From coordinating Massachusetts History Day (MHD) contests to helping host class visits, my co-op with the education department at the MHS has offered me an opportunity to explore the expansive work being done in history education. As I reflect on the past six months, I realize that all I have seen and done has attempted to answer one overarching question: How do we (educators) keep students engaged?
Student engagement is not a new challenge for educators, but concerns have grown amid a rapidly changing educational landscape. The numerous discussions, brainstorming sessions, and trial-and-error processes I have been involved in at the MHS have been fascinating and provided me with valuable insight to confront this age-old question.
Working on MHD, especially, has made me understand that personalization is key to engagement. The program allows students to pick their own topics and gets them interacting with history in more personal and interesting ways than the classic lecture format. Seeing students so excited and deeply passionate about their hard work was inspiring and gave me optimism for the future of education I aspire to one day help shape.
Additionally, I had the chance to dive into archival research at the MHS. I am currently helping with the development of an immigration primary source set. Through my sources, I hope to explore the identity struggles immigrants face in the U.S., particularly the tug of war between assimilating into American culture and preserving their heritage.
I also had the opportunity to co-lead class visits to the MHS, which gave me hands-on experience with teaching. As a history student myself, I often am the one going through the process of learning and historical inquiry, while a teacher is there to guide me. However, during class visits, I served as the teacher. I primarily worked with small groups of students, guiding their conversations about materials in show-and-tells and the MHS exhibit to achieve learning goals. I witnessed students going through the learning processes as they tried to understand what the materials are and why they are important and relevant.
While I used the toolkit of questions and guiding tactics I developed from observing class visits to help students work through the activities, I soon discovered that the structured strategy I was using wasn’t always effective in getting students excited about learning. What I found led to greater engagement was tailoring the experience to each student.
Forming personal connections with students, whether between them and me or between them and the materials, helped them to recognize the relevance of history in their lives. By taking the time to really talk to students, more were willing to share their thoughts and questions, leading to deeper engagement and analysis. These small conversations made the visits more meaningful and memorable, hopefully encouraging students to seek out similar opportunities.
These experiences were valuable to me, not only because they will benefit me in a future career in education, but also because they gave me a greater appreciation for academia as I return to my studies with a new perspective on learning and teaching.
I can not express the amount of gratitude I have for the education team. Their hard work and dedication to advancing education are deeply admirable and, from the start, have made me feel valued and a part of the team. There is still an endless list of exciting projects the team has, which I hope to contribute to even after I finish my co-op.
By Cassandra Cloutier, Associate Director of Research & Executive Coordinator of the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium
The Massachusetts Historical Society’s Research Department is pleased to announce the 2026-2027 cohort of research fellows. Each year, the MHS provides financial support for scholars producing original scholarship based on our unique collections.
During the 2026-2027 award year, the MHS will administer a variety of short-term fellowships that cover four to eight weeks of research. In addition to sponsoring research at the MHS, the Society also administers the Suzanne and Caleb Loring Fellowship on the Civil War, Its Origins, and Consequences in collaboration with the Boston Athenaeum. In addition, the Society administers the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium award in collaboration with twenty-nine other regional institutions.
The projects awarded for this year’s cohort span the seventeenth century to the present day and explore a variety of topics including women in the early American republic, the history of capitalism, African American caretakers, Reconstruction-era society, the post-war American military, and more. Others are examining material culture, food systems, and natural disasters throughout American history. At the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, several scholars are analyzing the founding of the country and various aspects of the conflict and its actors.
Please see the list of recipients and their projects below. We look forward to learning more about these projects in the coming year!
Short-Term Fellows 2026-2027
Barnes, Mollie, Associate Professor, University of South Carolina Beaufort, “Ednah Dow Littlehale Cheney and Nineteenth-Century Women’s Lives” (Ruth R. Miller Fellowship)
Bennett, Zachary, Assistant Professor, Norwich University, “Conquering the Dawn: New England’s Anglo-Wabanaki Wars” (Samuel Victor Constant Fellowship from the Society of Colonial Wars in Massachusetts)
Bowthorpe, Avonlea, Ph.D. Candidate, College of William and Mary, “Confidence and Coercion: Gender and Economic Agency in the British Atlantic, 1713-1800” (W.B.H. Dowse Fellowship)
Boyer, Emily, Ph.D. Student, Northeastern University, “Lemuel Shattuck: 19th Century Boston, Public Health, and the Creation of Modern U.S. Genealogy Practices” (Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship)
