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Internship: A Fresh Perspective on Local History

By Tom Begley

We rarely have the opportunity to learn a city’s history through the perspectives of women. Until recently, the everyday lives and achievements of women have not been well documented or celebrated, silenced or pushed to the margins. Since the mid-20^th century, historians and public history institutions have increasingly worked to fix this, searching the records and highlighting stories of women and other marginalized populations. During my internship with Lighting the Way: Historic Women of the South Coast (LTW) I worked on a new educational tool for the program and in the process learned important pieces of the history of New Bedford, Massachusetts through the inspiring stories of women of the city. It became clear how the city was shaped by their activism, organization, and passion to improve their communities.

Since 2018, the New Bedford Whaling Museum’s initiative LTW has highlighted women from Massachusetts’ South Coast, the region stretching from Cape Cod to the Rhode Island border. LTW seeks “to explore the impact of historical women from diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds throughout history” by “unearthing remarkable stories of women’s callings that required grit, tenacity, and enduring commitment to their families, careers and communities,” (www.historicwomensouthcoast.org). With thought provoking programs, online profiles, a mobile app, educator and school group resources, walking tours, forums, public art displays, and community civic engagement campaigns, LTW invites people to learn about their local history through the stories of women.

Lighting the Way. Courtesy of New Bedford Whaling Museum.

Working with LTW coordinator Cathy Saunders, my project was to create a mobile tour driven by an overarching narrative to explore a specific theme in the city’s history. Rhode Tour, a joint initiative between Rhode Island Council for the Humanities, Brown University’s Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage, and Rhode Island Historical Society, will host the tour. Rhode Tour is a smartphone app and website that brings stories and tours to the palm of the user in an engaging display, (www.rhodetour.org). The platform also serves as a digital exhibit space presenting “big ideas” and telling history through multimedia, essays, and links to additional resources such as articles and videos. Joining Rhode Tour will extend LTW’s reach and mission to the thousands of users who access the website and app each year.

I began my work by identifying themes in the collection of 100 profiles of women available on the LTW website. LTW intends to connect the tour to Massachusetts civic curriculum standards. With this in mind the long tradition of women activists and organizers started to become apparent. From abolitionists to PTA members to elected officials, women have worked to improve their South Coast communities and beyond. This realization brought us to the theme for the tour – “Organizing New Bedford: The Women Who Mobilized Change.”

Creating a shortlist of potential tour stops was the first hurdle to overcome. Rhode Tour suggests 6-8 stops and with so many fascinating LTW stories it was hard to choose only a handful of women to feature. To narrow the list and meet the requirement we established a set of criteria. We looked for women who spent the majority of their careers in New Bedford, motivated others to create change, and had several types of multimedia available to help tell the story. Through conversations with Cathy and LTW advisory committee members, the list eventually met the target with 6 tour stops highlighting the work of 7 women: Elizabeth Carter Brooks, Jennie Horne, Rosalind Poll Brooker, Rosemary Tierney, Eula Mendes, Polly Johnson, and Mary Santos Barros.

The Lighting the Way website (www.historicwomensouthcoast.org) features over 100 profiles of South Coast women, education resources, and a self-guided walking tour. Courtesy of New Bedford Whaling Museum.

After selecting the women, we sought appropriate locations for each tour stop. Some were readily apparent such as New Bedford City Hall for Rosalind Poll Brooker and Rosemary Tierney, the first women elected City Councilor and mayor, respectively. Others were more difficult because the places associated with the stories no longer exist or have become private residences. The textile mill where strike leader Eula Mendes worked has been torn down, as was the community center Jennie Horne directed. We also had to consider the current status of neighborhoods and whether it was appropriate to encourage people to visit. The historic areas of the city are surrounded by active neighborhoods and we wanted to be respectful of residents’ privacy. For guidance I turned to people more familiar with the city than me.

