Reading along the Bias Grain for Obour Tanner Collins

By Amelia Yeager

As historians, we are too often confronted by gaps in the archive — missing details or even figures who went unrecorded, but whose presence could answer so many questions. Last summer, I combed the archives for a freed African woman whose inclination toward posterity would, with plenty of digging, reveal her connections within the cultural and intellectual circles of Revolutionary New England.

Like many public history students, I had been entranced by Tiya Miles’s All That She Carried during my first semester of graduate school. In David Glassberg’s Public History course, we discussed how Miles created such a stunning history with, at first, only one piece of evidence: a sack embroidered by the descendant of the enslaved girl who carried it. I found myself similarly taken with Marisa J. Fuentes’s Dispossessed Lives, a study of free and enslaved women of color in eighteenth-century Bridgetown, Barbados. Fuentes used a methodology she termed “reading along the bias grain” to extract details of women’s experiences who were silenced by the archive.¹ In doing so, she recreated a tapestry of mobility and agency among women whose lives, in their time, weren’t deemed worthy of recorded history. 

I found this bundle of papers, secured with twine through the middle, in the First Congregational Church Records in the NHS Collections.

During the summer of 2023, I worked as a Buchanan Burnham Fellow at the Newport Historical Society (NHS) in Newport, RI. The fellowship was the perfect opportunity to apply my coursework at UMass to a historical organization and put some of the theory I learned during my first year into practice.

The NHS archives, which occupy a library, a vault, and a vast basement, presented so many documentary curiosities and paths for independent research that it was almost overwhelming. Among church records, early censuses, and decades of city directories, I caught glimpses of people whose stories weren’t recorded in any biographies or scholarly articles. It was the perfect opportunity to read along the bias grain. 

One of the names that arose was Obour Tanner Collins. According to the NHS’s records, she was a member of the First Congregational Church (FCC), enslaved in the 1760s-1780s by James Tanner and later his widow Hannah, and married to Barra Collins in 1790. The most intimate and best-known historical evidence of Obour Tanner Collins is her correspondence with Phillis Wheatley Peters, the famous poet who published her first poem in the Newport Mercury in 1767. At the time, Wheatley was enslaved in Boston, and she maintained a correspondence with her friend Obour in Newport from 1772-1779, at least. We have these dates as bookends because an elderly Collins gave six of her letters from Wheatley to Katherine Edes Beecher, the wife of her pastor at the FCC, in the early 1830s.² Beecher passed them along to a Reverend Hale who donated them to the Massachusetts Historical Society, where they are available online. 

Unfortunately, we have only one side of the correspondence between Wheatley and Collins. Even though none of the letters written by Collins survive, a picture of her emerges from Wheatley’s writing. The two friends were both literate, devout Congregationalists, and shared several mutual acquaintances — enslaved and free — in New England. The most striking part of their relationship is that Collins is likely the only friend who was truly Wheatley’s peer. Both were kidnapped and enslaved as children, an experience that Wheatley’s elite white patrons sensationalized and exploited, but could not share. To the famous poet, Collins was a “sister.”³

UMass’s copy of Wheatley’s Poems ready to go on display at SCUA.

When I drove back to Amherst in August with a summer of research behind me, I knew there was more to be found — and to be said — about Obour Tanner Collins. She is proof that the millions of enslaved people whose stories are absent from the archives lived deeply meaningful lives.

I decided to continue researching Collins, specifically in the context of her role in Phillis Wheatley’s campaign to secure subscriptions for her first and only book, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, in the early 1770s. On October 30th, 1773, Wheatley sent Tanner copies of her book proposal and asked her friend to “use your interest to get Subscriptions as it is for my Benefit.”⁴ The trust that Wheatley put in her friend to secure subscriptions (of which she needed 300 to print the book) attests to Collins’s connections within her Newport community.⁵ 

Tracking down the six copies Collins sold — in other words, performing literary genealogy — can reconstruct an understudied part of Revolutionary Newport and assert her centrality within it.⁶ Luckily, my search is beginning close to home: UMass acquired a first edition of Wheatley’s Poems as the Library’s two millionth volume in 1984.⁷ 

Studying newspapers from the early nineteenth century in the NHS’s reading room.

Ultimately, like any good historical inquiry, this research raises more questions than answers. Who exactly ordered copies of Wheatley’s book through Collins’s campaign, and how did she persuade them? What kind of connections did she leverage to convince them to subscribe, and how did her enslavers or their peers view her connection to a famous writer? And in terms of surviving evidence for all these connections — what happened to the books? 

Beecher wrote in the donation note that accompanied the letters to the MHS in the 1860s, “I have no doubt that many copies of it (Wheatley’s book) are still extant among the old residents in Newport” — and she may have been on to something!⁸ 

The most obvious connection is to the FCC, whose records list a copy of Poems purchased for the church by Rev. Samuel Hopkins in 1774.⁹ Wheatley mentioned Collins in multiple letters to Hopkins, claiming that the two women were “living witnesses” to the ability of Africans to accept God, and his son regularly carried letters between Newport and Boston.¹⁰ Another possibility is that the African community, which organized into mutual aid societies in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, pooled their money to purchase a copy to circulate (something they would do with lottery tickets and with other books).¹¹ Finally, in the 1880s, two first edition copies of Poems were listed in the estate of Dr. David King, who lived on land purchased from Collins by his father in 1831.¹² 

While it may be impossible to definitively track down each of the six copies that Collins sold on behalf of her Bostonian friend, researching the books reveals how an enslaved African woman was connected through literary networks across the Atlantic. Regardless of her relative absence from the archival record, Collins’s contribution to a literary legacy we enjoy today is remarkable. 

I will be presenting this research at the National Council on Public History’s 2024 Annual Meeting in Salt Lake City, UT, during the poster presentations on April 11th. Come see me! After that, I’ll be working on turning the project into a longform piece of writing.

Amelia Yeager is an M.A. student in History at UMass Amherst who is also pursuing the Public History Graduate Certificate. Her 2023 internship was supported by the Charles K. Hyde Intern Fellowship.

1. Marisa Joanna Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive, 1st ed, Early American Studies (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 9. ↩︎
2. “November Meeting. Death of Lord Lyndhurst; Death of Hon. William Sturgis; Dr. Ephraim Eliot; Diary of Ezekiel Price; Letter of Count de Marbois; Phillis Wheatley; Letters of Phillis Wheatley,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 1863-1864 7 (November 1863): 268-269, footnote. ↩︎
3. Phillis Wheatley, “Letter from Phillis Wheatley to Obour Tanner, 10 May 1779,” May 10, 1779, Massachusetts Historical Society Collections Online, https://www.masshist.org/database/viewer.php?item_id=778&br=1. ↩︎
4. Phillis Wheatley, “Letter from Phillis Wheatley to Obour Tanner, 30 October 1773,” October 30, 1773, Massachusetts Historical Society Collections Online, https://www.masshist.org/database/viewer.php?item_id=773&img_step=2&br=1&mode=transcript#page2. ↩︎
5. Phillis Wheatley, The Collected Works of Phillis Wheatley (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 188-189. ↩︎
6. Phillis Wheatley, “Letter from Phillis Wheatley to Obour Tanner, 21 March 1774,” March 21, 1774, Massachusetts Historical Society Collections Online, https://www.masshist.org/database/viewer.php?item_id=775&br=1; Phillis Wheatley, “Letter from Phillis Wheatley to Obour Tanner, 6 May 1774,” May 6, 1774, Massachusetts Historical Society Collections Online, https://www.masshist.org/database/viewer.php?item_id=776&br=1. ↩︎
7. John Kendall, PS.866.W5.1773 Acquisition File, University of Massachusetts Amherst Special Collections and University Archives. ↩︎
8. “November Meeting,” 268, footnote. ↩︎
9. First Congregational Church Records, MS.123 Box 1, Folder 19, NHS Collections. ↩︎
10. Wheatley, Collected Works, 176. ↩︎
11. Book of Records of the African Union Society, 1787-1796 (vol.1674B), NHS Collections, 63-64; Book of Records of the African Union Society, 72-73, 254; Minutes of the African Union Society & African Humane Society, 1793-1810, (vol.1674C), NHS Collections, 41. ↩︎
12. George A. Leavitt & Co., Catalogue of the Library of the Late Dr. David King, of Newport, Rhode Island, 3 vols., Harvard College Library Preservation Microfilm Program 02444 (New York: G.A. Leavitt, 1883), 263; Letters of Edward King, NHS Collections, 7; Newport Land Evidence 18: 356-357.  ↩︎

When History Lives Alongside the Present: The Power of Local Archives

By Stacie Klinowski

When I began working on UMass’ graduate certificate in public history a few years ago, this term—‘public history’ – conjured up mental images of museums, archives, perhaps even public statues or murals. As a graduate student in composition and rhetoric, I was new to the field and hadn’t initially considered places like libraries as sites of public history. Yet public historians have recently pointed to the potential for public libraries to be spaces of historical inquiry and public history programming. Beyond this potential for public engagement in history that collaborations with libraries can bring, I am compelled by the ways the archives hosted at public libraries can be meaningful sites of community celebration, reflection, and history-making. What is unique about library archives is how intensely local these collections are and how they can provide glimpses of the everyday lives of those who live in a particular area – mundane activities that historians might overlook when constructing more grand historical narratives. And because libraries are so often under-resourced, one of the real challenges public historians must take up is in making these archives accessible to the communities they belong to. 

