By David “Amby” Tierney, Cohasset High School

This spring I had the pleasure of working with the incredible resources of the Massachusetts Historical Society for use in my research paper. The paper was about the connection between the early events of the American Revolution in Boston and the ideas of the early United States. Perhaps I had hit the right topic, but the Historical Society had a wealth of different sources I could use that were very specific to my topic. In fact, it was somewhat overwhelming. The Historical Society provides an excellent resource, ABIGAIL, which is an online catalog of all of their documents. A simple search will reveal dozens of relevant primary source documents. And these are available in multiple formats. Many of the documents are available online, like John and Abigail Adams’ personal correspondence. Even more are kept at the historical society, in microfilm and microfiche rolls that stack filing cabinets row upon row, top to bottom. Then there are the hard-copy documents from the eighteenth century, which are beyond cool to look at.

Which brings up the personal experience that comes with going in to see the documents. I personally very much enjoyed it. The first time I went in I was rather nervous. I had signed up to Portal1791, the online reservation service, and I assumed that the Massachusetts Historical Society would be a very serious place. I was unsure about what I would need, and I was worried that I hadn’t reserved the right documents. I thought that it was an absolute necessity to reserve documents far in advance. My misgivings were magnified when I realized that I forgot my student ID, which I was informed that I’d need. This turned out to be unfounded. Upon arriving, I signed in and was able to enter with the help of my history teacher, who was my advisor in the project. All of the people at the Massachusetts Historical Society were very friendly and very willing to help. I was impressed with the efficiency of the librarians, who were able to help me find what I needed. When I needed an extra document that I hadn’t reserved, the librarians were able to get it for me without a problem. One librarian was very insightful in teaching me how to use the microfilm reader. Overall, it was an excellent experience and I would recommend using the Massachusetts Historical Society to people doing research.

*****

The MHS has awarded the John Winthrop Student Fellowship since 2013. This fellowship encourages high school students to make use of the nationally significant documents of the Society in a research project of their choosing.

By Zachary Hill, Nashoba Regional High School

Five weeks ago, I found myself playing chicken with the Green Line. My brush with death in Brookline was worth it.

As a high school student, my primary sources mostly come as nice, neat internet transcriptions. I never expected to be staring at a three hundred year old letter in which Hugh Hall, one of Boston’s prominent slave traders, complains rather vehemently of seasickness. The letter was written in big, loopy handwriting, the polar opposite of Hugh’s brother Richard’s cramped impossibility, on yellowed old paper that felt somewhat slimy.

For a moment, I was overcome by the idea that I was touching Hall’s DNA.

I was researching the development of the New England economy in relation to the slave trade. This rested chiefly on the shoulders of the exploits of early traders in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. I had first to establish the prominence and profitability of the trade, then track its influence, culturally and economically, as it inserted itself into the daily life of colonists. Slavery as a domestic institution was rather invisible in colonial Massachusetts, but the colony’s involvement in a booming international trade was not, and New England merchants grew rich by supplying Caribbean sugar plantations with slaves.

During this time I uncovered the most astounding stories. John Usher, later the Receiver General of the Dominion of New England, conspired with a group of London merchants and his friend John Saffin, to smuggle slaves into Rhode Island. At this time, the Royal African Company held a monopoly on all trade to “His Majesty’s Plantations” with Africa. Usher’s ship was nearly intercepted and had to be redirected to Nantasket, where the cargo was unloaded and sold (according to a bill of sale from 1681 in the miscellaneous manuscripts collection) three months later across New England.

These long-dead personages began to acquire personal characteristics. Richard Hall frequently wrote home to his children in Boston. Elizabeth Shrimpton, the grandmother of Shute Shrimpton Yeamans, who had inherited his father’s plantation in Antigua, sent him a letter in which she debated to herself whether he’d receive the Boston share of her will. With these personalities emerging, details that become almost tangible before the researcher, one finds it hard to imagine the sheer callousness of their commerce. Hall mentions slaves in the same breath as rum and turpentine. The Royal African Company frequently petitioned the King that New England smugglers were disrupting their quotas as to affect their quarterly margins, displeasing their Caribbean customers. I stood amazed that they trafficked in human beings, and that this “smuggling” and these “quotas” often decided the fate of hundreds of captive men, women, and children.