Brian, Amber, Associate Professor, University of Iowa, “Prescott and the Foundation of Hispanic Studies in the U.S.” (Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship)
Brooking, Greg, Independent Scholar, “Henry Laurens: A Southern Founder” (Massachusetts Society of the Cincinnati Fellowship)
Carabatsos, Julia, Ph.D. Candidate, Columbia University, “Album Logic: Assembling and Arranging America in Nineteenth-Century Art” (Andrew Oliver Research Fellowship)
Covington-Ward, Yolanda, Professor, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, “Diasporas within Africa: Identity, Culture, and Christianity among Congo Recaptives in Nineteenth Century Liberia” (Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship)
Criswell, Joel, Ph.D. Student, Texas A&M University, “Honorable Insanity: How Abolitionists Reimagined Madness in 19th Century U.S.” (Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship)
Davis, Indy, Ph.D. Candidate, Princeton University, “In the Name of Guardianship: Law and the Frailty of Incapacity” (Benjamin F. Stevens Fellowship)
Del Santo, Christopher, Ph.D. Candidate, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, “The Lycurgan Moment: Classical Slavery, Modern Government, and the Politics of History in the Early American Republic” (Marc Friedlaender Fellowship)
Flecha, Jesse, Graduate Student, Texas A&M University, “International Slavery, International Freedom: The Grant Administration’s Effort to End American Slavery Abroad” (Elizabeth Woodman Wright Fellowship)
Gandolfo-Lucia, Nicholas, Ph.D. Student, Brown University, “Paper Money Between Empire and Capitalism in the Eighteenth-Century North Atlantic World” (W.B.H. Dowse Fellowship)
Gonzalez, Alfredo, Assistant Professor, University of California, Santa Barbara, “Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. and the American Foreign Legion” (Abigail Bowen Wright Fellowship)
Haynes, Olivia, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, “Unseen Hands: Black Midwives, Care, and Belonging in the Early American North” (Alyson R. Miller Fellowship)
Heckart, Jordann, Ph.D. Candidate, Baylor University, “Dissenting Women: How Women Responded to Church-State Relations, 1730-1833” (C. Conrad & Elizabeth H. Wright Fellowship)
Hogue, Sarah Anne, Ph.D. Candidate, The University of Southern Mississippi, “Military Deputy Husbandship, Divorce, and Women’s Economic Responsibilities During Warfare, 1639-1783” (Samuel Victor Constant Fellowship from the Society of Colonial Wars in Massachusetts)
Kelly, Matthew, Assistant Professor, University of Washington, “Taken for Granted: Indigenous Land, Capital, and the Origins of American Common Schools” (Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship)
Lincoln, Angelina, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Maryland, College Park, “African American Children and their Caretakers in and around the Civil War’s Refugee Camps” (Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship)
Majerowicz, Daniel, Ph.D. Candidate, University of California, Riverside, “Negotiating the Commonwealth: Jurisdiction, Sovereignty, and State-Building in Early Pennsylvania, 1681-1720” (Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship)
McKenna, Nicholas, Ph.D. Candidate, Johns Hopkins University, “Before the Shot (Heard ‘Round the World)” (Malcolm and Mildred Freiberg Fellowship)
Palazzolo, Elena, Assistant Professor, University of Mississippi, “Modern Fare: Reconstructing the U.S. Food System, 1862-1906” (Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship)
Peterka, Aaron, Independent Scholar, “The Responsibility of Victory: American Citizen-Soldiers and the GI Mutinies of 1945-1946” (Military Historical Society of Massachusetts Fellowship)
Rosch, Cat, Ph.D. Candidate, Brandeis University, “Eccentric Troops and Grassroots Forces: College Women, Reproductive Health, and Activism in Massachusetts, 1960-1973” (Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship)
Rothe, Brayden, Ph.D. Student, University of Minnesota, “Counting the Consequences: Francis Amasa Walker, Statistical Authority, and the Remaking of the Nation after the Civil War” (Louis Leonard Tucker Alumni Fellowship)
Sauers, Cameron, Ph.D. Candidate, Pennsylvania State University, “Raising Free Laborers: Institutions, Indenture, and Children at Work in 19th Century America” (Louis Leonard Tucker Alumni Fellowship)
Scouller, Wulfstan, Ph.D. Candidate, Yale University, “Enterprizing War: How Merchants Shaped King Philip’s War” (Samuel Victor Constant Fellowship from the Society of Colonial Wars in Massachusetts)
Stanley, Matthew, Associate Professor, University of Arkansas, “Capital Reconciliation: Owners, Workers, and the Political Economy of Civil War Reunion” (Governor John A. Andrew Fellowship)
Stanton, Grant, Assistant Professor, Drew University, “The Language of Liberty: Black Politics and the Law of Antislavery in Revolutionary Massachusetts” (African American Studies Fellowship)
Sweat-Montoya, Sydney, Ph.D. Candidate, College of William & Mary, “Evading Empire: Commercial Networks and Illicit Trade in the Western Circum-Caribbean, 1630-1800” (Kenneth and Carol Hills Fellowship in Colonial History)
Urus, Arianne, Assistant Professor, Vanderbilt University, “Common Shores: A Political Ecology of the Eighteenth-Century Newfoundland Cod Fisheries” (Mary B. Wright Environmental History Fellowship)
Suzanne and Caleb Loring Fellowship (jointly awarded with the Boston Athenaeum)
Bowen, Alexander, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Georgia, “A Land of Gilded Promises: Florida in the Long Gilded Age, 1865-1926”
New England Regional Fellowship Consortium Fellows visiting the MHS
Allukian, Kristin, Associate Professor, University of South Florida, “Letters from Lowell: New Perspectives on the Epistolary Culture of America’s First Female Industrial Class”
Bennett, Zachary, Assistant Professor, Norwich University, “Conquering the Dawn: New England’s Anglo-Wabanaki Wars”