 The author processing items in the collection at the Chicopee Public Library Archive.

This past summer, with the support of a Charles K. Hyde Public History Intern Fellowship, I spent time processing a recent donation to the Chicopee Public Library, the Edmund F. Ukleja Collection. As I came to learn over the summer, the contents of this collection, which was composed of what the subject deemed important enough to keep, mirrored the historical remembrance of my town–Chicopee, MA– with its emphasis on its history as a site of late-nineteenth-century Polish immigration and commemoration of WWII-era deeds. Edmund F. Ukleja (1921-1991) was a life-long Chicopee resident, born to Polish immigrant parents, and served in the U.S. navy in World War II. During his service, he was stationed at the Waller Airforce Base in Trinidad and Tobago before joining the Pacific Theater of the war and participating in action against Japan, returning home in October 1945. This collection will be made public through the Chicopee Public Library Digital Archive thanks to the generous donation of Terry Ukleja, Edmund’s sister.

Photograph showing Japanese Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu signing the surrender document for U.S. General Douglas MacArthur.

The donated collection was an album of 440 objects, mostly photographs but also including records such as newspaper clippings, flyers, currency from places he was stationed during the war, and more. In my internship, I processed this collection and researched, described, and transcribed items for a finding aid. In addition to items that both historians and public audiences would agree count as traditional pieces of history, such as an original photograph of the official Japanese surrender on the U.S.S. Missouri, an alternate-perspective shot of the famous image, the collection also houses gems of local significance such as images of Chicopee’s centennial parade, as well as objects documenting moments of familial significance to the Uklejas, like weddings, baptisms, and more. And it was this last category of photographs that I became preoccupied with.

Historians have long dismissed notions of “great men’s history”: that is, the idea that history is made by singular exceptional people and moments (much like the above image of Shigemitsu and MacArthur). Since the mid twentieth century historians have instead argued that historical significance can be found through understanding the lives of everyday people. This is a perspective I find very persuasive, yet I initially dismissed a large section of photographs in the Ukleja collection, which I thought showed only sentimental family events.

However, I began to realize that there was historical and affective value to documenting and archiving the mundane or intimate moments of one family’s life. I undertook this internship a few weeks after my father unexpectedly passed away. I split my time between my parents’ home in Albany and in the basement of the Chicopee Public Library, sifting through the Ukleja collection. One day, I sat with my mother and siblings as we sorted through an old external hard drive we had forgotten about. We found everything from childhood photographs to a copy of the deed to my parents’ house. We looked at photographs of my father, of my sister on a field trip to Plymouth, and more. Besides taking a trip down memory lane, we were trying to locate some old work documents, and we were trying to decide what to keep. We were looking at these materials with both familial and archival motivations.

The next day, I was back in Chicopee, looking at the same kinds of photographs but from the Ukleja family, not the Klinowski one. What I had once dismissed as quaint but ultimately historically insignificant photographs, I now saw with new eyes. And I don’t think this is simply the lens of grief and nostalgia influencing my perception, although that is surely a part of it. But I suspect that these photographs can resonate with more than just the donor’s family or with overly sentimental folks like me. I think there is something to be said for the historical value of the mundane—of getting to see a few ordinary people on an ordinary day in our ordinary city, only seventy years in the past instead of today. When I shared selections of these photographs with other library visitors as part of other programming put on by the library, other residents who had no direct attachment to the people in these images were struck by the city’s streets in the background, the people’s expressions and dress, and more. They spoke about how important it is to put these kinds of images up for public use: how much local schools could benefit from their use, how it reminded them of their own genealogical efforts, and more. This is the power of community archives.

A certificate recognizing Edmund’s service in World War II, issued by the Franciscan order of the Basilica of Saint Stanislaus in Chicopee, MA.

With such a lens, a certificate recognizing Edmund’s service in World War II becomes not just a moment of individual pride and instead becomes one thread in a local tapestry of community identity-making. Looking at this document, I had the impulse to get up, walk out of the library, up the street one block, and right into the Basilica of St. Stanislaus—to experience the past alongside the present. Taken outside of an isolated context, Edmund’s certificate of recognition becomes a part of a whole constellation of community history. And, now housed in the Chicopee Public Library’s archive, it is resituated amongst other sites of local historical importance: the library itself as the first publicly-funded library in western Massachusetts, former mills and factories along the Chicopee River, sites of cultural importance to historical immigrant communities, like the Basilica of St. Stanislaus, and more.

Chicopee is not unique. It is a place that is, in many ways, just like everywhere else. But its history matters because it belongs to the people who lived here, people like Edmund or people like me. Community archives like the ones housed at the Chicopee Public Library can shed light on the social lives of past members of our community, and I am grateful I was able to spend a summer coming to this realization.

Stacie Klinowski is a teaching associate in the Writing Program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she is currently working on a PhD in Composition & Rhetoric and a graduate certificate in Public History. Stacie hosts a monthly writing group through the Chicopee Public Library. Her work can be found in outlets such as Another Word and Rhetoric & Public Affairs.

Working Through Cataloged Culture: Data Cleaning as Crucial for Collaborative Efforts in an Archaeological Collection

By Abigail Thomsen

My title references two seminal works on colonial collections management, Working through Colonial Collections (von Oswald 2022) and Cataloguing Culture (Turner 2020).

When I enter a new collections space, something clicks on in my brain. My eyes widen and scan the room, looking for patterns in the numbers on boxes. My nose perks up, recognizing the peculiar and familiar mixture of dust, plastic, and old paper. My hands itch for my pen and paper, ready to write down the questions forming in my head. Whose heritage is housed here? Do they have appropriate access to and control over it?

Abby peeks out behind numerous boxes of collections.

Walking into the archaeological repository at UMass was like coming home as I felt that switch flip and my senses heighten. After a year of graduate school coursework, I missed the embodied experience of learning with objects. As Eric Johnson, semi-retired faculty member and former director of UMass Archaeological Services (UMAS), led me around the high-ceilinged room in February of 2023, I sensed UMAS’s collections calling out for attention and care. Over the course of four decades, the cultural resource management firm conducted over 800 compliance surveys and excavations across greater New England. Headquartered at the university under various departments over time, the firm provided employment opportunities for archaeologists and important training for graduate students. 

The university shuttered the no-longer-profitable firm in 2018, leaving a skeleton crew of caretakers. Johnson and his undergraduate interns have spent the intervening years transforming what was once a loosely organized storehouse for a bustling firm into a well-organized repository, with the ultimate intention of easing repatriation of Indigenous materials to descendant communities and making collections available for education and research. With hundreds of thousands of objects, and with items and paperwork spread across campus, this collection is daunting. However, through years of diligent work, Johnson, in consultation with Julie Woods, UMass’s director of repatriation, have prepared the repository for a management transition after Johnson retires in Spring 2024. As is true with any collection, though, an extra set of experienced hands could help speed up the process, improve the quality of their documentation and prepare the collections for the ultimate goal: making them accessible. Accessibility has many different meanings. For Indigenous belongings, that could mean full return. For non-Indigenous historical materials, that could mean making the collections accessible to researchers.

