Amherst College is a private liberal arts college in Amherst, Massachusetts. The Amherst curriculum involves study in the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences and combines a broad education with specialization in one or more fields.
Amherst was established in 1821 as a men’s college to provide free training for the ministry. The president of Williams College, Zephaniah Swift Moore, believed that Williams was too isolated in Williamstown, Massachusetts. So Moore and a group of Williams students moved to Amherst, where the townspeople had agreed to provide financial support for a college. Other founders of the college, then called Amherst Academy, included Noah Webster, who compiled Webster’s Dictionary, and Samuel F. Dickinson, grandfather of the poet Emily Dickinson. The college began to admit women students in 1975.
The Robert Frost Library at the college is devoted to the work of the poet, who taught English at Amherst for much of the time from 1916 to 1938. The trustees of Amherst also administer the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., a research library devoted to the works of the English playwright William Shakespeare.
Well-known graduates of Amherst include clergyman Henry Ward Beecher, United States President Calvin Coolidge, librarian Melvil Dewey, oil executive Henry Clay Folger, stockbroker Charles E. Merrill, sociologist Talcott Parsons, National Urban League President Hugh B. Price, and Chief Justice of the United States Harlan Fiske Stone.
The college’s website at https://www.amherst.edu/ offers additional information.
