Heidi Gengenbach – Page 17 – Public History at UMass Boston

June 30, 2016Heidi Gengenbach No Comments

Beloved UMass Boston Professor and Scholar Passes Away

We mourn the loss of Professor Emeritus James R. Green, who passed away in Boston on June 23 after nearly two years struggling with complications of leukemia.

James Green, Professor Emeritus of History, College of Liberal Arts — Jim Green, Professor Emeritus of History, College of Liberal Arts, UMB.

Jim Green was a prolific scholar and beloved teacher. One student commented:

“Jim Green was my favorite teacher. He inspired us to read, understand and learn from workers’ history. Most of all he showed us he cared about us as students. He was a gift to working people!”

Cover of The Devil is Here in These Hills: West Virginia’s Coal Miners and Their Battle for Freedom (2015).

His two most recent books received wide acclaim: Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement and the Bombing that Divided Gilded Age America (2006) and The Devil is Here in These Hills: West Virginia’s Coal Miners and Their Battle for Freedom (2015). The latter was the basis for an “American Experience” PBS program, The Mine Wars, broadcast on January 26, 2016; four million viewers tuned in.

A prominent member of a wave of historians who transformed labor history in the 1970s and 1980s, Jim Green deeply influenced the broader field of social history. In 2010, Jim was named Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. Indeed, he was the recipient of many awards, including in April of this year the Labor and Working Class History Association’s Award for Distinguished Service. The text of the award reads in part: “In seven books, many articles, films, exhibits, local tour guides, and other cutting-edge labor education and public history projects, Professor Green has opened new avenues of scholarly inquiry and pioneered new ways to communicate historical narratives to broad audiences.”

Jim received his doctorate in history from Yale University, where he studied with C. Vann Woodward, who proved a model for writing history with a purpose. Jim came to UMB’s College of Public and Community Service (CPCS) in 1977. At CPCS he developed the Labor Studies Program, served as Acting Dean for a year, and held several other positions of academic leadership. In 2006, he joined the Department of History in the College of Liberal Arts, where he founded and directed the Public History Graduate Track, from 2009 until his retirement in 2014.

Not only were Jim’s publications distinguished by their scholarly rigor and depth of analysis, but, as one colleague put it: “Reading his books was like reading novels. He was a marvelous story teller.” Jim worked hard to be that story teller, but he was fundamentally committed to helping people tell their own histories. Jim worked to bring historical scholarship to audiences outside the academy, and democratize the writing and telling of history in both academic scholarship and public venues. His work across multiple contexts—as university teacher, historian of the labor movement, participant in neighborhood history projects, editor and contributor for the journal Radical America, co-founder of Massachusetts History Workshops, President of the Labor and Working Class History Association (LAWCHA), and partner and collaborator on documentary films–Jim’s personal and professional commitments serve as models for public historians and indeed, all publicly engaged scholarship. Jim tells his own story eloquently in his 2000 publication, Taking History to Heart: The Power of the Past in Building Social Movements.

Jim’s work as a scholar was matched by his devotion to his teaching. Students over the years viewed his courses as life-changing. One former student commented: “Jim Green was my favorite teacher. He inspired us to read, understand and learn from workers’ history. Most of all he showed us he cared about us as students. He was a gift to working people!”

In 2014, Jim Green was interviewed at the UMass Boston Mass. Memories Road Show about his work at UMass Boston and as part of union activities on campus.

In 2011, he donated his papers to University Archives & Special Collections. This collection details his career and activist history from 1964 to 2010. View the finding aid for the James Green papers here.

Jim Green is survived by his wife, Janet Grogan; their son, Nicholas Green of Somerville; his daughter by an earlier marriage, Amanda Green of Cambridge; his former wife, Carol McLaughlin; his mother, Mary Kaye Green; and three siblings and several nieces and nephews.

The family asks that people wishing to honor Jim’s memory to make a contribution either to nurses at the bone marrow transplant ward on Feldberg 7 at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center—send to BI Deaconess Medical Center, Office of Development, 330 Brookline Avenue-OV, Boston, MA 02215, with “James Green/Nursing General Fund” on the memo; or to the “James Green Scholarship in Labor Studies,” and send to University Advancement, UMass Boston, 100 Morrissey Blvd., Boston, MA 02125.

An open house will be held at 5 p.m., Thursday, June 30, in Dr. Green’s Somerville home (72 Mt. Vernon St.). A larger, public memorial gathering will be announced for later in the year.

A great deal more information about Jim can be found at http://jamesgreenworks.com/ obituaries appear in the Boston Globe and New York Times.

