In every issue of The American Scholar, we publish a back-page column called Anniversaries. This time, we pay homage to Edna Lewis’s A Taste of Country Cooking, now in its 50th year. But that’s not the only anniversary we mark in this issue. Andrew Reiner tells the story of the guiding light behind Colonial Williamsburg, founded a century ago, and Thomas Mallon presents selections from the diaries he kept during the many summers he spent at Vermont’s Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, also in its centennial year. Emily Bernard describes her relationship with Carl Van Vechten, whose most notorious work is 100 years old. And then there’s the big 250. Not just the nation’s semiquincentennial, but also that of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, started by five students at the College of William & Mary in 1776.
Among the articles celebrating that remarkable milestone is Augustine Sedgewick’s feature about Lida Mason and Ellen Hamilton, the first women inducted into Phi Beta Kappa—at the University of Vermont in 1875. Sedgewick (a PBK inductee from William & Mary) had just written a book about fatherhood and was thinking about the history of masculinity when he learned of Mason and Hamilton. His first thought: Why Vermont? “Then I saw that the first Black PBK member had also been inducted at Vermont, two years later,” he said. “I wanted to figure out what was going on up there that made it possible to recognize and celebrate the academic achievements of women and Black Americans during an age of bitterly contested claims for equality.”
Sedgewick spent a year in the Burlington archives and at the Library of Congress, piecing together fragmented historical records to reconstruct the contentious, groundbreaking meeting at which Mason’s and Hamilton’s PBK fates were decided. In writing this story about the early days of American coeducation, Sedgewick found resonance with the present-day crisis in boys’ and men’s education. His article is a superb example of the historian’s art: a portrait of a specific moment in the past that sheds light on events playing out many years later. That history has much to teach us about ourselves is hardly an earth-shattering statement, but it is well worth remembering in this year of looking back.
