Meet Some of Our Amazing Archivists

As a part of American Archives Month, we would like to introduce you to some of our amazing archivists! These are the very talented people that make our collections accessible and make our library work so seamlessly from behind the scenes. We are fortunate to have such an incredible, knowledgeable and dedicated staff, and would like the opportunity to acknowledge the contributions they make every day. 

We asked a handful of our archivists to identify their favorite collection/item at the MHS, indicate their area of expertise or interest, and share fun facts about themselves. 

Anna Clutterbuck-Cook
Reference Librarian

What is your favorite collection or item at the MHS? 

 One of my favorite items in the collection is a letter written from Rev. T. M. C. Birmingham to Margaret C. Robinson on 17 May 1923. In this letter, conservative preacher Thomas M. C. Birmingham of Milford, Nebraska, writes to Margaret C. Robinson, the head of the Massachusetts Public Interests League, seeking an ally in the fight against the "radical propaganda" being disseminated through women's colleges such as Bryn Mawr, Smith, and Wellesley -- propaganda turning "wholesome American girl[s]" away from patriotism and the Constitution, preaching "Communist sex standards," calling the literal truth of the Bible into question, and exposing young women to the theories of Freud and Marx.  The MHS featured this document as one of our Objects of the Month in February 2011. 

Please describe your area of historical interest.

My research as a historian focuses on 20th century American religious and cultural history, particularly the ways in which American Protestants engaged with (and helped to create) new ways of thinking about gender, sex, and sexuality. I am interested in mainline and left-leaning Protestant participation in the feminist and gay liberation movements during the 1970s. I have also become interested in the (not at all unrelated) ways that American reproductive politics have been shaped by conservative Christian and white supremacist ideas about white womanhood and white women’s sexuality, reproductive decisions, and actions. 

What is a fun fact about you?

My first job in public history was volunteering as a tour guide at the Cappon House (Holland, Mich.) a historic home built in 1874 to house my hometown’s first mayor, his second wife, and some of his eleven children! The photograph above is me on my first day as a volunteer in the autumn of 1993, when I was twelve years old. 

 

Katherine H. Griffin
Nora Saltonstall Preservation Librarian

What is your favorite collection or item at the MHS?  

 Forbes family papers and other China trade collections, plus any ships’ logs.

What is a fun fact about you?

When I started working here, women staff members were expected to wear dresses or skirts always (no pants allowed).

 

Hannah Elder
Library Assistant

What is your favorite collection or item at the MHS? 

At the moment, my favorite collection is the Massachusetts Audubon Society Records. Mass Audubon was founded in the 1890s by two women, Harriet Hemenway and Minna Hall, who used their social influence to protect birds by encouraging women to stop wearing feathered hats. Their work led to many protections for birds and Mass Audubon is still around today! 

Please describe your area of historical interest.

My historical passion is the Medieval period, but I’m very interested in the American colonial period as well. I also love the study of material culture and the way it can inform our understanding of history. 

What is a fun fact about you?

I spent a semester at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, where I learned Scottish Country Dancing! 

 

Ashley Williams
Library Assistant

What is your favorite collection or item at the MHS? 

My favorite item at the MHS is probably The Identity of Napoleon and Antichrist completely demonstrated… which is an essay we have on microfilm that I wrote a blog about last year. The unknown author sets out to prove Napoleon Bonaparte is the Antichrist by comparing excerpts from Revelations to significant aspects of his reign. 

Please describe your area of historical interest.

My historical interests include French History from the reign of the Bourbons through the reign of Napoleon, WWII history, and Jewish History.

What is a fun fact about you?

I was once in a college production of Sweeney Todd the Demon Barber of Fleet Street.

 

Brendan Kieran
Library Assistant

What is your favorite collection or item at the MHS? 

I really like Lilian Freeman Clarke’s 1864 diary, particularly her candid entries about and addressed to Emily Russell.

Please describe your area of historical interest.

My interests include late 19th- and early 20th-century U.S. history and the history of gender and sexuality.

What is a fun fact about you?

I contribute 90s music knowledge on my trivia team.

 

Do you have a question for one of our staff members? Please contact us at library@masshist.org. 

