Areas of Historical Interest: Chattel slavery, Native American and Indigenous Studies, Early American Republic, Local History
Jenna grew up in the Chicago area. She has a BA in US History from Framingham State University, and an MA in Student Affairs in Higher Education from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. After graduating, she worked in Residential Life for ten years before having two kids and taking a step back. While in undergrad, Jenna interned at the Little Compton Historical Society in Rhode Island. She started working there again once her youngest was old enough for her to be away. Her work there reinvigorated her passion for history and drove her to explore MA programs in history.
In her free time, Jenna enjoys crafting, Tabletop role-playing games & board games, photography, and community organizing & active citizenship. In addition, she is a member of the leadership collective of the History Graduate Student Association at UMass Boston. Jenna lives with her supportive husband, their two sons, Edmund and Oliver, and her in-laws in a 1904 farmhouse. They have a cat named Arya and a black dog named Snowflake. With everyone’s different schedules, the house only usually gets a few hours of sleep each night!
Favorite Historical Story: “Calvin Coolidge was sitting next to a young woman at a dinner party. She said she’d bet her friends that she could get the notoriously reserved Coolidge to say more than 3 words. Without looking at her, he said, “you lose”.”
Cai is originally from Toledo, Ohio. They attended the University of Toledo, where they studied History and Music. After graduating, they worked in the United States as a teacher for the Institute of Reading Development. Because of their interest in East Asian history, they moved to China in order to learn Chinese. Cai is currently working in Nantong, Jiangsu, China as an English Language teacher to children ages 3-12. They live with their husband Adam, and their four pets: cats, Sushi (grey) and Nori (white and grey), and dogs, Miso (looks like a fox) and Kimchi. In their free time they enjoy singing, playing piano, and cooking. They also serve as an officer with the History Graduate Student Association (HGSA) at UMass Boston.
Favorite fun fact: “It’s not really historical, but it’s a fun fact that I’ve learned to embrace while being in China. Everything, and I mean everything, can be cured with hot water. It’s like a cure all here. Fever? Hot water. Sore throat? Hot water. Cough? Hot water. Broken leg? Hot water. It’s Tuesday? Hot water. I don’t know, they just think it’s really really good for you. I used to think it was weird, but after four years of them telling me to drink it, I like hot water now.”
Areas of historical interest: American history – 20th century political history, urban history, animal history
Kylie is from Boston and graduated from Boston University in the Spring with a Bachelor of Arts in History. She lives with her family, including her dog and best buddy Nash. In her free time, she enjoys gardening, knitting, baking, and photography. Kylie also collects antiques, such as suitcases, typewriters, and cameras.
Favorite historical story: Kylie’s favorite story follows the theme of American history and sprinkles in the adventures of pirates. Future president Andrew Jackson, ridden with dysentery and becoming desperate, begrudgingly accepted the assistance of the pirate Jean Laffite. It helped him succeed in the Battle of New Orleans during the War of 1812, which essentially became his claim to fame.
Areas of historical interest: Women’s history, 20th Century
Meghan is from East Michigan, but currently lives in Dorchester, right by the UMass campus. She graduated from Grand Valley State University in Michigan in the Spring, where she received her Bachelor of Science in History with a minor in English. Meghan has always had dogs, and has two special pups, Lucy, a chocolate lab, and Bailey, a border collie/ lab mix back home. In her limited free time she enjoys watching movies, especially historical dramas, binge watching TV shows, and baking.
Favorite historical story: A piece of local Michigan history: In the 19th century, a man named James Strang claimed he was appointed the successor to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints by Joseph Smith. His faction was classified as the “Strangite” to distinguish it as the Latter Day Saint movement divided. Strang then moved his followers to Beaver Island, a small, relatively inaccessible island in Michigan, and declared himself king under an ecclesiastical monarchy that he established there, despite there having already been Irish immigrants populating the island.
By: Corinne Zaczek Bermon, Historian and Archivist in the Making
Corinne Zaczek Bermon Historian and Archivist in the Making
It was natural for me to fall into the wine business after growing up amongst the vines in the Finger Lakes region of New York State. I paid my way through college by standing behind a bar and loved to talk about wine regions, wine varietals and food pairings. Between my bar experience and being trained as a sommelier, it was certainly an easy transition to marketing and public relations for a local company after I graduated with an American Studies BA from UMass Boston. I spent my days tasting wine, writing about it, designing newsletters and advertisements, and blogging. Knowing my privilege as a good wine writer and an expert in the field, I happily traveled around the globe interviewing winemakers and having private tastings in their cellars while freelancing for magazines on the side. While I loved the world that I was in, I knew something was missing. I came to realize that I concentrated more on the history of wine and wineries when I researched and wrote and less about selling the wine to would be buyers.
That was when I knew it was time for a change.
