MHS News

Staff Spotlight: Honors and Recognition

October has been an exciting month at the MHS, where a veteran editor was recognized for his accomplished career and a fledgling reference librarian received an exciting opportunity to expand his professional knowledge.

Gregg Lint, Senior Editor of the Adams Papers, was recently honored at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Documentary Editing in Springfield, Ill., with the prestigious Lyman H. Butterfield Award. Presented annually since 1985, the award is given to an individual, project, or institution for recent contributions in the areas of documentary publication, teaching, and service. The award is granted in memoriam of Lyman Henry Butterfield, whose editing career included the editing of the Adams Family Papers. The award was presented by Mary-Jo Kline, a well-respected documentary editor who worked with Gregg when he first started at the Adams Papers in 1975.

Introduced as “an unsung hero among today’s documentary editors who has long played a very behind-the-scenes role in promoting our profession,” Gregg was singled out for his exemplary contributions to the Adams Papers, where he has published 15 volumes of the Papers of John Adams over 34 years, as well as his ongoing efforts to promote the field of documentary editing through educational initiatives and service in the wider scholarly community. One of his colleagues remarked that “for Gregg the goal of documentary editing is not only to get the documents out but to bring people in.  It is not enough to make more primary sources more accessible; it is necessary to demonstrate their value to the advancement of historical understanding and to encourage others to take a look. … To this end, he has presented his findings at academic conferences and in teacher seminars, inspiring interest in the Adams Papers in particular while garnering respect for editors and their work in general.” Gregg was widely commended as a diplomatic historian of the highest order and a treasured colleague by his peers at the Adams Papers.

On a slightly different note, Assistant Reference Librarian Jeremy Dibbell was awarded a full-tuition scholarship for a course at the Rare Book School, a highly regarded independent non-profit educational institute supporting the study of the history of books and printing and related subjects. According to the scholarship committee, the competition this year was intense, and the selected recipients were particularly outstanding. Jeremy, who has been with the MHS for three years, completed the Simmons College Graduate School of Library and Information Science dual degree program in Archives Management and History in May 2008. When he is not assisting researchers, he manages the MHS blog, the Beehive, and posts tweets from John Quincy Adams's line-a-day diary to over 15,000 followers.

The MHS staff members congratulate their colleagues on their well-deserved recognition. 

 

Atlantic Harvest

Ellery Sedgwick and The Atlantic Monthly, 1909-1938

Atlantic Harvest, the title of Ellery Sedgwick’s 1947 memoir and compilation of favorite articles from The Atlantic Monthly during the years that he was editor (1909-1938), will be the theme of the Society’s exhibition of Ellery Sedgwick papers that opens on 30 October and continues through 30 January 2010. The exhibition draws upon Sedgwick’s voluminous personal and editorial correspondence with an extraordinary range of literary and political figures during those years, together with correspondence and photographs from his personal papers and other collections of Sedgwick family papers held by the Society.

Through his personal correspondence with authors, many of whom he numbered among his friends, the exhibition shows how Sedgwick revived and expanded the Atlantic, increasing its circulation by ten-fold and adding political and economic essays and more contemporary poetry and fiction to its strong literary tradition. The exhibition includes a sampling of Sedgwick’s correspondence with writers and political and social activists including Jane Addams, Willa Cather, Winston Churchill, Robert Frost, James Hilton, William Dean Howells, Sinclair Lewis, Reinhold Niebuhr, Bertrand Russell, Edith Wharton, and Virginia Woolf. The exhibition also documents some of the events and controversies that roiled the pages of the Atlantic. Under Sedgwick’s editorship, the Atlantic published essays on the qualifications of a Roman Catholic—Alfred E. Smith—to be president, Felix Frankfurter’s dissection of the Sacco and Vanzetti case, and Sedgwick’s controversial support for Franco during the Spanish Civil War.

Atlantic Harvest also illustrates how Sedgwick nurtured authors: he brought to prominence (and introduced to each other) Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall, who flew for France during the First World War and both independently contributed articles from the Front to the Atlantic, before winning fame together as the authors of Mutiny on the Bounty. Sedgwick sometimes appears to have been a man who never heard a story too good to be true, and the exhibition also includes materials about two famous hoaxes that embroiled his years at the helm of the Atlantic: Wilma Frances Minor’s forgery of the purported love letters of Abraham Lincoln and Ann Rutledge, and the even more fabulous, The Story of Opal (originally serialized in the Atlantic), Opal Whiteley’s account of the diary she supposedly had written as a child.

