Library Menu
In addition to college publications and faculty and student scholarship, the Hope College Digital Commons repository includes some digital collections and oral histories from Archives and Special Collection.
For additional digital collections, please see the library's JSTOR Digital Collections site.
Hope College Digital Commons content can also be found by searching Hope Primo.
The following archives and college history materials are currently available in Hope College Digital Commons:
The Board of Foreign Missions (later, World Missions) was organized by the General Synod in 1832. The board was under the direction of the RCA but was also under the authority of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. David Abeel led the first mission of the RCA to the island of Borneo in the Dutch East Indies in 1836. Missions also sprouted in four primary target areas: Japan, India, China, and Arabia. In 1857, the board broke away from its ties with the American Board of Missions and established independent missions. Under its current name, the board is still active. This collection consists of annual reports (1857-1968).
A graduate of Holland High School and Holland, Michigan native, Dave Fetters excelled in basic training and advanced infantry training after being drafted in December, 1966, when he was 22 years of age. Fetters was given the opportunity to attend officers candidate school here the United States Fifth Special Forces (Green Berets), Third Corps, picked him for his hard work and high rank in his class. After the appropriate training, Fetters became a First Lieutenant and was sent to Vietnam and served there from 1967-1969.
A total of twenty-one hours of first-hand experiences, daily observations, frustrations, and emotions have been transcribed from fifteen audio cassette tapes that were recorded by Dave Fetters in Vietnam over a five month period in 1969. The transcriptions consist of narration by Fetters of the day’s events and his thoughts about those events and about the current state of the Vietnam War in general.
View issues of local newspapers Holland City News (1872-1977) and Ottawa County Times (1892-1905)
The Women’s Board of Foreign Missions (WBFM) of the RCA was organized in 1875 in Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan. Thirteen women, in response to a recommendation of the 1874 General Synod, met to commit themselves to the proposition that women in all parts of the world had a right to a Christian life. Through prayer and monetary gifts, the WBFM supported the schools established by the RCA for women and children at the various mission stations. The organization continued until 1946 when it was absorbed into the Board of Foreign Missions of the RCA. The collection includes annual reports.