Every month is American Archives month at the MHS! Continue to celebrate with us throughout the year and join us in thanking our amazing archivists for what they do every day!

Triumph and Tragedy in History

School has started, which means that it is time to start brainstorming for this year’s National History Day  projects!  Each year National History Day selects a theme that is intentionally broad enough so that students can select topics from anywhere and any time in history.  The theme gives students a lens through which they will gain a deeper understanding of history beyond facts and dates, and pushes them to think about perspective, context, and broader impact of historical events.

 

The 2019 theme has been announced as “Triumph and Tragedy in History.”  While this theme sounds straightforward at first, it challenges students and teachers alike to think about the true meaning of both words in a historical context.  National History Day advises students to begin with the definition of both words: according to Merriam Webster, the definition of triumph is “a victory or conquest by or as if by military force, or a notable success,” while tragedy is defined a “disastrous event.”  While students do not need to necessarily include both triumph and tragedy in their work, many topics will end up including both:  a military triumph, for example, might be defined as a tragedy by the losing side.  NHD then poses the following questions for students starting to select their topics:

“Can one person’s triumph be another’s tragedy? Can the same person or group suffer from tragedy and triumph at the same time? How does one ultimately triumph after tragedy? Can triumph lead to tragedy?”

 

The Massachusetts History Day affiliate recently held an Intro to Mass History Day teacher workshop for educators from BPS, Lynn, and other schools in the Boston area.  To put themselves in their students’ shoes, teachers built upon NHD’s questions about the meaning of “Triumph and Tragedy” and brainstormed their own questions (see image).  Some of their questions included:

• Can war ever be a triumph?  Is it always a tragedy?
• How long does triumph last in history?
• Does triumph always equal tragedy for someone else?
• Do people learn from tragedy?  Can that lesson be a triumph?
• Can reform be both triumph and tragedy?
• Can whether something is thought of as a triumph or tragedy change through history?  Does it depend on who remembers it?

Portrait of Elizabeth Freeman, 1811.

Along with many heritage organizations around the country, the MHS Center for the Teaching of History thought about how the NHD theme connects to our own collections at MHS.  We set up a CTH Theme Page with ideas about topics, links to collections, and intriguing objects from our archives that might serve as a launching point for student research into triumph and tragedy.  Suggested topics include early Boston smallpox inoculations, Massachusetts women in WWI, Boston marriages and LGBTQ+ history, Wampanoag and English settler interactions, and Elizabeth Freeman’s suit for freedom from slavery.

Henry A. Monroe, a young musician with the 54^th Regiment.

Another example is the history of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment, the first military unit consisting of black soldiers to be raised  in the North during the Civil War.  The 54^th’s tragic losses at the Battle of Fort Wagner in 1863 are also remembered for triumphant bravery shown and for how the soldiers paved the way for numerous other black units in the Union Army for the remainder of the war.  The 54^th also fought a lesser-known but just as critical battle against its own government: the fight for equal pay.  African American soldiers in the 54^th and other Black units refused pay for 18 months until the government granted them the same pay to their white counterparts.  While the achievement of equal pay is regarded another triumph for civil rights, numerous tragedies shape this story: the hardship of the pay battle on Black soldiers and their families, the immense tragedy of the US Government’s racism and oppression, and the harsh punishments and even deaths of several soldiers for “mutiny” over the conflict.

How do you think that Triumph and Tragedy can act as perspectives for examining history?  What items in our collection do you think connect to the theme?

Sibley’s Harvard Graduates: Determination and Persistence

One of the happy consequences of the Massachusetts Historical Society’s centuries-long institutional stability has been its ability to carry out extended projects. It is not that we actively try to transform small, modest undertakings into ones that never end, but that we see our commitments through to their conclusion. Determination and persistence are our watchwords. The time horizon of most businesses is usually a matter of a few weeks, months, or years. Even well-endowed educational and cultural institutions rarely project their plans decades into the future. One of the Massachusetts Historical Society’s signature projects, however, Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, a multi-volume collected biography of the college’s alumni, has a history more than a century and three-quarters long, including more than 130 years as a formal MHS activity.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, no one expected that work on Sibley’s Harvard Graduates would still be underway today. To say that Sibley has proceeded by fits and starts would be a triumph of tact. Whether one dates the series from 1842 (the year that Harvard assistant librarian John Langdon Sibley [1804-1885] began to collect source materials for the series), 1859 (when he wrote the first entries), or 1873 (when he published the first volume), the undisputable fact is that the project has been underway for a very long time.

