Meet the Archival Ambassadors' Mentor Teacher!

Christina Wallace
Hello! My name is Christina Wallace and I am currently a history teacher in Newark, NJ. I have been teaching for eleven years, and this past week I have had the great privilege and honor to serve as a mentor teacher for interns in the Archival Ambassadors program here at Washington's Headquarters Museum. I have taught US History for many years, but being here at the park and museum archives has truly been a treat. I have had an opportunity to examine and analyze several different primary source documents as well as work collaboratively with these amazing interns. For the past five days, my task has been to show them how to write lessons and create activities for the classroom. In addition, I have learned a great deal from them and the museum staff. I have learned that there are thousands of primary source documents, artifacts, maps, paintings, and so much more here in the museum archives. I have had the opportunity to create lesson plans, explore the teacher resources, and engage in many conversations about the importance of primary source documents in the classroom. Sarah, Jude, and myself have been exploring the many possibilities for teachers and students from Newark Public Schools to not only utilize the great museum archives and programs, but also to create new partnerships that foster collaboration on bringing the archives to the classroom in a variety of ways. I am very excited about all of the future opportunities to come. I am also very proud that two of my students will be participating in the Archival Ambassadors program starting July 11th. I know that they will have an amazing and life-changing experience as I have had. Thank you to all the interns and staff, especially Sarah for inviting me to be a part of this program.

Recent Grads Reflect on Their Internship Project

The entity that was the Continental Congress represented a gathering of some of the most intelligent, influential, and wealthy individuals on American soil during the War for Independence. Some of those individuals served for years, others for a short time, and still others who declined to serve all together. Here at Morristown National Historical Park, Peter Blasevick and I recently undertook the task of sifting through the papers in collection of those individuals who declined to serve on the Continental Congress. As interns from William Paterson University, we have both been able to utilize this opportunity at Morristown as a benefit to our futures. We are currently working through some 177 documents covering fifty-five of the ninety delegates who declined altogether. Included in the documents are some notable names, including George Mason, William Paterson, and James Bowdoin, whose collection of letters detail instructions for putting down Shay's Rebellion.

What surprised us foremost was the lack of any documents specifically mentioning an individual's election to the Congress. While some manuscripts predate the individuals election, and others postdate it significantly, the ones that are near to the time of election fail to mention it altogether. Nonetheless, Peter and I have been able to conclude for certain individuals why they rejected the call to serve. Some were ill, others far more attached to local politics and local responsibilities. The totality of the project has been far more intriguing than we could have imagined at the outset and is just one example of the hidden gems here at Morristown National Historical Park and Museum.

Blog entry by Bruce Spadaccini, William Paterson University.

Report 1: Greetings from the Archival Ambassadors!

We are now wrapping up our first week working with the Lloyd W. Smith collection to put together a Traveling Archives unit box for high school students as well as a plan for when our students come to join us later on in the program. It has been a very successful week, full of brainstorming, planning, and researching the collection using microfilm and other sources. Together, we were able to come up with an overall theme for our project, focusing on the everyday lives of people (soldiers at rest, women, children, slaves, Indians, etc.) during wars and the behind-the-scenes workings of the military when both at war and peace. We’re interested in not only covering the Revolutionary War era, which is fitting given our location at Morristown, but also other wars overtime and various locations in order to provide a full understanding of colonial life in general.

So far, each of us has been focusing on various subsections of our overall theme in order to gather all the manuscripts and other documents in the collection that we can include in both the unit box and our time with the students. We have all been able to find a variety of interesting things that may end up being useful.

Andrea has been focusing on looking for manuscripts written by soldiers pertaining to any aspect of the workings of war (not including the battles themselves), as well as any letters or memoirs that can shed light on the lives of everyday people during the colonial period. She has also been looking into anything that may illustrate relations with Indians or the role religion played in the colonial period. Through looking through rolls of microfilm, Andrea has been able to find a couple of particularly useful documents, including a return of provisions and stores received for the use of General John Sullivan (who was stationed in Staten Island in 1777). This document is particularly important in understanding the types of goods soldiers would have needed during the war and how much they would have cost.

Peter has been focusing this week on the economic impact of the American Revolution. Because the military had very little money, they needed to borrow from local businesses and farms constantly, and luckily many of those transactions have been documented. Money for guns, powder, clothing, and food were all copiously transcribed by the Continentals, and much can be ascertained from their records. Peter found a very interesting set of transactions by a leading general in Quebec who wrote his accounts in both English and French. His ledger has been interesting not only because of the amount of materials he purchased, but also because we are able to compare his use of two languages side by side.

