Browse Exhibits (4 total)
Visits to The Mountains
Who is Harold Johnston? Harold Johnston was a regular student at Berea College just like my fellow classmates and me. What's the difference between regular students now and Harold Johnston? He wrote letters that are preserved to this day about his experiences at Berea College to his friends and family back home. We have taken and analyzed some of his letters in order to share them with you. Harold Johnston was from New York, meaning he is an outsider to the Appalachian culture. In his letters he is filled with awe and wonder about the "mountain people" and his outlook on life and perspective change once he is immersed in a different culture that is unlike his own, the culture of the mountain people. In this exhibit, we analyze and interpret the contents of the letters he constructed to his family and friends specifically focusing on the "mountain people" and how they influenced him. We have numerous subdivisions on the topic including the following: mountain women, mountain men, mountaineer culture, lifestyle, and sense of self. In these subdivisions, there will be a detailed description and examination of the written words of Harold Johnston along with images that can be used as a visual representation of his written ideas.
There are many misconceptions of the mountain people in these letters, as well as premade judgment on Johnston's part about the mountain people. We can see how his judgment changes throughout the course of his letter writing. We will also dive into some of Daisy Nickum's letters on the mountain men and women and how they acted at the time. She was a female college student at Berea College and it is another interesting point of view coming from a different perspective.
Letters have been used to express feelings and emotions both positive and negative and to be able to share their ideas with like-minded others who also take part in the writing process. The main purpose of Johnston's letters was to bring awareness to his family members about his experiences in Berea, Kentucky. As well as this we personally think that there can be a sort of calmness in writing letters and using them to convey your inner thoughts, somewhat like a diary. Harold Johnstons was using his letters to reveal his more personal side, something that we tend to do in our journal writing, as we will see in the following exhibit.
Berea College Campus Culture
Glimpses of the vital and dynamic campus culture at Berea College can be observed throughout the letters that Harold Johnston sends home in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Examples of this lively culture can be found in subthemes, specifically clubs, violence, diversity, technology, religious studies, field day, finances, hiking the pinnacles, and Berea College's endowment. The themes and letters presented by a student who walked campus years ago serve as insight. Campus life at Berea College has changed and stayed the same in many ways since Johnston's experience. Each of these topics are useful in learning about the rich history of Berea and observing the viltality of campus life was like as a student. Intentional or not, Harold Johnston has left future generations of Berea students with an eye-opening, primary source to discover. In the depths of the Berea College archives are plenty of letters written by Harold Johnston to explore. Within these letters viewers will find a compelling and complex campus culture to consider and compare to campus life that takes place today. Additionally, a letter of Daisy Nickum will be presented to add further understanding of campus culture during their time. Nickum was a female student who enrolled at Berea College a year after Johnston left. Also included are various photographs from Johnston's time at Berea that are intended to futher illustrate the campus culture cultivated at the turn of the twentieth century.
Dear Homefolks: Love and Letters to Family
Today, it may seem difficult to imagine that people living more than a hundred years ago experienced and grappled with many of the same significant life changes and emotional difficulties that we find ourselves battling every day. In this collection of letters home from two Berea College students at the turn of twentieth century, we examine the persistence of family bonds and the familiar struggle of navigating the college experience while dealing with homesickness and academic rigor. Through this grand selection of letters from Harold Johnston of New York and Daisy Nickum of Ohio between 1899 and 1903, we piece together a moving and humanizing picture of these two students' rich familial and emotional selves. Via this rare, near-complete collection of letters to family from students at Berea College, there is a glimpse of their emotional lives. While they were hacking away at coursework, and slogging through labor, they were always finding time in between to write back home. Though the context has changed, how we experience familial love and adjustment to extensive and sometimes scary changes are timeless. These letters provide an insight into the persistence of emotion and experience through history in ways that still resonate with readers today.
Gender Relations in Berea
In this day and age, one may find it easy to walk into a local library and crack open a book or type a simple search into Google and find the history and timeline of exactly what they are looking for. However, do those books and searches signify what life was truly like living in that time period? Do they display what happened on a day to day basis or depict a firsthand account of someone’s feelings during that time? This project encompasses a selection of eight letters home from Berea College students Harold Johnston and Bertha Daisy Nickum as well as a plethora of photos and documents from the time period such as Codes of Conduct and meal tickets.
These resources paint a much more vivid picture of college life in Berea and help readers gain more knowledge and insight into what being a student may have been like as a male or a female during this era down to how one may dress and what hobbies or skills one could develop. This exhibit serves as a dive into not only campus culture in Berea but also the gender relations within the College at the turn of the 20th century, through policies such as curfews for female students, events including annual pig roasts, and excursions to the mountains.