Tag Archives: sesquicentennial

Premiere of Peace Talks for Chorus and Orchestra by James Matheson ’92

Founders Day Concert with the Swarthmore College Chorus and the Swarthmore College Orchestra

December 5, 2014; 8:00 p.m.
Lang Music Building
Swarthmore College (directions)
(Universal moment of silence at 8:00 PM EDT)

Featuring the premiere of Peace Talks for Chorus and Orchestra by James Matheson ’92, commissioned for the Swarthmore Sesquicentennial

James_Matheson_Peace_Talks

The program will also include works for orchestra by Sibelius and Fauré, and choral works from a variety of American composers and traditions.

This event is one of several planned during the 2014 calendar year to celebrate Swarthmore’s Sesquicentennial

Peace drama performed 100 years ago on campus

This story in The Phoenix, Swarthmore College’s student newspaper, from October 27, 1914, only three months after the start of World War I, was brought to our attention this week.

The clipping below reports on the performance of a Founders’ Day “peace drama” about one soldiers’ struggle with the horrors of war, his return home, and a vision for “an era of peace, unsullied by the sword.”

Swarthmore is celebrating its sesquicentennial this year.

Science and Compassion: John W. Thompson’s Trajectory From Swarthmore to the Nuremberg Trials

Science and Compassion: John W. Thompson’s Trajectory From Swarthmore to the Nuremberg Trials

A lecture by Paul Weindling

Wednesday, November 12, 2014 4:30 PM – 6:00 PM

Kohlberg Hall, Scheuer Room

Swarthmore College (directions)

John W. Thompson taught as professor of Physiology and Anatomy from 1929 to 1932.

Paul Weindling’s lecture will focus on his research contained in his new book, John W. Thompson: Psychiatrist in the Shadow of the Holocaust (University of Rochester Press) is the biography of a doctor whose revulsion at Nazi human experiments prompted him to seek a humane basis for physician-patient relations. As a military-scientific intelligence officer in 1945, Thompson was the first to name “medical war crimes” as a category for prosecution. His investigations laid the groundwork for the Nuremberg medical trials and for the novel idea of “informed consent.” Yet, Thompson has remained a little-known figure, despite his many scientific, literary, and religious connections. Thompson has a connection to Swarthmore College having taught as professor of Physiology and Anatomy from 1929 to 1932.

Paul Weindling is Wellcome Trust Research Professor for the History of Medicine at the Centre for Medical Humanities at Oxford Brookes University, UK. He has served on historical commissions on Nazi science including the Max Planck Society’s Presidential Commission for the Kaiser Wilhelm Society under National Socialism, and is a Trustee of the Council for At-Risk Academics (CARA) which originally rescued many scientists from Nazi persecution.

Sponsors: Sesquicentennial Events, Peace and Conflict Studies, Department of Biology

Thanks to Mary Walton for her lecture on Alice Paul ’05 and Mabel Vernon ’06

We would like to thank author Mary Walton for her lecture this afternoon on the courageous work of Swarthmore alums Alice Paul ’05 and Mabel Vernon ’06 in their organizing and nonviolent campaigns to secure the vote for women in the United States.

A standing-room only crowd of people from the Swarthmore community and the local community gathered in the Scheuer Room to celebrate the International Day of Peace, the College’s sesquicentennial, and 125 years since the first peace studies course in higher education was taught at Swarthmore. The audience expressed their appreciation for Ms. Walton’s presentation with extended applause.

We would like to thank all of our co-sponsors who made this event a success, including Peace Day Philly for including our event in the city-wide celebration of the International Day of Peace.

Sponsors: Peace and Conflict Studies, the President’s Office, Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Friends Historical Library, History Department, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Women’s Resource Center, Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility, English Literature Department, and Political Science Department.

Mark your calendars: Alice Paul ’05, Mabel Vernon ’06, and the Battle for the Ballot

Mark your calendars for the College’s first sesquicentennial celebration event, a talk by author Mary Walton:

A Woman’s Crusade: Alice Paul ’05, Mabel Vernon ’06, and the Battle for the Ballot

Mary Walton

September 19, 2013; 4:15 p.m.