I made three visits to the Massachusetts Historical Society. In each I was awestruck by the sheer volume of resources available to me: original documents, collections, microfilm, and digitized materials. The staff was very helpful in my attempts to locate evidence, and I oftentimes would have been lost in a jungle of information had they not hacked through some vines. For those researching slavery and the slave trade, the John Usher sections of the Jeffries family papers have proved very useful, as has the account book of Hugh Hall, the Shrimpton family papers, the wills in the Dolbeare family papers, and certain sections of the Winthrop family papers. The Sir William Pepperrell papers are, despite the label on the collection guide, an impenetrable morass of personal correspondence mostly related to the Siege of Louisburg, so deceptively organized by the archivists of 1898 that there are indeed indices to indices. I finally stumbled upon a bit of clarity with the discovery of Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America, a collection of just the right sort of manuscripts by Elizabeth Donnan, conveniently stored at the Massachusetts Historical Society. Here I found the Charter of the Royal African Company, as well as several petitions in regards to said company, and the account of a certain Captain Moore, whose schooner, the William, was “taken and retaken again,” by her captives.

I have always wanted to be a historian. My time at the Massachusetts Historical Society obliterated any lingering doubts in that ambition. Words cannot describe the joy of these encounters with the past, an opportunity I will never forget.  With that in mind, I would like to thank all those at the Society who have aided me in my research, and for awarding me this tremendous opportunity.

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**The MHS has awarded the John Winthrop Student Fellowship since 2013. This fellowship encourages high school students to make use of the nationally significant documents of the Society in a research project of their choosing.

By Anna J. Cook

Welcome to another installment of our Readers Relate series, in which we ask researchers to share a little bit about the work that brought them to the MHS and what they found when they got here.

Today’s interviewee is Jen Staver, candidate in history at the University of California, Irvine. Ms. Staver’s research looks at the natural and social environment along North America’s Pacific coastline, exploring “the development of new geographies of power and labor in the wake of European and American incursion from the Pacific.”

In her work, Ms. Staver highlights the ways in which MHS collections can support research on topics that seem fairly distant from New England geography and politics!

 1. Can you briefly describe the research project that brought you to the Massachusetts Historical Society?

I am working on a doctoral dissertation in American history. My project interrogates the relationship of the ocean to the social and environmental changes that look place along the North American Pacific Coast (from Baja California to southern Alaska) from about 1768 through the 1820s. My project explores the connections between what happened in, on, and abutting the ocean to the changing demographic, economic, and social relationships amongst the indigenous and foreign peoples in the region. By focusing on who moved through and labored in the waters of the North American Pacific Coast, how and why they did so, and the ways those people interacted with one another and the coastal environment, it explores the development of new geographies of power and labor in the wake of European and American incursion from the Pacific.

2. What specific material in our collections made coming to the MHS important to your research? Was there a specific collection or type of material  that you consulted?

Given that my research is focused on the Pacific coast, many of my family and friends were confused about why I needed to spend time in the archives in Massachusetts. Over the time period I’m studying, a good number of Americans began coming to the Northwest Coast and, later, to California, on merchant ships partaking in the China trade. These American ships were overwhelmingly owned by northeastern merchants and most often sailed out of Boston or other Massachusetts ports. As a result, the logbooks and journals from these voyages, the letters from sailors on them, and the papers of those who financed the trips and owned the boats are largely in New England archives. There are two types of materials at MHS that are quite important to my research. The first are the logbooks, journals, and other writings and drawings of people who actually visited the Pacific Coast. Such records are amongst the only written evidence that exists describing the Pacific Coast in the 1700s (especially the northwestern part, beyond the sustained presence of the Spanish in Alta California), the indigenous people living there, and the type and character of the interactions that took place between foreign sailors and indigenous residents. The second set of materials of interest for my project are the letters, account books, and other papers of merchants who perhaps never themselves sailed to the eastern Pacific but who financed voyages or who were involved in broader trade networks that the region was a part of. Their letters, for example, help me to understand both New England merchants’ perceptions and knowledge of the Pacific Coast as well as how that knowledge was situated within and influenced by the myriad global connections these merchants maintained.

3. While you were working here, was there something you examined that surprised you? What was it, and why was it surprising?

