Lawrence, O Lawrence

I finally got my pictures from graduation uploaded (so the camera will be hungry when we get to Turkey). Sadly, the camera ran out of power before the actual graduation ceremony (!!!) but I got some lovely photos before then:



This banner has a rather involved history. In the late nineteenth century the prestigious women's colleges in the east adopted class colors, a practice that drifted westward to the newly formed Milwaukee-Downer College (which incidentally was the brainchild of Catherine Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe's sister).

But in the 1960s, the cresting wave of coeducation drowned Milwaukee-Downer College. Rather than perish utterly, however, Milwaukee-Downer merged with Lawrence College (which was founded by Amos Adams Lawrence, who like Harriet Beecher Stowe was an important American abolitionist. He also founded Lawrence, Kansas, abolitionist headquarters in Kansas during the Bleeding Kansas era. Nineteenth-century America was a small world).

At which point, as it now contained two colleges, Lawrence College became Lawrence University, and also adopted the tradition of class colors.

There's a class at Lawrence about the history of the university. I greatly regret not working it into my schedule.

And another photo, just 'cause it's pretty.

More old photos

LJ insists that I must log in twice before it will, in fact, log me in. I find this perplexing.

Another photograph, from the other camera, which I also cleared out for photos. (Old cameras never die. They only lose memory capacity until you can take about two dozen photos on each one.)



This is from a freak snowstorm in April, when I visited Lawrence to turn in my honors project. The whole avenue looked like this - each branch bending under snow and glowing gold in the streetlamps. It looked like fairyland.

And now off to Istanbul!