Highlighted Collections

Start by browsing Digital Collections by major topics below

American Civil War collection

Letters (various New York regiments): 456 letters written during the American Civil War and related to regiments mustered out counties in the Central New York region such as Oneida County, Herkimer County, and Madison County. 926 Enlistment Forms (submitted in Oneida County, Herkimer County, and Madison County) New York 117th Regiment: Diary of Edward Snow Foster (3 vols.) Diary of John Humphrey 62 military record (official orders, field reports, prisoner lists) 23 textile reunion ribbons 13 printed reunion programs Miscellaneous Documents: 69 Nashville Army Headquarters Hospital Release Forms

Communal Societies

The Special Collections of Hamilton College include a substantial gathering of primary and secondary source materials relating to Communal Societies: groups of people intentionally living separate from the surrounding general society according to a shared set of principles, whether religious or secular, with common ownership of property. This collection comprises manuscripts, printed works, visual materials, audio/video materials, ephemera, and artifacts from the eighteenth through the twenty-first centuries. The collection also includes related materials on Spiritualism, Western Esotericism, the Occult, Botanical Medicine, Psychedelic drugs, and pseudosciences such as Animal Magnetism, Mesmerism, Phrenology, and Hydropathy.

Beinecke Lesser Antilles

The Beinecke Collection is the pièce de résistance of the Hamilton College Library collections. It is the preeminent collection of materials on the Lesser Antilles, largely from the 16th-19th centuries. This online collection includes more than 18,000 pages of rare original plantation reports, correspondence, oil paintings and watercolors. This collection was originally developed by Walter Beinecke, Jr., and donated to the Hamilton College Library.

Fillius Jazz Archive

Established in 1995, The Milton and Nelma Fillius Jazz Archive at Hamilton College holds a collection of videotaped interviews, numbering over 450 entries, with jazz musicians, arrangers, writers and critics. The collection generally focuses on artists associated with mainstream jazz and the swing era. Members of bands led by Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Woody Herman, Benny Goodman, Stan Kenton and the Dorsey brothers are well represented as well as soloists and leaders of small ensembles dating from the 1930s. This oral history project was conceived by Milton F. Fillius Jr. ’44 with the support of jazz singer Joe Williams.

Beloved Witness

The Beloved Witness project is a Mellon-funded digital archive of the video-taped readings, personal documents, letters, and manuscripts of Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali (1949-2001). New technologies will organize, display and allow interaction with the archive from multiple formats and devices, including materials for mobile devices. Our aim is to show how technology might be used to reveal what is unique in a poet's oeuvre and how teaching and literary scholarship in a digital environment allow a new globalized approach to poetry and culture. Ali's life and work offer an exemplary model for humanists to bear "witness" to a world of lost tribes, of political and ethnic conflicts, of the pain of exile and of the possibility for transformation and reconciliation. The archive is a collaborative effort which will expand through contributions of letters, documents, critical perspectives and creative responses from colleagues, friends and readers of Shahid's works. One of the goals of the archive is to assemble an advisory committee to help identify ways of building a community of Shahid's readers in South Asia and around the world.

Hamilton College Archives

The Hamilton College Archives hold Hamilton and Kirkland College records and personal papers of enduring value from administrators, faculty, students, and alumni from the founding of the Hamilton-Oneida Academy to the present.
Back to top