That’s where I come in. Before coming to UMass for my MA and PhD in anthropology, I worked in archaeological collections at various institutions across the U.S. Additionally, my experience with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) and my previous collaboration with Tribal Historic Preservation Officers in Minnesota prompted me to consider how to bring these collections into a space beyond mere NAGPRA compliance, to one of collaborative potential with descendant Native Nations. My experience has shown me that a well-digitized collection can make an institution more equipped to collaborate with descendant communities. 

Abby works on the design of the relational database.

Existing literature from archaeology, museum studies, archives, and the digital humanities all support this assertion. The manner in which institutions historically collected Indigenous materials has left a marked impact on how collections are organized, reflecting a Natural Sciences taxonomic organization (Deloria 2018, Turner 2020, von Oswald 2022). In order for collections-holding institutions to make cultural heritage accessible to Indigenous communities, they must first know what they have, and secondly, deconstruct the colonial knowledge system, making room for Indigenous epistemologies in the way the collections are organized. This act of working through cataloged material will make it easier for the communities to reconnect with their belongings, without navigating a system that has performed centuries of harm.

Woods and Johnson share a commitment to working with Native Nations and facilitating knowledge return. As Johnson, who holds immense institutional memory of UMAS and its projects, transitions to retirement, it is imperative to ensure that all data associated with the collections is compiled, organized, and searchable without his help. And, with our eyes toward collaboration, we must intentionally structure this data in a way that makes space for Indigenous Knowledge, while also preserving the empirical information from a Western science-oriented approach.

Over the summer of 2023, I addressed a small portion of these needs with the following goals:

1. Assess institutional collaborative needs
2. Understand the scope of the UMAS data issues
3. Create a pilot database
4. Make a place-based interface for collections
5. Reach out to affiliated Native Nations to discuss their access needs

The main collaborative needs for UMAS collections involved researching what Indigenous communities ask of UMAS and of other collections. Focusing on Indigenous-led and community-engaged research dealing with archaeological data yielded several important insights. While I did not engage directly with Native Nation partners, I worked closely with Woods, who has spent years establishing good relationships. Prompted by her knowledge and inspired by projects that draw heavily upon existing archaeological documentation and data in museum collections and university repositories, I determined that associating geographic information with the UMAS collections was imperative. Incorporating geographical information not only allows for integration with compliance systems, but also situates archaeological data on the land from which it came, offering new perspectives and paving the way for questions informed by Indigenous epistemologies.  

Notably missing from the records was geographical information, including archaeological site numbers, both historic and “prehistoric,” assigned by the Massachusetts Historical Commission (MHC). There was also the challenge of integrating catalogs of archaeological materials with other types of collections (a long-term goal).

A map that shows Indigenous homelands that intersect the state of Massachusetts. Map: Abby Thomsen.

Focusing on a region called to our attention by a partner Native Nation offered an opportunity to try out ideas on a subset of the data. The outcome was a new relational database with updated geographical information in the form of town names and UTM coordinates. The rest of the UMAS and other anthropology collections will be able to integrate one day.

With the help of many library staff, including GIS Librarian Rebecca Seifred and Database Librarian Steve Bischof, records from the pilot database have been exported into an ArcGIS (digital mapping software) map, allowing for a land-based view of the archaeological collections with Indigenous material. In time, other members of the project team will need to reach out directly to Native Nations, as the data issues made it take longer to create proof-of-concept. Woods is planning to use the pilot interface to help with future collaborations with Native Nations.

My work with the UMAS solidified for me the importance of careful, collaboration-oriented digitization in archaeological collections. Being able to see collections on the land with the click of a button made me see relationships between items that I couldn’t grasp while picturing them on the shelves of the repository. And I couldn’t have asked or answered those questions without clean, organized, queryable data.

Cleaning up the data and adding geographical information lays the groundwork for more effective collaborative relationships between UMAS and Native Nations. Having done so, I gained insight into just how much work it takes to organize colonial data and reformat it in a way that makes room for Indigenous epistemologies. I hope that such a data-wrangling project will lay the groundwork for collaborative efforts between UMAS and Native Nations through the lens of collections. As Anderson and Atalay (2023) have shown, preparing for and enacting repatriation of Indigenous ancestors and belongings can lead to new ways of thinking and being in the academy. Institutions with collections of Indigenous material not only have an ethical obligation to return stolen knowledge in the form of collections, but have the opportunity to grow from the relationships that repatriation can foster.

Sources:

Anderson, Jane, and Sonya Atalay. “Repatriation as Pedagogy.” Current Anthropology 64, no. 6 (December 1, 2023): 670–91. https://doi.org/10.1086/727786.

Deloria, Philip J. “The New World of the Indigenous Museum.” Daedalus 147, no. 2 (2018): 106–15. https://doi.org/10.1162/DAED_a_00494.

Oswald, Margareta von. Working Through Colonial Collections: An Ethnography of the Ethnological Museum in Berlin. Leuven University Press, 2022. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv3029hv9.

Turner, Hannah. Cataloguing Culture: Legacies of Colonialism in Museum Documentation. Vancouver, BC: UBC Press, 2020.

Acknowledgments: 

I would like to extend Thank yous to the Dr. Charles K. Hyde Internship Program, as well as to the UMass Natural History Collections Scholarship and the UMass Anthropology Department, whose support enabled this internship. Dr. Julie Woods’ mentorship helped me connect my professional experience to my academic coursework in Indigenous and collaborative archaeology, all while making a concrete impact. Dr. Eric Johnson’s expertise was invaluable to this project. Kay Mattena’s company and camaraderie kept me going.

Abby Thomsen is an MA/PhD student in Anthropology and a Public History certificate student at UMass Amherst.

 

Painting the Town: Muralism in Wichita, Kansas

By Piper Cruze Prolago

Fig. 1: Priscella Brown, Dunbar Theatre, 2018.

Public art has become a realm for community members to directly negotiate their civic identities by actively shaping the character of the urban environment. By nature of working in public spaces, muralists intervene in the city by inserting individual expression into spaces often dominated by the aesthetics of commercialism. Understanding how muralism facilitates expression and the relationship that these works have in multicultural placemaking has been an animating question for a Wichita, Kansas museum hoping to highlight the development of public art in the city. 

This past summer, I worked as a research and curatorial intern at the Ulrich Museum of Art as they prepared for a new and exciting exhibition, Urban Canvas: Exploring Muralism in Wichita, which opened in late January 2024 and will be on display through early June. Having grown up in the city, I was extremely excited about the opportunity to revisit the people and places I call home. In the period of about five years since I moved away, Wichita rapidly transformed from having a dozen or so murals to more than 150. Artists working here have not only built a network of creatives who support each other and advocate for opportunities for new works, but also imagine innovative and impactful projects related to advancing social equity.  Preparation for the exhibit prompted an investigation of programs and organizations that funded and facilitated an influx of mural projects, as well as rich conversations with individual artists invested in creating works to represent their communities. While some artists understood their work as a form of beautification that promoted civic pride, others emphasized their interest in amplifying minoritized perspectives and in turn, insisting on the importance and belonging of multiethnic Wichitans.

Having spoken with muralists and organizers working on public art projects in Wichita, I began to organize my findings to animate the curation of the exhibition, and working with Ulrich staff, to consider questions related to how artists understand their work in relation to their “publics.” To what extent do artists aim to create work that is universally appealing or rather, to specifically engage with a particular public? Many artists invoke ideas of local specificity, about representing themes and ideas that were particularly relevant to people in a specific space. In Wichita, this included artists advocating for immigrant rights in a predominantly Latinx neighborhood and portraits of Black performers (Moms Mabley, Richard Pryor, and Hattie McDaniel) on a historically Black theater (Fig. 1). In describing their creative process, one artist recounted sourcing family photos, including their own, from neighbors and local archives to paint faces in a crowd on one work; they were interested in capturing the spirit of the neighborhood, which they described wanting to achieve not by representing influential individuals, but rather through a mass of “everyday people” (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2: Heather Byers, The Women Who Mold Us, 2018. 

A particularly fruitful theme that many artists engaged with was the role of graffiti in their work. For some, this interest was more aesthetic. Artists in Wichita described learning techniques of spray painting from graffiti writers and incorporating the lettering style into the murals they made. Others were themselves graffiti writers in the past or present, and understood any work in a public place to be related to a project of radical self-expression. One graffiti writer turned muralist described incorporating their tag into a large-scale public work, a detail that other writers always noticed but seemed to not be visible to most. Another graffiti writer and muralist spoke passionately about how the criminalization of graffiti is completely at odds with the popularity of muralism, which they see as being founded on and indebted to graffiti. This dichotomy is particularly interesting given that mural projects in the city have at times been framed as an “alternative” to graffiti. Under a system of funded public art, artists work legally and are (often) paid to do so, but the tradeoff is handing over some kind of creative control to business owners or city officials. 