In the papers of Thomas Lamb, a prominent Boston merchant, I found an insurance policy for a ship involved in the China trade (Thomas Lamb Papers, Box 1, Folder: 1802-1816). The existence of the policy itself didn’t surprise me, but an addendum to the standard text of the policy did.

On August 30, 1815, Benjamin Waldo Lamb (brother of Thomas) insured the ship Sultan and its cargo for $3,000. The policy would remain in effect for up to four years or until the ship returned from the Pacific to Boston or another port of discharge in the United States. The standard policy covers dangers encountered at sea, pirates, enemies, and several other potential hazards at sea. However, added into the typed boilerplate policy was the following handwriting:

“The Insurers are liable for seizure for illicit trade on the Coast of California. In case of loss before the arrival of this ship at Canton no proof of property is to be required.”

In 1815, what is now California was still under nominal Spanish control, and Spain generally banned residents of the missions and pueblos of Alta California from partaking in trade with non-Spanish ships. However, the practice was common, despite ongoing if undermanned efforts by the provincial government and military in California to thwart it. Nonetheless, the brazen acknowledgment of American intentions to partake in such trade struck me in this case. That the ship owners felt it needed to be added to the policy indicates the tangible risks that a ship engaging in such “illicit” trade may actually face; on the other hand, that the insurers were liable for risks associated with such “illicit” activity seems to imply it was considered by these Atlantic businessmen to be an acceptable and even normal part of doing business in the Pacific.

4. Is there a particular quote (or visual image) from the material that you consulted that stands out for you? What is the quote (or image) and why is it important?

I am still going through what I was able to gather during my visit to MHS, but there was a passage from the logbook of a merchant ship that particularly caught my eye, even from the microfilm machine (William Sturgis Papers, Reel 4). On July 4, 1814, the Boston-based ship Atahualpa was docked at “Whymea Bay” in “Atooi” (on the island of Kauai in what is now Hawai’i). The sailors celebrated the anniversary of American independence, fortified by Madera wine that was “bountyfully  supply’d” by another American captain. According to the logbook, the men proceeded to partake in more than a dozen “patriotic Toasts” to a variety of honorees – the memory of George Washington, the American Navy, and the King of Atooi, to name a few. But it was the final four that stood out to me:

10^th Commerce – while we view with indignation the Injuries done by Britain, may peace never be concluded but by Free Trade + sailors Rights.

11^th The Union. May the first wretch who advocates a separation of the States be Tared [sic] + Feathered + banished the country.

12^th. The enemies of our country, the enemies of Mankind, may they all be bound up the river Styx, + consigned to Hell.

13^th. The Ladies of the Sandwich Islands, while embracing their charms, let us not forget the Yankee fair ones at home.

I find this excerpt important for the ways it elucidates the various worlds the sailors of the Atahualpa inhabited in 1814. On the one hand they felt themselves to very much be Americans, even Unionists – yet their toasts simultaneously reveal the supranational networks and interests (economic and sexual) that they were a part of by virtue of their activity in the Pacific.

5. If you brought a visitor to the MHS and you had a chance to show them ONE item from our collections, what item would it be?

If I were to pick from the materials I viewed on my trip, I would choose the late-eighteenth-century letterbook of the Boston merchants James and Thomas Lamb – a leather-bound, several hundred page book that contains handwritten transcripts of most of the business letters (and a few personal ones) the brothers wrote between 1797 and 1799 (Lamb Family Papers, Box 13). My specific interest in this letterbook was in any notes addressed to captains sailing along the Northwest Coast. But in looking for letters with this particular destination, I came across dozens of others addressed to correspondents located in Havana, St. Croix, Canton, Rotterdam, and London, as well as letters referencing trade, prices, and events in western Africa, Chile, Batavia, and other locales in Asia, South America, and Europe. Historians are increasingly studying and emphasizing the international nature of early America and the early republic, but looking at a letterbook like this one really makes tangible the astoundingly global nature of the business interests and social and political world of this Boston family. In doing so I think it would challenge any viewer to rethink their assumptions about life and knowledge in early national Massachusetts.                       

Asked to provide a few lines about her professional background and current research interests, Jen Staver writes:

I am a PhD candidate in history at the University of California, Irvine. My research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of early American, world, and environmental history. Before beginning my PhD, I got a BA in history and a MS in civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University and worked at an environmental consulting firm in San Francisco.

