local history – Public History at UMass Boston

By Meghan Arends

Longfellow House-Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site. Photograph taken upon my initial visit in August.

Longfellow House-Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site is owned and operated by the National Park Service. Built in 1759, the Georgian style house became the headquarters of George Washington during the Siege of Boston in 1775. It eventually became the home of American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow when it was bought by his father-in-law as a wedding gift.[1] From then on, the house became an important center of politics, society, and the arts.

The estate drew me in because of my interest in material culture. The collections held at the Longfellow House are numerous and diverse, representing the vast culture the family had the privilege of experiencing during their time. My internship here offered me a satisfying and richly challenging professional experience that expands past encounters with collections.

My overall internship goals were both practical and intellectual. In-depth research of extended family member Brevet Captain Nathan Appleton Jr. for the upcoming temporary exhibit “Longfellow Family in the Civil War” sat at the center of my experience. This involved familiar tasks, including online and off-site research into Nathan’s life, writing exhibit labels for artifacts and, eventually, producing web content to further expand upon his life as a Union soldier. This project required an intense focus on a singular subject and his place within the broader American history, which I don’t always get the chance to explore. Rather than generalized concepts and assumptions, an individual’s history can reveal their impact on the world and vise-versa.

Photographs of Brevet Captain Nathan Appleton Jr., “Appleton Family Papers,” Massachusetts Historical Society. Left: Nathan as a Harvard Student, shortly before entering the war. Right: Nathan after initial enlistment in 1863 as 2nd Lieutenant. Photographs courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

The most exciting part of the internship was certainly the weeklong research trip I took to the Massachusetts Historical Society, which maintains the Appleton Family Papers. Hundreds of documents shed light on the life of Nathan and his family in the years surrounding and including the Civil War. The richness and extent of the resources meant that I had to prioritize materials within the extensive collection. I had to determine which sources were most important to the themes and questions of my project, putting others aside. Previous research endeavors have never offered me such a volume of sources. My week spent at MHS taught me the importance of guiding themes in a research project, which is relevant for both historians and public historians.

The professional and practical aspects of the internship are among its greatest rewards, especially the communication and networking opportunities I’ve had with professionals in the field of public history. I attended weekly meetings with the rest of the site staff; they’ve provided an invaluable glance into the world of historic sites and their daily operations. The isolation of an internship can make it seem like the project you’re working on is the only one, but in reality, there are dozens of programs in development simultaneously. Nothing has expanded my personal field of public history knowledge more than hearing from other staff members about the various projects they are working on each day and their contributions to the site’s significance. A historic site can’t rely on one program or strategy to maintain relevance and interest. Diversity in programming and site history helps them serve multiple audiences and their needs.

The internship offered me opportunities to work on new skills, such as writing labels for exhibits. My natural instinct as a historian is to take my time crafting an argument and presenting evidence. That luxury isn’t available when writing exhibit labels, where you must communicate significance and meaning in relatively few words. General introductions that can’t explain the significance of an artifact in the context of the exhibit provide little substance for the audience. We read Beverly Serrell’s guide, Exhibit Labels, in class, but now I’ve had the chance to put her advice into practice and take on the challenges of writing exhibit text to tell stories and connect the past and present.[2] This is done all within 100 words written for the public, not scholars.

Process of writing and editing exhibit labels. 1. A short narrative with a list of the medals (too long) 2. A more narrative approach 3. Revision after separating a medal, requiring a new title 4. Continuous edits that create an interpretive narrative rather than just a list of facts

It’s inspiring to think that the work I’m currently doing isn’t just for a grade in a class. Instead, I hope to leave a mark on my field, to teach people and help them connect to the lives of this family. Eventually, this project will become part of a larger exhibit that will open in the spring of 2022. My work is not yet finished, as I will be helping with the design and execution of that larger exhibit for my capstone project next semester. I’m looking forward to identifying more stories that answer questions, inspire new ones, and entertain the public while pushing them to consider new ideas in the ever-evolving databank that is our history.