Blum, Edward, Professor, San Diego State University, “A Republic that Counts: How Data Broke the British Empire and Made an American One”
Bose, Neilesh, Professor, University of Victoria, “Charles Dall, India, and Indian Religion in Nineteenth Century New England”
Bouwkamp, Julia, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Pennsylvania, “Bodies of Critique: Women, Writing, and the Politics of the Personal in the Early United States”
Dickerson-Pells, Makhai, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, “Braided Justice in the Dawn Lands: Black Reparations and Indigenous Land Back in Southern New England, 1960-2026”
Dinnie, Sam, Ph.D. Candidate, George Washington University, “‘This Convulsed Commonwealth’: Western Massachusetts Women in Protest and Dissent, 1734–1787”
Duggan, Marie Christine, Professor Emeritus, Keene State College of the University System of New Hampshire, “New Englanders and New Spaniards: Elusive Trust in the Age of Revolutions”
Eisenstein, Lea, Ph.D. Candidate, Princeton University, “Coming Out: The Private and Public History of Hysterectomy in America”
Gasha, Anna, Adjunct, Columbia University, “Hurricanes and Floods in New England: Loss, Recovery, and Preparation of the Built Environment”
Jackson, Holly, Professor, University of Massachusetts, Boston, “No Half Measures: Radical Non-Resistance and the Theory of Abolition”
Jon, Ihnmi, Assistant Professor, Tufts University, “Mind the Archival Gap: The ‘Hermit Nation’ at a Crossroads (1876-1910)”
McLaren, Aidan, Ph.D. Student, University at Albany, “Empires in Glass: Greenhouses and Controlling Climates in the Atlantic World, 1607-1815”
Rojas, Heath, Ph.D. Candidate, Columbia University, “Written in the Heart: Sentimental Deism in the Enlightenment and the Age of Revolutions”
Sedzielarz, Aleksander, Assistant Professor, Kean University, “Making a Move: Diversion, Dialogue, Desire, and Empire in Games and Sport in the US and Asia-Pacific (1834-1959)”
New England Regional Fellowship Consortium Fellows not visiting the MHS
Aboelela, Ayah, Ph.D. Candidate, Northeastern University, “The Late Ottoman Hajj between Medina and Jerusalem”
Bianco , Allison, Independent Scholar, “38 Going on 90: A Print Series of The Great New England Hurricane”
Carabatsos, Julia, Ph.D. Candidate, Columbia University, “Album Logic: Assembling and Arranging America in Nineteenth-Century Art”
D’Urso, Carina, Ph.D. Student, Boston College, “Picturing America: Civic and Communal Life at the Children’s Art Centre”
Flinchbaugh, Anna, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Southern California, “Replication, Repetition, and Historical Revisionism: Art Needlework in the United States and United Kingdom”
Forsyth, Ari, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Washington, “A History of Jewish Social Work in the United States, 1880-1940”
Gardner, Martha, Associate Professor, Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, “Rights and Risks: Why American Women Kept Smoking even as Men Began to Quit, 1960s-1990s”
Haruna, Halima, Ph.D. Student, Northeastern University, “An Intellectual History of Black Women’s Disability Politics, 1870s -1900s”
Ombadykow, Dolma, Ph.D. Candidate, Yale University “The Human and its Borders after Biology: Twentieth Century Maintenance of Life, Livability, and Labor, 1900–1961”
Pack, Caroline, Independent Scholar, “From the Home to the Hospital: The Making of Death Care in Late 19th Century New England”
Rosen, Joshua, Ph.D. Candidate, Boston College, “City of Tenants: Rental Housing in Late 20th Century Boston”
Scouller, Wulfstan, Ph.D. Candidate, Yale University, “Enterprizing War: How Merchants Shaped King Philip’s War”
Turner, KT, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Idaho, “Claiming Space: The Emancipatory Power of African American Theatre During Reconstruction to 1900”
New England’s son Noah Kahan makes his triumphant return to Fenway Park this week, including an 11 July show on the birthday of John Quincy Adams. Kahan’s works have long reminded me of JQA but none moreso than Kahan’s most recent album, The Great Divide, an intensely personal look at life in a New England family.
Portrait of Abigail Adams Smith—“Nabby”
“You’re home, and I’m so grateful you are. Because you’re going to fix it; you’re going to patch it up. Honey, we’re fragile. You’ve always been so tough.” —American Cars
I’ve already written at length about JQA’s close relationship with his sister, Nabby. Nabby was the family’s regulating ballast. Endlessly tender and patient, she was a bedrock for Adams. This tribute Kahan wrote for his sister couldn’t be more apt.
“I’m cursing every exit sign and my devotion to hoping you might change your mind and to hating you for going.” —Downfall
It may seem strange to choose a song with the chorus “I’ll keep rooting for your downfall” as the one to sum up a marriage, but John Quincy’s relationship with his wife, Louisa Catherine, was anything but straightforward. Two strong but opposing personalities, they had trouble living together and even more trouble living apart. Louisa had no appetite for public life, and her husband’s return to Congress after losing his presidential bid was one of the most strained moments of their marriage. (“Staying Still” is also a JQA/LCA anthem!)
“I wish you could know me, and I wish I could know you much more sometimes Wish I could do nothing with you, sit in the yard while the day dies.” —Willing and Able
This album is one long run of songs written for the three Adams brothers—JQA, Charles, and Thomas. An elder brother who was handpicked by George Washington for diplomatic service would hardly encourage fraternal affection, particularly as the younger boys failed to keep up academically and professionally (and struggled with alcohol abuse). Yet John Quincy never stopped adoring his brothers, chiseling away at the wall between them with job offers and much-needed funds.
