SETH C. BRUGGEMAN

This field note essay, originally from summer 2024, reflects on method for doing historical research in archives. It is intended to reveal what research entails, why we do it, and how aspiring historians can begin to make sense of what they discover in the archive.

I arrived today at the H. Furlong Baldwin Library of the Maryland Center for History and Culture to begin my stint as this year’s Ashby M. Larmore Research Fellow. My purpose here is to study how public memory evolved during the early twentieth century along Maryland’s Eastern Shore. That is, I’m interested in finding out what people from that side of the Chesapeake Bay a century ago thought about the past and how they explained it to neighbors and visitors.

And already I’ve hit paydirt!

In the very first folder of the very first box that the library’s archivists retrieved for me are a half dozen tiny pamphlets, each containing a reprint of the constitution and by-laws of the Woman’s Eastern Shore Society of Maryland. The Society was formed in 1926 by and for women living in Baltimore who had either been born on the Eastern Shore or who had roots there. What bound them together was a desire to spend time with one another and, as the Society’s constitution puts it, to “preserve and foster an appreciation of the history and traditions of Eastern Shore of Maryland.”[i]

This is an excellent find for me because, during the 1920s, women’s organizations like the Society were our nation’s primary stewards of local history. If you have a century-old monument, house museum, or historic site in your community, odds are it originated in the work of a women’s organization. Understanding those organizations, then, is essential to understanding the history of public memory in the United States. What makes the Society especially interesting is that its focus was the history of a place its members had left behind. Theirs is a story of history, memory, and nostalgia woven together with a particular place and within the historical complexities of America’s interwar years. For a memory historian like myself, this is about as good as it gets!

But what really can we learn about the Society from a pile of pamphlets? Time is tight, and so typically I’d move quickly past this folder. What catches my eye though is the fact that, despite appearing identical, each pamphlet was printed in a different year. There are reprints here from every decade between 1936 and 1987. And since these pamphlets contain the constitution and by-laws of the Society, it occurs to me that what this folder really contains is an official record of how the society changed over time. It is a chronicle of the choices these people made about how they wanted to remember the Eastern Shore.

Some of those choices are startling. Consider, for instance, how the Society chose to select its members. Section 2 of the Society’s constitution concerns the selection of active members. Here’s the criteria from 1936:

Sec. 2. Active Members: Any woman eighteen years of age or older, native of the Eastern Shore of Maryland, or any woman descendant of an Eastern Shoreman, residing in Baltimore City or within a radius of fifteen (15) miles of the limits of Baltimore City, may become an Active Member. Such members shall be eligible to vote and hold office.

Fast forward to 1943, though, and we see a striking change:

Sec. 2. Active members: Any white woman eighteen years of age or older, native of the Eastern Shore of Maryland, or any white woman descendant of an Eastern Shoreman residing in Baltimore City or within a radius of fifteen (15) miles of the limits of Baltimore City, may become an Active Member. Such members shall be eligile to vote and hold office.

At some point between 1936 and 1943, the Society determined that only white women should have a hand in preserving and fostering an appreciation of the history and traditions of the Eastern Shore. It is very likely that the Society’s membership had believed that all the while, but their decision to clarify it within the organization’s by-laws by 1943 demands our attention. What changed? Was it the stir of passions surrounding World War II that somehow shifted their mood? Was it white fear of Black enfranchisement prompted by the successful 1938 crab pickers strike in Crisfield, MD during which Black women rallied together against pay cuts?[ii]

At this point, of course, I can only speculate. But what this change does remind us for sure is that racism and segregation are choices. And that all choices have histories. The great value of accessible public archives is that they preserve the histories of our choices in perpetuity so that we always have the opportunity to look back and make better choices going forward.

It reminds us too that how we remember the past is so often filtered through the chauvinisms of the very people who taught us how to remember in the first place. And in that regard we can identify another moment of choice wherein the Society opted to do better. In 1975, its members ratified a new constitution with very different ideas about membership:

Sec.2. Active Members: A woman eighteen years of age or older, residing in the State of Maryland, who is a native of the Eastern Shore of Maryland or who is a descendant of a native of the Eastern Shore of Maryland, may become an Active member. Such members shall be eligible to vote and hold office.

Here we see two important new choices. First is the significant choice, after more than three decades, to remove race as a qualification for membership. The second choice is more subtle, but no less significant. Since its inception, the Society limited active membership to women who were either born on the Eastern Shore or who had descended from a “shoreman.” That is, any woman could join so long as they were descended from a man born on the Eastern Shore. The revised by-laws carefully substitute “native” for “shoreman.” For the first time in the Society’s history, it was o.k. to be descended from a woman.

