Class Project Part 2: Moswetuset Hummock

Randall Stephens

About a year and a half ago I worked with students in my Critical Reading in History Class to create a history resource website for the Josiah Quincy House (a beautiful, well-preserved home, built in 1770 and just about a block from our main campus.) The work paid off. I blogged about it here and here. The local paper, the Patriot Ledger, even ran a full-page color story on it, interviewing me and the students. What's even better . . . that story in the paper, and our website, greatly boosted attendance at the historic home the summer after the semester ended.

This fall, with a new crop of students in the same class, we mulled over ideas for a similar project. We considered doing a website resource for a couple sites that no longer exist (the Quincy National Sailors Home and the Quincy Family Mansion, which used to grace our campus.) We also thought about doing a project on another old house in town (the Dorothy Quincy Homestead.)

In the end they chose to do their project on the Moswetuset Hummock, a patch of land/outcropping on a hill north of Wollaston beach. "Moswetuset," writes junior Austin Steelman, who took a lead on the project, means "'shaped like an arrowhead,' was the name of the Moswetuset or Massachusett Native American tribe from which the Commonwealth of Massachuesetts derives its name. The thickly-wooded hill was the summer seat of the tribe’s Sachem Chickatabot because of its view of the surrounding area and proximity to the bay, salt marshes, and the Blue Hills. It was here that Chickatabot met with Myles Standish of the Plymouth Colony in 1621 as the colonists began their early trade with the Indians."

This was quite a different project from the website we created for the Josiah Quincy House. Materials on the Hummock were much more spare. It was more challenging for them to find materials through Google Books, JSTOR, or just on the shelves of our library. Yet the students were certainly up to the challenge. They took photos and videos of the site. They collected maps, prints, and put together an extensive bibliography. Alex Foran, a journalism major, interviewed James Cameron, an emeritus professor of history here who has written extensively on local history and has done some work on the Moswetuset Hummock. A couple of the students made a pilgrimage to the Quincy Historical Society to gather maps and prints and to ask some good questions. While there they discovered a manuscript on the hummock that was written by none other than prof Cameron! With Cameron's blessing that MS is now on the site as a pdf.

Once again, this class effort was well worth it. I'm glad I got over my initial skepticism about group projects. Students seem to learn a great deal about research, hunting down evidence, and how best to present that to the broader public.

Why Study History? Revisited

Randall Stephens



On this blog we've included quite a few posts on "Why Study History?" beginning with one that Heather wrote back in March 2009. So, with the semester starting, it seems like a good time to revisit that question.



There are so many reasons why we study history. Sure, we might like to think that our encyclopedic knowledge of the Battle of Bull Run will win friends and influence people. It probably won't. Far too many undergrads and men and women on the street tend to believe that the study of history involves pointless rote memorization and war trivia. (History Channel maybe?)



As I get ready to teach my course on Critical Readings in History (a methods and historiography class) it helps me to think about the bigger picture. What large lessons does history teach us? How does it help us think critically about the world in which we live?



We learn about cause and effect from history. It teaches us about continuity and disruption. We also answer big questions and learn how to solve all sorts of problems related to what it means to be human.



Over at the Guardian Simon Jenkins writes about what history is and what it is not ("English History: Why We Need to Understand 1066 and All That," September 1, 2011). He begins with a content question that obsesses observes on this and that side of the Atlantic:

Which "bits" of English history do we need to know? Should they be Simon Schama's peasants' revolt, Indian empire and opium wars, or David Starkey's rules of chivalry? Or is the Cambridge professor Richard Evans right to dismiss "rote learning of the national patriotic narrative" out of hand, in favour of studying "other cultures separated from us by time and space"?



The answer is none of them as such. All seem static moments torn out of the context of history to suit a particular outlook on the world. Evans is the most wrong of all. His disparaging use of words such as rote and patriotic implies that facts about one's own country are in some way irrelevant, even shameful. All history must start from the reader's own standpoint in place and time. Otherwise it is just a blur.

To guard against the one-damn-thing-after-another approach, Jenkins warns:

The story of the nation in which we live is not a stage set crowded with isolated tableaux: the Norman conquest followed by Henry VIII, Charles I, the Industrial Revolution and finally leaping to Hitler. Sturdy tales of slavery, gender oppression and the defeat of Germany yield anecdotes that may raise the reader's blood pressure. But they are history neutered of argument, uncreative, essentially dumb. They may make us angry, but not wise. History must be continuous, building from cause to effect and reaching a crescendo in the present day.>>>

History provides us with a context to help us better understand our world today. It also teaches us innumerable lessons about human behavior, the nature of politics, change over time, how to write and tell a good story, and so much more.



But how does one best convince students that all this matters?

Historians and Their Memoirs

Randall Stephens

What can we learn about the craft of history by reading the autobiographies of historians? A great deal, I think. We get a picture of the context and era that shaped research and writing interests. We see how a historian grew into his or her work. We get an idea of how he or she was trained and mentored . . .