“I’m an astronaut; you’re the moon. I stare at you, I sing to you, I circle you.” —Orbiter
In my opinion, the true north of JQA’s life was his mother, Abigail. This track Kahan wrote for his mother perfectly encapsulates their relationship. JQA’s wife, Louisa Catherine, understood this relationship well, reflecting that her mother-in-law was “the guiding Planet around which all revolved.”
“Everybody’s asleep, let’s talk about him. Talk about high school, talk about death Where do we go when we die? I wouldn’t mind right here. No, I wouldn’t mind at all.” —Dan
17 August 1826 found a grieving John Quincy Adams writing to his “dear friend and cousin” William Cranch about the loss of their fathers and “the memory of the Scenes of our childhood.” Cranch was born two years and one week after his cousin and remained one of the few constants of Adams’s life. The cousins went from running around the Massachusetts countryside together as small boys to serving the federal government in Washington, D.C. As Adams aged and outlived his parents, sisters, brothers, two sons and a daughter, his cousin William was always there to remember what everyone else had forgotten.
The Adams Papers editorial project at the Massachusetts Historical Society gratefully acknowledges the generous support of our sponsors. Major funding of the edition is currently provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Packard Humanities Institute.
As newlywed Elizabeth Copley Greene (1770–1866) settled into her new estate, she found herself thousands of miles away from the artistic family who raised her. Born in Boston in 1770 but raised in cosmopolitan London after her family fled during the American Revolution, Greene grew up immersed in the artistic circle of her father, painter John Singleton Copley (1738–1815). In July 1800, she married the Boston merchant and planter Gardiner Greene in London. Elizabeth’s subsequent reverse migration produced a bountiful correspondence between her and her family spanning decades—materials I studied as the Andrew Oliver Fellow at the Massachusetts Historical Society for my dissertation on the use of pastel in Revolutionary-era North American art.
Before Copley left for London, he was the most prominent portraitist in colonial North America, renowned for his work in oil, miniature, and pastel. Popular for replicating textures like skin and textiles, pastel was nevertheless controversial for its fragility—a quality evident in some portraits, like that of Jonathan Jackson (figure 1). Despite this concern, Copley thought his “best portraits done in that way,” and worked in pastel until he left for Europe in 1774. He favored the medium enough to use it for pendant portraits of himself and his wife, Susannah, around the time of their marriage in late 1769, a year before Elizabeth’s birth.
Figure 1. John Singleton Copley, Jonathan Jackson, ca. 1767-1769, pastel on paper, 56.2 cm x 46 cm, Massachusetts Historical Society, Artwork 01.252
Of Copley’s children, only Elizabeth returned to North America; it was her branch of the family that became most invested in sustaining his artistic legacy. Elizabeth’s daughter, Martha Babock Greene Amory, wrote The Domestic and Artistic Life of John Singleton Copley, R.A. (1882), a history drawing from oral history and family letters. Another descendant, Harcourt Amory, later deposited these materials at Massachusetts Historical Society. While the Copley Family papers (Ms. N-1034) preserve Elizabeth’s received family correspondence through 1847, they lack later letters excerpted in Amory’s book, raising questions about how descendants sought to shape Copley’s legacy as they preserved it.
While many of the works in Copley’s studio eventually reached Boston through Elizabeth’s descendants, the pastel portraits had never left. Fleeing Massachusetts with three young children during wartime, Susannah could not transport the fragile artworks. During Elizabeth’s first year in Boston, she noted that she was in possession of the portraits of her parents. Her mother’s response expressed extreme distaste (figure 2): “I have to say that I hope you will not adorn your new house with those sad portraits which you mention, pray hang them in a closet.” Though fashionable in 1769, thirty years later, they were out of style in London.
Figure 2. Letter from Susannah Clarke Copley to Elizabeth Copley Greene, December 20, 1800 (section dated December 26), Copley Family Papers (Ms. N-1034), Box 1 (Folder Oct-Dec 1800), Massachusetts Historical Society
For Elizabeth, that did not matter; the portraits were the only representations she possessed of her parents. They remained in her family a for a generation longer than the letters before being sold to the collector Henry Francis du Pont, at whose Winterthur Museum they remain today. These portraits remain in good condition because they never crossed the ocean on a ship, rather remaining as a stand-in for Copley in Boston and cared for by his descendants. To Elizabeth, their chalky faces served as daily reminders of her beloved parents; the value of seeing their faces was worth whatever the aesthetic cost. The survival of art depends on such personal devotional acts. From a daughter’s insistence on displaying reminders of home to the researcher’s study of her letters, these materials—protected through generations at Massachusetts Historical Society—help reveal human priorities and desires across time and distance.
Further Reading:
Gurnsey Jones, ed., Letters & Papers of John Singleton Copley and Henry Pelham, 1739-1776 (Massachusetts Historical Society, 1914)
Copley Family Papers, Ms. N-1034, Massachusetts Historical Society
For the last few months, I’ve been telling you about Henrietta Schroeder, a 14-year-old American girl on a European tour with her family in 1889. Her diary in the Stout family papers is a very entertaining record of that trip.
Today I’d like to introduce you to some of her friends. One of Henrietta’s most endearing qualities, I think, is her love for her friends, so I wanted to know more about the girls that meant so much to her.