Atlantic Harvest: Ellery Sedgwick and The Atlantic Monthly, 1909-1938 is supported by the family of Mrs. Ellery Sedgwick, Jr.  The exhibition is free and open to the public Monday through Saturday, 1:00 to 4:00 PM, from 30 October 2009 to 30 January 2010.

New 2009 Fellows Elected

 

The election of the following Fellow nominees was approved by the Fellows of the Massachusetts Historical Society at their stated meeting on 19 October 2009:

 

Charles C. Ames

Charles C. Ames, a retired lawyer, graduated from Harvard College and the University of Virginia Law School. Following law school, he served as a clerk for Judge Levin H. Campbell at the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and for Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr., at the United States Supreme Court. He practiced law at the Boston firm of Hill & Barlow, where he specialized in real estate investment and finance and was the managing partner from 1992 to 1996. He is a trustee of the Massachusetts General Hospital and Wheelock College, a member of the board of managers of the Shaw Fund for Mariners’ Children, a past trustee of Concord Academy and the North Bennett Street School, a past selectman of the Town of Brookline, and a past chair of the Brookline Civic Association. His father, James Barr Ames, served as the Society’s president from 1975 to 1978. He is a member of the Society’s Board of Trustees.

Richard D’Abate

Richard D’Abate has served as the executive director of the Maine Historical Society since 1996. During this tenure, the organization has expanded its museum program, developed the Maine Memory Network (an online resource of images of the state), upgraded its journal, and completed a major renovation of its library. It has also become an active member of the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium, which is headquartered at the Massachusetts Historical Society. Mr. D’Abate is a graduate of Columbia.  He also undertook graduate work in Writing and English at Cornell University.  Between 1971 and 1983, he taught English at Nasson College in Springvale, Maine, rising to the rank of associate professor; between 1981 and 1983, he also served as the college’s vice president for academic affairs.  Between 1985 and 1995, he was the associate director of the Maine Humanities Council. Mr. D’Abate is the author of a book of poems and a number of chapters and articles as well as the co-editor of American Beginnings: Exploration, Culture, and Cartography in the Land of the Norumbega.

Marilyn Dunn

Marilyn Dunn is the executive director of the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, a program of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. The holder of a bachelor’s degree from Manhattanville College and master’s degrees from Simmons College and the University of Massachusetts, she has had a career marked by progressive responsibilities at the libraries of Mount Holyoke College and Hartwick College before assuming her present position in 2006. She is the Schlesinger Library’s representative on the board of the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium.

Paul A. Gilje

Paul A. Gilje is a George Lynn Cross Research Professor at the University of Oklahoma and the president for 2008-2009 of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, the major organization of scholars of post-Revolutionary America. He received his B.A. from Brooklyn College and his Ph.D. from Brown University, where he was a student of Gordon S. Wood. Professor Gilje’s research focuses on late-18th- and early-19th-century America. His many publications include his recent book Liberty on the Waterfront: American Maritime Society and Culture in the Age of Revolution, 1750-1850, which won two national prizes, including the “best book” award from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. He has presented his research at programs throughout the United States and Europe (including at the Society’s Boston Area Seminar in Early American History), and he has received numerous grants and fellowships to support his work (including an MHS short-term fellowship). As president of SHEAR, in 2008 he arranged a master class for graduate students at the MHS at which they met with Prof. Daniel Walker Howe of Oxford University and UCLA to discuss his Pulitzer Prize-winning book What Hath God Wrought.

Susan-Mary Grant

Susan-Mary Grant is the Professor of American History at the University of Newcastle, United Kingdom. Professor Grant, a historian of the American Civil War, took her Ph.D. at the University of London. She has taught at the University of Newcastle since 1992. She is the author of North over South: Northern Nationalism and American Identity in the Antebellum Era and The War for a Nation: The American Civil War as well as the co-editor of three volumes on the era of the Civil War. Active in British organizations to promote American studies, she was a founding member and officer of British American Nineteenth-Century Historians and an officer of the Scottish Association for the Study of America. Professor Grant is a former recipient of an MHS short-term fellowship. She has also served as a referee for the Massachusetts Historical Review.