The final step was to write each tour stop. The existing LTW profiles served as the foundation as I added new information and reshaped text to focus on the aspect of the woman’s life that exemplified our theme of organizing for change. The realities of researching women’s history were uncovered during this stage. Sources are limited, yet by looking closely at the silences stories start to emerge. We also had the great fortune of connecting with family members who provided a wealth of information about their mothers that wasn’t available otherwise.

The content experts involved with LTW were all incredibly gracious with their time and knowledge as I worked on the project. In particular Jan da Silva (New Bedford Whaling National Historical Park), Lee Blake (New Bedford Historical Society), Mary Smoyer (Boston Women’s Heritage Trail), and Ann O’Leary (NBWM Emily Bourne Research Fellow) provided detailed notes on appropriate locations and storylines to include in the tour. Overall, I owe my positive experience to Cathy Saunders who guided me through the process and shared her public history expertise to ensure that I considered the many different factors in order to properly share these women’s stories.

Recently, one of the LTW committee members, a lifelong resident of New Bedford, shared that she loves her city and was thrilled to see this “Organizing New Bedford” tour bring long deserved attention to the work these women did to make the city a better place. I hope others from New Bedford feel the same way and that this project may inspire students to get involved in issues important to them. It was an honor to work on this project and play a small part in furthering LTW’s educational mission. Not only did I enjoy sharpening my skills as a public history practitioner, but as a student of history, it was especially impactful to learn about New Bedford through the deeds of these amazing women.

Internship: Cold War Cassin Young

December 16, 2020 / Heidi Gengenbach / 1 Comment

By Charles Borsos

Standing on the stern of Cassin Young, trying to remember the specifications and history of the specific equipment installed behind me, my teeth were chattering. Park Ranger and internship supervisor Eric Hanson Plass and I spent the morning filming all around the ship which was closed for the winter. This gave us free reign to set up our camera without fear of getting in anyone’s way. It also meant we could step over the signs marked “closed to the public” without a curious visitor trying to follow and take the camera into the spaces normally unseen.

Still image from video shot by Eric Hanson Plass, of intern Charlie Borsos at the stern of Cassin Young in Charlestown, Dec 2, 2020

Closing for the winter meant it was cold on the ship. Not just the wind coming off the harbor but the bare steel of the ship itself was cold and sucked the heat off any part of the body idly leaning against it. It reminded me of the crewmen’s firsthand accounts of serving on the ship, and their gratitude for the simple installation of tile in particular spaces in the 1950s.

“It really made a big difference because when you got up in the morning, and slapped your flat feet out on that cold, clammy, wet steel deck in the morning, you couldn’t hardly stand up because of the condensation from everybody breathing,” said yeoman Theodore G. Johndrow, one of the last crewmen to leave the ship in 1960, interviewed in 1983. Combining interviews like these with the interpretation of the spaces within Cassin Young, allows visitors to understand the experience of the destroyer’s “being cold” instead of a simple fact.

In many ways, our winter film shoot capped hours of my research on the process of adapting a ship built to fight WWII for continued service during the much changed circumstances of the Cold War. The video, along with text, oral history excerpts and photographs, will complete the final section—“Modernizing the Fleet”—of the National Park Service’s web application, Ship of Steel, Spirits of Iron: The Stories of USS Cassin Young and the Charlestown Navy Yard.

Intern Charlie Borsos in front of “hedgehog launcher” on *Cassin Young*, Dec 2, 2020.

Because of the pandemic, I have conducted most of my research online, and indeed, the final product will be virtual. We shot the film during my second visit to the ship, which I had come to know intimately on paper, but not in real life. Despite this “remoteness,” my goal is to connect the history and the stories to the site; the opportunity to film on-site, after months of remote research and writing, has given clarity to some of the developing themes.