Elizabeth has been looking for maps and references to transportation. She has also been brainstorming ideas of activities for possible lesson plans to use with the students attending the program, as well as in the Traveling Archives Box. One neat document that Elizabeth has found is a map of Louisiana in French.

Lacey is focusing on various aspects of home life, including the experiences of women, children, indentured servants, and slaves. Since these groups tend to leave little in the way written documents, spaces themselves, such as the Ford Mansion, serve as excellent sources of information for clues as to the experiences of the eighteenth century home. Additionally, objects located in the gallery at the Washington Headquarters Museum, including dishes, clothing, and toys, provide insight into their owners' lives. Lacey has also had some success locating written documents about these subjects, some written by them and some only written about them. Types of sources she has found, and continues to search for, include family papers, personal letters, calling cards, deeds, and wills. A particularly meaningful source she found was the manumission documents of a slave owned by a woman. This document combines the experiences of both a person of color and a property-owning woman, two voices that are rarely heard in the written historical record.

Lauren is working on finding documents that contain poetry and other literary works. Some soldiers wrote beautiful moving letters. One letter that is particularly fascinating was one that was written by an ex-soldier to his friend that he met in prison. They were both captured by the British in the war. He finally recounted how he came to be captured and questioned by the British and escaped by digging a hole out of his cell. His story was moving and shows that there is always more to war than the battles. Also, Lauren is working on finding documents written by well-known people and finding another side of them that is rarely seen in public.

During the week the students are here, we will implement these documents and our process in explaining the role of a historian to them, so they can understand the process of formulating a broad topic based on their interests and then research it, shaping the topic to make it more refined and tight. Once they find good sources, they will learn how to analyze them to really understand the document and what it can tell us. Finally, after they have learned to analyze the documents they will be able to interpret them and learn how their interpretation of a document shapes how people perceive it. By the students putting together an exhibit of the documents and presenting their interpretations of them, they will be able to teach people who do not know about the documents. They will also learn about how sites and physical objects can also be interpreted and what the role of Morristown and other Historical National Parks is.

Meet the interns HERE.

This post written by the 2011 Archival Ambassadors Team.

Meet the Archival Ambassadors!

Elizabeth Ambrose

"My name is Elizabeth Ambrose. I just finished my sophomore year at Kutztown University. I am working to get my Bachelors in history and secondary education. I am also volunteering at Fosterfields Living Historical Farm in Morristown this summer."

Andrea Mehler

"My name is Andrea Mehler and I am currently attending Drew University for my Masters degree in History and Culture. Having graduated from The College of New Jersey with a Bachelors in history and a minor in anthropology, I am particularly interested in cultural history and the preservation and use of historical documents and artifacts and how everyday people lived their lives. I am also interested in public history and museums and the way knowledge is disseminated to the general public. Through this program, I hope to develop my archiving, exhibit planning, and teaching skills in order to aide me in my career search. I look forward to working with everyone involved with the Archival Ambassadors program, especially the students!"

Lacey Sparks

"My name is Lacey Sparks and I'm currently pursuing my masters degree in women's and gender history at Rutgers University-Newark. I received my bachelors in history and French at Murray State University, a rural school in Kentucky, my home state. I'm interested in women's and gender history, feminist theory, critical race theory, and queer theory, especially within the context of imperial/ colonial history. Cultural history, or the history of everyday life, is of particular importance to me since I like to study groups who were previously left out of the historical record and don't leave many written documents behind. When I grow up I'd like to be a history professor. This program is an excellent fit for me because it combines historical research and teaching, the skills I'll use the most in my career in academia."

Peter Mabli

"My name is Peter Mabli and I am a third year graduate student at Drew University. I currently am working on my Ph.D. in early American intellectual history, specifically the development of universities in the early American republic and their impact on the young nation’s culture and politics. I graduated from Fairleigh Dickinson University with a Bachelors degree in history and a Masters degree in secondary education. In the past I have worked as both a high school history teacher and an adjunct professor. I hope to instill my excitement and passion for history with all the students in the Archival Ambassadors Program, and I look forward to working with everyone!"

Lauren Talley

"My name is Lauren Talley and I am a second year graduate student in the Masters History Program at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. I received a Honors Baccalaureate degree in History for my undergraduate thesis on Vestal Virgins from the same university. My concentration is in public history but I am also greatly interested in European history. Experience has taught me that the way people perceive the past shapes the future and I feel that it is necessary for me to help people learn how to properly analyze and interpret history. The Archival Ambassadors program will help me learn how to guide and teach others as well as show me new and relatively untouched documents that make me interested in a part of history that I had previously not been interested in."

