Island Explorers Camp
(Nantucket Residents Only)

To celebrate the end of the school year, we are offering a special camp for year-round residents of Nantucket for a discounted price during the weeks of June 16th and June 23rd.  Program discounts are applicable with the purchase of an Island Family Membership.

Successful Ph.D. Defense on  

Nantucket Bay Scallops!

A large part of her work is trying to understand the influence of nub scallops in the population. Scallops usually reproduce twice a summer; there is an early spawn around late June and a late spawn that occurs late in the summer or early fall. Scallops produced in the late spawn are referred to as "nubs" because they are very tiny their first fall.

Congratulations Dr. Hall!

In Memoriam Elizabeth "Betty" Daniels

Vassar College and the MMA have lost a treasure.  For the MMA, it is the loss of another friend.  Betty Daniels was the Vassar College historian for at least twenty years.  Before that, she had been a professor of English at Vassar, also serving as dean (several times in various capacities) and head of the English Department.  Before that, she was a Vassar student.  Except for the years she earned her master's degree, Betty was always at Vassar, commuting to NYC for many years to get her Ph.D. while teaching at Vassar.  

We at MMA came to know Betty largely because of her work as the Vassar College historian, a post she took up (she was the college's first historian) after retiring from the English Department.  Betty discovered a trove of Maria Mitchell papers that Maria's sister and niece felt should remain at Vassar when Maria left in 1888.  Maria was not well enough to go back to remove her belongings - and it was likely also sad for  

her - so she sent Anne and Frances to complete the task.  Betty found these papers decades and decades later in a basement and made sure they became a proper and protected part of the Vassar archival collections. 

Betty was a remarkable woman.  Like Maria, she accomplished a great deal in a time when women were still expected to remain at home.  Think about raising four children in the late 1940s and 1950s, teaching at Vassar, and also working for something like seven years towards your Ph.D., this at a time when people were a lot less supportive of such a situation.  Maria Mitchell and she had a lot in common.

Betty leaves her son, John Daniels who is the president of the MMA's board of directors, her daughters, and numerous grandchildren.

To learn more about this remarkable woman, you can visit the "Vassar College Encyclopedia" and read this piece about her from 2003 in the "Vassar Quarterly".

"The step, however small, which is in advance of the world, shows the greatness of the person, whether that step be taken with brain, with heart, or with hands." Maria Mitchell

JNLF