Announcing 2017-2018 Research Fellowships

By Dan Hinchen, Reader Services

Each year, the MHS sponsors various fellowship programs which bring a wide variety of researchers working on a full range of topics into the MHS library. The Reader Services staff enjoys getting to know the fellows, many of whom become career-long friends of the Society, returning to our reading room year after year. 

The Society is excited to receive the list of the incoming research fellows for the 2017-2018 cycle. If any of the research topics below are particularly interesting to you, keep an eye on our events calendar over the course of the upcoming year, as all research fellows present their reearch at Brown Bag lunch programs as part of their commitment to the MHS. 

For more information about the different fellowship types, click the headings below. 

*****

Suzanne and Caleb Loring Fellows on the Civil War, Its Origins, and Consequences

Kathleen Hilliard

Iowa State University

Bonds Burst Asunder: The Revolutionary Politics of Getting By in Civil War and Emancipation, 1860-1867

 

MHS Short-term Fellowships

Judith Harford

University College Dublin

The Power of Social and Professional Networks to Promote Agency and Negotiate Access: The Role of the Women’s Educational Association, Boston, in Advancing the Cause of Women’s Admission to Harvard

 

African-American Studies Fellow

 

Natalie Joy

Northern Illinois University

Abolitionists and Indians in the Antebellum Era

 

Andrew Oliver Fellow

Susan Eberhard

University of California – Berkeley

Artisanal Currencies: Silver Circulations of the US-China Trade, 1784-1876

 

Andrew W. Mellon Fellows

Daniel Burge

University of Alabama

A Struggle Against Fate: The Opponents of Manifest Destiny and the Collapse of the Continental Dream, 1846-1871

 

Angela Hudson

Texas A&M University

The Rise and Fall of the Indian Doctress: Race, Labor, and Medicine in the 19th-century United States

 

Lindsay Keiter

Colonial Williamsburg Foundation

Uniting Interests: Love, Wealth, and the Law in American Marriage, 1750-1860

 

Kimberly Killion

University of California – Berkeley

From Farms to Kitchens to “the Body Laboratory”: Nutritional Science and the Politics of Food in the United States

 

Sunmin Kim

University of California – Berkeley

A Laboratory for the American National Identity: The Re-Invention of Whiteness in the Dillingham Commission (1907-1911)

 

Aaron Moulton

University of Arkansas

Caribbean Blood Pact: Dictators, Exiles, and the CIA in the Caribbean Basin, 1944-1955

 

Heather Sanford

Brown University

Palatable Slavery

 

Jaclyn Schultz

University of California – Santa Cruz

Learning the Value of a Dollar: Children and Commerce in the U.S., 1830-1900

 

Christopher Pastore

University at Albany

American Beach: Law, Culture, and Ecology along the Ocean’s Edge

 

Benjamin F. Stevens Fellow

Gretchen Murphy

University of Texas – Austin

Disestablishing Virtue: Federalism, Religion, and New England Women Writers

 

Louis Leonard Tucker Alumni Fellows

Alexandra Montgomery

University of Pennsylvania

Projecting Power in the Dawnland: Colonization Schemes, Imperial Failure and Competing Visions of the Gulf of Maine World, 1710-1800

 

Ittai Orr

Yale University

Intellectual Power: Print Culture and Intelligence in the United States, 1781-1908

 

Michael Williams

Carnegie Mellon University

Impolite Science: Print and Performance in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic

 

Malcolm and Mildred Freiberg Fellow

Derek O’Leary

University of California – Berkeley

Building the American Archives

 

Marc Friedlaender Fellow

Nina Sankovitch

Independent Scholar

The Rebels of Braintree: Exploring Collaboration, Conflict, and Conciliation Between Colonial Families Prior to the American Revolution

 

Massachusetts Society of the Cincinnati Fellow

John McCurdy

Eastern Michigan University

Quarters: Billets, Barracks, and Place in Revolutionary America

 

Ruth R. & Alyson R. Miller Fellows

Kabria Baumgartner

University of New Hampshire

A Right to Learn: African American Women and Educational Activism in Early America

 

Caylin Carbonell

The College of William and Mary

Women and Household Authority in Colonial New England

 

W. B. H. Dowse Fellows

David Ciepley

University of Denver

The Tug-of-War between Trust and Corporation as Models for Colonial New England Government

 

George O’Brien

University of South Carolina

“What an expecting and troublesome being a New England Refugee is”: The Struggles of Early New England Emigrants in Nova Scotia, 1755-1783

 

MHS-NEH Long-term Fellowships

Kimberly Blockett

Penn State University – Brandywine

Race, Religion, and Rebellion: Recovering the Antebellum Writing and Itinerant Ministry of Zilpha Elaw