The documentary evidence, for example, revealed that the barbershop was the segregated quarters on the ship during the war. These destroyers were designed in the 1930s when the Navy and indeed much of the United States was segregated, and the predominantly Black and Filipino sailors of color who served on board Navy ships were relegated to serving as stewards’ mates and cooks. Experiencing the physical space onboard Cassin Young reveals that this space for their berthing, away from the main space for the white crew, is accessed from the white crew’s berthing by going through the chow line and up a set of stairs physically removed from the rest of the crew and stuck in another compartment. It reinforces within the very structure of the ship the racial separation within the Navy during WWII.

This process of thinking about the history as tied to space on Cassin Young, and also considering those spaces as areas where men worked and lived are crucial interpretive lessons that shape my continued work on text and voice overs for the video. The new equipment used to search for enemy submarines in the 1950s were not just vacuum tubes capable of hearing a certain level of decibel from a certain range. The experience of the man stationed at a radar scope in the middle of the night as Cassin Young made its way across the Atlantic on a goodwill visit to the Mediterranean attaches layers of meanings to this technology. These technologies don’t live on their own, they are part of a ship and the lives of the ship’s crew; what can seem like minutiae can be woven into a richer fabric strongly attached to the interpretive site.

USN Escort Ship fires similar weapon, Dec 18, 1944, Court. USN

Professor Profile: Nick Juravich

December 11, 2020 / Heidi Gengenbach / 0 Comments

Nick Juravich (he/him/his)

nicholas.juravich@umb.edu

Nick is an Assistant Professor of History and Labor Studies and the Associate Director of the Labor Resource Center

Historical Interests: Urban history, women’s/gender history, the history of education, and the history of social movements (particularly the Black freedom struggle in the United States)

Classes: At the undergraduate level, Nick teaches Touring the City: An Introduction to Public History (182), Labor and Working-Class History in the US (210L), US History Since 1877 (266), Work & Education (275L), and Working-Class Boston (390L). At the grad level, he teaches primarily in our public history program, offering courses including Introduction to Public History and Public Memory (620), Oral History (688), and Thesis/Capstone Prep (690)

Nick grew up in Amherst, MA. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Chicago. He then went to the UK to pursue a Masters of Philosophy in Economic and Social History at Oxford. From there, he and his partner moved to Brooklyn, where he worked in the public schools doing health and fitness education for several years before starting his PhD at Columbia. Throughout his studies, he has focused on the history of wherever he has been based, most often on labor movements and protest campaigns. After he received his PhD from Columbia, he started a two-year Public History post-doc in the Center for Women’s History at the New York Historical Society where he gained an extensive hands on education about Public History in all its forms from historians, museum educators and curators. Following that, he came to UMass Boston last year.

One of Nick’s favorite things he has done in his brief time at UMass Boston has been teaching the Labor and Working-Class History Survey. This broad course brings together students from across the university and utilizes the resources of the school, incorporating archival work and guest speakers for the board of our Labor Resource Center. Nick sees it as “the best of UMB in miniature.” Nick lives with his partner and their two children, born Christmas and Christmas eve. He has been a distance runner all his life and loves running the Neponset River in Dorchester, often with a neon yellow double jogging stroller.

Favorite Historical Story (at the moment): “I’ve always known Frank Murphy as the New Deal governor of Michigan who was swept into office in FDR’s 1936 landslide and promptly called out the National Guard to keep the peace and hold off GM’s goons during the Flint Sit-Down Strikes (a truly remarkable moment, given the National Guard’s long history as a strikebreaking force). Just this fall I realized that FDR appointed the same Frank Murphy to the Supreme Court in 1940, where he promptly issued a famous, stinging dissent in the Korematsu case (in which the court shamefully upheld Japanese incarceration during WWII). I don’t know a whole lot else about Frank Murphy, but in two incredibly consequential moments of US history, he did the right thing.”