Learn more HERE.

Featured Artifact: Captain Cook Prints

Description:

The two prints depicted here, A Night Dance by Men in Hapaee and Articles Sandwich Islands reflect how vast and rich James Cook’s final voyage was.

A Night Dance by Men in Hapaee exhibits the exoticism of Polynesian dances. Seated at the centre foreground is Captain Cook who is flanked by his crew. Bare-chested dancers perform a dance to a rhythm provided by men striking the ground with bamboo poles. John Webber engraved this scene c. 1774 on the island of Hapaee (Ha’apai, Central Tonga).

Articles Sandwich Islands displays wooden weapons, sharks teeth, a musical gourd instrument with feathers, an idol with mother of pearl eyes and dogs teeth and boar’s tusk bracelet. John Webber was also the artist of these objects c. 1785 at Cook’s last voyage in Kealakekua Bay, Hawaii.

The exquisite prints produced by the artists on Cook’s voyages come from Lloyd W. Smith as part of his extensive archival and rare book collection donated to the park in 1955.

MORR?


About Cook's Voyage:

Born in 1728 in Marton Yorkshire, Britain, Cook joined the Royal Navy and sailed his first voyage around the world on the ‘Endeavour’ from 1768-1771. He sailed three voyages in total in the 1770’s, and was killed on the third voyage in an unfortunate miscommunication between his men and the native in Kealakekua Bay, Hawaii in 1779. Cook was attempting to circumnavigate the globe in an attempt to define shipping routes, trade routes, identify new societies and cultures, and to determine the position and extent of the west side of North America.

Cook had naturalists, anthropologists, and artists (no cameras of course) among others, to document the exotic sites and peoples he encountered, and to collect biological specimens. Men such as Henry Roberts, William Hodges, Sydney Parkinson, and John Webber joined Cook to document what they saw by sketching drawings, maps, and engravings. These prints that were produced by the artists are among the most valuable productions and developments from an anthropological standpoint during a very active decade for the British.


Resources:

Morristown NHP Collection
Bound volumes of Captain Cooke's voyage to the Pacific Ocean exists in the Morristown Library Collection

Featured Manuscript: Lincoln Legal Papers

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Curator's Note:

Like most larger than life historical figures, Abraham Lincoln suffers from a condition of under-representation. In other words, he is known for one, single, solitary act of greatness at the expense of every other event or activity of his life. This syndrome is not unknown and is in some ways symptomatic of the way we as Americans like to take our history. We like one simple helping without too much context and extraneous material—something like a “meat and potatoes” approach to the smorgasbord of historical events.

While Lincoln was certainly the president during the Civil War (the beginning of which we commemorate this year), he had an entire life, a vocation, before entering on that final life episode which has made him a household name. His career as a lawyer, known in vague outline, is a subject which scholars have begun to explore more deeply in an effort to bring forth a more fully formed historical understanding of the man and his time.

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Daniel Stowell, the editor of the Lincoln Papers Project in Springfield, IL contacted Morristown NHP two-and-a half years ago to schedule an appointment to view the Lincoln papers in the Lloyd W. Smith collection. Dr. Stowell was prepared for the perfunctory types of manuscripts usually found at institutions not directly related to the Lincoln story. The first folder he opened his jaw nearly dropped. Inside were four sheets of legal size paper filled with Lincoln’s answer (Lincoln represented the defendant and was thus “answering” to the charges of the plaintiff) in the case of Kelly v. Wells and Wells from Sangamon County Circuit Court, 1853. The Lincoln answer in the case had been presumed lost and was listed as such in the collected Lincoln Legal Papers. Of course now, a separate volume will probably need to be published at some point to contain all of the legal manuscripts located since the project ended in 2008.

Morristown NHP is proud to be part of the reason that a new volume will be necessary.

Welcome Interns!

Morristown would like to welcome our 2011 Archival Ambassadors Interns.

Later this month, you can follow their progress as they share their experiences on this blog. In July, they will be joined by a talented group of high school students.

Stay Tuned!

From left to right: Peter Mabli, Andrea Mehler, Elizabeth Ambrose, Lacey Sparks, and Lauren Talley.

William Paterson's Notebook

Jude Pfister explores Morristown's William Paterson notebook in the recent The Supreme Court Historical Society Quarterly. This featured manuscript is part of the Lloyd W. Smith Archival Collection.

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*Permission to republish kindly granted by The Supreme Court Historical Society.

The Supreme Court Historical Society Quarterly, Volume XXXIII, Number 1. 2011