Again, we could speculate at length about why the Society’s members made these particular choices in this particular moment. That work will come. What’s more useful in the early throes of historical research is to simply recognize the choices, and to note what they tell us about what was truly important to the people we study. In this case, that the Society went to such great lengths to codify its choices about race, gender, and memory shows us that the language of identity has never been just about wordplay. For the women of the Woman’s Eastern Shore Society of Maryland, at least, choosing how to describe themselves had everything to do with choosing whose pasts we remember, and whose we don’t.

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[i] The Woman’s Eastern Shore Society of Maryland, “Constitution and By-Laws of the Woman’s Eastern Shore Society of Maryland” (1936), Folder Constitution and By-Laws 1936-1987, Box 1, MS 3189, Woman’s Eastern Shore Society of Maryland Records, 1926-2007, H. Furlong Baldwin Library of the Maryland Center for History and Culture.

[ii] See, for instance, Meg Walburn Viviano, “Crisfield’s 1938 Crab Picker Strike Remembered with New Historical Marker,” Chesapeake Bay Magazine (May 14, 2024), https://www.chesapeakebaymagazine.com/crisfields-1938-crab-picker-strike-remembered-with-new-historical-marker/.

Teaching is the most important thing that happens at a university. Doing it well, however, is not easy. It wasn’t easy before COVID-19, and it isn’t easy now. And, yet, regardless of the format or setting, there are several guidelines that I’ve found to be particularly useful for clarifying my purpose as a teacher. These may not work for everyone, but they have helped me to make teaching a more deeply gratifying part of my professional life.

I’ve grouped my guidelines into principles, goals, and course design. Principles are the bedrock ideas on which all of my teaching is built. Goals refer to the core purpose of any given teaching endeavor, whether it be a course, workshop, independent study, or so on. Course Design includes several guideposts that ward me away from bad tendencies when devising syllabi.

Principles

1. Teaching is making.

When we teach, we make things with our students, always. We build relationships. We form questions. We devise frameworks and habits that allow us to understand one another. Sometimes we even make things that are useful for our schools, for strangers, for our neighbors. The durability of these things, and their persistence beyond the classroom, is the measure of good teaching. Making students aware, early on, of this active making—and their stake in it—increases the likelihood that the things we make together will last.

2. Teach people, not courses.

Every course is a conversation among people, and because the people are always different, so are the conversations. I am responsible for hosting thoughtful conversations wherein everyone can participate. That responsibility does not give me license, however, to compel students with mobility challenges to endure endless fieldwork, or to retraumatize people who may have sought out my classroom as a refuge from trauma. Regardless of what the business of education would have us believe, we teach people, not courses, and so wherever possible, I will query students about the feasibility of various learning possibilities BEFORE designing a course.

3. Modeling inquiry, NOT delivering information, should be the chief aim of teaching.

My value as a teacher is not bound up with what I know so much as it is an index of how I respond to the much larger universe of things that I do not know. In this regard, all teachers always model inquiry. Responding to the unknown with fear and derision (e.g. feigning expertise, belittling other ways of knowing, ignoring the moment) models habits of mind that reinforce privilege and exclusivity. Beginning rather with what we don’t know, and marshaling what tools we have to explore it, models habits of mind that promote calm, kindness, and confidence in times of uncertainty.

4. Teaching is the curation of experience.

A good course is an intentional sequence of discrete experiences (e.g. reading, lectures, discussions, assignments, encounters, trips, etc.) that reveal to each student new knowledge about themselves and about the topic they’ve chosen to study. My capacity to teach well resides not primarily in my content expertise, important though that is, but rather in my ability to pick, choose, and create learning experiences that together are greater than the sum of their parts. I am a deejay, and I succeed so long as my students keep dancing.

5. Assume the best.

In almost every instance, teachers must take students at their word, no questions asked. It is true that, from time to time, we will be deceived. It may be that a student misses class or performs poorly or acts out for reasons that we cannot or need not know. And that’s o.k., SO LONG AS:

• • the student is not in danger or endangering others;
  • the student’s actions are not intended to exploit the vulnerabilities of others; and,
  • the teacher has created a learning experience wherein fairness of evaluation does not require that everyone perform equally in all instances.

Teaching is hard. Learning is hard. Life is hard. We can’t ever expect to know or understand all the challenges our students confront. I pledge to be a teacher, not a gatekeeper. Confusing the two promotes fear, misunderstanding, and inequity.

Goals

1. Promote wonder.

Wonder is the wellspring of learning. In order to learn, we must first believe in the possibility of being amazed by ourselves, by others, and by the world around us. A good course provides all of its students with the tools necessary to harness wonder, and to witness it in ourselves. This is to say, a good course should change each student AND provide each student with the tools necessary to recognize how they have changed.

