Kirsten S. Rambo 01G 03PhD explores the link between privacy and domestic violence during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Trivial Complaints is part of the Gutenberg e-series of history monographs and is only a partial representation of the greater work found online.