The Curiosity Raising Club
On October 19, 1889, Henrietta had a great idea: “Lina Wetherill, Edith Speyers & Lena Schroeder & myself are going to get up a club, called the ‘Cur[i]osity Raising Club,’ […] for the purpose of getting up the cur[i]osity of others.” Just who were these curious young women?
I’ve mentioned Lina Wetherill before – that is, Caroline Bowen Wetherill, Henrietta’s best friend. Henrietta often wrote about Lina in her diary like this: “Oh! how I long for her, pray for her, love her. Oh! how I wish I could see her over here and (if only for an hour) press her to my heart once more, and be able to hear her voice, and feel her warm kiss once more.”
Lina, the daughter of Civil War veteran Francis Dring Wetherill, was born in 1876 and grew up in Philadelphia. At the age of 30, on a trans-Atlantic ocean liner, Lina met a 42-year-old bachelor lawyer from Seattle named Josiah Collins. They married a few months later and went on to have two sons together. Lina died in Seattle at the age of 80. I sincerely hope she and Henrietta stayed friends for the rest of their lives.
Confusingly, there was another Lena in Henrietta’s life, this one with an “e.” Here she is in an adorable photograph pasted into Henrietta’s diary.
Photograph of Lena Schroeder, ca. 1889
This Lena was Selina Richards Schroeder, Henrietta’s first cousin once removed, the daughter of New York cotton broker Gilliat Schroeder. She was born in 1875, just ten days before Henrietta. The Historical Society of Pennsylvania holds three diaries kept by Lena between 1888 and 1891. They look very similar to Henrietta’s; one of them even includes her picture!
In 1896, Gilliat Schroeder made some bad investments, and as the New York newspapers quaintly expressed it, “unfortunate speculation swept away the [family’s] fortune.” Lena, who was just 20 years old, went into business as a dressmaker to support her family, soon moving to larger premises in Manhattan and employing at least 25 other women. Her entrepreneurship was lauded in contemporary papers and in an 1898 book called What Women Can Earn.
The last member of the Curiosity Raising Club was Edith Lawrence Speyers, also of New York, Lena Schroeder’s first cousin through their mothers, Louisa and Selina Lawrence. Edith was also born in 1875, the oldest of the friends by a few months.
Edith would become best known as a leader in relief organizations during both world wars. She was chair of the National League for Women’s Service during World War I and, in 1920, founded the Dug Out, a Manhattan club for disabled veterans. For her various wartime efforts, she was decorated by the governments of France, Romania, and Serbia. But Edith didn’t rest on her laurels. She headed the National Women’s Council of the Navy League during World War II, when she was in her sixties. She was widowed twice and died in 1949.
Edith McVickar (née Speyers) and Breck Trowbridge receiving honors from Romanian politician Gogu Negulescu, clipped from the Dodge Center Record, October 9, 1919
I hope you’ll join me as I pick up Henrietta’s story in a future post!
By Bianca Laliberté, Andrew Oliver Fellow, 2025-2026
I have not yet encountered a philosopher dealing with the reality of archival research who has not confessed to me the ache and discomfort they experienced once actually immersed in the work. Fair enough: the Foucauldian confrontation of the philosophical tradition with the messy realm of the archives would not come about without irritation. Archival research breaks the flow of the tightly configured reading processes that inform this tradition. It cracks open the philosophical experience, leaving much room for emotional and cognitive dissonance, opening the door to a sort of chaotic sentiment.
Figure 1. Jeremy Belknap Diary, 1786. Massachusetts Historical Society, Ms. N-1827; P-380, Boxes A.1.10-11 III.
I wish to bring attention to the fact that such a Western philosophical narrative holds space for a rather European point of view. Unless we think of the development of American thought as a mere extension of European thought—which I can’t resign myself to doing for critical reasons analogous to the ones put forward by Ned Blackhawk, we must admit that, on the other side of the Atlantic, the logic of archival research somewhat follows an inverted logic. When facing the intellectual history of early America, one could argue that the chaotic sentiment is not experienced as the product of a philosophical breakthrough. It appears to me to be much more accurately perceived as the effect of an intrinsic quality. For researchers looking into materials from the seventeenth and eighteen centuries, the cognitive need to confront and defeat the dispersion of what we could call “American thought” through the grey world of archives and documents tends to feel rather unavoidable. Chronologically speaking, first comes the dissemination of the body of modern American thought, then come its otherwise structured forms.
Figure 2. Jeremy Belknap Diary, 1786. Massachusetts Historical Society, Ms. N-1827; P-380, Boxes A.1.10-11 III
Gérard Deledalle, the French philosopher who introduced American pragmatism in France during the golden years of continental philosophy, did not share these preoccupations. His framing of the beginnings of American philosophy (1954) led him no further back than to written oeuvres that could arguably be compared to textual forms that are familiar to the philosophical tradition. After rapidly covering contributions from individual thinkers like Samuel Johnson, Jonathan Edwards, or Thomas Jefferson, he rushes to address the emergence of American transcendentalism. Many early Americanists, on the other hand, have tended to be much more generous—sometimes too much so. Following patterns observable in early American discourses, many of them willingly identify the unarticulated philosophies of the seventeenth and eighteen-century American context as “practical” and even as “pragmatic” ones, sometimes without giving the notion of philosophy itself any further thought. This loosening of the notion of philosophy is not only the fruit of academic developments, however. The approaches to knowledge that drove eighteenth-century-born American learned societies certainly contributed to it.