Advice for students: “It’s a tough time for teaching, learning, and researching. Be kind to yourself and one another, be creative about finding sources and ways to engage them, and make time for yourself away from screens whenever possible. If you’re finding yourselves completely overwhelmed and exhausted by working remotely (feeling like it’s twice the work for half the product), I can assure you that many professors, including yours truly, are in exactly the same boat. Let us know how we can help. Normally I’d say “swing by my office and say hello sometime!” but in lieu of that, I’m always glad to hear from students! Find me at nicholas.juravich@umb.edu.”

Internship – After the Road Show: Contextualizing and Interpreting a Digital Collection

December 3, 2020 / Heidi Gengenbach / 0 Comments

By Marielle Gutierrez

Mass. Memories Road Show event layout (pre-pandemic). Photo courtesy of Mass. Memories Road Show and University Archives & Special Collections, Healey Library, UMass Boston.

Mass. Memories Road Show (MMRS) is a statewide, event-based participatory digital archiving program that documents people, places, and events in Massachusetts history through family photographs and stories.* I have been lucky enough to work with this organization as a public history intern. They do amazing work and I am so happy to have played a part in helping the organization grow and expand in the public history world.

The first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic hit right when I was seeking internship opportunities for the fall. Understandably, the pandemic suddenly limited the range and availability of internships. Most cultural organizations had to suddenly switch gears to remote work, which often meant learning new technology, and creating new programs and priorities, all of which put enormous strain on already-taxed staff. I was very fortunate that the MMRS moved quickly to reimagine their program and welcomed help to bring the participatory archival project into the (digital) public history sphere. They conceived the internship as entirely remote, which was crucial for me since I relocated back home to California because of the pandemic.

Technology was crucial in supporting my work on this project. I have learned that it is 100% possible to work with people thousands of miles away and still produce a meaningful product—one that expands community histories by shining a light on its residents’ personal histories. Overall, email, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom have all contributed to my success. They have helped me communicate with people throughout the course of my internship. Although it was not without its own difficulties—I did find challenges in communicating efficiently to set up meetings (the bicoastal time difference played a role in this), and we all had technology challenges from time to time.

Archival repositories face challenges in making their collections meaningful and accessible to the public. As an intern with MMRS, I was tasked with identifying ways to contextualize and interpret MMRS (and other) collections, and to suggest some answers to the question: what happens after the Road Show? I undertook research to discover how digital collecting projects have used the materials they have collected. Collecting this data suggested ways that the MMRS can use their materials to create walking tours, (in-person and digital) exhibits, and publish stories in print and via podcast, to name a few examples. My work will be used to create MMRS’s Roadmap to Participatory Archiving—a guide that teaches institutions how to create participatory archiving events and what to do afterwards.

Promotional design for the 2020 Malden Mass. Memories Stuck-at-Home Show. Photo courtesy of Mass. Memories Road Show and University Archives & Special Collections, Healey Library, UMass Boston.

My internship has also allowed me to pilot an example that showcases contextualization and interpretation of community-collected archival materials. In this, I have been working with the Malden Stuck-at-Home Show Collection—resulting from a remote Road Show created for the people of Malden to safely share their archivable materials during the pandemic. The Malden stakeholders in this project have graciously allowed me write and publish four profiles in Malden’s online newspaper, Neighborhood View, about four of the participants and their submitted photos.

Logo of the online newspaper *Neighborhood View*—a newspaper that focuses on Malden stories told by citizen journalists. The newspaper is run by Malden Access Television. Photo courtesy of *Neighborhood View’s* website: https://neighborhoodview.org.

To prepare these profiles, I researched the city of Malden’s history, examined the participants’ photos to understand the stories they found important, designed interview questions, and corresponded with the participants to schedule interviews and invite them to share their story via a feature in Neighborhood View.

My internship with the Road Show also gave me the opportunity to try out social media advertising—something very new, but of growing interest, to me. I have learned that it is not easy work; it requires identifying the perfect marketing picture, in this case a submitted MMRS photo, and writing a few sentences that share that reveal the contributor’s story, the MMRS’s mission, and, most importantly, capture the audience’s attention. It is a fun and creative way to get community histories out into the world.

