It\u2019s not surprising to find in the archives of the Boston Athen\u00e6um a scholar of seventeenth-century Massachusetts, such as Arthur Kamya, PhD candidate in BU\u2019s American & New England Studies program; however, the opportunity for him to undertake a specialized secondary school curriculum development project on U.S. women\u2019s political history under the auspices of a PhD internship in the Humanities at the Athen\u00e6um is exceptional.<\/p>\n
Working as a PhD intern in the Humanities at the Boston Athen\u00e6um, Arthur took a deep dive into the dynamic history of women\u2019s political struggle in the United States to collate materials for a workshop designed to help secondary educators integrate primary sources into the high school classroom.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe primary sources I chose narrate American history between 1776 and 1920 as a series of contingent individual and collective actions by diverse women to carve out roles for themselves in American public life,\u201d Arthur said. \u201cAt the same time, I made sure that the primary sources I chose to use in the workshop did not misrepresent the period between the American Revolution and the First World War as the inevitable progress of women\u2019s political status culminating in the 1920 adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.\u201d<\/p>\n
In order to give a sense of the range of experiences, political alignments, and rhetorical and political strategies that constitute the history of women\u2019s political mobilization in the U.S., Arthur designed the workshop around both representative and unexpected materials. For instance, he drew upon first editions of Phillis Wheatley\u2019s poems, handwritten letters by Lydia Maria Child, Booker T. Washington, and Louisa May Alcott, as well as constitutions produced by working-class women as they promoted the cause of self-education.<\/p>\n
Arthur also foregrounded the interdisciplinary nature of this archive, noting of the materials related to the struggle for women\u2019s political franchise, \u201cSuffragists\u2019 intensity in waging a multi-media campaign\u2014in the form of tracts, broadsides, playing cards, almanacs, and portraiture\u2014speaks to their sophistication and ingenuity.\u201d<\/p>\n
Yet Arthur\u2019s days were not always spent in the archives. \u201cI was able to attend talks given by resident research fellows at the Athen\u00e6um on a variety of interesting subjects,\u201d Arthur said, \u201cAnd I usually joined some of the staff for a brown-bag lunch in the common room. As part of these informal conversations, I got to know what it is that makes the archivists and librarians tick\u2014and what they consider important\u2014which is helpful as I embark on a career characterized by life in archives.\u201d<\/p>\n
Having been invited back by the Athen\u00e6um to be the lead instructor and facilitator of the workshop he designed, which will be implemented next summer, Arthur\u2019s days working at the Athen\u00e6um might not yet have come to an end, even if his PhD internship has formally and successfully concluded.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the course of my academic work,\u201d Arthur reflected, \u201cI have become convinced that women\u2019s history is American history and American history is women\u2019s history.\u201d Arthur was grateful for the chance to design a project around this conviction through the PhD internships in the Humanities offered by the Associate Provost for Graduate Affairs and the Center for the Humanities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It\u2019s not surprising to find in the archives of the Boston Athen\u00e6um a scholar of seventeenth-century Massachusetts, such as Arthur Kamya, PhD candidate in BU\u2019s American & New England Studies program; however, the opportunity for him to undertake a specialized secondary school curriculum development project on U.S. women\u2019s political history under the auspices of a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10855,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[316],"tags":[320,341,365],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13194"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10855"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13194"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13194\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13196,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13194\/revisions\/13196"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}