From the Field – Page 4 – Public History at UMass Boston

June 1, 2017Heidi Gengenbach No Comments

Putting Public History Into Practice: The Industrial School for Girls

By: Sarah K. Black

When I entered the public history graduate program at UMass Boston, my experience in the field of history was strictly academic. One can only imagine how anxious I felt when I received the syllabus for HST 625, Interpreting History in Public: Approaches to Public History Practice. Under the instruction of Professor Jane Becker and in partnership with Joe Bagley at the Boston City Archaeology Program, my colleagues and I were tasked with uncovering the history of those who lived and worked at the Dorchester Industrial School for Girls (ISFG) during the 1860s and delivering those stories to the public in a way that was both appealing and accessible.

ISFG map — Map depicting the Dorchester Industrial School for Girls, 1889.

The ISFG was established in 1853 by several women who sought to educate and train destitute young girls in the field of domestic service. Once deemed ready by the staff, the girls would be placed in homes to work as servants. Our class was required to connect our biographical sketches with artifacts retrieved during Bagley’s excavation of the site in Summer 2015, and construct a website to ensure our interpretations could reach the widest possible audience. I was extremely intimidated by the project because, unlike writing a paper, we were working with a client (Bagley) and producing a tangible product. Who knew that the ISFG project would become the most exciting, informative, and meaningful experience of my entire academic career.

There were two main phases of the project—the first of which required each of us to conduct extensive biographical research on one staff member and one student. But how do we construct narratives for women who spent much of their lives on the fringes of society? And what does the middle ground of meticulous research and writing for a popular audience look like? These were just a few of the many questions we had to grapple with when we began producing these histories. We had to learn how to effectively weave facts and relevant context into a story that was both informative and accurate, as well as include elements that readers could connect with.

Hasson card — Record of Margaret Hasson, an ISFG student who later became “inmate #13430” at Bridgewater Almshouse. Courtesy of the Massachusetts State Archives. Photograph by author.

Like several of my classmates, the beginning of my research was defined by countless hours working with genealogy sites and other online resources. Once we made it through the initial frustration of uncovering subjects so elusive in the historical record, we found that each had a unique and captivating story to tell. Some narratives featured immersive details of mischief, international travel, and death, while others concluded with more questions than they started with.

While conducting my research, I was fortunate enough to travel to the American Baptist Historical Society, located at Mercer University in Atlanta. There I found a collection of letters written by the ISFG matron, Mary S. Daüble, while she served as a missionary in India. Whether working as a missionary in India or a matron at multiple institutions, Mary devoted her life to education and religious teachings. After some intensive genealogical investigation, I was able to shed light on Daüble’s life and experiences. I even located a blueprint of her home and added her to my own family tree on ancestry.com.

Blueprint of Mary Daüble's house. — Blueprint of Mary Daüble and her husband’s house. Courtesy of the American Baptist Historical Society. Photograph by author.

The story of Margaret (Maggie) Hasson was quite different. An Irish orphan who entered the institution at just 8 years old, Maggie found herself placed as a domestic servant in 10 different homes between 1860 and 1864. Mischievous to say the least, she ran away several times and even eloped with an African American Civil War soldier. After a police officer located and returned Hasson to the Industrial School for Girls, the school sent her to the Bridgewater Almshouse.

The second phase of the project was centered on group work. Our class was divided into three groups: website design and introduction, social media and marketing, and annotated transcription the ISFG’s 1860 annual report. As a member of the introduction group, I was responsible for contributing to the overall design of the website and drafting the text for the site’s landing pages.

Once again, we were met with challenges: How do we create an interface that is both informative yet engaging? How can we stand out against the plethora of webpages that characterize the digital age in which we live? Just as it was difficult to condense hours of biographical research into 1000-word narratives, our team struggled with determining what information was essential for each of the site’s main pages. These sections had to be brief enough to capture and maintain the reader’s interest, but also paint the fullest possible picture of the school, the archaeological dig, and the project.

This experience gave my peers and me the opportunity to develop and improve skills in biographical research and historical interpretation in a digital age. We also learned the value of collaboration—not only with one another, but also with our professor, our client, and other cultural institutions. And finally, the project prompted us to retrieve voices that may have otherwise remained silent, gave us the chance to tell history from the bottom-up, and helped us to see the extraordinary value in uncovering the “ordinary.” The ISFG project proved to be the perfect introduction to turning public history theory into practice.

Sarah K. Black is earning her M.A. in History with a specialization in Public History. She currently also works as an editorial assistant for The New England Quarterly.