 

Laurel Daen

The College of William and Mary

The Constitution of Disability in the Early United States

 

Adrian Weimer

Providence College

Godly Petitions: Puritanism and the Crisis of the Restoration in America

 

New England Regional Fellowship Consortium Fellows

Christopher Babits

University of Texas – Austin

To Cure a Sinful Nation: A Cultural History of Conversion Therapy and the Making of Modern America, 1930 to the Present Day

 

Renzo Baldasso

Arizona State University

The Emergence of the Visuality of the Printed Page from Gutenberg to Ratdolt: Case Studies in the Collections of the New England Consortium of Libraries

 

Kathrinne Duffy (MHS)

Brown University

Doctrine of the Skull: Phrenology, Public Culture, and the Self in Antebellum America

 

Craig Gallagher

Boston College

Covenants and Commerce: Religious Refugees and the Making  of the British Atlantic World

 

J. Ritchie Garrison (MHS)

University of Delaware

Matter and Mind in the Early Modern Atlantic World

 

Karen Harker

University of Birmingham

Shakespeare’s 19th-Century Soundscape: Reconstructing, Reconsidering, and Preserving Shakespearean Incidental Music written for Victorian and Edwardian Theatres

 

Hina Hirayama

Independent Scholar

Edward Sylvester Morse (1838-1925): his American Life & Times

 

Alexander Jacobs

Vanderbilt University

Pessimism and Progress: Left Conservatism in Modern American Political Thought

 

Shira Lurie (MHS)

University of Virginia

Politics at the Poles: Liberty Poles and the Popular Struggle for the New Republic

 

Jen Manion

Amherst College

Born in the Wrong Time: Transgender Archives and the History of Possibility, 1750-1900

 

Laura McCoy (MHS)

Northwestern University

In Distress: Family and a Marketplace of Feeling in the Early American Republic

 

Brianna Nofil

Columbia University

Gender, Community Policing, and Crime Control in the Late 20th C.

 

Heather Sanford

Brown University

Palatable Slavery

 

Nancy Siegel (MHS)

Towson University

Political Appetites: Revolution, Taste, and Culinary Activism in the Early Republic

 

Daniel Soucier

University of Maine

Navigating Wilderness and Borderland: Environment and Culture in the Northeastern Americas during the American Revolution, 1775-1779

 

Tyler Sperrazza (MHS)

Penn State University

Defiant: African American Cultural Responses to Northern White Supremacy, 1865-1915

 

Amy Voorhees

Independent Scholar

Christian Science Identity and New England Cultures, 1820-1920

 

Peter Walker

McNeil Center – University of Pennsylvania

The Church Militant: Anglicanism, Loyalism, and Counterrevolution in the British Empire, 1720-1820

 

Donald Yacovone (MHS)

Harvard University

The Liberator’s Legacy: Memory, Abolitionism, and the Struggle for Civil Rights, 1865-1965

 

Colonial Society of Massachusetts Fellowship

Hannah Anderson (MHS)

University of Pennsylvania

Lived Botany: Households, Ecological Adaptation and the Origins of Settler Colonialism in Early British North America

 

 

Posted in Uncategorized Tagged

This Week @ MHS

By Dan Hinchen

Coming up this week, we have programs featuring ice cream, the “other” speaker at Gettysburg, and interstate trade during the Civil War. Here are the specifics:

– Tuesday, 6 June, 6:00PM : Ice Kings is the next installment in our Cooking Boston series or public programs. In this panel discussion, Gus Rancatore, Jeri Quinzio, and Judy Herrell discuss Boston’s unusual obsession with ice cream. Moderated by Kathleen Fitzgerald, the talk will look at where this devotion to ice cream comes from and how institutions like Bailey’s ice cream parlor and innovators like Steve’s have changed the country’s taste for frozen treats. Samples of ice cream from Toscanini’s and Herrell’s are available at the reception. This talk is open to the public and registration is required with a fee of $20 (no charge for MHS Members or Fellows). Pre-talk reception begins at 5:30PM followed by the speaking progam at 6:00PM. 

– Wedensday, 7 June, 12:00PM : This week’s Brown Bag talk is put on by research fellow David Montejano of University of California, Berkeley. “From Southern Plantation to Northern Mill: Traveling the Cotton Trail During the Civil War” looks at the vigorous cotton trade between the north and south that re-emerged through the neutral port of Matamoros, Mexico. Montejano looks at how the politics of war were trumped by the “invisible hand” of the market by following the cotton stream from Texas to Massachusetts and making visible the many hands involved in this suspect wartime commerce. This talk is free and open to the public. 

