Long-Term Fellowships at the Massachusetts Historical Society

FAIN: RA-264475-19

Massachusetts Historical Society (Boston, MA 02215-3631)
Conrad Edick Wright (Project Director: August 2018 to January 2020)
Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai (Project Director: January 2020 to February 2025)

16 months of stipend support (2-4 fellowships) per year for three years and a contribution to defray costs associated with the selection of fellows.

The Massachusetts Historical Society requests NEH funding for a program of long-term post-doctoral fellowships. The Massachusetts Historical Society is both a major repository and a center for scholarship. It not only houses collections, its staff of approximately fifty members includes historians actively engaged in research on a variety of topics as well as editors and librarians. Serving the high concentration of Boston-area academic institutions through collections, publications, and scores of seminars, lectures, brown bag lunches, conferences, and receptions each year, it is also one of New England’s most important centers for scholarly programming in history and allied areas. MHS-NEH fellows benefit from a thriving and intellectually engaged community nourished by a wide range of events and devoted to advancing the humanities. [edited by staff]

Associated Products

William Falconer and the Rhetoric of the Sea (Article)
Title: William Falconer and the Rhetoric of the Sea
Author: Jamie M. Bolker
Abstract: From the Duke University Press website: "This essay explores how William Falconer's A Universal Dictionary of the Marine exemplifies the “rhetoric of the sea,” which operates according to an inclusive approach to maritime knowledge, which maritime authors adopted in an effort to translate into writing a unique, physical practice at sea. Since maritime practice involved diverse processes in an environment that could not be controlled, maritime and navigation books thereby contained diverse styles and forms, from poetry, to criticism, to illustrations, to definitions, in an effort to reflect the diversity, and experience, of the sea itself. This essay places Falconer's Dictionary (1769) into a longer history of maritime and navigation books, especially dictionaries, including John Smith's Seaman's Grammar and Dictionary (1626), and the development of specialized dictionaries in English. Building on developments in “blue ecocriticism,” this essay concludes by suggesting that the eighteenth-century rhetoric of the sea provides us an understanding of the semantic and physical power of the world's oceans."
Year: 2023
Primary URL: https://read.dukeupress.edu/eighteenth-century-life/article/47/2/166/351937/William-Falconer-and-the-Rhetoric-of-the-Sea?guestAccessKey=3e26fec5-6ab6-4452-aa62-b4d8ac69b24d
Format: Journal
Publisher: Eighteenth-Century Life (Duke University Press)

The Abolitionist Civil War: Immediatists and the Struggle to Transform the Union (Book)
Title: The Abolitionist Civil War: Immediatists and the Struggle to Transform the Union
Author: Frank J. Cirillo
Abstract: From the LSU Press website: "The astonishing transformation of the abolitionist movement during the Civil War proved enormously consequential both for the cause of abolitionism and for the nation at large. Drawing on a cast of famous and obscure figures from Frederick Douglass to Moncure Conway, Frank J. Cirillo’s The Abolitionist Civil War explores how immediate abolitionists contorted their arguments and clashed with each other as they labored over the course of the conflict to create a more perfect Union. Cirillo reveals that immediatists’ efforts to forge a morally transformed nation that enshrined emancipation and Black rights shaped contemporary debates surrounding the abolition of slavery but ultimately did little to achieve racial justice for African Americans beyond formal freedom."
Year: 2023
Primary URL: https://lsupress.org/books/detail/abolitionist-civil-war/
Publisher: Louisiana State University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780807179154