May 4, 2017Heidi Gengenbach No Comments

In the News: Public History Program Helps Dorchester Uncover Its Past

UMass Boston News featured a story about the exciting work that our Public History program has undertaken this spring. Text from the following article was written by UMass Boston News writer, Anna Fisher-Pinkert.

When most people think of Boston history, the images that come to mind are the Old North Church, the brownstones of Beacon Hill, or the Old South Meeting House. UMass Boston history professors and students are working to expand our knowledge and understanding of the history right in the university’s own Dorchester neighborhood through two new projects.

“Building a People’s History of Dorchester.” a community event that occurred in April.

On April 22, Jane Becker, internship coordinator and history lecturer, and Monica Pelayo, assistant professor of history and director of the public history master’s program, collaborated with John McColgan, Archivist, Boston City Archives, to host “Building a People’s History of Dorchester” at the Dorchester Historical Society. The event was designed to encourage current and former Dorchester residents to take part in telling the story of their neighborhood.

Approximately 30 people attended this initial meeting, and contributed ideas for building a timeline of Dorchester history. For Pelayo and Becker, this is just the beginning of a conversation about how to help the community tap into their own history.

“What’s important about this process is that it comes from the bottom up, not from the top down,” Pelayo said.

She added that people don’t always realize that their family photos, documents, or keepsakes are potential historical resources for their communities. Pelayo and Becker plan to have more events in the future to encourage individuals and community organizations to participate in the project.

UMass Boston public history master’s students are also involved in revealing a piece of Dorchester’s history. This semester, students partnered with city archaeologist and UMass Boston alum Joe Bagley to tell the stories of women and girls who lived and worked at the Industrial School for Girls in the 1860s. The school was founded in the 1850s to train poor girls to work as domestic servants.

Online exhibit documenting the history of Dorchester Industrial School for Girls.

The history graduate students wrote about the women and girls at the school, and created a website to share their findings with the public. Much of the information on daily life in the school came from the objects uncovered by Bagley in a 2015 archaeological dig.

Exhibition Opening & Reception: Dorchester’s Industrial School for Girls.

Want to learn more about the rich history of Dorchester Industrial School for Girls?

The graduate students and Bagley will present their findings on May 10 from 4 to 6 p.m. at the Massachusetts Archives and Commonwealth Museum.

Join us at this event–it’s free and open to the public.

April 10, 2017Heidi Gengenbach No Comments

Hidden in Plain Sight: African Women’s History Beyond the Archive (Part II)

By: Heidi Gengenbach (Second of two parts. Here’s Part I)

Wuxaka ra tinhwari hi ku handza swinwe. (Kinship among partridges comes from scratching in the soil together).[1]

Archives and oral traditions hold little information about rural African women’s history. How do rural women themselves keep track of the past? In Magude, a Shangaan-speaking district in southern Mozambique where I conducted research in the 1990s, women’s histories reside in places long invisible to scholars, but in plain view in everyday life.

(“Typical Thonga kraal in Gazaland”): A. M. Duggan-Cronin, The Bantu Tribes of South Africa: Reproductions of Photographic Studies (Cambridge, U.K.: Deighton, Bell, 1935), vol. 4, Henri P. Junod, The Vathonga (The Thonga-Shangaan People), plate 24. — Colonial-era anthropologists’ photos often captured women’s group activities (here, food preparation) as mere backdrop for “tribal” life. This photo (“Typical Thonga kraal in Gazaland”) appeared in H.P. Junod, “The Vathonga (The Thonga-Shangaan People),” in A. M. Duggan-Cronin, The Bantu Tribes of South Africa: Reproductions of Photographic Studies (Cambridge, U.K.: Deighton, Bell, 1935), Vol. 4.

Through their performance of tasks culturally defined as women’s work, rural women and girls carve out feminine social spaces where they create historical records with female actions at center stage. Using skills honed over centuries of specialized labor—as mothers, farmers, healers, artisans—they memorialize experiences that archives and formal oral traditions disregard. Academic historians have overlooked the evidentiary value of women’s “remembrances” (Shangaan: switsundzuxo), which take unconventional forms, defy disciplinary norms, and challenge the masculinist thrust of “official” stories. But without these sources, we not only lose the opportunity to glimpse rural women’s pasts; we also accept versions of history whose “truth” requires the exclusion of their knowledge.

