Filial Piety, Infidel Yale, and Memory Making in Lyman Beecher's Autobiography

Rampant drunkenness, a deserted chapel, schoolboy Voltaires greeting Rousseaus on the Green—this is how Lyman Beecher recalled his Yale days in his Autobiography (1864). But evidence suggests that these colorful events may have been cribbed from an unsigned 1818 memoir of, oddly enough, Yale's President Timothy Dwight.