The curatorial team was interested in moving away from the traditional orientation of the gallery space, where mounted works on walls are cleanly, succinctly organized in a way that can feel separated from the viewer and distanced from their lives outside of the museum. When curating these works, we are tasked with dually uplifting the importance of their contribution to the community while also honoring the specificity of their initial contexts. We decided to print works on hanging banners that would hang from the ceiling, inviting visitors to weave through various murals. In addition, the team went on to digitize five works that became part of a virtual reality component allowing visitors to seemingly step into the space of the original context for the works. Finally, seeking to model the importance of socially-engaged practice that so many contributing artists cited, the museum facilitated a public art project to be installed on Wichita State University’s campus, implemented in tandem with the student body. 

Fig. 3: Ric Dunwoody, Untitled, 2018. 

Fig. 4: Connie Fiorella-Fitzpatrick, Justicia Para Las Mujeres Inmigrantes, 2018. 

In speaking with artists about their work, I was always moved by stories of individual experiences that artists negotiated to represent their communities. An Indigenous artist described how his experience at a local high school with a racist mascot undergirded a work depicting the recently-abolished logo. He described how his choice to draw on aesthetics of graffiti related to his sense that such mascots persist because of a refusal to view Native peoples as contemporary and changing (Fig. 3). Another muralist described how the experience of her mother’s unjust deportation as a result of a legal technicality–a case that ended up being heard at the Supreme Court – motivated her to create a work celebrating immigrant women (Fig. 4). In each of these works, the artists emphasized the extent to which such perspectives are often excluded from the narrative of the Wichita “public” despite their resonance with so many residents. As the exhibition took shape, it was clear that notions of “public” and “community” are never universal, but rather continuously and individually defined. In this process, muralism is not only a medium that reflects existing bonds between people, but also becomes an active agent in forming and negotiating these networks. 

Fig. 5: Photo of Ulrich Museum of Art featuring Personnage Oiseaux by Joan Miró.

Piper Cruze Prolago is a student in the History of Art & Architecture MA program at UMass Amherst where she is also pursuing a graduate certificate in Public History. Piper’s research centers on modern art in the Philippines and the role that visual art plays in mediating mulitethnic national identity in the post-colonial nation state. These are questions that Piper is also interested in pursuing through work in public art and its intersections with social activism, which she was able to build on through this summer internship supported by a Charles K. Hyde Internship Fellowship.

Field Notes: Research Highlights from 2023

The wide array of research interests among UMass historians was on vivid display in 2023, as students and faculty explored their respective interests in museums and archives around the U.S., and the globe. For a few glimpses into a sampling of these exciting projects, read on!

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UNSILENCING THE PAST

By Sheher Bano ’23MA

In 1910, while taking a stroll around his family farm with a friend, Kishan Singh came upon his three-year-old son, Bhagat Singh, digging the soil in the fields of Banga (Lyallpur, Punjab). When asked what he was doing, he reportedly said, “I am sowing guns, so that we will be able to fight and get rid of the British.” 

This is one of the many stories told, and retold, about Indian revolutionary and freedom fighter Bhagat Singh. As a teen, Singh founded the renowned Hindustan Socialist Republican Army (HSRA), a significant anti-colonial agitator in the 1920s. When Singh was 23, he and his comrades were executed by the British colonial state in the Lahore Conspiracy Case following the assassination of a British official in 1931. 

Haider Rizvi commemorates Singh in a play at the 1986 Punjab Conference in Lahore.

Titled “Memories of Hope and Loss: Kerhi Maa Ne Bhagat Singh Jameya,” (in English: “Which Mother Birthed Bhagat Singh?”), my MA thesis delves into the ways that Bhagat Singh is remembered in post-partition South Asia—specifically the Pakistani side of the province of Punjab. My research draws heavily on oral history and contemporary Punjabi poetry and prose, which I collected, transcribed, and translated during my trips to Lahore in the past two years. I used these sources to argue that Singh’s memory is invoked in contemporary Pakistan to serve a range of political purposes, especially by various groups and individuals who identify as leftists or Marxists. Activists and writers use the figure of Bhagat Singh to highlight the erasure of regional and lingual identities in Pakistan. Their remembrances underline a perceived historical injustice: the imposition of a national identity based on Urdu and Sunni Muslim-ness, which marginalized Punjabi ethno-lingual identities and revolutionary histories. These remembrances challenge Pakistani state narratives, which tend to mute histories that do not serve its interest. 

Analyzing the concept of revolutionary motherhood within the literary narratives about Singh, I also demonstrate how mourning and hope coexist in the Punjabi contemporary emancipatory imagination. Such overlaps illustrate how the past is continuously in dialogue with the present, and how the promise of radical hope is woven into the story of Bhagat Singh’s martyrdom. 

Sheher Bano is now a doctoral student at UMass Amherst. She was awarded the 2022 History Department Travel Grant, which made her research at Punjab Archives possible. Her research interests include histories of imperialism and anti-imperialism in South Asia; politics of exclusion, erasure, and mourning; and rethinking Third World feminist methodologies.

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UNEARTHING ASIAN HISTORY

At the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts 

by Catherine Wan

I never gave much thought toward the creation of sources I used in essays. Databases and journal articles were simply online. However, interning at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) Archives allowed me to be directly involved in the creation of a database. This database, or digital collection, contains all PAFA’s documents on Asian students who attended from 1917 to 1949. As a Chinese American with an interest in Asian American history, I was excited to bring these students out of the files and into the public eye. 

A lot of work goes into digitization: scanning; formatting; making sure a document’s size, type, language, and origin are properly labeled; and, finally, choosing the best layout for online presentation. My internship has given me immense appreciation for the work of archivists. 

I’ve gotten a taste of the countless hours of work put into digitizing historical documents. And there’s a level of satisfaction in knowing I’ve contributed a bit to the sea of online resources. At PAFA, I’ve held the same pages held by students decades ago, turning them from crumbling paper into something that will outlast even myself. 

Catherine Wan at work on the database she assembled from records of Asian students who attended PAFA from 1917-1949.

Catherine Wan is a sophomore majoring in history and legal studies. As a Philadelphia native, she was particularly excited to intern at such an important historical institution as the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

ABOUT THE PROJECT 

Over the course of her internship, Catherine Wan researched, digitized, and cataloged academic files from students of Asian descent who attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts from 1917–1949. She also curated a digital history project bringing these hidden histories to light. Highlights from her research—including a timeline, profiles, primary sources, and more—are featured on PAFA’s website. Check out her project here.

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THE VICTORY OF VIOLENCE

Depicting War on the Column of Marcus Aurelius 

by Timothy Hart

This engraving comes from the narrative frieze that spirals up the length of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius’s monumental victory column in Rome. Completed after the emperor’s death by his son Commodus, the column celebrates Rome’s Marcomannic Wars, which were waged from 166 to 180 CE against an alliance of peoples who dwelt on the northern banks of the river Danube. Depicted here is a scene of intentional terror wrought by the Roman army. We see a Marcomannic village set ablaze by Roman troops while the inhabitants are rounded up for enslavement. The scenes on Marcus’s column tend to depict the cruelties of war with an unflinching eye, which historian Elizabeth Wolfram Thill suggests sets it apart from the less violent scenes of conflict on the slightly earlier column of Emperor Trajan. 

In the second chapter of his forthcoming book, Beyond the River, Under the Eye of Rome, Timothy Hart argues that the explicit violence and terror depicted on Marcus’s column both reflects popular sentiment toward the Marcomanni at the time and illustrates imperial support for this dehumanization of Rome’s Transdanubian neighbors. Hart explains that concurrently with the Marcomannic Wars, the Roman world was ravaged by a deadly pandemic known to scholars as the Antonine Plague. Faced with incurable disease bringing death to the heart of Roman cities, the wars along the Danube offered a chance for Marcus Aurelius to prove his ability to lead and protect his people by eradicating the “barbarian” menace. Thus, despite repeatedly seeking peace with the empire, the Marcomanni and their allies suffered more than a decade of death and enslavement to ease the minds of a fearful Roman public. In the frieze of Marcus’s column, we see the Marcomanni receiving what they “deserved” after years of demonization as Rome’s designated enemy. 