As in the rest of southern Mozambique, men in Magude have been migrating to South Africa in search of mine work since the late 1800s. Known in precolonial times for its agricultural prosperity, droves of cattle, and bustling trade, Magude became in the 20^th century an increasingly impoverished labor reserve, whose patrilineal kinship and marriage rules pressured women to remain on the land and sustain communities in men’s absence. The limited archival evidence on these women falls into one of two categories: it either depicts them as powerless, dutiful appendages of their husbands and male kin, or it vilifies the minority of women who “abandoned” their marital homes and fled the countryside to live in town. Free from the “misery” and (according to European commentators) moral constraints of rural life, so-called “town women” earned money on the margins of the colonial economy, making their way as market traders, food vendors, prostitutes, or—for the fortunate few—low-paid factory labor. In the records of the colonial state as in scholarship relying on archives alone, rural women are the faceless, unchanging background to these events, toiling on in worsening poverty and helpless to improve their lot.

Lili Xivuri with her grandson, Tlhongana, Phadjane (Magude district), January 1996. — Lili Xivuri with her grandson. Phadjane, Magude district, January 1996. © Heidi Gengenbach, 1995. Courtesy of author.

But rural women’s own accounts tell a surprisingly different story. In Lili Xivuri’s version of her family history, for instance, she refashions the Shangaan tradition of the clan praise song to foreground beer-drinking, marriage choices, soil selection, and common household objects (baskets, mats, awls), instead of the usual themes of chiefly politics or war.[2] The designs female potters “write” on their clay vessels, on the other hand, document women’s experiences of long-distance overland travel and trade.

Magude potters once used naturally-occurring red ochre to make colored glaze. — Women used to dig locally for red ochre (an earth pigment) to make pottery glaze. Here, a potter uses black glaze made from the manganese oxide powder inside a manufactured C-size battery. Facazisse, June 1995. © Heidi Gengenbach, 1995. Courtesy of author.

In the early 1900s, women such as Cufassane Munisse walked for days at a stretch to exchange her pottery for baskets of grain (or vice versa), visiting female kin and friends spread throughout southern Mozambique and in neighboring South Africa. In the course of this regional trade, potters also spread new vessel styles and decorating techniques, defying European stereotypes of rural women’s passivity, home-boundness, and resistance to technological change.

By the 1940s, female body-marking practices show that women in Magude were anything but passive victims of male migrancy and Portuguese rule.

Example of women’s cicatrized tinhlanga from early 20th-century southern Mozambique. Source: E. Dora Earthy, “On the Significance of the Body Markings of Some Natives of Portuguese East Africa,” South African Journal of Science 21 (1924): 586.

Tinhlanga, the cicatrized patterns with which girls and women had adorned their bodies for centuries, offered a powerful medium for contesting the colonial hierarchies that threatened to divide women in new ways. Whether it was Christian missionaries offering literacy in exchange for rejecting “uncivilized” customs such as body-marking, or manufactured consumer goods accessible only to the most successful migrant workers, girls and women appropriated the power of these intrusions by incorporating them into new tinhlanga techniques and designs.

Incised tinhlanga popular in the 1940s-50s mix old and new designs: museve, the ancient chevron pattern; xitlhangu, the shield used by 19th-century Gaza Nguni conquerers of southern Mozambique; xinkwahlana, gecko or lizard; xikero, metal scissors.

An elderly woman’s remarkable array of body art includes geometric cicatrizations along with needle-ink designs depicting the Blue Cross logo, manufactured flower pots, writing, and instant coffee (“Coffe,” the name of the person who gave her this tattoo).

Older women who had once cicatrized girls’ skin with sharp stones or acacia thorns and ash took up imported shoe polish and sewing needles to create tinhlanga depicting the new commodities trickling into the countryside: scissors, flower pots, tins of Blue Cross condensed milk.

Surely aware of the irony, schoolgirls used the blouses and skirts missionaries insisted they wear to conceal prohibited tinhlanga, risking corporal punishment.

Valentina Chauke, Facazisse (Magude district), March 1996.

A few, such as Valentina Chauke, rebelled more openly, inscribing the letters of their xilungu (European) name on their forearms.

Unconcerned with missionary rules, adult women flaunted the “modern” images emblazoned on their skin, declaring that they were “civilized” too.