Margaret Randolph Higonnet

Margaret Randolph Higonnet is a professor of English at the University of Connecticut, where she has taught since 1970. She graduated from Bryn Mawr College and received the M.Phil. and Ph.D. degrees from Yale University. Professor Higonnet’s wide-ranging scholarship includes publications on World War I and World War II. She is editing the memoir of Margaret Hall, a World War I Red Cross worker, for publication by the Society.

Margaret A. Lowe

Margaret A. Lowe, an associate professor of history at Bridgewater State College, studies the lives of American women in the late 19th and 20th centuries. A graduate of the University of Vermont, Professor Lowe earned her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees at the University of Massachusetts. She is the author of Looking Good: College Women and Body Image, 1875-1930 and a co-editor of From Megaphones to Microphones: Women’s Public Discourse, 1920-1960. Professor Lowe has held an MHS short-term fellowship. She used the grant to work on the diary of Marian Lawrence Peabody, which she is editing for publication by the Society.

Kenneth Pieter Minkema

Kenneth Pieter Minkema is the executive director of the Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale and the executive editor of the Works of Jonathan Edwards. He is also an adjunct faculty member of the Yale University Divinity School. He received his bachelor’s degree from Calvin College, his master’s degree from Bowling Green State University, and his Ph.D. from the University of Connecticut, where he worked with Harry S. Stout and Richard D. Brown. Dr. Minkema has devoted most of his career to editing. In addition to editing or co-editing four volumes of Edwards documents and a collection of essays on Edwards, he has also co-edited a volume of church records and a volume of sermons for publication by the Colonial Society of Massachusetts. He is the author of about two dozen book chapters and articles, including “Jonathan Edwards’s Defense of Slavery,” published in the Massachusetts Historical Review.  He is also the recipient of one of the Society’s short-term fellowships.

John M. Murrin

John M. Murrin is a professor emeritus of history at Princeton University, where he taught from 1973 to 2003. He received his B.A. from the College of St. Thomas and his A.M. from the University of Notre Dame.  He took his Ph.D. from Yale University, where he was a student of Edmund S. Morgan. The mentor to a generation of talented doctoral students at Princeton, he was (and remains) a formidable figure at professional meetings. Murrin is the author of important articles and review essays on a broad range of topics in early American history as well as a co-editor of three collections of essays and a volume of edited documents.  He was also the moving force behind the publication of the final two volumes of Princetonians, a collection of biographical sketches comparable to the Society’s series Sibley’s Harvard Graduates. When the Society and the New England Historic Genealogical Society proposed a CD-ROM of biographical sketches of the students of the American colonial colleges, Professor Murrin’s endorsement of the project was vital to securing permission to from Princeton University Press, the copyright holder, to include entries from Princetonians.

Colin Nicolson

Colin Nicolson is a lecturer in American history at the University of Stirling, Scotland, where he has taught since 1993. Dr. Nicolson received his training at the University of Edinburgh. A former Society of the Cincinnati fellow at the MHS, he is the author of essays both in the Society’s former periodical, the Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, and its current journal, the Massachusetts Historical Review. He is also the author of The ‘Infamas Governor’: Francis Bernard and the Origins of the American Revolution and the editor of a projected four-volume documentary edition of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, The Papers of Francis Bernard, Governor of Colonial Massachusetts, 1760-1769. 

Susan Park

Susan Park is the president of the Boston Preservation Alliance, the president and chief executive officer of Boston Harborfest, Inc., and an assistant commissioner of the Boston Parks and Recreation Department.  Awards from the United States Coast Guard, the North Atlantic Region of the National Park Service, the Bostonian Society, the Massachusetts Historical Commission, the Gibson House, and the Boston Preservation Alliance, among other organizations, have confirmed her place as one of Boston’s most important activists and advocates on behalf of historic preservation.

Natalia Yurievna Suchugova

Natalia Yurievna Suchugova is an associate professor in the Foreign Languages Department of the Russian State University for the Humanities, where she received her Ph.D. A specialist in the diplomatic relations of the United States and Russia in the early 19th century, she is the author of The Diplomatic Mission of J. Q. Adams in Russia, 1809-1814, published in Russian in 2007.  To pursue further research in early U.S.-Russian relations, she held a Fulbright Fellowship at the MHS during the autumn of 2007. Upon her return to Russia, she was named coordinator at her university’s Russian-American Center for American Studies.