By Anna J. Cook

Welcome to the third installment of our Beehive series, “Readers Relate,” in which we bring you a variety of examples of the type of research being done here in the MHS library.

Today’s responses come from Kathryn Segesser, a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto who visited the MHS in early January on an intensive research trip.

1. Can you briefly describe the research project that brought you to the Massachusetts Historical Society?

My research looks at abnormal eating in late eighteenth to early-nineteenth-century America and England. I’m focusing predominantly on medical texts that discuss the causes and nature of both prolonged abstinence from and over-indulgence in eating but I’m also interested in other genres of writing and uncovering personal experiences of such behaviors. I’m essentially trying to see if these eating patterns were conceptualized as more than just physiological, if there emerged an idea that the behaviors resulted from a choice, and if such theories developed in both regions within similar timeframes. I began my American archival research only recently. My visit to the MHS was at the start of this portion of my research and I planned to consult mainly manuscript sources.

2. What specific material in our collections made coming to the MHS important to your research? Was there a specific collection or type of material that you consulted?

I knew that the MHS would be important for the early period I’m studying but there was no one collection I had in mind, given the nature of my topic. I thought that I’d concentrate my attention on the diaries held at the MHS but, although I consulted these, I found a wealth of medical notebooks, records and printed material that I was unaware of prior to arrival. Medical manuscripts, microfilms and printed material all proved valuable.

3. While you were working here, was there something you examined that surprised you? What was it, and why was it surprising?

The diaries I consulted at the MHS were the first eighteenth-century American diaries I’d seen. I expected them to be rather more descriptive and instead found them to briefly record routine daily occurrences. On the other hand I did not expect to find so many medical manuscripts, especially those that contained comprehensive comparisons of treatment methods and reworked notes on select cases. Several manuscripts had incredibly detailed descriptions. For example, Edward Holyoke’s series of notes to the Massachusetts Medical Society contain a wealth of information about the seasons and incidents of disease in 1780s Salem. I hadn’t really seen such localized and consistent reporting of that nature before.

4. Is there a particular quote (or visual image) from the material that you consulted that stands out for you? What is the quote (or image) and why is it important?

There were two sources that really stood out. The first was the State of the Asylum report for the Philadelphia Asylum (Philadelphia, 1821). This source contains the earliest record I’ve found of an American asylum admitting someone for ‘a constant refusal of food previous to admission’. The second was Benjamin Lynde Oliver’s medical notebooks, 1760-1835 (contained in the Oliver Family Papers). In his notes on hydrophobia I found a very early description of the use of what was essentially electric-shock therapy to cure this ‘disease’ as well as separate classifications for ‘genuine’ and ‘hysterical’ hydrophobia. The fact that Oliver separated types of hydrophobia based upon principles of a mental impulse, rather than just physical reactions, is encouraging for my project.

5. If you brought a visitor to the MHS and you had a chance to show them ONE item from our collections, what item would it be?

Although this source did not prove fruitful for my particular research I really enjoyed reading Aaron Wight’s diaries because of the illustrations he drew to accompany his accounts. The drawings helped to immediately indicate the aspects of his life that he was most keen to record. These images, such as this one, from his March 1773 entry, make his notes one of the most visually engaging and lively diaries I’ve seen.

We invited Kathryn to share anything further about her research that Beehive readers might be interested in. She writes:

I am a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto, in my third year of the programe. I’m currently following a summer’s research in England with a term travelling around the north-east American coast. I came to this topic via a previous interest in the institutional treatment as well as the popular use of the idea of insanity in eighteenth-century England. I have chosen to shape my thesis as a comparative analysis in part because there is a considerable degree of information exchange across the Atlantic and in part because discussions of pre-nineteenth-century disordered eating have tended to be Eurocentric. The research I have undertaken so far – both in England and America – suggests that my early theory, that there was an attempt to understand these patterns from a psychological perspective will hold, if perhaps the transition towards such an understanding is fairly tentative.

By Anna J. Cook

Welcome to the second installment of our Beehive series, “Readers Relate,” in which we bring you a variety of examples of the type of research being done here in the MHS library.

Today’s responses come from Joshua Kercsmar, a PhD candidate under Mark Noll at the University of Notre Dame who spent several weeks conducting research here at the MHS this past summer.

