Adam Gordon '06 (Briarcliff Manor, N.Y.) is spending his summer with Alexander Hamilton. After winning an Emerson Grant this year, Gordon, a government major and art history minor, decided to conduct research on Hamilton for a project titled "Alexander Hamilton: Patriot for Mankind."
"Alexander Hamilton had a very different upbringing from the other founding fathers," Gordon explained. "He had a tough childhood on the island of Nevis, and witnessed Caribbean slavery and brutality first-hand."
The focus of Gordon's project is to trace the evolution of Hamilton's idea of liberty by exploring his childhood and then formal education. "As an outsider," said Gordon, "he could empathize with the oppressed. College helped cultivate those ideas into a political ideology. Hamilton would eventually become a fervent abolitionist and champion of human rights.
"By studying his education at Kings College, which is now Columbia University, and his exposure to slavery, I can determine his exercises of liberty," said Gordon. "As an outsider, he could develop a higher sense of liberty than the other founding fathers, who had similar educations, and could see the hypocrisy among his peers."
While Gordon spent his entire junior year off campus, in Washington D.C. during the fall semester and in Rome, Italy, in the spring, this is his first summer conducting research on campus. He said that it was his professors who encouraged him to apply for the Emerson Grant, and ever since, he has spent four hours a day in the library, has conversed with different historians, and has visited the New York Historical Society and the Columbia University archives.
"I think it's awesome that the College is open to hearing about original projects and will sponsor you," said Gordon. "I'm not so sure you can do that in many other places."
Hamilton students have been awarded Emerson Grants to collaborate with faculty members during the summer on topics ranging from forgery in the arts to Nietzsche's influence on the Harlem Renaissance.
-- by Katherine Trainor