In my Critical Readings in History course I've paired selections from John Hope Franklin's memoir with selections from Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s autobiography. Both went to Harvard in the 1930s. Students can see pretty clearly the basic differences in their backgrounds. One grew up in a well-to-do white family with ties to America's intellectual aristocracy. The other came of age in Oklahoma, struggling with poverty and race prejudice. It's not difficult to move from that reading to a discussion of how historians pick the topics they study and how historians are formed by their setting. From there students can reflect on their own interests and how history is, at least in some sense, autobiographical.

I recently dusted off and started rereading C. Vann Woodward's Thinking Back: The Perils of Writing History (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1987). Years before he became the tweedy, pipe-smoking Johns Hopkins and then Yale sage of southern history, Woodward was an aspiring historian, not quite sure what the next stage in his life would hold for him. Still, he was ahead of the game. He already had what would be a major book underway while he was still a grad student at UNC in the 1930s:

With a fresh if empty mind and an exciting book of my own underway, I reasoned that perhaps I would now see this unexplored field take on a new glamor and I would rise to the challenge. Much better minds had done so. After all, I was nearly four years older since my first brush with the subject and far riper in wisdom—or so I thought. The first thing to do, I was told, was to master the standard "sets"—the old American Nation series, the Yale Chronicles, and others guaranteed to bring one up to date. Noting with some puzzlement that most of the many volumes were already a generation old, I nevertheless plunged in. That first plunge was chilling. Plodding through volume after volume, I began to wonder if I had ever encountered prose so pedestrian, pages so dull, chapters so devoid of ideas, whole volumes so wrongheaded or so lacking in point. Was there anything memorable about what one was expected to remember? Was this the best my newly chosen profession could do? Was it what I would be expected to do? A career, a lifetime dedicated to inflicting such reading on innocent youth? Or accepting it as a model for myself? Fleeing the stacks repeatedly, I spent much of that first year pacing Franklin Street by night debating whether I might fare better as a fruit-peddler, panhandler, or hack writer. . . . (21-22)

No Southern youth of any sensitivity could help being excited by the explosion of creativity taking place during the early 1930s—in fiction, in poetry, in drama. Nor could I help seeing that the novelists, poets, and playwrights were in the main writing about the same South historians were writing about and making the whole world of letters at home and abroad read what they wrote and ring with their praise. With this awareness and the expectations it aroused, I arrived as a young apprentice at the doors of the history guild for training—and what a striking contrast, what a letdown, what a falling off! No renaissance here, no surge of innovation and creativity, no rebirth of energy, no compelling new vision. This was a craft devoted primarily at the time, or so it seemed to me, to summing up, confirming, illustrating, and consolidating the received wisdom, the regional consensus that prevailed uniquely in the South of the 1930s and—though I could not then have known it—was to continue through the 1940s. That consensus proclaimed the enduring and fundamentally unbroken unity, solidarity, and continuity of Southern history. (23)

The business about continuity sums up much of Woodward's work as a historian. Indeed, at the beginning of The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955) he wrote "The people of the South should be the last Americans to expect continuity of their institutions and social arrangements" (3). The book—which Martin Luther King, Jr., called the historical bible of the civil rights movement— argued forcefully that the South's segregationist turn in the 1890s was something new. Woodward's memoir abounds with similar insights into his life and career.

There are many other memoirs by historians that I'd still like to explore. I include here a handful of those I've read and a great many more that I haven't.

Max Beloff, An Historian in the Twentieth Century: Chapters in Intellectual Autobiography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992)

Thomas Dionysius Clark, My Century in History: Memoirs (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2006)

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., A Life in the Twentieth Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917-1950 (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2000)

Gerda Lerner, Fireweed: A Political Autobiography (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003)

Forrest McDonald, Recovering the Past: A Historian's Memoir (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004)

John Hope Franklin, Mirror to America: The Autobiography of John Hope Franklin (New York: FSG, 2005)

Margaret Atwood Judson, Breaking the Barrier: A Professional Autobiography by a Woman Educator and Historian before the Women's Movement (New Brunswick: Rutgers, 1984)

George F. Kennan, Memoirs, 1925-1950 (New York: Pantheon, 1983)

William Hardy McNeill, The Pursuit of Truth: A Historian's Memoir (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2005)

Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918)

Maria Lúcia G. Pallares-Burke, The New History: Confessions and Conversations (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2002)

James M. Banner Jr. Jr. and John R. Gillis, eds., Becoming Historians (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009)

John Lukacs, Confessions of an Original Sinner (New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1990)

John B. Boles, ed., Autobiographical Reflections on Southern Religious History (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001)

John B. Boles, ed., Shapers of Southern History: Autobiographical Reflections (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004)

Guy Stanton Ford, ed., (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1910) Essays in American history, Dedicated to Frederick Jackson Turner. Read Carl Becker on Kansas!