It goes without saying that everyone involved would prefer a more rapid rate of publication. The series was an ancillary responsibility when Sibley began to work on it some 176 years ago, however, and an ancillary responsibility it has remained. One of his many duties as assistant librarian was to maintain an up-to-date record of Harvard’s alumni. The college began no later than 1674 to publish an annotated broadside list of its graduates, Catalogus eorum qui in Collegio Harvardino . . . alicujus gradus laurea donate sunt, so in 1841, when President Josiah Quincy asked (or really instructed) Sibley to add the preparation of the list to his library responsibilities its form and nature were well established. The broadside appeared once every three years. To the extent possible, it included the Latinized names of the known graduates of the college—thus William Ames, A.B. 1645, became Gulielmus Amesius. Graduates who had achieved such honors as elevation to a major public office or admission to a significant cultural institution qualified for appropriate abbreviated notes recognizing these distinctions. When a graduate died, he did not disappear from the list; instead, a star next to his name marked his passing.

As Sibley accumulated reams of biographical information on Harvard men, friends began to urge him to make more of this data than the restricted space of the triennial broadside allowed. There were already models of collected biography to draw on, notably Athenae Oxonienses: An Exact History of All the Writers and Bishops Who Have Had their Education in the University of Oxford from 1500 to 1690 by Anthony Wood (1632-1695), but, model or not, preparing volumes of Biographical Sketches of Graduates of Harvard University, later known simply as Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, still proved to be a time consuming task. Shortly before Sibley’s death in 1885, he completed his third and final volume; he had taken his story from Harvard’s first graduating class in 1642 through the class of 1689. All told, he had written entries on 301 graduates. Some sketches, on subjects about whom little was known, were only a few paragraphs long. In contrast, the entry on the Puritan minister Cotton Mather, A.B. 1678, no doubt colonial America’s most prolific author, ran 153 pages, including a list 117 pages long of his 456 works.

John Langdon Sibley and his wife, Charlotte, lived with unusual frugality; at his death, after providing for Charlotte, he pledged to the Society about $150,000, to that point its largest bequest. Although the legacy could be used for a number of different purposes, the continuation of Sibley’s Harvard Graduates was the closest to his heart. Nearly half a century passed before another scholar, Clifford K. Shipton (1902-1973), resumed the series. Between 1930, when Shipton began the work, and the posthumous publication of volume 17 in 1975, he prepared fourteen volumes of sketches, a massive achievement that carried the project from the class of 1690 through the class of 1771. After a sixteen-year pause, work on the series resumed in 1989. Volume 18 appeared in 1999. Publication of volumes 19 and 20 is in progress, and research and writing for volume 21, which will take the series through the class of 1784, is far along.

From time to time, scholars and administrators at other American colleges have toyed with the possibility of undertaking their own counterpart to Sibley and two institutions have produced valuable reference tools. Between 1885 and 1912, Franklin Bowditch Dexter (1842-1920) brought out six volumes of entries on Yale alumni from the school’s founding in 1701 through the class of 1815. At Princeton, between 1976 and 1991, a team of scholars issued five volumes of sketches of that college’s graduates and non-graduates through the class of 1794. In 2005, the MHS and the New England Historic Genealogical Society brought out a CD-ROM, Colonial Collegians: Biographies of Those Who Attended American Colleges before the War for Independence, that collected all the Harvard, Yale, and Princeton entries through the class of 1774, together with parallel material on the graduates of William and Mary, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, Brown, Dartmouth, Rutgers, the medical schools at Penn and Columbia, and William Tennant’s Log College, a Presbyterian seminary.

Recent Sibley volumes, both published and in the works, as well as Colonial Collegians testify to the Society’s belief that even after well over a century it has not quite satisfied its commitment to John Langdon Sibley and his Harvard graduates. In the coming years, look for more Sibley volumes in print, including those now in press. And look for Colonial Collegians, currently available in our reading room as a CD-ROM, to be accessible one day as a free reference source on the MHS’s website.