May 20, 2016Heidi Gengenbach No Comments

Digging Into Digital Preservation & Outreach at Boston City Archives

By: Lauren Prescott

This semester I completed a digital archives internship at Boston City Archives with archivist Marta Crilly. Established in 1988, in an old school building in Hyde Park, the archives (now located in spacious location in West Roxbury), holds documentation of the history of Boston from the 17th century to present. Some notable collections in the archive include documentation of Boston’s role in the Civil War, immigration records, city council records, and Boston Public Schools (BPS) desegregation records. My interest in digital archives, as well as my experience in History 630, the digital archives class working with Boston Public Schools’ desegregation records, made this internship a perfect fit for me.

Desegregation

0405004-001-004-001 — A report from the Massachusetts State Board of Education on the racial imbalance in schools, circa 1965.

In 1961, the NAACP met with the Boston School Committee in an attempt to get the committee to acknowledge the racial imbalance of Boston Public Schools. The School Committee refused to acknowledge the presence of segregation for over a decade. In the 1971-1972 school year, enrollment in the public schools totaled 61 percent white, 32 percent black, and other minorities comprised the remaining 7 percent. However, 84 percent of the white students attended schools that were more than 80 percent white, and 62 percent of the black pupils attended schools that were more than 70 percent black. Also, during this time, at least 80 percent of Boston’s schools were segregated.[1]

Eventually, the NAACP filed a lawsuit in Federal district court in 1972, known as Morgan vs. Hennigan. The case came before Judge Wendell Arthur Garrity Jr., who made his decision on June 21, 1974. He found that “racial segregation permeates schools in all areas of the city, all grade levels, and all types of schools.”[2] The court ordered that the school committee immediately implement a desegregation plan for its schools. Garrity’s decision met with a myriad of responses from hostility and protest to submission and acceptance. Parents, teachers, politicians, and even students voiced their opinion in various ways; many sent heartfelt letters to Judge Garrity and Mayor Kevin White.*

Digital Preservation

0245001-003-015-020-page-001 — A letter sent to Mayor Kevin White urging him to ask Senator Barry Goldwater for help regarding desegregation and busing.

In the digital age, archivists face challenges of acquiring and preserving electronically generated records. In addition to this, archives are constantly under pressure to make their collections more accessible, through online finding aids or digitizing collections.[3] Some repositories use Institutional Repositories (IRs) for “collecting, preserving, and disseminating the intellectual output of an institution” in digital form.[4] Boston City Archives has recently begun using Preservica to keep their digital files safe and share content with the public. Preservica does not necessarily constitute an institutional repository; but, as digital preservation software, it keeps digital files safe and accessible for institutions. Preservica contains Open Archival Information System (OAIS)-compliant workflows for “ingest, data management, storage, access, administration and preservation…”[5] In addition, Preservica allows institutions to share this digitized content with the public.

Desegregation Records

For my internship, I began the process of digitizing the Boston City Archive’s desegregation records. Because the archive contains a plethora of desegregation records spread through numerous collections, I was not able to digitize everything. This semester I worked with the School Committee Secretary Files, the Mayor John F. Collins Records and the Kevin White Papers. Not every single document can be digitized, so I was responsible for choosing records that are important to understanding the desegregation of Boston public schools. In some cases, I digitized only a few documents in one box, and in others I was digitizing entire folders.

An important part of the internship involved writing metadata. Metadata is “data about data” and provides descriptive language about a record, “such as proper names, dates, places, type, technical information, and rights.”[6] Metadata constitutes a critically important piece of digitization; without it, digital objects would prove inaccessible and futile over time. If archives presented digitized images without identifiable information, researchers could not, with certainty, understand the context surrounding the document’s content!

I wrote metadata for each document and included information such as title, unique identifier, date created, creator, city, neighborhood, description, collection name and number, box and folder location, type, language, access condition and Library of Congress subject headings (LCSH). Inputting the metadata was easier than expected, thanks to last spring’s Digital Archives class.

0245001-002-024-008-page-001 — An angry letter sent to Mayor Kevin White from a resident of South Boston who does not believe that the mayor should have “interfered” with the School Committee. The letter has been redacted.

Redaction of sensitive or private information constituted another major component of the internship. I primarily redacted letters written to Mayor John F. Collins and Mayor Kevin H. White regarding desegregation of Boston Public Schools. John F. Collins served as Boston’s mayor from 1960 until 1968. While he played no official role in the desegregation of Boston Public Schools or the subsequent busing of students in the early 1970s, Mayor Collins still dealt with the problem of racial imbalance during his term. Since many of the letters expressed hostile and, in some cases, racist views, the archivist decided to redact the names and contact information of the authors. Documents written by politicians, federal and local government employees and other public figures did not require redacting.