When I graduated from UMass Boston, I left with an overwhelming feeling that I had not had enough. I registered and graduated in 3 semesters with all the transfer credits I had accrued. American Studies intrigued me because it combined my love of American history while looking at aspects that are left out of the master narrative such as race, class and gender. It struck me that I was not done with American Studies and I made the decision to apply to the graduate program.
So now I spend my days studying early 20th century history’s intersections of gender and class and urban history. I am currently working on my thesis for graduation entitled “The Activist Gardener: Rose Standish Nichols in the National and International Movement of Peace, 1915-1945.” Focusing on one Boston woman’s work, Rose Standish Nichols, I will bring to light the national and international networks women formed in the peace movement while bringing Nichols back into her rightful place in history as a founder of the long-standing Women’s International League of Peace and Freedom, while continuing her career as a world-renown landscape architect.
While starting my second year of grad school, I found a second love: archival studies. Archiving represents for me the practical use of my knowledge in history. It’s hands on and always moving forward with the use of digital tools. For my digital project on the history of Boston desegregation, I hoped to be able to bring an interactive mapping tool that would give this project a sense of place and bring the different neighborhoods affected by bussing into focus for non-Bostonians and Bostonians alike.
I only drink wine now for pleasure and not my job. I still accept some freelance jobs because, let’s face it, graduate students need money and freelancing pays.
Lauren Prescott, November 2014 trip to Washington D.C.
I grew up an hour south of Boston in New Bedford, Massachusetts. New Bedford was a major whaling and trading port in the 19th century and the home of abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass more many years. The history of my city greatly interested me and I was lucky enough to spend many afternoons at the New Bedford Whaling Museum in their summer program. As a child I found my history classes boring, but field trips to museums and historic sites were some of my fondest memories of school. Unfortunately, my history classes were lacking, and we were nothing more than date-memorizing machines for exams.
I entered UMass Amherst in the fall of 2008 as a math major. I had no interest in math, but I had always excelled in those classes. Although I loved history and would often be found immersed in a history book, I did not see a future career in the discipline (other than teaching). I disliked most of my classes, but remained as a math major for two years. At the time, I was working at the Science & Engineering Library on campus and had befriended many people in other disciplines. One person I became particularly close with was a history major and it was through him that I saw the career possibilities in history. Why stick with something that I had no passion for? Why spend all four years of my undergraduate career feeling unfulfilled? It was then that I made the decision to become a history major and took extra courses each semester to finish on time. Those two years were some of my hardest, as I still worked full time, but they were also the most interesting.
In my last year at UMass Amherst, I came across an introductory course to public history. At the time I had no idea what public history was, and simply took it for course credit. That introductory course and Professor opened my eyes to the career possibilities of a public historian. I immediately began looking at graduate schools that offered public history programs and came upon UMass Boston. So what is public history? Public history refers to the work that is done outside the academy, especially in regards to recreating and presenting history to the public. Public historians can be found as archivists, museum curators, historical preservationists and writers. My specific interests lay in childhood education. Public schools across the country have had problems with their history curriculum, and many students (like I did) do not find their history classes interesting or beneficial outside of school. Thankfully, the classroom isn’t the only place for kids to learn! Museums in Boston offer after school and summer programs for students of all ages. This type of interactive learning can make history meaningful and that is what I hope to do after graduation – to present history in a way that makes it meaningful for people, particularly children.
I am now in my second year as a graduate student and hope to finish my degree in the spring of 2016. I recently finished an internship with Mount Auburn Cemetery in December which I greatly enjoyed. For the internship I researched 19th century women activists interred at the cemetery for an upcoming web exhibit on Mount Auburn’s website. I wrote all of the text and acquired all of the visuals (photographs, documents, newspaper articles) for the exhibit. I spent a lot of my time doing research at various archives in the Boston area, especially at Harvard’s Schlesinger Library. The time I spent in the archives this past year gave me a great appreciation for archivists and I wanted to learn more about the profession, which led me to Professor Marilyn Morgan’s digital archives class this semester.
I am also beginning an internship this semester with the Arlington Historical Society in the collections management department. The internship will give me hands on experience working with their collection of over 4,000 objects. My previous internships focused solely on research and my internship at AHS will allow me to learn more about collections care and management, while also learning to use collection management software.
This semester the class will look at the desegregation of Boston schools in the 1970s – 1980s and create a digital archive highlighting items found in archives across the city. I am specifically interested in the students’ perspectives. Desegregation of Boston schools was covered in the media for years, and it frequently focused on the opposition to forced busing, parents who refused to send their children to school, and the violence that erupted across the city. But what about the students? How did they feel about school desegregation? How was their day at school impacted? Did the violence stop once the students stepped inside the schools? Were they able to create new friendships, or was there really all of this hostility? There was much more to students’ daily lives than what was portrayed in the media and I hope to bring their stories to light.
A collaborative space for the Archives & Public History Programs, Graduate Studies in History, UMass Boston