Travel Without Moving : Adam Matthew Digital and the History of Tourism

As summer draws to its inevitable end, I am somewhat grateful (In case you haven’t noticed, it has been a hot one!) and somewhat wistful. Although I’ve been privileged to take several trips this season, I am someone always thinking of the next place left to explore, even if that place is as close as downtown Boston or a small piece of New England I haven’t yet seen in my lifetime of living here. Luckily, as a library assistant here at MHS and an aspiring archivist, I do always have an option to turn to when needing to be transported to a new place: the archives.

Quite the useful tool in my vicarious travels has been the Adam Matthew Digital online database Leisure, Travel and Mass Culture: The History of Tourism. This digital collection - available by subscription - highlights materials from several contributing institutions around the world, including the Massachusetts Historical Society, revolving around the birth and growth of travel and mass tourism between 1850 and 1980. The collection is made up of all sorts of ephemera from photographs, travel brochures, and ads to promotional tourism films. One can explore the collection by curated themes, country or region, contributing institution, or even within a set chronological timeline. It can be accessed online here at the MHS, or within any contributing or subscribing library.

Below I’ve highlighted a few items from our collections available on this database, and how they contribute to our understanding of how Americans traveled and toured New England in the past two centuries.

Many of the more eye-catching items are those tourism guides and brochures by transportation and tourism companies trying to entice consumers to be whisked away on a seasonal adventure of a lifetime. A prime example is this guide, Outdoors in New England, published in 1909 by the Boston & Maine Railroad General Passenger Department.

 

Inside this colorful volume, are nearly 50 pages of enthusiastic prose on the many leisure activities in the different states of New England, “the ideal, the perfect resting-up section of America.” Accompanied by both photographs and tri-colored illustrations of serene activities like boating and fishing, it captures the ever increasing narrative of the commodity of vacation as a respite from the tedium and stress of work and everyday life that was becoming available to the average American as railroads commercialized.

 

As the next decade approaches, more of these brochures became geared toward automobile travel, such as Real Tour to the Berkshires, published by the Real Tour Association of Lenox, MA. Including a fold-out map of the routes, the guide provides a detailed description of a scenic drive from New York through Connecticut and into the Berkshire area of western Massachusetts, with suggestions of accommodations and activities along the ride.

 

 

Aside from brochures and advertisements, a large part of our travel related collections on this database, and in general, are travel diaries. The diaries of Eva E. Blackwelder record her travels through Boston and surrounding towns, from winter 1938 to spring 1939. Eva’s entries are quite thorough, noting the weather, the sights seen, town histories learned on her tours and the quality, or lack thereof, of food at each of their accommodations. Not unlike myself, Eva seems to have kept most of the brochures, maps, photos and newspaper clippings collected along her journey to remember these places by. A notable realization as one leafs through these pages is how most of the sites she visited nearly a hundred years ago - the many stops of the Freedom Trail, Plymouth village, the House of Seven Gables in Salem - remain the draw for many tourists to this area today due to eastern Massachusetts’ historic past.

Eva E. Blackwelder Scrapbook [8], c.1938-1957.

 

Eva E. Blackwelder Scrapbook [Brochures], 1935.

 

Eva E. Blackwelder Scrapbook [Brochures], c.1938-1957.

Here’s a final nostalgic image from Eva’s journal - soon to be just a faint memory for Massachusetts travelers - physical turnpike tolls. On her way back into Boston at one point she writes:  

The toll houses were constructed with large gates which swing across the way as reminders to the traveler that he must help pay for the road.

The toll rates for passing over the turnpike were 25 cents for one person with a carriage of 4 wheels drawn by four horses. Carts and wagons with 2 horses paid half this amount… horse chaise, 10 cents. A man on horseback 5 cents. Cattle one cent and sheep and swine 3 cents a dozen. According to the general turnpike laws no toll could be collected from a passenger on foot; nor could toll be collected from those going to or from public worship within the limits of any town.

It’s hard to decide which is more surreal - a 25 cent toll or dozens of sheep on I-90! Either way, I hope this post inspires you to venture out on one last day trip before it’s too late.