BU PhD Student MaryKate Smolenski Highlights Overlooked Revolutionary War Voices Through Internship at the Boston Athenaeum
When thinking about the Revolutionary War, most people tend to picture the patriots: Paul Revere and Founding Fathers like Samuel Adams who fought for American independence. But for MaryKate Smolenski, it’s the loyalists—colonists who remained faithful to the British—who first come to mind.
MaryKate Smolenski (GRS‘27), a PhD candidate in the College of Arts & Sciences’ American Studies program, studies the memory of Revolutionary-era loyalism, with her dissertation examining nine loyalist families in New England.
So when Smolenski heard the Boston University Center for the Humanities was funding a summer internship at the Boston Athenaeum—one of the nation’s oldest libraries—that focused on Revolutionary-era research, she knew she had to apply…
To read more, visit BU TODAY where this article originally appeared on July 31, 2026.