2. Slow down.

Coverage is a myth of profit. The notion that there are a particular number of topics, or themes, or decades, or datum that must be “covered” during any given course is born of the tendency to standardize education, to mechanize it so that its costs and profits can be routinized. Yes, I have learning goals. Yes, some courses are conceived of primarily as surveys. Yes, our time is valuable. And yet, because every course is different, so is its relationship to time. Wherever possible, I will set our pace according to the particularities of the topic, the needs of my students, and the exigencies of the moment. In all cases, it is my goal to slow down and protect students from the contrivances of time and profit.

3. Resist the classroom.

A learning space, such as a classroom and all of its contents, constitutes a theory of education. It is an organizing principle that silently maps onto us ideas about learning that often originate in the ledger sheets of corporate architects, furniture manufacturers, paint vendors, courseware firms, and no end of others for whom education is secondary to profit. In all instances, I will resist the classroom’s tendency to define my pedagogy. My capacity to teach well need not reside in a lectern or within any other topography of power. We will insist that ideas be our guide even when—especially when—those ideas conflict with what we are encouraged to accept as the normal landscape of learning.

4. Learn about by learning how.

Course expectations are too frequently infused with the veiled language of productivity and privilege. Formulations such as skills training, vocational education, hard/soft skills, life of the mind, and theory/practice all serve to reinforce the notion that thinking and doing exist on either end of a spectrum along which humans must stake their identity. My pedagogy is committed to demonstrating that thinking and doing are, in fact, one in the same. By jettisoning the old binaries, we learn to discover nuance where none seemed to exist. I aim to learn how to do something new, with my students, each time I teach.

5. Create safety; encourage risk.

To the best of my ability, I will strive to create learning spaces wherein it is possible for everyone to grapple with big ideas free of the anxieties associated with economic pressure, time pressure, corporate learning outcomes, health concerns, or fear that others might insist that any single characteristic of one’s self be forced to stand in for one’s whole self. I will rarely succeed in achieving this goal fully, but constantly challenging myself to do so will ensure that I always value all of my students, above all, as humans. By working together to create a safe learning space, we will empower ourselves to take intellectual risks.

6. Revel in ourselves; respect our neighbors.

In learning together we discover strength in difference. It is the mingling of our various identities, beliefs, goals, and aspirations that promotes self-awareness and sparks discovery. In learning, then, we celebrate ourselves. And yet, we must not forget that we learn together in the presence of everyone whose lives intersect in our lessons, including our neighbors and the multitudes of people whose labor makes this moment possible. We will strive to honor them by making our time together serve others beyond ourselves.

Course Design

1. Ideas, not lectures

Organize each class session around the exploration of an idea. Devise several experiences, but not too many, that prompt students to consider the idea from different perspectives. My “lecture” is the narration that binds those experiences together and that provides just enough context to make them meaningful. Imagine that each session yields a sentence, and that by stringing each sentence together over the course of a semester, I will have written a paragraph that reveals to readers a new way of knowing.

2. Intentionality

Every aspect of teaching is meaningful insomuch as students infer meaning from everything a teacher does, even if it is not intentional. It is therefore necessary to be honest and forthright in all instances about teaching goals, expectations, and the rationale underlying every class session. Assigning work that is not immediately relevant to the purpose at hand undermines credibility. Recycling ideas and experiences from previous courses without regard to the exigencies of the moment undermines credibility. Be present; be intentional.

3. Course correction

A course is called a “course” because it promises passage through a sequence of ideas. Don’t mistake a course for a map. Maps are fixed. Courses shift to accommodate obstacles and opportunities. My syllabus, therefore, though it must be clear about the duration of the voyage and its goals, need not guarantee any particular route. Set a course at the outset, but don’t be afraid to correct it early and often, and—most importantly—in conversation with your crew.

4. Accretion

Strive always to make students aware of their accumulation of knowledge over time. Create assignments, for instance, that are iterative over the entire semester, wherein one idea leads to another, and for which each accomplishment is a necessary precondition for the next. Reveal to students how knowledge accretes through successive and purposeful acts of learning. Allow my evaluation of their success to also accrete over time.

5. Maximize feedback; minimize grades.

Chicken eggs are graded. Cuts of meat are graded. Lumber, steel, and plastics are graded. Grading is a technology devised to establish hierarchies among objects for which physical characteristics determine value. Students are humans. Grading humans is unethical. Presuming that grading a student’s work is somehow different than grading the student constitutes a category mistake (see Goal 4). When required to assign grades to students, I will do so primarily by gauging the completeness of a student’s body of work. Students will receive the real substance of my evaluation by way of written and spoken feedback, and in conversation with peers and project partners who will all have a hand in helping us understand the value of our work together.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clajmI8y8J0&list=PLZ_kpEZ3K1UT4nTTwnhAmEtn0dZnJGIIh&index=7&t=0s

