Introducing College Students to the Joys of Archival Research

This past week, Brooklyn Historical Society hosted a week-long institute for eighteen college professors participating in the Students and Faculty in the Archives project (SAFA).

As regular readers may remember, this spring BHS commenced the SAFA project, thanks to funding from the U.S. Department of Education's Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education (FIPSE). For the next five semesters, SAFA partner faculty from St. Francis College, Long Island University Brooklyn Campus, and New York City College of Technology will bring their first year students to BHS’s Othmer Library to immerse them in our rich historical collections. This upcoming year alone, over 800 students will hone their research and critical thinking skills by working with newspapers, broadsides, slave indentures, maps, atlases, pamphlets, correspondence, diaries, and many other archival materials housed here at BHS.

At the end of the three-year project, BHS will have created a replicable pedagogical model for collaboration between archives and institutions of higher learning. We’ll also have exposed thousands of first-year college students to the joys of archival research.

Before these students descend upon BHS, the SAFA staff (Outreach and Public Services Archivist Robin M. Katz and me, BHS Public Historian Julie Golia) wanted to give partner faculty some time to design their classes and to get to know our collections.  During the Summer Institute, we gave faculty ample research time in Othmer Library.  There they pored over hundreds of different documents.  We were blown away by their ideas, and by the creative ways they are using our collections.

St. Francis College professor Athena Devlin, for example, is using the decade of the 1860s as a lens to introduce her American Studies students to a myriad of materials: diaries, personal correspondence, political broadsides, and much more. Professor Devlin found our recently published Civil War Subject Guide a great help.  In particular, the correspondences between Brooklyn soldiers and their families in collections like the Cranston Papers will allow students a personal glimpse into life in camp and on the home front.

City Tech professor Peter Catapano, teaching American History since 1877, has a long list of subjects that he needs to address in his survey course. He decided to focus on the history of theater in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Brooklyn. During their visit, Professor Catapano and his students will examine issues of the turn-of-the-century theater periodical The Opera Glass and contextualize the locations of theaters with our rich map collection.

Leah Dilworth, professor of English at LIU Brooklyn, is teaching Rubbish!, a course that will chronicle the cultural and material history of garbage. One of the collections that Professor Dilworth and her students will use this fall is the Arnie Goldwag Brooklyn Congress of Racial Equality Collection. When we think of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, our minds go to segregation and sit-ins before they go to garbage. But the inequitable collection of waste in neighborhoods with large non-white populations was a key issue championed by Brooklyn CORE.

These are just three of the inventive courses that our faculty began designing during our SAFA Summer Institute. As the students visit our archive in the fall, we’ll report back about their experiences. In the meantime, we hope you’ll be inspired by the SAFA experience and visit Othmer Library to do some archival research of your own.