The memories women inscribed in their crop fields entered a higher-stakes public domain. Agricultural labor occupies most women here from dawn to dusk, and provides the bulk of household food supply. Although traditional land tenure rules give men the authority to allocate plots, in practice most women choose their own farming sites, and they lend, borrow, and transfer land among themselves as needed. They document these informal transactions in the boundaries (mindzelekana) they “scratch” in the soil around their fields—faint, squiggly lines whose location everyone can guess, but only adjacent field owners know with certainty. As long as there is enough land for all, this system causes few problems. But during the civil war (1976-92), when the stationing of government troops in Magude town (the district capital) made the area a magnet for displaced families, competition for land intensified. By the mid 1990s, acute land scarcity and the diminishing size of subdivided plots drove some desperate women to “steal mindzelekana,” surreptitiously redrawing boundaries to increase their cropping area.

A typical field border in Facazisse, a rural community outside Magude town where land competition became especially fierce in the early 1990s.

Victims’ threatening response to this transgression—“I will bury you in the border!”—and the death by poisoning of several suspects made clear that mindzelekana were far more than just lines in the dirt. Field boundaries recorded agreements among women for whom every inch of cultivable ground was a precious resource, with life-or-death significance in wartime. Erasing these negotiated divisions undermined female authority and the bonds of women’s “cultivating kinship,” while challenging mindzelekana’s important memory work: reminding women of their shared responsibility for community survival.

Magude women’s practices of record-keeping preserve and pass on facts of the region’s past that would remain unknown to historians if we neglected the world of evidence beyond archives and official stories. But is such evidence relevant to researchers outside southern Mozambique? At the very least, it proves that historians don’t always need a paper trail; that important history-telling can happen without writing, even without words; and that gendered people leave gendered traces of their lives, if we know where to look.

Heidi Gengenbach (right), Assistant Professor of History.

Heidi Gengenbach is Assistant Professor of History at UMass Boston. Her doctoral dissertation received the Gutenberg-e Electronic Book Prize from the American Historical Association, and was published by Columbia University Press (Binding Memories: Women as Tellers and Makers of History in Magude, Mozambique) in 2005. Her second book project, Recipes for Disaster: Gender, Hunger, and the Remaking of an Agrarian Food World in Central Mozambique, 1500-2000, will be published by Ohio University Press.

References

[1] Armando Ribeiro, 601 Provérbios Changanas (Lisbon, 1989), 116.

[2] Interview with Lili Xivuri, 29 June 1995, Phadjane, Magude District.

April 3, 2017Heidi Gengenbach No Comments

Hidden in Plain Sight: African Women’s History Beyond the Archive (part 1)

By Heidi Gengenbach (First of two parts. Here’s Part II)

Avavumbeli mbita eku cukumeta.
(Potters don’t fashion clay into a pot just to throw it away.) [1]

How do historians study people who left no written traces of their life, no paper trail hinting at who they were or what they accomplished? Questions of “truth” and “fact” suddenly dominate American politics and news media. But debates about how we know what we know, about the reliability of the evidence behind claims we make about the world, are as old as history-telling itself, and they haunt historians every day. It is difficult enough to reconstruct someone’s past from the documentary fragments we unearth in public and private archives. When no such records exist, when people leave no evidence behind, can—or should—historians pay attention to their lives at all?

Map of Africa, 2011. — Political map of Africa, 2011.

Today, in the 48 nations of sub-Saharan Africa, over 50% of adult women ages 15 and up—nearly 250 million women—lack basic literacy skills.[2]

During the millenia of human history before 1900, when most African cultures relied on sophisticated oral rather than written forms of communication, the number of writing women was truly minute. As happened during the peaceful spread of Islam into Africa from the 7^th century on, European missionaries and colonizers brought writing skills to the parts of the continent they occupied or conquered between the 15^th and 20^th centuries. In the 18^th and 19^th centuries, some liberated African slaves who had converted to Christianity in the Americas similarly introduced literacy when they returned to Africa, sometimes as missionaries themselves. But African girls had limited access to the Quranic and Western-style Christian schools these men established. And because the colonial state ignored “native” women unless they broke the law, appeared in court, or engaged in political protest, neither European officials nor the male African clerks who did much of their record-keeping documented women’s ordinary activities or opinions.

Rosalina Malungana and her great-granddaughter Nestacia, weeding Rosalina's field, Facazisse (Magude district), March 1996. © Heidi Gengenbach, 1996. — Rosalina Malungana and her great-granddaughter Nestacia, weeding Rosalina’s field, Facazisse (Magude district), March 1996. © Heidi Gengenbach, 1996. Courtesy of author.

The lives of rural women, especially, escaped the notice of Europeans, who lumped them together derisively as “peasants” or “beasts of burden.” In colonial eyes, rural African women were less troublesome than their sisters in the urban “educated elite,” but less deserving of attention too.