During 2016-2020, I researched and wrote an administrative history of the Boston National Historical Park, sponsored by the Organization of American Historians – National Park Service Collaboration. Click here for a series of videos wherein I reflect on the project and my findings toward helping NPS staff imagine new possibilities for doing history in Boston. Topics include urban renewal, heritage tourism, histories of race and power, the economics of American nationalism after World War II, and the contrivance of Revolutionary memory during the twentieth century. Enjoy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G06Sn3ygb1w

 

The Philadelphia History Museum’s story is a complicated one, more so than I can even begin to know. There are, however, a few things I do know for sure:

* Any museum–even a bad one–can survive so long as it has enough expertise, passion, and money. That the PHM is failing indicates that it is deficient in one or more of those areas.

* The city is bound, partially by law and entirely by tradition, to ensure that the PHM has enough expertise, passion, and money. PHM’s failure indicates that the city has decided not to hold up its end of the deal. Mayor Kenney owns that decision.

* PHM’s demise is no surprise. Its struggles during the last decade are well known among Philadelphia’s museum set. That others are only now getting the message, evidenced for instance by the Inquirer’s July 2 editorial, is an unfortunate index of how little most of us know about Philadelphia’s nonprofit cultural institutions and their struggles.

The possibility of PHM’s collapse worries me a great deal. Fussy though they may be, Philadelphia’s cultural institutions–especially those like PHM that steward collections– together constitute a fragile ecosystem (as Ken Finkel put it in another recent Inquirer editorial). Just one rotten leaf can signal trouble at the root. I worry about the PHM because I worry about what its fate portends for the rest of us.

Consider for a moment that the PHM is lacking expertise, money, and/or passion in a city that:

* Is home to scads of top-shelf historians, and no less than three world-class university programs in public history, museum studies, and museum leadership. Philadelphia has plenty of expertise.

* Is home to museums, historic sites, and exhibit designers that have, in recent years, won some of the most prestigious awards in our field. Our city is an incubator for the most innovative public history practice in the country. Philadelphia has plenty of passion.

* Is home to donors, philanthropists, and grant makers who pay out millions of dollars to all manner of public and private (though mostly private) historical endeavors. Philadelphia has plenty of money.

It seems that the PHM is starving in the pantry. How is it possible? Why is it that the city can’t connect its history museum with resources that are literally at PHM’s doorstep? How can it be that this inexpensive museum struggles along while massive new multi-million-dollar museums—the National Museum of American Jewish History (2010), the new Barnes Foundation gallery (2012), the Museum of the American Revolution (2017)—grab headlines. The Museum of the American Revolution alone cost $120 million. The PHM runs Philadelphia about $300,000 a year.

Much of the problem, of course, owes to the flow of capital. Amid decades-long declines in public funding for arts and culture, museums that can’t tap deep pockets must endure the crushing rhythm of annual grant cycles. Getting grants is hard, and eats into the core resources needed to keep a small museum on its feet. And yet, tapping deep pockets might be even more limiting insomuch as it requires doing history that rich folks get excited about. We know what museums that follow this path are like: big buildings, pricey tickets, privileged vacationers strolling the exhibits, working people of color relegated to custodial crews and café registers. This is not the kind of heritage infrastructure that does justice to Philadelphia’s rich and difficult past.

I am sure that other private-money schemes for PHM are already being bandied about now that the Temple deal has collapsed. My greatest fear is that one of these will work, and that the public face of Philadelphia’s past will get tied up in private interests. Private funding doesn’t guarantee bad history, but it usually guarantees limited perspective and it most certainly will undermine any legitimate efforts among PHM staff to share curatorial authority with the people who actually make Philadelphia history: Philadelphians.

That said, as it’s unfolding right now, the conversation regarding PHM is run through with privilege and unexamined assumptions about power and entitlement. I want the Mayor to keep PHM alive, but I also want us to think hard about how history can be deployed in the service of all Philadelphians. I’m reminded of the Philadelphia Moving Past Project, sponsored in 1982 by Penn’s Philadelphia Social History Project, which sought amid the celebratory hubbub of the city’s tercentennial to equip Philadelphians with the historical skills necessary to resist detrimental policies right here in our own neighborhoods. Imagine a PHM retooled for that purpose today: a public training space for active citizenship, staffed by a rotating network of passionate experts drawn from all across the city. Here is where we and the Mayor could come for historical crib notes on all the key issues facing Philadelphians today: immigration, police violence, homelessness, etc., and etc. and etc. Private museums won’t provide that service, at least not for everyone equally. Universities are too concerned with stadiums and prestige.

Mayor Kenney, however, has the power to make PHM a vital third space. It will take expertise, passion, and money. We’ve got all of that in Philly. But do we have the leadership?