Tafeln I – LXIV. 1896. Bd. tafe, 1. Die Marcus-Säule auf Piazza Colonna in Rom. München: Bruckmann. doi:10.11588/diglit.9328.

Marcus’s victory column is just another tourist stop in Rome today, but a closer look at the monument’s frieze reminds us of some hard truths the tour guides usually omit: The Roman state was often a brutal agent of imperial oppression, and emperors—even those deemed “good” by posterity—were often deeply complicit in that violence.

Timothy Hart is a lecturer in the history department, where he teaches courses on a range of subjects related to ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern history. His research focuses on the ways Greek ethnographic theory and writing influenced Roman perceptions of, and actions toward, peoples dwelling beyond the imperial frontiers.

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INTERPRETING ELIZABETH FREEMAN

Centering the Woman, Not the Myth 

By Reid Ellefson-Frank, in cooperation with Marcus Smith, Jaehee Seol, Jamie Mastrogiacomo, and María Portilla Moya

In 1781, Elizabeth Freeman brought suit against her enslaver, Col. John Ashley, on the grounds that slavery went against the new Massachusetts state constitution. In doing so, she became the first person in Massachusetts to win her freedom on the grounds of constitutionality. After her emancipation, Freeman did domestic labor, served as a midwife, and became one of the most prominent Black property owners in Berkshire County. 

From left: Jaehee Seol, Marcus Smith, and Reid Ellefson-Frank presenting their project on Elizabeth Freeman.

During the 2022–23 academic year, a team of UMass public history graduate students worked with the Du Bois Freedom Center in Great Barrington, Mass., to develop text for an interpretive sign about Elizabeth Freeman. Unfortunately, most of what historians know about Freeman comes from her employers, the Sedgwick family. The narrative the Sedgwicks established is highly proprietary, claiming Freeman as a member of their family and overemphasizing their role in her life while downplaying her chosen and blood relations. We saw this project as an opportunity to join more recent scholarship centered on Freeman’s bravery, resistance, agency, and community. Freeman’s actions were remarkable; she dared to turn the apparatus of government against itself at no small risk to her personal safety. She initiated the chain of events that would lead to the abolition of slavery in Massachusetts. 

In writing this script, we had to grapple with biased primary source documents and gaps in the historical record, which routinely excludes enslaved people’s perspectives. The UMass public history team was honored to work with the Freedom Center and to offer our interpretation of Elizabeth Freeman’s story. 

Reid Ellefson-Frank is a public history certificate student interested in archaeology, the politics of memory, and how public history can be an agent of social change. 

Fresh Ink: New Books by UMass History Faculty

In 2023, UMass Amherst history faculty published new books on the history of Brazil, the roots of Trumpism and the unexpected impacts of Title IX. Read on for the highlights. If you missed them when they dropped earlier this year, join us in adding them to your reading list for 2024!

Joel Wolfe Publishes ‘Fast Paced and Engaging’ Book on Brazil

Joel Wolfe, professor and graduate program director in the College of Humanities and Fine Arts Department of History, recently published his third book, Brazil, with Polity Books for the Polity History Series.

Brazil is Wolfe’s third book focuses on Brazil’s history. Called “fast-paced and engaging” by Boston College’s Heather Cox Richardson, the book covers the period of 1808 to the present day, paying particularly close attention to Brazil’s struggle for control of its vast national territory and to establish a vibrant democracy among the intense inequality, racial discrimination and regional rivalries.

“The goal of the Polity History Series is to have senior scholars produce books for a broad audience. The books aim to present a country’s history for other scholars, policy makers, and others in an accessible way,” Wolfe says. “The book pays particularly close attention to the last two decades of political turmoil. I waited to submit the book until after last November’s presidential election was settled.”

While working with page proofs for the soon-to-be published text, Wolfe was asked by the director of Polity Books to include an afterword about the January 2023 pro-Bolsonaro riots in Brasília. “It was a unique experience to have written something that happened only months before a book came out,” Wolfe says.

Wolfe is the author of numerous articles and books on Brazilian society and politics. Brazil follows the publication of Autos and Progress: The Brazilian Search for Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2010) and Working Women, Working Men: São Paulo and the Rise of Brazil’s Industrial Working Class, 1900-1955 (Duke University Press, 1993), the latter of which was named a Choice Outstanding Book.

Since publication, Brazil has had multiple bids for a version in Greek, and it is currently available for purchase at multiple places including Barnes & Noble, Target and politybooks.com. 
 

Elizabeth Sharrow Co-Authors Equality Unfulfilled on How Title IX’s Policy Design Undermines Change to College Sports

The year 1972 is often hailed as an inflection point in the evolution of women’s rights. Congress passed Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, a law that outlawed sex-based discrimination in education. Many Americans celebrate Title IX for having ushered in an era of expanded opportunity for women’s athletics; yet fifty years after its passage, sex-based inequalities in college athletics remain the reality. Equality Unfulfilled explains why. 

Published by Cambridge University Press, the book identifies institutional roadblocks—including sex-based segregation, androcentric organizational cultures, and overbearing market incentives—that undermine efforts to achieve systemic change. Drawing on original surveys with student-athletes, athletic administrators, college coaches, members of the public, and fans of college sports, it highlights how institutions shape attitudes toward gender equity policy. It offers novel lessons not only for those interested in college sports but for everyone seeking to understand the barriers that any marginalized group faces in their quest for equality.

 Dr. Elizabeth A. Sharrow is an associate professor in UMass Amherst’s School of Public Policy and the Department of History, and Director of Faculty Research at the UMass Institute for Social Science Research. Their scholarship focuses on the politics of gender and race in the U.S. with a focus on how policy has shaped intersectional meanings of sex, race, sexuality, disability, and class over the past fifty years. Sharrow’s research looks at the history and consequences of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, the politics of the family, and the politics of college athletics.

Read more.

Historicizing Trumpism: Kevin A. Young co-edits new book, Trump and the Deeper Crisis

​While many analysts emphasize Trump’s uniqueness, Professor Kevin A. Young and his co-authors argue he should be viewed as a symptom of a deeper systemic crisis. This collection, co-edited with Michael Schwartz (Stony Brook University) and Richard Lachmann (University at Albany), examines the roots, impacts, and future prospects of Trumpism as well as the possibilities for combating it.

The essays are published as part of the series “Political Power and Social Theory” from Emerald Publishing. According to the publisher, “chapters analyze the role of racism and xenophobia, evangelical religion, and elite support in enabling Trump’s political ascent, demonstrating how both his demagogic style and his policies draw from the historic repertoire of the Right. The authors also trace the impacts of his presidency on inequality, health, ecological destruction, and U.S. empire. As far-right forces cement their hold on the Republican Party, and as the Democratic Party appears unable to stop them, what lies ahead? The authors argue that confronting Trumpism requires a frontal attack on the conditions that incubated the monster.”

In addition to editing the collection, Professor Young wrote the introduction, ”Trump As a Symptom” and two chapters, “Trump, Biden, and Why Elections Don’t Bring Bigger Policy Changes” and “Fossil Fuels, the Ruling Class, and Prospects for the Climate Movement.” 

Young is a historian of social movements, revolution, labor, political economy, and imperialism in modern Latin America and the United States. His books include Blood of the Earth: Resource Nationalism, Revolution, and Empire in Bolivia (2017), the edited volume Making the Revolution: Histories of the Latin American Left (2019), the coauthored book Levers of Power: How the 1% Rules and What the 99% Can Do About It (2020), and the coedited volume Trump and the Deeper Crisis (2022). His next book, Abolishing Fossil Fuels: Lessons from Movements That Won, is due out in spring 2024.

If you are interested in reading Trump and the Deeper Crisis, please reach out to Professor Young for a copy of the PDF. 

Reprinted from www.umass.edu/history with permission

Looking Back, Looking Ahead: A Report from the 2023 Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife, Indigenous Histories in New England: Pastkeepers and Pastkeeping

By Marla Miller and Alice Nash

This sign was created by Hampshire College student Isabella Uttley-Rosado using fallen trees from the Hampshire woods. It invites visitors to consider the Indigenous history the land on which Hampshire College was built.