In other words, the vast majority of sub-Saharan African women in the past possessed neither the means to write about their experiences, nor the power to be represented fairly in the written archives of their place and time. And while the continent’s wealth of oral traditions—performed narratives that recount past events and are transmitted across generations—offer another body of evidence, women seldom appear as speakers or subjects in these histories either.

There are some exceptions, but in most African oral chronicles women’s voices and deeds are sidelined by patriarchal cultural norms and a gender division of labor that assigns women the arduous work of subsistence, leaving them too socially marginal (and too busy) to challenge the public histories their menfolk tell.

Given women’s absence from traditional written and oral accounts of Africa’s past, it might seem that their lives—and African women’s history as a whole—must be hopelessly beyond our reach.

In the rural communities of Mozambique where I have been working since the 1990s, the devastation wrought by Portuguese colonial rule (1895-1975) and protracted independence and civil wars (1965-75, 1976-92) further complicates research on women’s history.

In addition to the spottiness, racism, and sexism of colonial archives, and the androcentrism of oral traditions, the scars from nearly 30 years of violent displacement and traumatic loss—of family, belongings, homes—can make it exceptionally difficult to interview women about their experiences.

Battle-scarred shell of a commercial building outside Mapulanguene (Magude district), September 1995. © Heidi Gengenbach, 1995. Courtesy of author. Returning refugees blamed the absence of roofs, doors, and windowpanes from most abandoned structures in Magude on Renamo soldiers, who were said to have stripped buildings for useful materials when they occupied Mapulanguene during the war.

Too many elders did not survive the civil war, leaving a generation of youth bereft of the knowledge their grandparents would have taught them.

Memories of brutal conflict, particularly the atrocities committed against civilians by Renamo rebels, can be too painful to speak aloud.

Magude residents accompanying author to Renamo base camp at Ngungwe (Magude district) to visit displaced relatives, November 1995. Author photo. — Magude residents accompanying author to Renamo base camp at Ngungwe (Magude district) to visit displaced relatives, November 1995. © Heidi Gengenbach, 1995. Courtesy of author.

Girls and women suffered both wars in distinctly gendered ways, including rape and sexual enslavement but more commonly by shouldering the burdens of food provisioning, childcare, care for the sick and elderly, and ritual mourning of the dead—often while on the run as “internally displaced persons” or refugees in neighboring countries.

Government tank burned by Renamo forces in a 1987 battle near their Ngungwe base camp, on the South African border, November 1995. © Heidi Gengenbach, 1995. Courtesy of author.

A person’s understanding of the past can’t help but change in such harrowing times. Post-war grief and nostalgia, and the urgent need to rebuild shattered communities, also raise the stakes of remembering “correctly,” while discouraging memories—of injustice, victimization, betrayal—that distract from the business of moving on. How does one analyze women’s testimony in these circumstances, let alone separate “truth” from nightmare?

Part II explores these questions next week.

References

[1] Henri P. Junod, The Wisdom of the Tsonga-Shangana People (3d ed. Braamfontein: Sasavona Books, 1990), 162-3.

[2] Literacy data from the World Bank which currently estimates the population of Sub-Saharan Africa as 974.2 million, with women comprising 50% of the total. http://www.prb.org/Publications/Reports/2016/economic-growth-equity-ishrat.aspx

March 29, 2017Heidi Gengenbach No Comments

Sailors, Shopkeepers & Scientists: Women of Nantucket Succeeding in a Man’s World

By: Cheyenne Dunham

Women’s history month provides a time to look back on various female role models from our past–women who inspire us, make us think, and perhaps challenge us to question societal restrictions, as they did. These stories of empowerment, leadership, and success don’t always come from the most obvious places.

Nantucket 1792 — Map of Nantucket, 1792.

Nearly 30 miles off the coast of southeastern Massachusetts lies Nantucket, a small and unassuming island that hosted an independent and progressive society in which women long played a vital role. In this place, women existed as prominent religious figures, business owners, educators, scientists, and adventurers before the voices of suffrage permeated the political and social dialogue of the late 19^th century.

Nantucket thrived as a whaling port until the 1850s. This caused many of its male residents to venture out for years at a time, on voyages across the world, without the guarantee of returning to their home or loved ones. Subsequently, the women of the island were often left solely responsible for their family’s financial, social, and religious well-being.

Women of Petticoat Row circa 1895. Courtesy of the Nantucket Historical Association. — Women of Petticoat Row ca.1895. Courtesy of Nantucket Historical Association.

