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Eric B. Schultz Ask an American historian to define the Great Migration and you’ll hear one of several answers.   Most will describe the movement of 6 million African Americans from the rural South who headed north and west, from A Jack Delano photo of migrants heading north from Florida, 1940. World War I through 1970, seeking economic opportunity and relief from Jim Crow laws. This is the story so beautifully told in Isabel Wilkerson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Warmth of Other Suns . There’s another group of historians who might describe the Great Migration as the 20,000 English men, women, and children who crossed the Atlantic between 1620 and 1640, seeking opportunity and relief in New England. These are the Mayflower names, the families that delight and provide such rich insights for genealogists.   Since 1988 the New England Historic Genealogical Society has sponsored the Great Migration Study Project , scheduled for completion in 2016. In his monumental What Ha...

Eric Schultz Brian Williams recently featured a story on the NBC Nightly News about the bureaucratic nightmare that has more than 900,000 American veterans awaiting disability benefits from the government. The Veterans Administration is promising to have the backlog cleared by the end of 2015, but for now, the average wait time is 273 days. After hearing this I had a flashback of sorts and walked downstairs into the basement, past the water softener and over by the Christmas ornaments to find the musty blue Rubbermaid tubs filled with my King Philip’s War notes from over twenty years ago.  Sure enough, there was the file marked “Veterans.”  I began leafing through it. In December 1675, 696 Massachusetts Bay soldiers mustered on Dedham Plain, thought to be the present Hyde Park section of Boston. They were to march south and meet with soldiers assembling in Plymouth and Connecticut colonies to form a thousand-man army and attack the Narragansetts in their large fort at today’...

Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe On my first day as a brand new assistant professor a student came up to me, introduced himself, and announced, “I am a visual learner.” The class was a reading and writing intensive freshman seminar with a predetermined syllabus. I knew we had a problem, but I had limited agency to remedy the situation.  This year I decided to see if I could match my long-since graduated student’s need for visual stimulus with my own desire to make students delve deep into the documents that reveal the mental landscape of the past. I integrated video presentations into the middle portion of each three-hour seminar. The visual interlude fixed one pedagogical problem and revealed another. Although academic historians of colonial America know that all the world was not New England, word has yet to reach the filmmakers. Three Sovereigns for Sarah captures Salem’s witchcraft crisis and Mary Silliman’s War strips the romantic Revolutionary myths away from a tense civil war in Con...

Dan Allosso Working on the final revisions of   An Infidel Body-Snatcher and the Fruits of His Philosophy , I’ve found myself asking, “Okay, so what’s different?” As historians, we’re always making comparisons between the past and the present, even if we disagree about the ways these comparisons ought to be used. I’m writing popular history, so my approach has been that both the differences and the similarities between my subjects in their world, and my readers in ours, should be relevant and meaningful. First, the differences. Day to day life is so much easier now, that it’s hard for readers to appreciate the sheer work that went into staying alive from year to year in the early 19th century. Ironically, I think this can make it easier for modern readers to identify with elite characters like Thomas Jefferson (who had slaves and employees to do the day to day work of basic survival for him, as we now have technology), than with the 99%.  And of course, the body-snatching. M...

Chris Beneke Guided tour at Lowell National Park.  Photo courtesy of www.nps.gov/lowe If the experiences of my kids are at all representative, the glum accounts you’ve heard or read about elementary and secondary education in the U.S. have some basis in fact. Public school students move in virtual lock-step with their classmates, get a meager fifteen minutes for recess, and take tests with unsettling regularity. Meanwhile, their hardworking teachers and principals must manage both rigid curriculum standards and large classes. In light of these oft-repeated concerns, my perspective brightened last week while chaperoning my son’s fourth-grade class trip to the Lowell National Park , the splendid and well-preserved site of the famous textile mills where America’s industrial revolution took off in the 1830s and 1840s. I didn’t come away feeling like a Finnish parent probably feels after accompanying his or her child on a field trip. Still, the experience left me much more ...