The majority of the documents I digitized came from the Kevin H. White Papers. Kevin White served as the mayor of Boston from 1968 through 1984; this period spanned the desegregation of public schools. Documents digitized from this collection included police logs sent the mayor’s office, departmental communications, statements from the mayor and a plethora of letters, both against and in support of the mayor.

I worked with the Kevin H. White papers last semester when I created an online exhibit for class, so I was familiar with the collection; but, I still felt surprised by some of the letters I read this semester. Many of the letters Mayor White received in the 1970s were hostile and racist. Mayor White did not just receive letters from angry Boston parents, he also received letters from people in the South who had already experienced desegregation in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as several letters from other countries.

IMG_20160506_113833 — Hand-drawn covers containing letters from fourth and fifth grade students at the Maurice J. Tobin School in Roxbury.

Letters written by children were my favorite documents.

Students of all ages had opinions of their own and even offered suggestions to Mayor White. Click here to learn more about students’ responses to desegregation and read a sampling of letters written by students at the time. Letters poured in to Mayor White’s office from students in Boston and all over the country. Most students were against busing, but mainly because they were afraid of potential violence. I digitized some letters from the advanced fourth and fifth grade classes at the Maurice J. Tobin School in Roxbury. The students were worried that the administration would remove advanced classes during Phase II of desegregation and wrote to Mayor White to express their concerns.

My internship at Boston City Archives was one of the best I have had throughout my academic career. Working directly with professionals in the field on an important project is gratifying. The purpose of the project was two-fold: digitally preserve documents relating to an important time in Boston’s history, and to share these desegregation documents with a wider audience. Not everyone can go to an archive and spend time doing research. The project to digitize Boston City Archive’s desegregation records is not over. I have digitized only a portion of the records and others will continue where I left off.

_________________________________________________________________

*For more information about the letters sent to Mayor Kevin White, see the finding aid to: the Mayor Kevin H. White records, 1929-1999 (Bulk, 1968-1983) at Boston City Archives; to learn more about the the letters sent to Judge Garrity, see the finding aid for the Papers on the Boston Schools Desegregation Case 1972-1997 at UMass Boston’s University Archives and Special Collections, in the Joseph P. Healey Library. This collection contains the chambers papers of Judge W. Arthur Garrity, Jr.

References

[1] School Desegregation in Boston: A Staff Report Prepared for the Hearing of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in Boston, Massachusetts, June 1975. Washington: Commission, 1975, 20.
[2] Ibid., 71.
[3] Christina Zamon. The Lone Arranger: Succeeding in a Small Repository. Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2012, 39.
[4] Ibid., 45
[5] “Preservica.” How Preservica Works. Accessed May 13, 2016. http://preservica.com/preservica-works/.
[6] The Lone Arranger, 47.

May 4, 2016Heidi Gengenbach No Comments

Mass History Conference – June 13, 2016

The annual Mass History Conference, presented by Mass Humanities and its partner organizations, is a great one-day program that features opportunities for learning, networking, and collaboration with a wide range of history professionals, students, and advocates. This year’s conference will take place on Monday, June 13, at its traditional location at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA. Organizers have chosen the fascinating theme of Putting History on the Map Together: In Town, County, and Across the Commonwealth. Following a keynote address by Steve Bromage, Executive Director of the Maine Historical Society and the Maine Memory Network, attendees will have the opportunity to attend roundtables and workshops on topics including (but not limited to):

– From Google Drive to Wikispaces: Technology to Support Collaboration

– Creating Tours to Enhance Community Engagement

– Digital Tools for Sharing Your Collections

– Find the Money! [how to navigate the grant-writing process]

– History for and with Kids and Schools

– Setting Up an Archives

– Exhibit Design – Working with Designers: Building Partnerships with Lasting Value

Panelists and workshop leaders come from a variety of institutions, including historical societies, university archives and special collections, university public history and archives programs, museums, conservation centers, and advocacy groups. This conference is sure to be beneficial to all who attend, whether you are a student, someone working in the field, someone looking to learn more about how to “do” history, or all of the above. To register and to view the full program, visit the conference website here.

