Does the archives represent Mount Holyoke College as a community?

Adrienne Shaw

If we accept the statement that communities are 1. imagined and 2. always in the past, then it could be said that the archives represent MHC as a community. There is an attempt to try and image that the artifacts contained in the archives provide us with a window into the past. Letters saved from a student in the 1940s can give us a glimpse into life at Mount Holyoke in those days. Traditions, connections, and shared memories of major events (such as the construction of a new building, a ‘traditional’ event, or changing of college policy) are points around which we assume a community exists. These communities, however, always exist in the past, as do the items in the archives. The archives represent the memory of what Mount Holyoke was like in the past, and like any memory it lacks some details and has a few holes which arise in the glossing over process. The archives do not represent a whole memory of the past, but a very selective memory comprised of a small selection of sources. Perhaps Mary’s letters only represent a single individual’s experience, one that was not shared by anyone else on the campus at that time. However, because her experiences are recorded and saved in the archives they are how we remember in the late 1940s and early 1950s at Mount Holyoke.