Bringing the Past to Life

On a visit to the Schlesinger Library last semester, Nina Howe-Goldstein ’25 was struck by a white cowboy hat ringed with the words “Life of the Party” and “RNC For Life” in red and blue letters.

The colorful topper was eye-catching, but its history is what really caught her attention. The hat belonged to Mildred Jefferson, the first Black woman to graduate from Harvard Medical School, who liked to wear it to Republican Party functions. Jefferson was also a self-described Lincoln Republican and antiabortion activist—and someone Howe-Goldstein had never heard of until a Schlesinger librarian intro­duced the hat and asked the junior and her class to investigate.

A history concentrator with a particular interest in Black history, Howe-Gold­stein says that “fun little activity to get us engaged in the collection” sparked her ongoing exploration of Jefferson’s records at the Schlesinger. For her final class project last fall, she wrote about Jefferson’s intellectual development, and she is currently using a grant from the Harvard College Research Program to adapt that paper into a longer article she hopes to get published. And it all started with the class.

“What the class does so masterfully, I think, is getting students engaged,” says Howe-Goldstein, “encouraging us to dip our toes in, so that we know the collections are there, we know how to use the finding aids, and make the most of it. In my case, I was exposed to a collection I never knew existed.”

The hat is part of the Schlesinger’s Mil­dred Jefferson Papers, and the course Race, Gender, and the Law through the Archive, led by Myisha S. Eatmon, was an experiment to embed classes in the Library’s newly created teaching space and ground them in its collections. The grant-funded pilot project hosted Eatmon’s seminar in the fall, and Queer Archives, taught by Lauren Kaminsky, this spring. Together, the instructors and students met weekly with librari­ans and curators who helped lead semi­nar discussions, answer questions, and navigate deep dives into the Schlesing­er’s rich holdings.

“These embedded classes create the opportunity to scaffold student learning, moving them from that first exciting opening of a folder, where they find a hat or handwritten document, to understanding how to navigate an archival collection and use documents as evidence to make an argument,” says Tamar Gonen Brown, the Library’s new head of education and outreach and a librarian who helped develop the pilot program and introduced the hat to Eatmon’s class.

The Schlesinger has always welcomed classes on site but often for only one-time sessions to review specific items from a particular collection. Other classes have met more frequently in the Library in recent years but were typically tied to a particular project or person, says Brown, such as Femi­nisms and Pornography, a 2017 seminar co-taught by Jane Kamensky, the Schlesinger’s then–faculty director, and courses connected to the Long 19th Amendment Project that moved online during the pandemic.

But Harvard’s doors have long been back open, and the Schlesinger hopes to attract even more students to engage with its vast resources as part of their regular studies. In 2023, Library staff asked a number of Harvard faculty members to submit proposals for class­es that would draw on the Schlesinger’s collections and convene in its newly created dedicated teaching space.

The Library classroom was part of a 2018 renovation that also revamped the building’s main entrance and exhi­bition gallery, and it features display screens, a document camera, and flexi­ble furniture that allow it to accommo­date a range of class sizes.

“It was a transformative experience for me and for the students who may not have ever previously touched archival material, or who may have only gone to the Schlesinger for one or maybe two classes,” says Eatmon, assistant professor of African and African American studies and of history. “Being in the archive every week and having an archivist with us almost every single time, who could jump in and give us background information on the collec­tions and how they are processed and acquired, was really unique.”

Eatmon, a legal historian who spe­cializes in African American legal and US history, used the Schlesinger’s collections to highlight Black women who were not legal scholars by training but were true “lawmakers during the 20th century.”

In the papers of the poet June Jordan and the activists Angela Y. Davis and Pauli Murray, students saw how the women used their art and social action “to effect change in public policy and laws,” says Eatmon. They also saw how the women lived away from the spot­light; Murray, who would eventually become a lawyer, wrote about her own struggles with gender identity, and faxes from the journalist Sara Miles to Davis discuss the wording of a quote in which Davis refers to her lesbian identity for Miles’s 1998 story on her in Out magazine. Seeing this human dimension of the collections helped students understand how the women’s personal lives informed their activism, says Eatmon, while helping them draw connections to their own lives and social action.

“They were able to investigate how these women were thinking about things such as Palestine and issues of international solidarity and abortion,” Eatmon says, “and how Pauli Murray struggled with her identity before we actually even had the science or the psychology or the language to talk about that.”

For students who have never been to a Harvard archive, “it can be a lot to get up to speed in just one class meeting,” says Kaminsky, an associate senior lec­turer on history and literature, a facul­ty associate, and the director of studies in history and literature at Harvard. Such brief encounters, she says, “don’t reflect the reality of archival research, which is about really getting into the weeds to figure out what’s there and what’s not there—and what’s interest­ing. That just takes time.”

Like Eatmon did in her fall class, Kaminsky offered students that kind of devoted time in the archives during her spring seminar. Her weekly course at the Library introduced students to the varied content related to gender and sexuality in the Schlesinger’s collections through the holdings of Murray and the poet and activist Pat Parker along with the papers of the less familiar Abraham Bartlett Smith, a transgender individual, and Mary Elisabeth Dreier, a 20th-century social reformer. The class also acquainted them with the “uncertainty, frustration, and immense satisfaction,” that can come from archival research and scholarship, says Kaminsky, who hopes the experience “will encourage students to pursue similar research in the future.”

Jenny Gotwals, the Johanna-Maria Fraenkel Curator of Gender and Society, worked with Kaminsky’s class. She calls the process “extremely generative intellectually” and appreciates the chance to connect with students on a regular basis to better understand how “they’re engaging with the material.” Part of that engagement came in the form of a class assignment that required students to draft their own finding aids—keyword descriptions that help researchers find exactly what they need—for selected collections.

That kind of work, says Gotwals, can help make the Library’s holdings even more accessible as time passes and norms, customs, and language change. By updating a collection’s description, future researchers will have a better chance of “locating what they are looking for,” Gotwals says.

Kaminsky adds that the finding aid project also got students thinking about what really goes into this work. “They have encountered some of their own biases and expectations in the process, and they have realized how difficult it is to represent the past—as the collection represents a life—in a way that does justice to that past and anticipates a contemporary researcher,” she says.

Prepping for the courses can be painstaking work. Some collections involve hundreds of boxes, and trying to choose a small handful of documents for students to study each week is time consuming. Fortunately, Eatmon had help last year from the curators, the librarians, and Sarah Yerima, who is pursuing her JD at Yale University and her PhD in history at Harvard and who helped review and select appropriate items for discussions and projects.

“Sarah spent a huge amount of time in the reading room over the summer going through some material that we suggested would be relevant,” said Brown, “and she also found a number of things on her own.”

Yerima flagged a range of material for Eatmon, including correspondence between Jordan and Derrick Bell—an author, a lawyer, and a civil rights activist—and a syllabus for Racism and the Law: The Afro-American Experience, a 1979 course jointly taught by Davis and her sister Fania at the New College of California School of Law in San Francisco. “There were just so many cool connections to make while going through the collections,” says Yerima, adding that it’s “incredible to just see everything that is on hand and available at the Schlesinger.”

One goal of the new classes that appears to already be paying off is encouraging the students to explore the archives outside of class. The Library offers Carol K. Pforzheimer Student Fellowships to undergraduates each summer. And while it’s not always easy enticing a busy Harvard student to spend some of their precious months off diving back into academia, the new program has helped generate more interest in the summer offering.

“Not only did we get more applicants this year than ever before, but at least four of the applications were from students in the embedded classes,” says Brown. “That means they are comfortable in this environment and eager to engage.”

Colleen Walsh is a freelance writer.