I have found it very rewarding to bring an archives event into the public history world by sharing these everyday stories. This internship has opened my eyes to the importance and value of community histories, which focus on the contributions of “ordinary people” to history. Their stories deserve to be told, preserved, and shared.

*All submitted material to MMRS is scanned and uploaded to https://openarchives.umb.edu (take a look!).

Internship: Cooking up a Trail in Boston

December 1, 2020 / Heidi Gengenbach / 2 Comments

By Mia McMorris

There are many possible lenses and avenues for exploring Boston’s history. The Boston Women’s Heritage Trail (BWHT) is one of many organizations that use site-based histories to open the past to the public. Their research has culminated in more than 15 different self-guided tours that focus on the contributions of women to Boston’s history. My internship has allowed me to work alongside BWHT’s long time members, Mary Smoyer and Katherine Dibble, to gather resources for a curated tour focused on women in Boston’s food history. This tour will utilize some of their existing data and will be thematic versus their neighborhood-based tours.

The BWHT operates primarily online, with brochures and guides to tour the city. The information is easily accessible through their website. They also host a series of events throughout the year that bring awareness to the impact and achievements of women who have had a significant effect on the city. My internship has allowed me to meet with their board on two different occasions and attend their annual conference, which featured the sculptor Meredith Bergmann as speaker. She designed the Boston Women’s Memorial and spoke about her most recent installation in New York. I have enjoyed my experiences with them, and am impressed by the knowledge and experience of BWHT’s team, and their expertise and dedication to public history.

Boston’s Women Memorial on Commonwealth Ave. honoring, (right to left) Phyllis Wheatly, Abigail Adams, and Lucy Stone. Courtesy of Boston.gov

Perhaps my greatest challenge with this project has been finding historical resources for an inclusive tour that focuses on the themes of food insecurity and innovations made by Boston women to address the problems of hunger in the city. To do this, I reached out to various immigrant communities, contacted local food scholars, and utilized the knowledge brought by the BWHT board members and their networks. But the resources are difficult to find, in published material, or, especially, in archival collections. So I have worked to identify and speak with community members who may have sources to share or suggest. For example, I have made connections with members of the Caribbean community and hope to speak to other immigrant communities to learn about women who have influenced food culture in Boston. I am also in conversation with a former organizer of the Black Panther’s Breakfast program.

The history of women in Boston’s food history does have some documentation, but the COVID-19 pandemic has prevented access to some of these sources. Stay-at-home orders led many research institutions to close their doors, and this has limited my access to valuable documents. Nevertheless, the support of my supervisors at BWHT has allowed me to create a list of viable women to showcase on my tour.

The Kip Tiernan Memorial on Dartmouth Street. Courtesy of Mia McMorris

Kip Tiernan, a pioneer in the fight against food insecurity, is the focus of one stop on the tour. Her memorial, installed on Dartmouth Street near the Boston Public Library, is one of five monuments dedicated to women in Boston. One of Kip Tiernan’s colleagues, Georgia Mattison, spoke with me about Kip’s impact on Boston. Georgia Mattison together with Kip Tiernan played crucial roles in the founding of the Boston Food Bank, which operates as the joint bank of food for many of the shelters of Boston. They provide food and resources across the state, interfacing directly with supermarkets and other food suppliers. The Boston Food Bank is one of the many organizations targeting hunger with which Kip Tiernan was involved. She also helped to establish 16 shelters that feed and shelter residents of the city.

I am honored to work with the Boston Women’s Heritage Trail to curate this tour of Boston. As a newcomer to Boston, learning about this city through the eyes of the women on this tour has provided much food for thought. Focusing specifically on the roles of women in feeding Boston, reveals women’s impact on the city’s history. I hope to bring awareness of women’s roles in Boston’s food history in a positive and long-lasting way that is available to residents and visitors to the city.