[1] Beverly Serrell, Exhibit Labels: An Interpretive Approach (Walnut Creek: Alta Mira Press, 1996), 19.

[2] “Longfellow House Washington’s Headquarters,” Home Page, National Park Service, https://www.nps.gov/long/index.htm.

By: Violet Hurst

On Saturday, October 28, 2017, my phone rang out its shrill, soul-crushing alarm at 7:00 AM. And then 7:05. 7:10.

At 7:45, I dragged myself out of the safety and coziness of my bed, threw on clothes, and placed an On-the-Go Dunkin Donuts order for a large coffee while brushing my teeth.

“Add a turbo shot?” the app asked me. I hit yes and dashed out the door, pulling on my shoes as I ran.

What was I, a twenty-two year-old graduate student, doing waking up so early the morning after a friend’s Halloween party—my first day off in weeks? Driving an hour to volunteer at a public history event, of course!

The Mass Memories Road Show at UMass Boston is an event-based public history project that digitizes family photos and memories shared by the people of Massachusetts. Road Show volunteers work with members of the local community to organize a free public event where residents can contribute their photographs to a digital archive. To date, the project has digitized more than 6,000 photographs and stories from across the state, creating an educational resource of primary sources for future generations. On October 28, 2017, I volunteered at the project’s event in Marshfield. It was my first Road Show, and despite having attended a training session, I had no idea what to expect.

Ventress Memorial Library, Marshfield, MA

Carolyn Goldstein, the Public History and Community Archives Program Manager at UMass Boston’s Archives and Special Collections, greeted me with a smile when I walked through the doors of Marshfield’s Ventress Memorial Library. She directed me to a medium-sized community room, where I saw volunteers of all ages milling around, chatting with one another and setting up their stations. Members of the local community had turned out in force, each excited to take an active role in documenting the history of their community. Several were elders with long memories of Marshfield’s history; some were history buffs; a few were even volunteers from other towns who had volunteered in previous Road Shows. I sat down at my designated station next to an affable woman named Maureen. She and her husband had moved to Marshfield the year before, hoping that a house by the beach would entice their grandchildren to visit more often. She had come to the Road Show because she wanted to become more involved in her new community, and to learn about its history in the process.

As we waited for participants to arrive, Maureen and I went over our responsibilities. Our task was simple: we were to help participants fill out a form for each one of their photographs. We would ask them to title and describe their own photographs and to identify any relevant people, places, and events they captured. We were to allow people to tell their own stories, and to record the meanings that they assigned to each photograph. Our role was to listen, not to shape, suggest, or revise.

Throughout the day, I was privileged to meet and serve many members of the community, and to learn about their diverse experiences as residents of Marshfield. I saw pictures of family homes, children’s weddings, vacations, and old-time local businesses. A woman laid out three pictures before me that comprised six generations of her family. A widow came with her daughter to make sure a photograph of her husband’s old five and dime store made it into the archive. Two of Marshfield’s town historians wanted to scan the cover of their first book. “Don’t worry,” they told me when they learned that I was in a history MA program, “You can make a living doing history—we sure have!”

All day long, I was humbled by the knowledge that participants were allowing me an intimate glimpse into their hearts and minds. They were showing me the people and places that they valued most in the world- memories held so dear that they were worth preserving for future generations. This was, truly, something special.

It is an unfortunate but undeniable reality that archival repositories—digital and not—tend filled with records of the powerful. Their materials disproportionately focus on the lives of white men, the wealthy, the healthy, the well-connected. Those who lack privilege are chronically underrepresented in archival collections, and, too often, that absence leads to an erasure from history. Projects like the Mass. Memories Road Show, which empower people to construct their own archives, tip the balance of power by allowing ordinary people to shape the historical record. They gather together a wealth of material that the historians of the future can draw upon to construct a richer, more complete picture of the past.

And that’s worth getting out of bed on a Saturday morning.

The next Mass. Memories Road Show will be in Amesbury, MA on Saturday, April 21st. A full schedule of Spring events can be found here.

Flyer for the upcoming Road Show in Amesbury, MA.

Tag: local history

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