Figure 3. Jeremy Belknap Diary, 1787. Massachusetts Historical Society, Ms. N-1827; P-380, Boxes A.1.10-11 III.
In Jeremy Belknap’s annotated almanacs, calendar pages and blank pages covered with manuscript notes drastically alternate (Figures 1–4). These artefacts convey a powerful image of his personal experience of the disruption of continuous time. And so does the gathering of the first collections of the MHS, through which he certainly dealt with the interrupting rhythm of archival dissemination, even more so given that the organizing principles that led his endeavor surpassed the bibliographical and archival categories. His approach could, in that sense, be called “intermedial”: the spectrum of material he embraced included objects, maps, images, and so-called “curiosities”. Belknap never bestowed his collecting philosophy with a formal theorization, and it would be quite dubious to frame him as a philosopher. However, to build on a statement articulated by Abram C. Van Engen (2023) in relation to the discipline of history, the impact that individuals like Belknap, Ebenezer Hazard, and John Pintard have had on the development of American intellectual history at large has yet been overlooked by scholars attached to the various disciplines that draw on the gigantic pool of early texts and artefacts that they collected. This postulate includes—or should include—philosophy and intellectual history.
Figure 4. Jeremy Belknap Diary, 1787. Massachusetts Historical Society, Ms. N-1827; P-380, Boxes A.1.10-11 III.
One way to think of this interdisciplinary phenomenon in general terms would be to verify to what extent it sheds light on the horizon of a troubling possibility, which Van Engen touches upon: the disseminative logic that determines the making of the various fields of Early America to this day stood at the heart of Belknap’s nationalist project. This is, at least, what I want to leave for the reader of this blog post to think about. Continental standpoints of philosophy fed the critique of American nationalism from the 1970s on. We need a philosophy of archival research which recognizes that the unreflective application of these standpoints to the American proto-imperial context runs the risk of blinding us to the task here at hand. From the perspective of the study of Early America, the study of institutional history and the critique of structures of power that motivated Michel Foucault’s engagement with archival research cannot target a monolithic form of philosophy alone. It must be capable of weighing the fact that the American nationalist metaphysic, which Belknap and his associates translated into a practice of gathering, embodies a sort of democratic and inclusive quality. One could speak, using the terms of Jacques Rancière—and not without a touch of irony—of a democracy of the sensible, where sheets of paper, records, images, and Indigenous art pieces, are put together for the State’s and citizen’s eye to see and exhibit. This invites us to acknowledge that our defense of democratic approaches to research thus requires deeper thinking and renewed forms of investigation, which might prove necessary to face the symptomatic return of nationalism.
And of course, following this path, one should expect to experience a certain level of ache and discomfort.
Further Reading:
For a critique of the denial of the cost of political and imperial “independence” of the United States, view Blackhawk, Ned. The Rediscovery of America. Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History. New Haven, Yale University, 2023—and p.1 in particular, where he writes: “Historians have largely followed suit in focusing on Europeans and their descendants: Puritans governing a commonwealth in a wilderness; pioneers settling western frontiers; and European immigrants huddled upon Atlantic shores. Scholars have long conflated U.S. history with Europeans, maintaining that the United States evolved from its British settlements”.
Deledalle, Gérard. Histoire de la philosophie américaine, Presses universitaires de France, Paris, 1954.
For a critique of unreflective applications of philosophical interpretation to the Early American context, view Beard, Charles. The Supreme Court and the Constitution. New York, Paisley Press, 1912. On p.79, Beard argued that the Founding Fathers and the Framers of the Constitution, “were not philosophers, but men of business and property . . . and had no problem with the system of class rule and the strong centralization of government which existed in England”.
Van Engen, Abram C. (2023). “Pursuing the “True History” of America” in The Massachusetts Historical Review, Published by the Massachusetts Historical Society, Vol 21, 2020. I wish to thank Ondine Le Blanc for referring this brilliant article to me.
Adams Family Correspondence, volume 17, forthcoming in 2027, is filled with politics, diplomacy, war, and strong opinions, but also many personal changes for the Adams family. Several beloved Adams family members and dear friends die between 1809 and 1812, the years covered in this volume. In the midst of this sorrow, John and Abigail watch their grandchildren develop into teenagers and young adults. Letters of the third generation first appeared in volume 16, but their correspondence plays a more prominent role in the series as they grow older. While some of the grandchildren are more famous than others due to their own careers or family drama, I want to highlight one of the lesser-known Adams grandchildren, Susanna Boylston Adams.
Susanna Boylston Adams (1796–1884) was the eldest daughter of Charles and Sarah Smith Adams (Sarah Smith Adams was the sister of William Stephens Smith, who married Charles’ sister Nabby!) Susanna and her younger sister, Abigail Louisa Smith Adams, spent much of their youth with grandparents John and Abigail after their father’s death in 1800.
Silhouette of Susanna Boylston Adams, by Boston artist Henry Williams
In 1817, Susanna married Lt. Charles Thomas Clark, who died two years later. She remarried in 1833 to William R. H. Treadway, who died in 1836. The Adams family provided her with financial support until her death. The first letter to Susanna in our collection is an 1808 letter from her grandmother, printed in volume 16, with most of her early correspondence falling into the timeline of volume 17. Her writings are even more frequent in the Adams Papers as she gets older.