Women held a prominent presence in the public and commercial spheres. One group of women managed an entire section of the town business strip nicknamed “Petticoat Row.”

The island has always been relatively small. Its population peaks, both in its whaling days and current tourist seasons, at around 10,000. In the earlier years, this population total included many of those away at sea. Nantucket’s isolation and self-sufficiency, combined with its early history of political and ideological separation from the mainland, resulted in a unique environment where a woman’s capability and voice in society often equaled their male counterparts. In the Heart of the Sea, author Nathaniel Philbrick explains,

“Given the island’s place on a map, you might expect Nantucketers to be an independent bunch, and you would be right. …More than anything else, it is this place, ‘away off shore,’ that has determined who the Nantucketer is.”((Philbrick, Nathaniel. Away Off Shore: Nantucket Island and Its People, 1602-1890. (New York : Penguin Books, 2011): xiii, xvi.))

Nantucket produced a wide range of interesting women and influential female leaders. One of the earliest of these notable women was Mary Coffin Starbuck (1645-1719), the first woman to marry and have a child on the island.

Excerpt from Eliza Brock's Journal Created Aboard the Ship Lexington c. 1853 Courtesy of the Nantucket Historical Association — Excerpt from Eliza Brock’s Journal Created Aboard the Ship Lexington ca.1853. Courtesy of Nantucket Historical Association.

She was not only greatly responsible for bringing Quakerism to the Nantucket community, but she successfully ran her family’s trading post as one of the earliest authoritative businesswomen in the town. Unlike Starbuck, who oversaw the family affairs while her husband was away, some women chose to go to sea alongside the men. Two such women, Susan Austin Veeder (1816-97) and Eliza Spencer Brock (1810-99), kept detailed journals of their experiences at sea which are now archived at the Nantucket Historical Association.

Photo of Painting by Mrs. H. Dassel c. 1851 Maria Mitchell Looking Through a Telescope Courtesy of the Nantucket Historical Association — Painting. “Maria Mitchell Looking Through a Telescope,” by Mrs. H. Dassel ca.1851. Courtesy of Nantucket Historical Association.

Outside of the island’s commercial world, women were just as influential in science, education, and social movements. Maria Mitchell (1818-89) was a brilliant scientist and librarian whose accomplishments included discovering a comet, becoming the first professional female astronomer, and eventually becoming a professor at Vassar College. Mitchell became well-known for her influence in astronomy and education on the mainland. However, her early years on Nantucket and her involvement in its progressive community greatly shaped her outlook and future. She attained unprecedented success in her field. By her own successful example, she promoted the potential for all women. Throughout her life, she advocated for gender equality in any field and encouraged other women to strive for success.

Anna Gardner. Courtesy of the Nantucket Historical Association.

Another Nantucket educator also fought for equality but in a different scope. Anna Gardner (1816-91) was a teacher at the African School on the island. Gardner left her position as an educator to protest racial discrimination that had been experienced by one of her students and to more fully dedicate herself to the cause of abolition. She eventually helped organize the first Anti-Slavery Convention on Nantucket and would continue her activism by fighting for both gender and racial equality with organizations such as the New England Freedmen’s Aid Society and the Association for the Advancement of Women, an organization partly founded by Mitchell.

These women represent only a few examples of the many incredible women that can be found throughout the island’s history. As time goes on, authors and historians will undoubtedly uncover more inspirational stories while attempting to interpret the unique role women played in shaping Nantucket since the 17^th century. But what was so unique about this place that contributed to such a concentration of powerful figures? Whether it was thanks to situational necessity or progressive and inclusive thinking, this island has produced a legacy of individuals well-deserving of our consideration.

Cheyenne Dunham is earning her M.A. in History with a specialization in Public History. She earned a B.A. in History, minoring in Anthropology, from Eastern Washington University. Currently, her work explores Nantucket’s developmental history alongside the Pacific Northwest’s settlement. She is designing a digital exhibit connecting post-whaling industrial and population shifts on the Massachusetts island with the establishment and growth of Washington State in the second half of the 19th century.

By: Heidi Gengenbach (Second of two parts. Here’s Part I)

Wuxaka ra tinhwari hi ku handza swinwe. (Kinship among partridges comes from scratching in the soil together).[1]

References

By Heidi Gengenbach (First of two parts. Here’s Part II)

Avavumbeli mbita eku cukumeta. (Potters don’t fashion clay into a pot just to throw it away.) [1]

References

Avavumbeli mbita eku cukumeta.
(Potters don’t fashion clay into a pot just to throw it away.) [1]