Since 2018, UMass Boston historians, archivists, and students have partnered with the Boston Teachers Union (BTU) to archive, explore, and share the union’s history and the experiences of its members in Boston Public Schools since 1945. Thus far, our collaborations have included a participatory archiving event at the union hall, an ongoing oral history project, the digitization of the archives of the union’s newspaper, the Boston Union Teacher, and the transfer of the union’s documentary archives to UMass Boston. These newly accessible materials are being used in BTU organizing trainings, contract campaigns, and internal research, and by UMass Boston students in coursework and capstone projects. In Spring 2022, graduate students in Prof. Nick Juravich’s “Digital Public History” course organized the launch of these collections, along with a companion website they built and a library research guide. This project remains active!
Corridor to Revolutions (2021)
In spring semester 2021, students in “Interpreting History in Public: Approaches to Public History Practice” (HIST 625) collaborated with the Boston National Historical Park and Revolutionary Spaces to create a web exhibit on the multiple social, political and cultural movements focused on equality led by generations of Bostonians on the same landscape where the events leading to the American Revolution played out in the 1760s and 1770s.
The team brought the methods and skills of public historians to the documentary, material, and visual historical evidence to narrate this history for NPS audiences. This web-based exhibition is installed on a WordPress platform created for and managed by the NPS. Corridor to Revolution connects a curated collection of historic artifacts and documents to social, political and cultural activism performed in the Boston landscape spanning the 18th to the 20th centuries.
This web exhibition explores the struggles for social and racial justice, political action, equality, and cultural change. Short articles on featured topics that draw on a wide range of primary source materials offer audiences new ways to consider the “revolutionary landscapes” of Boston, and the city’s role in inspiring social and political change.
Corridor to Revolutions encourages us to reconsider the meanings of “revolution” and how these meanings shape our lives, past, and present. In this project, our project team joined Boston’s 2020 activities in commemorating and interpreting the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution. The colonial town proved a crucial center to the events of the American Revolution, witnessing meetings, protests, and even violence in the 1760s and 1770s. Today’s Washington Street, leading from Downtown Crossing to Old South Meeting House, the Old State House, and Faneuil Hall at Dock Square, served as the core corridor of Revolutionary Boston. In 2020, another generation of Bostonians engaged in protests, gatherings, and even violent confrontations on the very same ground. The 250th anniversary of the American Revolution is not simply an occasion to remember what happened 250 years ago, but an opportunity to reflect upon the past 250 years that leads to our current moment. For 250 years, generation after generation of Bostonians came to this same corridor to protest, meet, and fight their own revolution.
1919 Boston Police Strike (2019)
On September 9, 1919, more than 1,100 City of Boston police officers walked off the job to fight for union recognition and improved working conditions. In the days that followed, they lost their employment and public sympathy, and Boston’s streets erupted in lawlessness and riots. The replacement police workers hired in the wake of the strike received the concessions that the strikers were denied, while the fired police officers were left without jobs and unable to find employment in Boston. The strike was one of the most dramatic incidents in Boston’s history, and had long-lasting local and national political impact, including helping to catapult Calvin Coolidge into the U.S. Presidency.
University Archives & Special Collections in the Joseph P. Healey Library at UMass Boston launched the 1919 Boston Police Strike Project to document and preserve the stories of the more than 1,100 police officers who were involved in this highly influential labor strike. By September 9th, 2019–the centennial of the strike–the team will have compiled an online biographical database documenting each of the officers who went out on strike, for the benefit of researchers, historians, students and others, including family members of the strikers.
In Spring 2019, graduate students in HIST 625 “Interpreting History in Public: Approaches to Public History Practice” partnered with UASC to document the participants in the 1919 strike, its impact on the city, and and explore the ways that the Boston Police Strike of 1919 has been remembered by descendants, and the public. Our historical research and interpretation will require us to consider questions such as: How we can understand this local event in the context of broader local and national histories? What are the histories of individual strikers? How did their participation shape their personal and family histories? How did strikers function within the local and police communities? How have the strikers’ descendants remembered the strike? How did organized labor respond to and understand the strike, and how did they publicly acknowledge it? What is the meaning of this event today? To whom does the history of this strike matter?
Public History students contributed to the Boston Police Strike website in multiple formats. They wrote brief biographies of strikers based on material in the striker database and other primary sources; created a digital map of the 1919 strike, using images and text that incorporates various perspectives on key places prior to, during, and just after the strike; collaborated with strike descendants to document family stories and memories of the strike and impact on their family/community; and explored primary sources to understand public commemorations and interpretations of the strike by labor and non-labor perspectives. All of these endeavors found its way onto the Boston Police Strike website and is available for public use.
Dorchester Industrial School for Girls (2017–18)
What can the artifacts, materials, and objects we leave behind say about our lives? The combs, dolls, writing slates, sewing needles, scraps of clothing, and pieces of pottery pulled out of the ground at the Dorchester Industrial School for Girls site left clues about the lives of the women and girls who made their home at the school. But who were these women? Why were they there? What were their stories, and could they be uncovered from the recesses of time?