– Thursday, 8 June, 6:00PM : Join us for a talk with Matthew Mason of Brigham Young University, author fo Apostle of Union: A Political Biography of Edward Everett. Everett’s distinguished career, from the 1820s through the Civil War, reveals a complex man who shifting political opinions illuminate the nuances of Northern Unionism. Everett’s political and cultural efforts to preserve the Union, and the response to his work from citizens and politicians, help us see the complexity of the coming of the Civil War. This talk is open to the public, registration required with a fee of $10 (No charge for MHS Members or Fellows; no charge for Members of the Union Club of Boston). Reception begins at 5:30PM, followed by the talk at 6:00PM. 

– Saturday, 10 June, 10:00AM : The History and Collections of the MHS is a 90-minute docent-led walk through our public rooms. The tour is free, open to the public, with no need for reservations. If you would like to bring a larger party (8 or more), please contact Curator of Art Anne Bentley at 617-646-0508 or abentley@masshist.org.

While you’re here you will also have the opportunity to view our current exhibition: The Irish Atlantic: A Story of Famine Migration and Opportunity.

Posted in This Week @MHS

The Significance of Strawberries

By Rakashi Chand, Reader Services

In New England, the arrival of summer is synonymous with strawberries. Strawberry plants (fields) can be found throughout the region, and the strawberry harvest in late May and early June goes hand-in-hand with the most beautiful part of the year. The lovely, fragrant evenings and the final sigh of relief as New Englanders pack their coats away for the summer inevitably lead to the sudden desire to celebrate the arrival of the long-awaited warm months of summer. So, naturally, spring fetes were often “Strawberry Festivals.” The delicious berry was a welcome addition to the kitchen after months of cooking and consuming dried fruit. Every dish on the table was augmented, filled, or garnished with the beautiful, vibrant, and sweet berry.

In the nineteenth century Strawberry Festivals or parties were very popular. The strawberry was the first crop of the summer, and the region was dotted with strawberry farms. Strawberry festivals were popular events celebrated in many New England towns. Here at the Historical Society we have a few examples of broadside advertisements for local strawberry festivals from the late nineteenth century.

 

Harvard’s Hasty Pudding Club (yes, they were up to the same silliness all those years ago!) produced an annual show called “Strawberry Night” in June. 

 

But for us at the Massachusetts Historical Society, such festivals have a very special significance as our annual strawberry festival may have indeed led to the bequest of our biggest benefactor. According to Robert C. Winthrop, MHS President from 1855-1885, it was the invitation to the Massachusetts Historical Society’s Strawberry Festival that led Thomas Dowse to donate his prized library to the MHS, and to that end, Winthrop says, “the regeneration of our Society may thus be fairly dated.”

“SPECIAL MEETING, JUNE, 1886. A Social Meeting of the Society was held at the house of Mr. Charles Deane, in Cambridge, on Friday, the 18th instant, at five o’clock, P.M.

The Hon. Robert C. Winthrop then spoke as follows :

 “Passing from this topic, let me say how glad I am to find myself at another social meeting of our old society at Cambridge…

…But another of these Cambridge meetings was still more memorable, and can never be forgotten in the history of our Society. I refer, as I need hardly say, to the meeting at good George Livermore’s in 1856, just thirty years ago. From that meeting came the library and large endowment of our great benefactor, Thomas Dowse. Mr. Dowse was a neighbor and friend of Mr. Livermore, and had been specially invited by him to come over to our strawberry festival. Age and infirmities prevented his acceptance of the invitation; but the occasion induced him to inquire into the composition and character of our Society, and he forthwith resolved to place his precious books, the costly collections of a long life, under our guardianship, and to make them our property forever. From that meeting the regeneration of our Society may thus be fairly dated. Cambridge strawberries have ever since had a peculiar flavor for us, – not Hovey’s Seedling, though that too was a Cambridge product, but what I might almost call the Livermore Seedling or the Dowse Graft, which were the immediate fruits of our social meeting at Mr. Livermore’s.”*

Read more about Thomas Dowse and the Dowse Library here! (http://www.masshist.org/database/210)

 

 

Ten years ago, The Librarian of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Peter Drummey, suggested the library staff resurrect the age-old tradition; one hundred and fifty years later, a Strawberry Festival was once again held by the Massachusetts Historical Society.

The Library Staff of the Massachusetts Historical Society holds a Strawberry Festival every year in late May or early June for the staff, friends, volunteers, researchers and patrons of the Massachusetts Historical Society. We will be hosting our 2017 Strawberry Festival on Friday, June 2nd.

 

*Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Second Series, Vol. 3, [Vol. 23 of continuous numbering] (1886 – 1887), pp. 53-54

 

Posted in From Our Collections, This Week @MHS Tagged