In June, the 2023 Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife explored the theme  Indigenous Histories in New England: Pastkeepers and Pastkeeping, in a recognition that the work of pastkeepers in Indigenous communities is and has been important to the past, present and future of public history practice in the region. We are delighted that both UMass History and the UMass Public History programs were co-sponsors of this important gathering.¹ The Dublin Seminar is a longstanding regional scholarly community, launched in 1976 by Peter Benes, who was at that time teaching at the Dublin School in Dublin, New Hampshire. Conceived from its inception as a public history enterprise that would draw together professional and avocational researchers around an annual theme and present that scholarship to audiences of historians and public historians as well as interested members of the public, over the past 40-plus years the seminar has examined a wildly diverse range of subjects, from foodways to fashion, and from music to maritime history and culture.²

The June 2023 event marked the 20^th anniversary of the publication Algonkians of New England: Past and Present (1993), the proceedings of the 1991 Seminar. This was a landmark event at a time when historians of New England largely assumed that Indigenous peoples had died out or disappeared after King Philips War (1675-1675), and when museum curators saw no irony in labeling objects as being associated with someone who was “the last of their race,” but donated by a living family member. Only one of the essays in this classic volume is Indigenous-authored—an essay on Tisquantum and fish fertilizer as Indigenous technology by Nanepashemet, a Wampanoag historian from Plimoth Plantation— but all of the essays reflect a growing recognition that historians needed to address the black hole of missing scholarship between 1675 and the visible presence of tribal communities in the late 20^th century who won legal victories and proclaimed, “We were here all along.”³ The volume includes Ann Marie Plane’s study of how gender and colonization impacted Sarah Ahhaton, a Wampanoag woman from the praying town of Ponkapoag, and Colin Calloway’s essay on Algonkians in the American Revolution. Students of Professor Alice Nash may be familiar with these essays from her classes. The volume marks a key historiographical shift, recognized by the later and ongoing work of many of the presenters.⁴

Table of contents of Algonkians of New England: Past and Present.

The 2023 program included a dozen presenters (out of twenty-six) who are Indigenous, either by tribal citizenship or heritage, and all of the presentations centered Indigenous sources and perspectives. Quite a change from 1991! 

The sold-out seminar kicked off with an electric, and packed event on Friday morning, in the Amherst College Collection of Native American Literature.⁵ Archivist Mike Kelly and his colleague Brandon Castle (project coordinator, Mapping Native Intellectual Networks of the Northeast) created an open house, offering seminar participants an opportunity to learn more about this important resource, which gathers some of the earliest published writing by Native authors from the eighteenth century to today.
The program then moved to Historic Deerfield with a roundtable titled “Indigenous Histories and Intergenerational Collaboration: Honoring Neal Salisbury, Pastkeeper, Spacemaker.” Neal Salisbury (1940-2022), who taught for many years in the History Department at Smith College, was a guiding force behind the 1993 proceedings as well as the 1989 Dublin Seminar New England, New France, which highlighted the need for more focus on Indigenous histories. In a powerful and moving conversation, Lisa Brooks, Christine Delucia, and Alice Nash reflected on how each were “inspired and mentored in different ways” by Salisbury, and the many ways he brought complexity, nuance, and compassion to the field of ethnohistory, from his groundbreaking (and still highly relevant) first book, Manitou and Providence (so many participants reported the state of their dog-eared but beloved copies of this book), to his numerous articles and his brilliant, meticulous edition of Mary Rowlandson’s 1682 captivity narrative. 

Participants gather in the Deerfield Community Center on the first day of the sold-out conference.

While Salisbury’s scholarly contributions are significant, he played an equally and perhaps more important role by using his academic privilege to create space for Indigenous pastkeepers who, at that time, with a few exceptions, worked in community spaces that were all but invisible to the academy. The keynote conversation on Friday evening made it clear, to anyone who didn’t already know it, that times have changed. The panel, “Hidden Histories: New England Museum Representations of Native American Indians,” electrified another packed house. Linda Coombs (Aquinnah Wampanoag) spoke of her 50 years in public history, from her start at the Boston Children’s Museum to the heady years of developing the Wampanoag Indigenous Program at Plimoth Plantation. Her experiences illustrate both the potential for museums to use their institutional resources for Indigenous-led research and the negative impact when museum leadership retreats from meaningful partnerships with Indigenous communities. This context enhanced our appreciation of what the next two speakers, who represent tribal museums, had to say. Lorén Spears (Narragansett/Niantic), executive director of the Tomaquag Museum in Exeter, RI, spoke of the founding of Tomaquag in 1958 and its many activities today. They have exhibits and partnerships that reach out to the general public but also offer internal programs and activities for the Native community. The third speaker was Joshua Carter (Mashantucket Pequot and Narragansett), who was appointed interim director in 2021 and is now the executive director of the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center in Ledyard, CT, which opened in 1998. Carter explained that his priority is to serve the tribal community. They have an open process where any community member can suggest new ideas and programs. This fosters community engagement with the museum and leads to exciting new developments. The keynote panel reminded us that “hidden histories” become visible when Indigenous people can tell their own stories.

Presentations and hallway conversations reflected the excitement, opportunities, and challenges of bringing Indigenous histories to the fore in New England.  As Jean-Luc Pierite (Tunica-Biloxi, the board president of the North American Indian Center of Boston) observed during the final discussion on Saturday afternoon, it is important not only to look back 400 years, but to look ahead 400 years.  Together, these papers mark a fitting sequel to the 1993 proceedings and invite us to do more and better work at the intersection of Indigenous Studies and Public History.

In time, the Dublin Seminar will publish the proceedings of this watershed event. It is our privilege to be co-editing that volume, helping to bring this important scholarship to wider audiences. 

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Marla Miller—a longtime professor of History who takes great delight in having joined the UMass faculty in the same year as Alice Nash—is currently serving as President of the Dublin Seminar.

Alice Nash—a longtime professor of History who is both a fan of the Dublin Seminar and of Marla Miller—is co-editing the proceedings of the 2023 Dublin Seminar for posterity.

Notes

¹ Other much-appreciated co-sponsors included the American Antiquarian Society; the Amherst College Library; the Boston University American and New England Studies Program; and the Smith College Department of History.

² That inaugural 1976 event, which examined Puritan Gravestone Art, was hugely successful. It led to the creation of both the Dublin Seminar and the Association for Gravestone Studies, an ongoing organization whose records are preserved at the University of Massachusetts Amherst Special Collections and Archives. The Dublin Seminar can be found at https://dublin-seminar.org/. The seminar has been hosted for many years by Historic Deerfield, Inc., which also distributes the annual Proceedings. For more, see https://www.historic-deerfield.org/dublinseminar/. This discussion of the event is drawn from the author’s introduction to the conference proceedings.

₃ This idea is expressed in the title of Donna Keith Baron, J. Edward Hood, and Holly V. Izard, “They Were Here All Along: The Native American Presence in Lower-Central New England in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” The William and Mary Quarterly 53, no. 3 (July 1, 1996): 561–86. doi:10.2307/2947204.

⁴ Several contributors to the 1993 proceedings published later works that continue the historiographic theme of documenting the ongoing presence of Algonkian peoples in New England and questioning why they were “disappeared” from the literature. See Ann Marie Plane, Colonial Intimacies: Indian Marriage in Early New England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000); Colin G. Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995) and an edited volume, After King Philip’s War: Presence and Persistence in Indian New England. Reencounters with Colonialism (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1997); Kathleen Joan Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 1650-1775, Civilization of the American Indian Series: V. 259 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2009); asl well as Ives Goddard and Kathleen Joan Bragdon, Native Writings in Massachusett, Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society: V. 185 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1988); William Apess and Barry O’Connell, On Our Own Ground : The Complete Writings of William Apess, a Pequot, Native Americans of the Northeast (Amherst, MA:. University of Massachusetts Press, 1992). Kevin McBride was deep into the planning of what became the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center in Ledyard, CT, which opened in 1998; his research reflects his close engagement community members in establishing a landmark museum where academic and tribal ways of knowing were equally respected, continuing the theme of “We are still here.” As is characteristic of Dublin Seminar gatherings, the formal presentations, lunch time conversations, and new relationships during the conference have had a ripple effect that extends well beyond the printed page. The egalitarian culture of the program committee encourages submissions from younger scholars, graduate students, or independent researchers from ou side the academy, and weighs them equally with proposals from senior academics.

