Amherst College
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Amherst College. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
an educational institution in Amherst, Mass., founded in 1821 and incorporated in 1825. The members of the faculty in 1919 numbered 52, and the students 503. The productive funds amounted to $3,800,000, and the income to $300,000. President, Alexander Meiklejohn, Ph . D., LL. D. AMHERST, JEFFERY, LORD, a distinguished Brit British officer, born in 1717. He entered the army at an early age, and ultimately became Major-General. Sent over to America, he captured Louisburg, and followed it up by the reduction of Forts Duquesne, Niagara, and Ticonderoga, which paved the way for the entire conquest of Canada. In 1763, Amherst was made Governor of Virginia, and created Baron Amherst of Holmesdale in 1776. He was appointed Commander-in- 11-Vol. I-Cyc Chief of the British army in 1778, in which capacity he took a most active, but humane, part in suppressing the London riots of 1780. Upon resigning his chief command in 1795 he was made a Field-Marshal. Died in 1798.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
an influential New England college at Amherst, Massachusetts. It was opened as an academy December, 1814. The college was opened in 1821. Among the distinguished educators connected with its development, Edward Hitchcock, the geologist, and President J. H. Seelye may be named. The Amherst museums contain one of the richest collections of fossils and Indian relics in the world. The number of graduates has passed the 4,000 mark. The annual enrollment of students is between 400 and 500. There are about forty members of the faculty. Library, 75,000 volumes; annual income, about $110,000.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Both accounts describe a small men's college of 400 to 500 students; Amherst has been coeducational since 1975 and now enrolls roughly 1,900 undergraduates, with no fraternities since the college abolished them in the 1980s. The $3,800,000 in "productive funds" that Collier's reported in 1921 has become an endowment measured in billions of dollars, among the largest per student of any American college. Alexander Meiklejohn, named as president in the 1921 entry, was forced out by the trustees in 1923 after a bitter fight over his reforms, and went on to become one of the best-known American theorists of academic freedom. Aiton's boast about the fossil collection still holds: Edward Hitchcock's dinosaur trackways remain a centerpiece of what is now the Beneski Museum of Natural History, and the town's other draw is the Emily Dickinson Museum, in the house where the poet the old articles never mention spent her life.
Written for this edition, 2026.