In the News

First-time voter speaks out--Kate Thall '00 was interviewed by phone on October 29 as part of C-SPAN's "First Vote '96," which features young people who are voting for the first time. A C-SPAN top twenty-five scholarship winner, this is Kate's second time on C-SPAN this year. In the recent interview, she discussed the November 5 election party at Mount Holyoke as well as her thoughts on politics and this election. She also said that she's having a good year at Mount Holyoke and explained why she voted for Clinton.

By the time I get to Phoenicia--Geology professor Mark McMenamin, whose theory that an ancient map of the world--including the New World--is contained on Carthaginian and Phoenician coins is featured in the November issue of the journal The Numismatist. His theory is also receiving some notice in the national press. The Washington Post, the Christian Science Monitor, and The Chronicle of Higher Education have all written about McMenamin's unique theory that these peripatetic ancients may have seen the Americas 1,700 years before Columbus.

Alcott a gender-bender?--Assistant professor of English Elizabeth Young's article "A Wound of One's Own: Louisa May Alcott's Civil War Fiction" in the American Quarterly was profiled in the "Research Notes" section of the October 18 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education. The Chronicle describes Young's work as exploring the relation between gender and nation in women's writing of the American Civil War era. In particular, Young argues that Alcott blurred conventional gender designations in works such as Hospital Sketches to feminize the Civil War era. Currently completing a book on women writers and the American Civil War, Young has also published essays in American Literature, Feminist Studies, and Camera Obscura.