Susanna was born during her grandfather’s presidency but grew up in the idyll of her grandparents’ farm in Quincy. Her social circle was filled with cousins (including Nabby’s daughter, Caroline Amelia Smith) as well as young women in the greater Quincy area, including Ann Hall, an orphan raised by the Adamses’ neighbors, and Ann Gerry, daughter of Elbridge and Ann Thompson Gerry. She also traveled locally, including to Newburyport to spend time with friends. In October 1810, Abigail wrote to her in Newburyport that this was the “first time you have gone so far from home without a guide.” She reminded Susanna about proper etiquette and social behavior.
Most of the extant correspondence is comprised of letters that Susanna received rather than those she wrote, but we are able to learn quite a bit about Susanna from her incoming mail and how often she addressed letters as her grandmother’s assistant. She had an especially close relationship with John Adams; Abigail noted he loved reading Susanna’s letters, hearing her sing and play guitar, and going on outings together, including a visit to the First Church of Weymouth.
For more on Susanna Boylston Adams, be sure to check out Adams Family Correspondence, volume 17, when it is published in 2027!
The Adams Papers editorial project at the Massachusetts Historical Society gratefully acknowledges the generous support of our sponsors. Major funding of the edition is currently provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Packard Humanities Institute. Volume 16 and 17 of the Adams Family Correspondence also received support from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission.
By Michael A. Schoeppner, Andrew W. Mellon Short-Term Fellow, Associate Professor and Trustee Research Professor University of Maine-Farmington
Historians often go into the archives with specific questions in mind, and we can exhibit obscene levels of patience as we sift through materials in search of historical evidence to answer those questions. Many research trips yield more frustration than insight. But other times, not only do we find what we are looking for, we come across an item that speaks directly to us about our contemporary historical moment. I call this fortunate event an “archival surprise.”
During my first week at the Massachusetts Historical Society, I was scrolling through the Winthrop Papers, a sprawling collection that contains multiple volumes from Robert C. Winthrop, former US Senator and US Speaker of the House. In 1843, Winthrop wrote a report about the imprisonment of Black people in Southern port cities. This report was central to my current research on the movement of free Black people before the Civil War and their ideas about citizenship. As I scrolled through Winthrop’s personal correspondence, I came across a letter from Charles Sumner, who was just cutting his teeth in public service when he wrote it. In the letter, he applauded Winthrop’s argument about Black people’s citizenship rights. I did not read the entire letter at first; I made an electronic copy to read later.
Two days afterwards, I was in the MHS reading room, exhausted from the previous evening’s doomscrolling over the recently argued birthright citizenship case currently before the Supreme Court. While I was waiting for a set of documents to be delivered, I read that letter from Charles Sumner. As I suspected, he held similar views as Winthrop regarding the citizenship rights that Black travelers ought to be entitled. But then, completely unsolicited, Charles Sumner wrote,
“The genius of our institutions invites immigration, but it does not say “come,” then add “but all who come must be of the purest white, and you cannot have offspring entitled to privileges + immunities of citizenship.” For whatever may be the conditions of the foreign immigrant under the Acts of Congress, I cannot doubt that his children, born in the United States, are citizens thereof.”
And just in case I was misreading Sumner’s rather deplorable handwriting, he reiterated in no uncertain terms,
“The accident of birth impresses upon the infant this indelible character. He becomes a citizen by birth within the jurisdiction of the Commonwealth, for then the C’wealth treats him as owing allegiance. He is one of her children. He is not a resident, but a citizen.”
I was shellshocked at how pertinent and precise Sumner’s position was. Given how essential he and other Radical Republicans were in the drafting and passage of the Reconstruction Amendments and the 1866 Civil Rights Act while Sumner was a US Senator, his views on immigrants’ birthright citizenship should be required reading for legal theorists. If anyone cared what the Radical Republicans meant when they proposed the 14th Amendment’s birthright citizenship clause, here was a powerful enunciation.
I swore Sumner was talking to me. Then I remembered the portrait hanging directly behind my table in the MHS reading room. I turned around, and Old Charles was there, sitting in his chair, staring down. His smug glare confirmed my suspicion. He wrote that letter to us as much as he wrote it to Winthrop. Here was an archival surprise, courtesy of Charles Sumner.
Portrait of Charles Sumner in the MHS reading room
Anyone who has spent considerable time in the archives has met with similar moments. Archival surprises are special rewards, a reminder that the past is not ever really past. It also confirms that public archives, such as the Massachusetts Historical Society, are invaluable cultural repositories.
On February 12, 2026, the MHS welcomed Alex Green of the Harvard Kennedy School to give a talk on his book, A Perfect Turmoil: Walter E. Fernald School and the Struggle to Care for America’s Disabled. Green’s research has been ongoing, so he included information in his talk that he has uncovered since publication. It was a fascinating glimpse into a subject I have been researching in the MHS collection with my Disability in the Archive series, which you can check out in the further reading section. Green’s work looks at the ways disability was treated in Boston’s own backyard at the Walter E. Fernald State School in Waltham, Massachusetts.
Green’s book A Perfect Turmoil: Walter E. Fernald School and the Struggle to Care for America’s Disabled.