March 25, 2016Heidi Gengenbach No Comments

Books & Maps & Photos, Oh My! An Afternoon at the NEDCC

Amanda Maloney showing a a rare megalethoscope print and discussing the preservation process. — Graduate students in the Archives program learning about megalethoscopes from Amanda Maloney, Associate Photograph and Paper Conservator, at NEDCC (left).

By: Corinne Zaczek Bermon

Recently, graduate students in “Archival Methods and Practices,” a history course taught by professor Marilyn Morgan, entered the exciting world of conservation and preservation at the New England Document Conservation Center (NEDCC). Located in Andover, MA, the NEDCC, the premier center for conservation, provides treatment for rare books, oversized maps, photographs, historic documents, scrapbooks, illuminated manuscripts, audio recordings, movings images, and other rarer formats. Working with archival repositories, museums, and individuals, NEDCC aims to preserve records in their original format. They save tangible pieces of history.

Upon our arrival, Julie Martin, Marketing and Public Relations Manager, and Eva Grizzard, Preservation Specialist, provided a warm and informative introduction to the NEDCC and led us to the impressive main work laboratory. The vast room held several enormous tables at which conservators painstakingly attended to various projects.

While the conservators concentrated on their work, Michael Lee, the Director of Paper and Photograph Conservation, discussed the processes involved in paper conservation and explained the vital importance that advanced knowledge of chemistry and manual dexterity play in conservation work. He expertly described one process that used water baths to refresh the cellulose of delicate paper advertisements.

Michael Lee explaining paper conservation. — Director of Paper and Photograph Conservation Michael Lee (left) explains that paper conservation requires advanced knowledge of chemistry and manual dexterity to Lauren Prescott, Paige Kinder, Rebecca Carpenter, Laura Kintz, Connor Anderson, Corinne Bermon, Patty Bruttomesso, and Dorothy Clark.

Mary Patrick Bogan, Director of Book Conservation, displayed books, scrapbooks, and illuminated manuscripts in various states of deterioration. She described some treatments in book conservation including stabilizing the bindings, boards, and spines of books.

NEDCC_books — Mary Patrick Bogan explains how to treat an early 20th century scrapbook to Maryrose Grossman, Connor Anderson, Lauren Prescott, Laura Kintz, and Paige Kinder.

As she highlighted the difference between conservation and restoration, she explained that, as a conservationist, her primary goal entailed preserving the books to prevent further damage.

Amanda Maloney, Associate Photograph and Paper Conservator, discussed the conservation of megalethoscope prints, a rare style of photography invented by Carlo Ponti between 1861 and 1862. Megalethoscopes used special translucent albumen photographs that were colored, pierced, and backlit from an internal source to create dramatic effects. Maloney demonstrated how she preserved the albumen prints and their support structures.

In NEDCC’s digital imaging area, Terrance D’Ambrosio, Director of Imaging Services, and David Joyall, Senior Photographer, demonstrated the significance of digital photography in preserving oversized items. Using stationary overhead digital cameras enabled them to photograph pieces of extensive works, such as the wall-sized historic map below. They then virtually stitched together the digital images to recreate a readable map online.

NEDCC_maps — Terrance D’Ambrosia (left) and David Joyall demonstrate to Corinne Bermon and Dorothy Clark how digital photography can be used to preserve oversized items such as this extensive map.

Lastly, Julie Martin introduced a fascinating machine: IRENE (Image, Reconstruct, Erase Noise, Etc.) that operates within NEDCC’s audio preservation center. Physicist Carl Haber won the MacArthur Genius Award for inventing this process in which cameras photograph the grooves in fragile or decayed sound recordings. Then, using software that knits those digital images together, the IRENE creates an unblemished image file and reconstructs the sound recording by converting the images into an audio file.

Julie Martin, Marketing and Public Relations Manager, explains the functioning of IRENE.

Haber’s IRENE is revolutionizing audio preservation. Sound recordings on older formats, such as wax cylinders or lacquer discs, are too delicate to be played back with traditional equipment. Without the non-invasion method of preservation that IRENE provides, unique voices, such as Alexander Graham Bell, and early obscure recordings of artists, like Woody Guthrie, would be lost forever. You can read more about NEDCC’s work with IRENE on their blog or listen to some digitized recordings NPR.

Maryrose Grossman, Patty Brutomesso, Corinne Bermon, Lauren Prescott, Laura Kintz, Connor Anderson, Paige Kinder, Marilyn Morgan (professor), Dorothy Clark, and Rebecca Carpenter at NEDCC.

Our archives class walked away from the NEDCC fascinated by the different facets of preservation work and intrigued by the use of modern science to preserve our history.