To find out, Boston City Archaeologist Joseph Bagley and his team partnered with public historian Dr. Jane Becker and her graduate students at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Inspired by the preliminary research of two UMass Boston historical archaeology graduate students on Joe Bagley’s team – Sarah Johnson and Madelaine Penney – in spring semester 2017, members of the graduate history seminar, Interpreting History in Public: Approaches to Public History Practice, began extensive biographical research into 16 women and girls who studied, worked, and lived at the Dorchester Industrial School for Girls.
In 2017 our graduate students collaborated with the City Archaeologist to create a public platform that begins to explore the histories of the students and staff and managers who lived at or supported the Industrial School for Girls—Dorchester. The resulting online exhibition Uncovering the Dorchester Industrial School for Girls focuses on the 1860s: the board of managers, and students, teachers and matrons who lived at the school in the early years of occupancy at the Centre Street property. This online exhibition is built on a WordPress blog that presents the research and invites feedback from the public. We continued the work in in Spring 2018, focusing again on the personal stories of these girls and women, now bringing these histories into dialogue with the rich material culture that archaeologists removed from the site.
Artifacts found at the site of the archaeological survey provide an important source of information about the life and work of the students and staff at the ISFG. This collection of found materials offers important evidence regarding the details of everyday life at the school, information extracted from the remains of clothing and adornments, household and school items, for example. This material culture can offer more meanings, however, when we know more about the users, makers, and consumers of these goods. Other historical evidence, such as census records, street directories, and vital records, provide evidence of the lives of the individuals associated with the ISFG, and thus help historians and archaeologists understand the significance of the material evidence from the ground and its relationship to the lives of these 19th century women. Our historical research and interpretation focuses on three groups of women associated with the ISFG in the 1860s and 1870s—students, staff who worked or lived on site, and officers or managers who supported and directed the organization. With little more than their subjects’ names and definitive location in 1860, the historians worked backward to find official records, personal papers, and photographs. UMass and the Boston City Archaeology team also worked with the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University, which generously made the records of the Dorchester Industrial School for Girls accessible to our team, and facilitated use of the collection for this website. The material culture retrieved from archaeology at the School’s site, and the ISFG admissions logs and secretary records provide rich historical resources.
Stay tuned. We have more to do!
Learning By Doing: Exhibiting Thompson’s Island Histories (2016)
Partners: University Archives & Special Collections, Healey Library, and Thompson Island Outward Bound Education Center
UMass Boston and Thompson Island have been neighbors since UMass Boston moved its campus to Columbia Point in 1974. University Archives & Special Collections in the Joseph P. Healey Library at the University of Massachusetts Boston was established in 1981 as a repository to collect archival material in subject areas of interest to the university, as well as the records of the university itself.
The mission and history of the University of Massachusetts Boston guide the collection policies of University Archives & Special Collections, with The university’s urban mission and strong support of community service are reflected in the UASC collections, which include local history related to neighboring communities. Since 2014, UASC has been expanding its collections related to the Boston Harbor Islands.
These include the records of the educational institutions established on the island starting as early as 1833 with the Boston Farm School. These schools have left a rich collection of historical materials–the records of the Boston Farm School, Boston Asylum for Indigent Boys, Boston Farm and Trades School, and Thompson Academy—that open many possibilities for exploring Thompson’s Island’s multiple histories, and sharing them with the public. In 1988, Outward Bound partnered to operate the island, creating a new entity: Thompson Island Outward Bound Education Center (TIOBEC), which owns and manages the island today. The island continues its mission to serve the underserved youth of Greater Boston with programs that instill teamwork, self-confidence and compassion, and encourage learning by doing.
Today, Thompson Island is privately owned and managed by the Thompson Island Outward Bound Education Center (TIOBEC). TIOBEC fulfills a vital educational role for children and adults from Boston and the surrounding metropolitan area. It is the site of an Outward Bound program for inner-city youth that strives to bring together students of varying race, ethnicity, and class in an ambitious outdoor learning program. As stewards of the island, TIOBEC is acutely aware of the legacy of education there and a primary stakeholder of the island’s history. The organization is further engaged in building a community of alumni of Thompson Academy and other predecessor schools.
TIOBEC has installed a number of outdoor interpretive “wayside” signage throughout the island. In the future, TIOBEC plans to install a small museum display about the island’s history. In 2016, public history graduate students worked with Thompson Island collections in the UASC to develop proposals and interpretive samples to support TIOBEC’s interest in developing and installing a permanent exhibition on-island and creating a site where visitors can access historical materials.
Working with primary sources in UASC collections, students created a set of proposals for temporary exhibitions and sample exhibition panels focused on the history of Thompson’s Island. They conducted research, developed themes, chose and researched exhibit materials, wrote exhibit text, and planned participatory activities. They presented their ideas to TIOBEC in an exhibition installed at the Healey Library.