June 2021
The Story of “Inventing Disease” via the Eli Whitney Grave Marker in Grove Street Cemetery
This short visual presentation offers the story of “Inventing Disease” in the first half of the nineteenth century, revolving around the figure of Eli Whitney, well known for the cotton gin and for his interchangeable gun parts factory on the Mill River. Whitney’s grave marker and the subsequent memorializing and honoring of fellow white industrialists such as Charles Goodyear, whose own grave marker is also in Grove Street Cemetery, created a pantheon of political and social power that extended all…
Details »Contested Histories online workshop
Contested Histories: Creating and Critiquing Public Monuments and Memorials in a New Age of Iconoclasm is organised by Swansea University’s Conflict, Reconstruction and Memory research group. Exploring debates surrounding the cultural and political uses of monuments, and reflecting upon their role in the memorialisation and imagining of the past. For the purposes of the proceedings, we will take a broad view of ‘monuments’, considering artefacts such as war memorials, cenotaphs and public statuary as well as urban sites damaged through…
Details »July 2021
A Portrait of Resistance
A Portrait of Resistance A small almost square portrait of a Black man wearing a white toga appeared in early 1840. This man was Cinque, or Sengbe Pieh, the leader of the mutiny on board La Amistad, a slave transport ship intending to carry him and other West Africans to Caribbean Islands for a lifetime of brutality and labor. Instead, due to their resistance, the Amistad Africans went to trial, ending at the US Supreme Court and won their freedom.…
Details »October 2021
Historically Situated: History, Memory, and Place
In 1820, New York merchant William Ferris Pell took the remarkable step of purchasing the grounds of the former military post at Fort Ticonderoga. Pell prevented the further deterioration of the fort ruins by installing a fence, a small by powerful act that marks perhaps the first private preservation effort of an 18th-century battlefield site in American history. Throughout 2020 Fort Ticonderoga will be involved in a number of preservation efforts, the restoration of William Ferris Pell’s summer home the…
Details »June 2022
Chicago Summer School
The Chicago Summer School focuses on the American roots of Modernism. After the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, progressive architects and patrons moved the city to the forefront of technological and aesthetic experimentation. Through expert lectures and tours, course directors Tina Strauss ad John Waters lead a survey of 19th and early 20th century architecture, design, art, landscape and preservation.
Details »September 2022
The Place of the Urban Past before “Public History,” 1850-1960
Historians that have studied the experience of modernity have often looked to periods of industrialisation and urbanisation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many approaches and definitions of modernity co-exist, but, in general, an element of rupture – a distinctive and often conscious break with the past – has dominated. Yet ‘the past’ did not necessarily disappear with urban transformations. Both the historic environment, and civic understandings of history within that space, could be used as a way to…
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