Scheuer Room, Kohlberg Hall, Swarthmore College

Maps and directions

Download a flyer

Mary Walton

On September 19th, Peace and Conflict Studies and co-sponsors will celebrate the International Day of Peace, 125 years of peace and conflict studies at Swarthmore College, and the start of the College’s Sesquicentennial with a talk by Mary Walton, author of A Woman’s Crusade: Alice Paul and the Battle for the Ballot. The focus of Walton’s talk will be Alice Paul (Class of 1905) and her friend and fellow Swarthmore alum, Mabel Vernon (Class of 1906).

A New Jersey Quaker, Alice Paul was the leader of the militant wing of the suffrage movement from 1913 to 1920. Hers was a David-and-Goliath struggle to convince a reluctant congress and a stubborn president to give women the vote. Paul and her followers were the first people to picket the White House. They were arrested, thrown in jail, brutalized and force fed when they went on hunger strikes. A pioneer in non-violent resistance, she was to suffrage what Gandhi was to Indian independence, what Martin Luther King Jr. was to civil rights.

In 1913, Mabel Vernon gladly gave up teaching to join her college friend, Alice Paul, in working full time for the Congressional Union. From that day on, she devoted her life to suffrage and other causes. Mabel Vernon was among the most militant suffragists. In 1916, she stood up in a full auditorium and heckled President Wilson as he spoke about democracy. Vernon picketed the White House and was among the first suffragists to go to jail.

Mary Walton is the author of four previous works of nonfiction. She was a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer for many years where she wrote more than a hundred magazine stories as a staff writer for the Sunday Inquirer Magazine. She has also written for the New York Times, Washingtonian, theWashington Monthly, and the American Journalism Review. After graduation from Harvard University, and a turn at social work and community organizing, Walton began her journalism career in 1969 as a reporter for the Charleston (WV) Gazette.

International Day of Peace 2013

Bibliographic links for photographs.

150 years ago: A College Founded in Wartime

Cleaning one’s office can be a chore, but it also encourages one to stumble across gems that were set aside in the rush of an academic year. In my cleaning today, I came across one of Chris Densmore’s sesquicentennial historical pieces from the July 2012 Swarthmore College Bulletin.

150 years ago: A College Founded in Wartime

Christopher Densmore

Curator, Friends Historical Library

By 1862, the Civil War was in its second year. The campaign to raise money for what was to become Swarthmore, which had been temporarily suspended at the beginning of the war, was resumed in earnest. The founders had originally anticipated that the school could be funded by large donations from wealthy individuals, but they now turned their efforts to a grassroots campaign to visit and solicit support from Quaker meetings across the Mid-Atlantic. Later perhaps, the “stewards of a superabundance of this world’s goods” might be persuaded to contribute larger sums.

The war became an impetus for establishing a Quaker school. An editorial in the Friends Intelligencer in September 1862 commented: “The war spirit has penetrated almost every institution in the land; the Public Schools are used as means of promoting the love of military glory, and are increasingly engaged in teaching military drill to their pupils. We should be especially concerned to guard our children against this snare, and to build them up in those principles which will not only preserve them in the practice of peace and good-will towards all men, but will make them fit successors to those who have gone before them as lights in the world, and exemplars of the peaceable spirit of Christianity. To this end Friends should educate all their children under their own care. …”

Today, Swarthmore College seeks diversity among its students, faculty, staff, and administrators and strives to make the campus a safe place for that diversity. Likewise, the College founders sought to create a safe place for diversity, though in the form of a “guarded education” for the children of Friends.

Other sesquicentennial pieces by Chris Densmore include:

150 Years Ago: The Dream of a College (April 2011)

150 Years Ago: “Honest, Useful Men and Women” (July 2011)

150 Years Ago: Friends, We Have a Problem (October 2011)

150 Years Ago: Martha Ellicott Tyson proposes a new school (January 2012)

150 years ago: Benjamin Hallowell, man of peace (April 2012)

150 Years Ago: The Meaning of Swarthmore (July 2013)