Katheryn P. Viens

Katheryn P. Viens is the executive director of the New England Museum Association. A 1984 graduate of Salve Regina College in Newport, R.I., she took an M.A. in history with certification in Historical Agencies and Administration from Northeastern University in 1991. She also served as an editorial assistant on The New England Quarterly. Between 1993 and 1995 she was a member of the Society’s Publications Department, first as an editorial assistant, then as an assistant editor. She was a co-editor of Entrepreneurs: The Boston Business Community, 1700-1850, a collection of essays first presented at an MHS conference that the Society published in 1997. In January 1996, she became the executive director of the Old Colony Historical Society in Taunton. In her current position at NEMA, where she has been on the staff for nearly a decade, she is the public voice of scores of small museums—primarily history museums—across our region. Since leaving our staff at the end of 1995, she has been an active contributor to our series Sibley’s Harvard Graduates; Viens is the author of 20 entries in volume 19.

Well-behaved Woman Makes History

MHS Presents Kennedy Medal to Noted Harvard Scholar

Approximately 100 guests were in attendance on the evening of 14 October as Prof. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich was honored as the 10th recipient of the John F. Kennedy Medal of the Massachusetts Historical Society at the Harvard Club of Boston. Ulrich, a Corresponding Fellow of the MHS since 1991 and 300th Anniversary University Professor at Harvard University, was presented with the medal as part of the Society’s 60th Annual Dinner. She addressed the Fellows and Members of the nation’s oldest historical society with a talk entitled “A Mormon Apostle in Boston: Sightseeing, Riot, and Martyrdom.”

“Throughout her career Professor Ulrich has mixed very distinguished scholarship with an ability to cross conventional academic boundaries, which has greatly enriched our understanding of history,” stated Bill Clendaniel, chair of the Society’s Board of Trustees. “In addition, she has helped make American history relevant and thought-provoking to a wide audience through her PBS documentary and the popular use of her phrase ‘well-behaved women seldom make history.’ That she is the first woman to receive the Kennedy Medal also gives the Society particular pleasure.”

Professor Ulrich has taught at Harvard University since 1995. Formerly professor of American history at the University of New Hampshire, she is the author of many articles and books on early American history, including A Midwife’s Tale, which won the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for History. During her tenure as a MacArthur Fellow, she worked on the production of a PBS documentary based on A Midwife’s Tale. In The Age of Homespun (2001), she explored museum artifacts as sources for history, an approach she has taken in much of her recent teaching. Some people know her best for the sentence that escaped from one of her scholarly articles and now appears on tee shirts, bumper stickers, and other paraphernalia. Her 2007 book, Well-behaved Women Seldom Make History, tells the story behind the “accidental slogan” and asks what it means to make history. This year, Professor Ulrich is serving as President of the American Historical Association.

The John F. Kennedy Medal is the Society’s highest possible honor. Shortly after President Kennedy’s death, the Society received several gifts designated for use in any appropriate way to perpetuate President Kennedy’s memory as an active member of the Society and a great friend of historical scholarship. The MHS determined to create a medal in President Kennedy’s name and commissioned eminent artist and MHS Fellow Rudolph Ruzicka to design the medal. Since then, the Society has presented 10 honorees with the Kennedy Medal, awarded from time to time to persons who have rendered distinguished service to the cause of history. It is not limited to any field of history or in fact to any particular kind of service to history. The previous recipients of the medal are Samuel Eliot Morrison (1967), Dumas Malone (1972), Thomas Boylston Adams (1976), Oscar Handlin (1991), Edmund S. Morgan (2002), Alfred DuPont Chandler, Jr. (2003), Bernard Bailyn (2004), John Hope Franklin (2005), and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. (2006).

In addition to honoring the fallen American president, the Kennedy Medal naturally connected Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, also an MHS Fellow, to the Society in a personal fashion. He and his sister, Jean Kennedy Smith, were involved in past conferrals of the medal, including the MHS bicentennial dinner in 1991 where he presented the Kennedy Medal to Oscar Handlin and the 2006 evening honoring medal recipient Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Earlier this past summer, Senator Kennedy was invited to present the medal to Ulrich. Due to the senator’s passing and the grief of his family, MHS President Dennis Fiori and Chair of the Board Bill Clendaniel presented the medal to Ulrich on behalf of the Society.

 

Image Credit: Michael Lutch