⁵ The full schedule of presenters and paper titles for the 2023 seminar can be found here.

Lessons in Law: Jennifer L. Nye Honored for Exemplary Teaching and Mentorship

By Alison Russell

Jennifer L. Nye, a Senior Lecturer in the Department of History, won the 2023 College Outstanding Teaching Award (COTA), in recognition of her excellence in teaching and many contributions to students in the history department, College of Humanities and Fine Arts and beyond.

Nye is committed to teaching and social justice both in and out of the classroom. She holds a law degree from Boston College Law School and has worked at Southern Arizona Legal Aid and the Arizona Center for Disability Law. “From a young age, I identified as a feminist, and I knew I wanted to use the law to protect people’s rights as the civil rights and women’s movement did,” Nye says in her teaching statement. When she joined the UMass faculty eight years ago, she envisioned using that legal experience to “demystify the law for students, empower them to be engaged citizens and even inspire a few of them to pursue careers in public interest law.”

For Nye, this vision, and the very act of teaching legal and political history, has felt more vital than ever in recent years in the face of significant challenges to the rule of law. Nye has supported students both by teaching them to think critically in the classroom and by arranging opportunities for them to get more involved. In the past three years, she has developed innovative new courses, like History 397RL: Rape Law—Gender, Race, (In)Justice, which responded to the #MeToo movement. In addition, Nye has organized panels of guest speakers – both in her classes and in her capacity as co-chair of the Five College Reproductive Health, Rights and Justice Certificate – on recent Supreme Court decisions and legal career planning, among others. 

Pictured here among the law books in the W.E.B. Du Bois Library, Theodore Bellak ’23, Evan Fournier ’23, and Honour Rhoades ’23 each nominated Nye for this award. All 3 took multiple courses with Nye and plan to enter the legal field. 

A testament to Nye’s teaching, all the students and alumni who nominated her had taken multiple classes with her. Each spoke of how she creates classroom environments that enable students to take on controversial and personal topics and to think more critically about the world around them. Evan Fournier, a senior in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, says that he has taken three of Nye’s courses because of both the important content and because of her “immense compassion and empathy” in teaching such weighty topics. 

By engaging with contemporary issues in her law and history classes, Nye challenges as well as nurtures students. Alumna Nargis Aslami ‘18, who took four classes with Nye during her time at UMass, remembers that Professor Nye encourages students to interrogate their own worldviews, holding them up to the light of historical analysis. “She teaches the history of legal movements by exposing the hard truths and outlining a clear progression in societal thinking.” Many of Nye’s students mention that the direct engagement with challenging issues like campus sexual assault or abortion inspired them to get more involved in social justice issues. 

Not only does Nye support students’ endeavors in the classroom, encouraging them and pushing them to excel, but she opens up other opportunities by sending them to conferences and helping them see a future for themselves in activism and advocacy. Between 2017 and 2020, she helped send 37 students to the Rebellious Lawyering Conference at Yale Law School, which brings together “practitioners, law students, and community activists from around the country to discuss innovative, progressive approaches to law and social change.”

“Professor Nye transformed my world as an undergrad student. Her courses and thoughtful teachings served as the foundation for my passion and pursuit of a career in reproductive justice.”

Leila Aruri ’22

Nye’s mentorship has encouraged students like Fournier and Aslami to pursue law after their time at UMass to continue their advocacy. Aslami praises Nye’s support both at UMass as a first-generation student and in transitioning to her current work at Yale Law School. Nye, Aslami says, is “a true institution and is absolutely a distinguished professor, mentor, and friend.”

The College Outstanding Teacher Award is presented based on nomination and support from colleagues and students. Both students and alumni wrote in support of Nye’s nomination and spoke to the long-term impacts of her work on their lives. As Evan Fournier says, “I can confidently say that Professor Nye has had the largest impact on both my academic and professional career aspirations out of anyone in my life.”

Reprinted with permission from an article originally published on the History Department website.

Confronting Empire: 2022-23 Feinberg Series Explores Histories of U.S. Imperialism and Anti-Imperialist Resistance

By Christian G. Appy, Jess Johnson, and Diana Sierra Becerra

The 2022–23 Feinberg Series, Confronting Empire, brought together scholars, journalists, educators, writers, community organizers, and survivors of state violence to examine global histories of U.S. imperialism and anti-imperialist resistance. Engaging an international audience of thousands, the series comprised nine public events—including lectures, panels, and a poetry reading—as well as a four-part workshop series for K–12 educators and more than two dozen linked undergraduate courses. 

Presented in collaboration with the Ellsberg Initiative for Peace and Democracy and co-sponsored by more than three dozen community and university partners, Confronting Empire traced the roots of U.S. imperialism from the conquest of North America through the creation of a formal and informal overseas empire in the late 19th century, ending in the present day. 

THE FEINBERG SERIES

The history department’s signature event series, the Feinberg Family Distinguished Lecture Series is offered every other year, with each iteration focusing on a topic of great contemporary significance with deep historical roots. Oriented toward community and student audiences, this widely celebrated event series is made possible thanks to the generosity of Kenneth R. Feinberg ’67 and associates.

Ellsberg Initiative Director Christian Appy (R) moderates the audience Q&A with Inaugural Ellsberg lecturer Azmat Khan, following her lecture, “The Human Toll of America’s Air Wars.”

The series opened in September of 2022 with a keynote conversation between Nobel Peace Prize laureate Dr. Rigoberta Menchú Tum and journalist Vincent Bevins. With Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman as moderator, together they explored the devastating consequences of U.S.-backed state terror in Central America and Southeast Asia and the path that survivors have charted for healing historical trauma. 

On the heels of the keynote, Barnard College professor and historian Manu Karuka presented “The Imperialist Roots of the U.S.A.,” which traced the evolution of U.S. imperialism from the conquest of North America to the creation of an overseas empire by the close of the 19th century. Drawing on the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, Karuka offered a definition of imperialism and made the case that it is central to understanding and overcoming the major crises of our moment, including climate change, poverty, and the looming threat of nuclear war. 

The Asia-Pacific region has been a major site for the development and maintenance of U.S. empire. In November, scholars and journalists Moon-Ho Jung, Nerissa S. Balce, and Brian Hioe explored this history, including its racist roots, the revolutionary struggles it engendered, and the profound consequences for people in Asia, the Pacific, and the United States today. With moderator Sigrid Schmalzer, they urged us all to understand that despite the oft-repeated goal of promoting democracy, U.S. empire has consistently produced state repression and violence. 

Later in the month, the Feinberg Series hosted the inaugural Ellsberg Lecture, an event that launched the Ellsberg Initiative for Peace and Democracy. The lecture, introduced by Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, was given by Azmat Khan, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter for the New York Times. Her talk, “The Human Toll of America’s Air Wars,” offered evidence that despite U.S. military and government claims that its air wars were precise, even surgical, drone attacks and bombing strikes in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria routinely caused significant civilian casualties. 

A railroad company executive stands on railroad ties in 1866. For more on 19th century U.S. empire, including the role of the rail system, listen to Manu Karuka’s lecture.

Rounding out the fall semester, the “Vietnam Era Antiwar Movement” panel discussion analyzed the impact of the most vibrant, diverse, and sustained anti-war movement in U.S. history. Moderated by filmmaker Judith Ehrlich, this panel of scholar activists featured Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, historians Nguyet Nguyen and Carolyn Eisenberg, and veteran and poet W. D. Ehrhart. Presenters gave special attention to the ways the anti-war movement inhibited some of President Richard Nixon’s plans to escalate the war even more. 

From joining with Indigenous peoples to contest European settlement to protesting the annexation of foreign territories, African Americans have fostered a vibrant and complex Black radical tradition opposed to U.S. imperialism. In the first talk of the 2023 spring semester, “None of Us Is Free Unless All Are Free,” public intellectual Bill Fletcher Jr. sketched a long trajectory of Black anti-imperialism from the 16th century to the present and offered a critical historical analysis of this tradition, including its inherent contradictions. Organized by the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies, this event was the 2023 James Baldwin Lecture, a biennial lecture created by history department alumnus Allen J. Davis ’68. 

