After a decade's hiatus, John and Mary's Journal resumes annual publication
with this issue. In introductory remarks to one of the earliest numbers,
college historian Charles Coleman Sellers envisioned a publication that
forges "a link between the living Dickinson and a larger public" and "makes
our Library's rich holdings available to others, discussing significance
and larger relationships." The vision remains the same as the Dickinson
College Library enters a new century in its stunning new quarters in the
Waidner-Spahr complex. These pages will showcase some of the gems in the
college's Archives and Special Collections Department and provide an outlet
for the exciting kinds of research those treasures make possible. The manuscripts,
rare books, photographs, artifacts, and other materials preserved in the
May Morris Room of the Waidner-Spahr Library provide an extraordinary set
of resources on the history of American education and the intellectual
and cultural life of the nation. Dickinson faculty, students, and alumni
fortunate enough to have touched and studied them have long known of their
value. John and Mary's Journal hopes to spread the word to a wider audience
and to encourage scholarship based on the college's collections.
The articles in this issue--each written by a recent Dickinson graduate--focus
on two colorful personalities from the college's past: eighteenth-century
founder Benjamin Rush, and remarkably accomplished nineteenth-century alumnus
Horatio Collins King. In exploring the educational theories of the first
and the undergraduate experiences of the second, each piece uses the resources
of the May Morris Room in very different ways to open windows on the evolution
of higher education in the years before the American Civil War. We hope
you will agree that they build a strong new beginning for a publication
evoking the name that Rush once proposed for "the child of our affections,
‘John and Mary's College.'"