Green took us through the context around the creation of the Fernald School. He complicated the narrative of Walter Fernald, the man who founded the school, who was neither good nor evil. Through Green, the audience understood that Fernald was a man who was trying his best, even when his best failed people. Fernald was a eugenicist who eventually changed his opinion and fought against his prior beliefs. Green discussed the way the Fernald School was set up and the impact this particular school had on the education of disabled children in the United States, and later the world. Fernald believed that hard work and busyness could improve disabilities. Green pointed to the way the theories Fernald espoused are still present in special education practices around the United States today, and even presented his own rather radical idea that there should be no separation of disabled and abled children in schools.
However, Green did not shy away from the damage that Fernald’s theories created. He showed image after image of truly horrifying ways the students were treated, including being locked up, chained, and other brutalizations. Much of what he described was remarkably similar to the things I read in Dorothea Dix’s texts about the treatment of disabled people in jails and almshouses. The cruelty is still startling to me, no matter how many descriptions of it I read or images I see. And Green was clear about how cruel these things were. He was clear too about how that cruelty extended to the way the school handled the health and safety of these students. Those who died while attending the Fernald School, as well as the Metropolitan State Hospital, are buried in a cemetery on the grounds. I have been to the cemetery myself and the anonymity of the graves is as striking as Green said. It is not meant to be a place for loved ones to come and weep. And that is even more clear from Green’s explanation that sometimes families were never told what happened to their loved one who entered the school.
The research Green has done is not without controversy or challenges. Even accessing the records of the Fernald School at the Massachusetts State Archives was difficult, as a state law requires that an individual’s medical records remain private after their death, even to family members. He was able to get a court order to unseal them, but he noted his belief that these records should be accessible to survivors and family members without such extreme measures and described his frustration that only an Ivy League professor could access them. He also emphasized that much of the restricted material did not seem to be medical records at all, including drawings done by residents of the school and hospital. The issue of access to information is further complicated by the lack of centralization. As hospitals and schools closed, many of the records did not go to a single location or even an archive at all. In fact, many of these records have been sold on eBay and other similar sites in the ensuing years. It is a multi-pronged problem with no clear solution.
Green shared an important story. The brutality of what happened in these schools should not be forgotten or swept under the rug. The same ideas that formed the Fernald School are still present in American society today, as Green pointed out by linking the philosophy of Fernald to modern special education. Green demanded an unflinching look at the treatment of disabled people, one with compassion towards all but particularly towards the victims of an abusive system. It was a good reminder, and one we should take care to listen to.
Further Reading of the Disability in the Archive Series
Today I return to the diary of 13-year-old Henrietta Schroeder, part of the Stout family papers here at the MHS. Henrietta has made a big impression on me, with her unfiltered, exuberant, and irreverent writing style. She seems so relatable, so much like a teenager today. I hope you’ve been enjoying getting to know her, too.
We pick up our story on September 11, 1889. After spending the summer in the U.K., Henrietta and her family visited the continent, first France and then Switzerland. They landed at Dieppe, where Henrietta wrote in her diary (her “Cher Confidante”), “Now, surrounded by French people gabbling off French I really feel as though I were abroad.” She made herself right at home, polishing off three glasses of claret at one dinner.
From Dieppe, the Schroeders went south to Rouen and Paris. They visited Rouen Cathedral, the burial place of Richard I’s “lion” heart and of “Henry the something of England,” as Henrietta put it. In Paris, they spent 5-6 days touring the famous Exposition Universelle, including the brand-new Eiffel Tower. Henrietta did ride the elevator to the top, but not until a few weeks later, so I’ll talk about that in a future post. She also saw Mont Blanc at Chamonix, France, which inspired her first original sketch in the diary.
“General view of Chamonix,” drawn by Henrietta Schroeder, September 29, 1889
But October 1889 was a relatively quiet month for the Schroeders, spent mostly at the Grand Hotel in Montreux, Switzerland. The hotel still exists today. It was there Henrietta spent her fourteenth birthday on October 9. Among her presents was a small ivory letter opener from her best friend Lina, which she cherished.
It was also on her birthday that the family toured Chillon Castle, where François Bonivard was imprisoned back in the sixteenth century. The castle seems to have genuinely spooked Henrietta. She wrote, “For the rest of the day I had the horrors. […] The Gallows were there, and a lot of other horrible things which I don’t want to write about.”
During this month-long pause at Montreux, Henrietta wrote in her diary a little more often and in a more introspective vein. Occasionally some of her fears and insecurities came through. While she was enjoying her European sojourn, she was also thinking about the future, which to her looked bleak.
Her older sister Lucy had “come out”—that is, debuted in society—the previous winter after her eighteenth birthday. Henrietta, five years younger, wondered what was in store for her. This passage made me want to give her a hug.
Oh! dear I feel so cross today – To think of my future! See what a lovely time Lucy had last winter! and see what is prepared for me! Lucy is pretty – I am an ape. Lucy has a splendid talent for music, and I have no talent what ever. I only long to paint, paint, paint – I never can be any kind of a belle in society – I can never do any thing – I have kept this feeling in for weeks & weeks, but have said but a few words about it, and Mamma instantly came down upon me and told me never, never to say it again, it was wicked etc. so I am not going to write about it any more.
Pages from Henrietta Schroeder’s diary, October 29 to November 8, 1889
I hope you’ll join me for my next post in this series here at the Beehive.