Pax Economica: Left-Wing Visions of a Free Trade World (Book)
Title: Pax Economica: Left-Wing Visions of a Free Trade World
Author: Marc-William Palen
Abstract: From the Princeton UP site: "Today, free trade is often associated with right-wing free marketeers. In Pax Economica, historian Marc-William Palen shows that free trade and globalization in fact have roots in nineteenth-century left-wing politics. In this counterhistory of an idea, Palen explores how, beginning in the 1840s, left-wing globalists became the leaders of the peace and anti-imperialist movements of their age. By the early twentieth century, an unlikely alliance of liberal radicals, socialist internationalists, feminists, and Christians envisioned free trade as essential for a prosperous and peaceful world order. Of course, this vision was at odds with the era’s strong predilections for nationalism, protectionism, geopolitical conflict, and colonial expansion. Palen reveals how, for some of its most radical left-wing adherents, free trade represented a hard-nosed critique of imperialism, militarism, and war. Palen shows that the anti-imperial component of free trade was a phenomenon that came to encompass the political left wing within the British, American, Spanish, German, Dutch, Belgian, Italian, Russian, French, and Japanese empires. The left-wing vision of a “pax economica” evolved to include supranational regulation to maintain a peaceful free-trading system—which paved the way for a more liberal economic order after World War II and such institutions as the United Nations, the European Union, and the World Trade Organization. Palen’s findings upend how we think about globalisation, free trade, anti-imperialism, and peace. Rediscovering the left-wing history of globalism offers timely lessons for our own era of economic nationalism and geopolitical conflict."
Year: 2024
Primary URL: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691199320/pax-economica
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780691199320

“America Still Isn’t Ready to Acknowledge That a Hero of National Myth Could Have Died by Suicide,” (Article)
Title: “America Still Isn’t Ready to Acknowledge That a Hero of National Myth Could Have Died by Suicide,”
Author: Jamie Bolker
Abstract: N/A
Year: 2023
Primary URL: https://time.com/6340942/meriwether-lewis-suicide-history/
Primary URL Description: Link to TIME Magazine link.
Access Model: Open Access
Format: Magazine
Publisher: Made by History at TIME Magazine

Fertile Grounds: Knowledge, Ceremony, and the Intensification of Maize,” Agricultural History Vol. 97, Number 4 (November 2023): 513-546. (Article)
Title: Fertile Grounds: Knowledge, Ceremony, and the Intensification of Maize,” Agricultural History Vol. 97, Number 4 (November 2023): 513-546.
Author: Patrick Bottiger
Abstract: N/A
Year: 2023
Format: Journal
Publisher: Agricultural History

"Full and Impartial Justice": Robert Morris and the Equal School Rights Movement in Massachusetts (Article)
Title: "Full and Impartial Justice": Robert Morris and the Equal School Rights Movement in Massachusetts
Author: Kabria Baumgartner
Abstract: In early nineteenth-century Boston, African American children and youth faced severe educational inequalities and inequities in the city's racially segregated public school system. In response, Robert Morris and other African American youth organized for change. This article traces their organizing efforts, from establishing a literary society to petitioning the Massachusetts state legislature. Their collective work resulted in the overthrow of racially segregated public schools in Boston in 1855.
Year: 2022
Primary URL: https://doi.org/10.1162/tneq_a_00940
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: New England Quarterly 95.2, June 2022
Publisher: New England Quarterly

A Place to Come Together (Article)
Title: A Place to Come Together
Author: Kabria Baumgartner
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2024
Format: Magazine
Periodical Title: Newburyport Magazine, Fall 2024

Five Things to Know About Black Parents' Activism (Book Section)
Title: Five Things to Know About Black Parents' Activism
Author: Kabria Baumgartner
Editor: Jack Schneider
Editor: Jennifer C. Berkshire
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2024
Publisher: The New Press
Book Title: The Education Wars: A Citizen's Guide and Defense Manual

Single Publication (Open Access eBook or Collection)
Publication Type: Single Publication
Title: African Americans in Essex County, Massachusetts: An Annotated Guide
Year: 2024
Publisher: National Park Service
Author: Liz DuClos-Orsello
Author: Kabria Baumgartner
Abstract: n/a
Primary URL: https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/upload/African_Americans_EssexCo_Final.pdf
Primary URL Description: National Park Service site
Type: Other

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