On the eve of International Women’s Day, the series hosted “Feminists against Empire,” a panel of Latin American feminists exploring the relationship between patriarchy and U.S. imperialism. Focusing on the fatal impacts of U.S. sanctions, Cuban and Venezuelan journalists and community organizers Liz Oliva Fernández and Alejandra Laprea outlined how U.S. economic warfare greatly intensifies the reproductive labor of women and exacerbates existing inequalities in those societies. Alongside moderator Diana Sierra Becerra, they called for U.S. movements to link domestic and foreign policy and build cross-border solidarity. 

Later in March, the series marked the 20th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq with “Resisting Imperial Memory,” an international panel exploring the Iraqi experience of the invasion and occupation. This group of U.S. and Iraqi scholars, veterans, journalists, and activists (Kali Rubaii, Dave Inder Comar, Salman Khairalla, Nazli Tarzi, and Ross Caputi) discussed not just the devastating human and environmental toll of the conflict but also grassroots efforts to seek restorative justice. 

Bill Fletcher Jr. with correspondence between W.E.B. Du Bois and his great-grandfather, William Stanley Braithwaite, uncovered at UMass’s Special Collections and University Archives following his lecture on Black anti-imperialism.

The capstone event, “The Poetry of War and Resistance,” featured four distinguished, award-winning poets—Carolyn Forché, Yusef Komunyakaa, Dunya Mikhail, and Ocean Vuong—who read their works and shared the moral, political, and literary challenges of writing about war and its human consequences. With moderator and poet Ru Freeman, the panelists discussed the complex relationship between art, citizenship, and political commitment. 

Accompanying the lectures was a four-part yearlong workshop series for K–12 educators. Facilitated by high school teacher Brian Brown and historian Alison Russell, the workshops supported teachers in translating the themes of the lectures—aimed primarily at an adult community audience—into lesson plans for K–12 students. At the university level, the series was dynamically integrated into more than two dozen courses across our campus and the Five Colleges, including the series’ four official courses, which together enrolled hundreds of students. 

The historical issues and evidence presented by this series could not be more timely and relevant as the United States continues to assert its global power through private and public institutions of every kind. The U.S. military alone maintains more than 750 bases on foreign soil, and the country spends as much each year on its military as the next nine most heavily armed countries combined. This year’s Feinberg Series challenged audiences to consider how these priorities came to be and to imagine better alternatives for the future. 

We invite you to join us. Recordings of the Feinberg Series events are available on the series website: www.umass.edu/feinberg

Christian G. Appy is Professor of History and Director of the Ellsberg Initiative for Peace and Democracy at UMass Amherst. Jess Johnson is Director of Outreach and Community Engagement in the UMass Amherst History Department. Diana Sierra Becerra is Assistant Professor of History at UMass Amherst. Together, they were the co-chairs of the 2022-23 Feinberg Series. They thank the large team of students, staff and faculty who collaborated with them in planning and implementing the series, including Stefanie Austin, Richard T. Chu, Ross Caputi, Tom Kelleher, Toussaint Losier, María Portilla Moya, Maya González ’23MA, Traci Parker, Alison Russell, and Sigrid Schmalzer.

Biography Lab 2023: A Forum on Craft

By Deborah B. Kallman, PhD Candidate

For anyone contemplating writing a biography, I recommend checking out the Biographers’ International Organization (BIO) and their annual “BIO Lab,” a one-day conference with speakers, networking, and practical instruction. BIO and the tips I learned at the lab proved crucial to my dissertation—a biography of Hazel Hammond Albertson (1883 – 1969).  Albertson owned and operated a farm in West Newbury, Massachusetts from 1909 until her death in 1969, and my project seeks to craft a narrative of her life and to place her and her farm in the broader context of women’s and gender history and American history. 

“Chestnut Hill Farmhouse & Barn” from the Berkenbush Family Collection.

The lab, held online on January 21st, was both timely and informative to my research as I develop subjects, sift through a mountain of letters and other primary sources in my possession, and make mindful choices from these sources as I write the narrative of Albertson’s life.  The Biography Lab provided several important insights that will inform my work.  Moreover, I formed connections with other biographers and the question-and-answer periods at the end of each session illuminated many additional tips and tricks that I will apply to my own research.

Dame Hermione Lee opened the lab with the plenary address, “A Biographer’s Choices.”  The author of biographies of Virginia Woolf (1996), Edith Wharton (2006), Penelope Fitzgerald (2013) and Tom Stoppard (2020), Lee presented her “ABCs” for writing biographies, many of which, especially E, F, J, P and R, resonated with me. “E” is “elephants in the room,” which Lee stresses are important to deal with, warning the audience that they will come back to bite you if you ignore them. “F” stands for “fear,” which she advised the assembly is part of the biographical process, stating “it’s what you do with fear that counts.”  Fear can take many forms.  For example, in her biography of Woolf, she was not the first scholar to approach Woolf’s living friends and relatives.  She had to prove her credentials and convince them to speak to yet another biographer. On the letter “J” – “jokes” — Lee advised the attendees to be true to the voice of their subject and not to be too solemn.  She also stressed the importance of place (“P”) and the need to talk to any living relatives (“R”) of your subject, adding that biographers must talk to the relatives and gain their trust while being mindful that they may very well be protective of the subject.

Hazel on the porch in her white bloomer suit “airing” her hair, from the Berkenbush Family Collection.

In his session “Curating Context:  How to Angle for a Subject’s Unwritten Voice from Various Subjects,” Eric K. Washington discussed various methodologies he uses to find the unwritten voices of his protagonists.  The author of Manhattanville:  Old Heart of West Harlem and Boss of the Grips:  The Life of James H. Williams and the Red Caps of Grand Central Terminal, Washington’s work centers around subjects who left little written documentation behind.  Washington discussed his methods for recovering their voices, exploring how sources such as vital records, military records, church records, employment records, census data, and cemetery records can be used to triangulate and reconstruct key life moments from the hidden voices of biographical subjects. 

T. J. Stiles, a double Pulitzer Prize winner for Custer’s Trial:  A Life on the Frontiers of New America and The First Tycoon:  The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt, discussed strategies for developing well-rounded subjects in his session, “It’s a Personal Matter:  Characters and their Uses.” He does this by creating a visual sense of the person and place, finding moments of change, seeking out contradictions, and establishing their interests, nature, and desires.  Stiles emphasized that the biographer must be careful not to “over personalize” the subject, meaning that there should remain a certain amount of detachment.  He also urged prospective authors to create a sense of honesty with the reader and be prepared to have your work challenged.

Caroline Fraser concluded the day with a session on incorporating history into biographies.  Fraser’s book Prairie Fires:  The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder was the winner of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for biography. In her talk, “Filling in the Blanks:  How to Deploy History in All Kinds of Biographies,” Fraser emphasized the importance of the “wide shot” which provides historical context and builds texture into biographies of a single person.  Fraser emphasized that the historical context must be relevant and is an opportunity to demonstrate how the life of the protagonist fits into the wider perspective of historical events.

“Hazel Hammond,” circa 1901

The forum was well-timed to my own research, and I learned much from this conference. For example, Lee’s comments are particularly relevant to my work.  Many of Albertson’s relatives are still alive and have houses on the farm’s land or live in the farmhouse. I have conducted personal interviews with family members, which are crucial in understanding their interaction with Albertson and daily life at the Farm.  I have also uncovered elephants in the room and must deal with these as I continue researching and writing. 

I have numerous written primary sources at my disposal.  Among these are letters sent to and from Albertson, scanned copies of the farm journals, and her diaries.  Washington’s suggestion of triangulating information encourages me to extend my work to vital records as well.  For example, I discovered that when Albertson married her husband, her mother witnessed the ceremony, as evidenced by her name on the marriage certificate.  I must ask, where was her father, to whom she was very close?

Finally, I will keep in mind the advice Stiles and Fraser dispensed to the attendees and be mindful of the selections and quotes that I incorporate.  I must provide a sense of Albertson’s personality, the way she spoke and wrote, and her interests—without reifying her. Further, I must provide historical context for the period in which she lived. 

My course work at UMass Amherst and the guidance from my advisors have helped me to develop the analytical tools and historiographical background required to write the dissertation, but the craft of life-writing is an old one.  Having an organization that serves writers of biography and offers opportunities to learn from the craft’s leading practitioners will be crucial to my work.

Debbie Kallman holding a fraction of the over 4,000 letters in the Hazel Albertson Collection.