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John H. O'Neill, the Edmund A. LeFevre Professor of English, was honored at the 2007 annual meeting of the Northeast American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies held at Dartmouth College on October 25-28. O'Neill was recognized with a special session titled "Libertinism: A Panel in Honor of John O'Neill." At the Society's business meeting he was presented with a plaque in recognition of his 18 years as newsletter editor for the organization.

Randy Ericson, the Couper Librarian, accepted the Outstanding Project for 2007 award from the Communal Societies Association on behalf of Hamilton College at the CSA annual meeting on Sept. 29. Hamilton received the award for the digitization of the Shaker periodical, variously titled The Shaker, Shaker and Shakeress, The Shaker Manifesto and The Manifesto. This publication ran from 1871 until 1899 and shared religious and political opinions between Shaker communities from Maine to Kentucky.

Blake Hulnick '09, who is studying in Washington, D.C. this semester through Hamilton's Program in Washington, is interning with the American Enterprise Institute. Hulnick co-authored a piece on overseas voters that appears on the AEI election reform Web site: http://www.electionreformproject.org/.

Christine Rathbun, a playwright and performer, presented her one-woman play, "Reconstruction: Or How I Learned to Pay Attention" on Monday, Nov. 5. The performance was sponsored by the Diversity and Social Justice Project's "Health Matters" series.

Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz, the Margaret Bundy Scott Professor of Comparative Literature, presented her paper, "Tragedy and Empire, American Style," at an international conference on the appropriation of ancient empires within modern imperial cultures. Her paper focused on the play The Darker Face of the Earth, by Rita Dove, African-American writer and poet laureate (1993-95).

William M. LeoGrande has written five books on politics in Cuba and Central America, published articles in media including The New York Times and The New Republic, and served on both the Democratic Policy Committee of the U.S. Senate and the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations. On Monday, Nov. 5, he presented a lecture titled "Talking with Fidel: The Secret History of U.S.-Cuban Diplomacy" in the Chapel.

The week of Nov. 5 is National Collegiate Emergency Medical Services Week and Hamilton is proud to recognize its 22 student volunteers. The current active members are Sujitha Amalanayagam, Nicholas Berry, Ashley Bourgeois, Megan Brousseau, Christina Clark, Ruth Duggan, Erin Evans, Max Falkoff, Michael Flanders, Ellen Griffin, Megan Herman, Shane Knapp, Jared Leslie, John Lofrese, Ryan Messier, Ben Saccomano, Amanda Schoen, Alexa Schwarzman, Ryan Seewald, Denroy Thomas, Emma Trucks and Kendra Wulczyn.

"The Flower in the Gun Barrel," an essay written by Professor of History Maurice Isserman was featured on PBS' BILL MOYERS JOURNAL (11/2/07). The piece was originally published last month in The Chronicle of Higher Education's Chronicle Review. Isserman's essay recounts his experience as a participant in the march and analyzes the event's importance in the evolution of the Vietnam anti-war movement. The program producers highlighted the essay along with photographs provided by Isserman.

Hamilton College's $700 million endowment and the alumni investment team that contributes to its success were featured in a New York Times article "How Smaller College Endowments Still Reap Big Returns" (11/04/07). The article noted that while it is sometimes difficult for smaller college endowments to match the returns of Ivies like Harvard and Yale, Hamilton with its $700 million endowment returned 21.1 percent last year. Henry Bedford '76, Richard Bernstein '80, David Solomon '84 and Robert Morris '76 were acknowledged in the article as providing "alumni expertise" to Hamilton's endowment. Bedford is portfolio manager at Moore Capital Management, Bernstein is chief investment strategist at Merrill Lynch, Solomon is co-head of investment banking at Goldman Sachs and Morris is founder of Olympus Partners, a private equity firm.

Philip Pearle, professor of physics emeritus, was interviewed for a New Scientist feature article "Taking the spookiness out of quantum theory" (11/3/07). In an article that questions whether quantum theory is "the final theory," Pearle comments on physicist Stephen Adler's "emergent quantum theory" – an idea that builds quantum physics from the bottom up, starting from a hypothetical lower level that obeys classical physics. "This work is truly ingenious," Pearle said in the article. "Is it the long-sought formulation that makes quantum, theory understandable? I'd say a definite maybe."