Allowing the Archives to Speak: Seniors Present Original Research in Annual Symposium

The Honors History Seminar is a yearlong course open to seniors. In the fall, students researched and wrote 20- to 25-page original theses on a research topic of their choosing. The spring half of the course is titled “Recovering Lost Voices from the Archive: Black & Indigenous New England, 1600–1800.” For the past three years, Leeming has partnered with the Framingham History Center to enable students to conduct hands-on archival research, and this year marks the second year the class has devoted the spring semester to that work entirely. Through their work in this course, students help bring much-needed attention to the presence of Black and Indigenous people in local history, putting the focus on groups often underrepresented in the history of colonial New England. This effort is often referred to in the course as eliminating “silences” in the archives.

As their starting point, students in Leeming’s class used the finding aid “Framingham People of Color: 1600–1800” to spark research ideas and to identify items in the collections they might choose to research before diving deep into their specific project. 

Through their projects, each of the 10 students in the course explored the voices of this region’s past residents, many of whom were unable to speak for themselves, and whose history was recorded by those in power through documents like bills of sale, legal petitions, property registers, and maps. The topics unearthed by their research were often challenging to face. Students pored over the records of enslaved people and Indigenous people whose land was forcibly taken by colonists, confronting this heavy subject matter in order to construct a fuller narrative of those people’s lives. 

Grant Ramirez ’26, Noelle Lee ’26, and Katherine Shaw ’26 each investigated some aspect of slavery in Framingham. Ramirez researched a legal petition, drafted in 1716 by John Jackson on behalf of his enslaved wife, Joan Jackson. Ramirez addressed the research question, “To what extent do petitions reflect the voices of enslaved people vs. the people speaking for them?” Joan Jackson, often mentioned in the petition, does not directly speak at any point in the document. 

Lee used her research on enslaved people in Framingham to create a finding aid for the collections in the Framingham History Center. At one point, Middlesex County had the largest number of enslaved people in Massachusetts, due to the demand for labor in the agricultural communities. In her final presentation, Lee noted that this directly acknowledges the presence of slavery in Massachusetts, a fact that many historians have minimized. She also addressed the issue of gaps in available perspectives. Archival materials are inherited, and they are often written and recorded by people holding power, making it challenging to identify the perspectives of those not given a voice to speak. Lee hopes that her research is a starting point for others to digitize more collections and make the presence and voices of the enslaved people from Framingham seen and heard. 

Shaw’s research revolved around a 1764 bill of sale for a 2-year-old enslaved Black girl, Phebey. Bills of sale and other legal documents, Shaw explained, were designed to record legally relevant property information, not human identity. The archive of slavery is an archive of ownership, not of personhood, she noted. 

“Phebey’s bill of sale tells us almost nothing about Phebey, and that’s exactly the point. Reading the silences of the archive is not a secondary scholarly technique. It’s the primary ethical obligation of historians who choose to study enslaved people in all aspects of the archive,” said Shaw. 

With her project website, Shaw seeks to document not only Phebey’s humanity and that of others sold into slavery, but also reflections from present-day readers who engage with this challenging history. 

While the course title references the date range of 1600 to 1800, students were not limited to researching within that time period, and many took advantage of the robust collections to explore the stories of slightly more contemporary individuals.

Because of her own interest in art and set design, Vivian Dykema ’26 was captivated by Black Framingham artist Meta Fuller. Originally from Philadelphia, Fuller moved to Framingham in 1909 with her husband, Solomon Fuller. Both were active contributors to the community: Meta Fuller was sculptor and costumer whose artistic ideas were influenced by the Harlem Renaissance. As part of her investigation of Fuller and her contributions as a Black woman in a predominantly white area, Dykema conducted an oral history interview with Fuller’s grandson, David Fuller, which she included as part of her research website.  

Esme Asaad ’26 and Henry Goldstein ’26 built upon work Cailin Kim ’25 and Bridget Minogue ’25 began last year. For their seminar project last year, Kim and Minogue started an extension of the “Framingham People of Color: 1600–1800” finding aid by researching items from the Framingham History Center’s collection beyond the 1800 date, and Asaad and Goldstein continued that work. 

Robby Hargrove ’26 and Jacob Peters ’26 investigated the Black and Indigenous servicemen of Framingham from King Philip’s War to World War I, summarizing their findings for their project website. Their research brings to the surface names of individuals  whose service and accounts may have previously been overlooked.

Beyond studying individuals, students also dove into the deep history of the land as an archive of native history. Lily Chung ’26 researched Native contributions to modern day infrastructure in Framingham, discussing landmarks like the “Old Stone Road,” a segment of the Old Connecticut Path, sites of old burial grounds, and ancestral fishing areas. Chung documented her research through layered maps on her project site. 

Jason Minicozzi ’26 investigated the disappearance of a Native American heritage site which appeared in many historical documents, but ceased to be mentioned after the year 1932. Through his research in the archives, Minicozzi traced clues from different sources to locate the probable site of the “Indian Village” mentioned in the archives, on the banks of Lake Cochichuate. Eventually, he discovered the site is now a present-day highway interchange and a solar plant. 

“It feels almost unbelievable that something so important to our history would be just taken from us, but it was,” Minicozzi said. He noted that there is history all around us, and it’s important to be mindful and intentional about preserving history, since it can easily be “erased just for the sake of a highway, for the sake of progress.” 

Following the students’ presentations, many community members asked questions and approached the students to learn more. Attendees also reported an appreciation for the maturity and quality of the students’ presentations. The center, too, is eager to continue the partnership.

“Every single student, including this cohort, has asked some of the best questions I've heard, have grappled with some of the really difficult questions of history,” said Anna Tucker, executive director of the Framingham History Center. As she told the students, “You're bringing to light history that otherwise would be sitting in an archival box.”

Leeming hopes that the archival research produced in the Honors History Seminar will eventually formally become part of the Framingham History Center’s resource materials for other researchers to use. While that may take some time to build out, there remains plenty of material to explore in the center’s collection of over 25,000 items.

Leeming is also expanding the partnership beyond the Honors History Seminar. After piloting a summer internship last year with Gavin Bollar ’27, Leeming has three students embarking on internships with local historical societies this coming summer.