By Professor Rose Stremlau (Spring 2021)
Good questions drive research agendas. When I began teaching at Davidson College in the fall of 2016, I didn’t have answers to some of the good questions that students asked. I believe that training students to practice the discipline of history prepares them to be strategic researchers, critical thinkers, engaged citizens, and skilled communicators, and I make the study of the past relevant by inviting students to consider the experiences of their ancestors or past residents of our community when we discuss important topics and themes. The boundaries of my knowledge serve as productive sites of learning.
Most students live in their college town for a brief four years, and their understandings of its history generally reflect official narratives, such as those shared in admissions tours or on institutional webpages. Understandably, those narratives are almost always celebratory, and they tend to be exclusive in framing institutional progress as the result of visionary leadership and meaningful participation in terms of widely recognized measures of success, such as academic accomplishment and athletic victory. While this narrow focus serves institutional purposes, it leaves out the kinds of stories that humanize a place and foster a sense of community among us. We can’t all win an athletic championship or a Fulbright, but we all can nurture relationships and do something that makes our shared home better. While some historians might disagree with me and argue that the study of change over time should be neutral and separate from activism in the present, I’ve never understood why one would care about the past if one didn’t want a better future freed from the struggles of the present.
As a newcomer to Davidson, I had read the published books on the history of the college and materials posted on the webpage of the Archives and Special Collections, but those important works left many questions unanswered. What roles did women fill on campus before coeducation? When did the first disabled student attend Davidson? At what point did queer students here regularly come out? For all of these and others, we wanted to know more about these peoples’ experiences. This sparked the idea to build class projects in my US history courses around finding answers and making this information available to others. Recognizing the need for continuity and accessibility, I decided on a webpage modeled off popular public history tours—brief essays accompanied by primary sources at the ready for anyone with a smartphone and five minutes to read. With students in HIS 306, HIS 307, and HIS 444 and support from staff in the Archives and Special Collections and Digital Learning, Isabel Padalecki and I have created Inclusive Histories as an ongoing initiative. As we fill gaps in official histories of Davidson College, we find others. As we craft essays, we identify patterns and post alternative themes characterizing Davidson’s past.
For example, while traditional histories of the college explain initiatives to increase diversity and inclusivity as the outcomes of successive presidential agendas, essay authors have proven that invisible labor, particularly performed by female students and students of color, often drove administrative actions for social change. It is our hope that prospective and current students see themselves in the change makers we describe and understand that their work here—outside of the classroom—has value. We prepare students to change the world when they graduate from Davidson; the truth is that many students have changed Davidson for the better by envisioning what this community could be and organizing to make it better even though they might not be here to see those outcomes. We are holding up and naming some of those alum.
In addition to telling different stories, we want readers who haven’t been interested in learning about the past to think differently about history. We invite readers to engage with history not as a series of truths to be memorized but as a practice of discovery and the crafting of meaning out of the shreds and scraps of the past left to us. We call this first-hand evidence a primary source, and historians draw their conclusions from the evaluation of them collectively and in context. Human biases and complexities shape the creation of primary sources and our interpretation of them. Likewise, archives are not morally neutral spaces. They do not exist outside of social structures that privilege and disempower, and they normalize hierarchies, such as those of gender and race. They also can sanitize the human experience of violence by naming, categorizing, and organizing traumas in ways that reduce the unspeakable to data. Above all, archives can silence by denying some experiences or existences. Archives, like documents, are authored.
“By trying to understand the past from the margins in, we fundamentally alter how we explain change over time and how power functions then and now.”
By asking – and answering questions – about Davidson College’s history that prompt inquiry into the processes of preserving records, researching topics, and crafting narratives, we seek to build community. By trying to understand the past from the margins in, we fundamentally alter how we explain change over time and how power functions then and now. What results, I hope, is a history of Davidson College in which current and future students see themselves and the tremendous potential we have to make good on our statement of purpose “to assist students in developing humane instincts and disciplined and creative minds for lives of leadership and service.”
To explore the Inclusive Histories archive, please click here.