February 22, 2016Heidi Gengenbach No Comments

Legacy in the Archives: Mayor Menino’s Office of Neighborhood Services

By: Ashley Kennedy-MacDougall

I began my internship at the City of Boston Archives in September 2015 under the direction of Marta Crilly, Archivist for Reference and Outreach. I was able to work on the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Services series from the collection of Mayor Thomas Menino. Boston’s Mayor Thomas Menino (December 27, 1942 – October 30, 2014) served from 1993-2014, and emphasized the importance of neighborhood development and city services to the neighborhoods such as trash removal, plowing, street sweeping, pothole repair. The Office of Neighborhood Services (ONS) was formed to ensure the needs of city constituents were heard and addressed. Each neighborhood of Boston was assigned a coordinator who was involved with addressing and aiding to resolve various types of constituent issues that often required coordination with other city departments such as the Inspectional Services Department and the Zoning Board of Appeals. The coordinators were also involved in the local neighborhood associations and other civic organizations of their area.

The records in this series consisted of paper materials collected by the neighborhoods’ ONS coordinators and included correspondence, meeting notes, minutes, and event plans, as well as materials from various city departments including the Boston Transportation Department, Boston Inspectional Services Department, Boston Conservation Commission, Boston Landmark Commission, and the Boston Redevelopment Authority. The correspondence, fliers, and meeting notes of various neighborhood associations were also included. The dates of the materials ranged from 1987 to 2013, with the bulk of the material falling between 1995-2013.

As Marta had explained to me when I began, some of the materials had been collected directly from the current coordinators’ desks at the end of Mayor Menino’s administration, so the level of organization would vary from box to box. The first order of business was to survey the materials and identify which neighborhood or coordinators they belonged to. This was not too difficult to discern because there were personal notes written on the coordinators’ personal letterhead intermingled with the records. I began processing the materials, which consisted of removing paperclips, flattening brochures or folded papers, re-foldering when needed, flagging for sensitive materials, photographs, or newspaper, and weeding duplicates or unneeded materials such as the coordinators’ handwritten notes and call sheets.

The processing experience differed for each coordinator’s materials – some coordinators were organized and had assembled their materials in labelled folders, other boxes contained piles of unfoldered, loose documents or unlabeled hanging folders. The boxes containing hanging folders required complete re-foldering and dating of the folders, and the boxes of loose materials required me to find an order in the materials and create folder titles and dates. While these materials required the most time to process, having to closely read and inspect the documents was especially interesting as it revealed how local government interacted with its constituents and vice versa.

Figure 1 – Loose materials prior to processing

Once I had completed processing all the neighborhoods’ materials, as well series of street sweeping records, Zoning Board of Appeal records, and architectural plans, all of the boxes were brought out so that I could arrange them in alphabetical order by neighborhood, consolidate neighborhood materials together, and incorporate 7 boxes of previously processed materials from South Boston and Charlestown. This organizing was challenging because there was some overlap in neighborhoods and coordinators, and when there was more than one coordinator over the 18 year span I separated the materials where I could, but this was not always possible. Once the boxes were in order, I began condensing them, pulling materials from the next box into boxes that were not full. I then numbered them, incorporating the previously processed boxes, for a total of 30 boxes, not including the three boxes of materials that were pulled for destruction.

The next step was to enter the folders into Archives Space. This was my first experience with this software, but it was very easy to learn. I would start a neighborhood by creating a subseries which was named after the neighborhood, and assign a date range. The folders titles and date ranges were then entered under their neighborhood. This process also varied from box to box, as the folders I had made were already dated and were much faster to enter then the folders I had to date as I was entering. After entering the folder information I had to go back to each folder to assign it a location in the records room because unfortunately this info wasn’t able to be entered with the initial folder information, so that added time to the process as well. I also created a scope and contents note to the series, which gave an overview of the types of materials contained within the series.

I really enjoyed my experience at the City of Boston Archives. Getting hands on experience is so essential for an archives student because there are some experiences that can’t be relayed through text books. While sorting through the records when I first began was intimidating, after becoming familiar with the materials and the processing experience, I gained confidence in my abilities and knowledge of the series. In time I was able to date folders, pull materials for destruction, and organize the materials into folders with confidence. Gaining experience with the Archives Space software was also important and less difficult than I would have imagined.

I also learned a lot about Boston, local government, and Mayor Menino’s administration. Through these records, Menino’s legacy as a mayor who was dedicated to the growth and improvement of his city and its neighborhoods is reflected. One of the reasons I became interested in archives is the opportunity to learn something new every day, and this experience reinforced that.