Can you briefly describe the research project that brought you to the Massachusetts Historical Society?

My dissertation explores how British Americans used the moral meanings of animals to define religious and political identity in the New World. In coming to the MHS I wanted to know how ministers — key interpreters of nature for popular audiences — translated the meanings of animals for their listeners.   

What specific material in our collections made coming to the MHS important to your research?

The extensive collection of sermons at the MHS was a main attraction. Once there, however, I discovered an impressive collection of maps. Maps are important for my project, because engravers often framed them with allegorical scenes of people and animals. To promote whites’ image of themselves as improvers of the land, map-engravers would often portray Europeans in the vicinity of livestock. Scenes of Africa and America, however, tended to show Africans and Indians standing near (or riding atop) various species of wild, reptilian, or otherwise unproductive creatures. Through these kinds of comparisons, map-images helped reinforce the notion that Britain was more civilized and virtuous than other cultures.

While you were working here, was there something you examined that surprised you? What was it, and why was it surprising?

These animal-tropes were quite persistent, even into the late eighteenth century. Although I wasn’t sure what to expect, their persistence surprised me. I had thought that as the idea of the “noble savage” gained momentum during the eighteenth century, the equation of Indians with morally questionable reptiles might soften. But it didn’t.

Is there a particular quote (or visual image) from the material that you consulted that stands out for you? What is the quote (or image) and why is it important?

On two maps (Joshua Fry’s A Map of the Most Inhabited Part of Virginia Containing the Whole Province of Maryland [London, 1755], and John Henry’s A New and Accurate Map of Virginia [London, 1770]), I found not Indians but African slaves, who were portrayed as nearly naked and serving food. Given the strong connection between Africans and wild animals in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century maps, I read the slave-images as emblems of nature tamed. The images are important, because they suggest how common was the link (so often made in pro- and anti-slavery writings) between African slaves and domestic animals.

If you brought a visitor to the MHS and you had a chance to show them ONE item from our collections, what item would it be?

I would show them the Atlas des Colonies Angloises en Amérique, which contains thirty-eight maps printed in a wide variety of styles from 1736 to 1777. Many of the maps I looked at were from this fine collection, although I was delighted to find that the MHS holds nearly two hundred other maps printed between 1500 and 1800 as well.

We invited Joshua to share anything further about his research that Beehive readers might be interested in. He writes:

 I earned my B.A. in Theology from Wheaton College (IL); my M.Div. from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary; and my Th.M. in American Religious History from Harvard Divinity School, where I worked under David D. Hall. I am now a Ph.D. candidate in U.S. History at the University of Notre Dame, and a student of Mark Noll.

My dissertation, entitled “Nature of the New World: Animals, Identities, and the Moral Ecology of British America, 1530–1800,” examines the ways that British Americans turned to the animal world, a vast repository of moral meaning, to make sense of their place in the American wilderness. I argue that ever since the Middle Ages, Britons had read systems of relationships among humans and animals (what we now call ecologies) as religious and moral indicators. Farmers were virtuous because they cultivated useful and industrious animals such as livestock, and killed destructive ones like foxes, crows, and wild dogs. Witches were evil in no small part because they reversed the scheme, cursing livestock and nurturing relations with snakes, frogs, black dogs, and a host of other corrupt animals. Responding to massive religious and social upheaval, sixteenth-century writers and artists expanded this system. They began to link Catholics and indigenous peoples to wolves, reptiles, and other wild beasts; and Protestants to domestic animals and ecological improvement. British colonists brought these ideas with them to America. Adapting them to new contexts (and through a wide range of sources), they came to define Indians and Africans as sub-humans that needed to be killed, removed, or (in the case of slaves) tamed, but themselves as Protestants, Britons, and (by the 1780s and 1790s) virtuous citizens of a new republic.

I also have two articles in progress. One of them explores how booksellers marketed the predictions of Ursula Shipton, an obscure English prophetess, to various London audiences during the English Civil Wars. Another, in the “revise-and-resubmit” stage with the William and Mary Quarterly, argues for the ongoing influence of Perry Miller on studies of early New England.

If you are a researcher who has worked at the MHS and are interested in participating, please contact me and I will be happy to forward our “Readers Relate” questionnaire to you.