Inside the white-walled, vitrine-filled museum, it is easy to assume that the objects within it neutrally represent history’s many turns. Conservation shapes how those objects are preserved, displayed, and interpreted. From putting back together shards of a pot after excavation to using a solution to remove acid from paper, the field’s practices are aimed at allowing access to historical materials. I worked in conservation for several years, and was initially drawn to the field because of the ethics of keeping extant objects of history accessible to researchers. However, until I was asked to repair a few cracks in a life-size painted plaster bust at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University, I did not realize how fraught the decision to preserve can be. Although the discipline of conservation has an ethos of care, many of the objects that make up the museum instead conspicuously mark its anti-humanist foundations. Conservation can mask the museum’s colonial and imperial origins.

In early January, my partner and I became first-time parents. We immediately fell in love with every minute detail of this tiny stranger whom we had brought home. Like many new parents, we sent photos and videos to our family members, hoping to share our joy and introduce our little one to those we love.

The McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania is co-sponsoring a summer internship with Insurrect! The stipend for the internship is $3,000. This internship is open to undergraduate students enrolled at McNeil Center Consortium institutions. Interns are expected to work 35 hours per week for 8 weeks. Beginning and end dates will be arranged between the Insurrect! and the intern, but the internship will conclude by September 1, 2024. One half of the stipend will be paid at the beginning of the internship, and the other half will be remitted at its completion.

This roundtable includes reflections from four scholars who presented on a panel, “Mutual Aid in Early America” at the Society of Early Americanists (SEA) Biannual Meeting in June 2023, chaired by Liz Polcha. In this roundtable for Insurrect!, the panelists reflect on their own presentations as well as the conversation that ensued. Teachers and writers have a different orientation to mutual aid than organizers, but as several of the authors in this roundtable point out, that does not mean that mutual aid isn’t on our minds in our pedagogy and research. What we offer here is a larger reflection on a question that Kimberly Takahata poses below: how can we support and engage in mutual aid without placing our own demands upon it? Further, each author offers a list of suggested resources for further reading (thanks to Eagan for this idea!)

Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona, first published in 1884, was initially met with mixed reviews by readers of the time. The novel is set after the Mexican-American War throughout the state of California following the life of a Scottish-Native American woman, Ramona, that was orphaned and subsequently fostered by a  Mexican family, the Morenos. In the novel, the relationship between Ramona and her foster mother, Gonzaga Moreno, is described as full of tension due to Ramona’s mixed racial background. We see Ramona grow into a beautiful young woman who falls in love with Alessandro, a Native American man who has a friendly work relationship with the Morenos. Throughout the novel, we see the many hardships that both Ramona and Alessandro face due to the discrimination against Native American communities and how this pushes Alessandro to his demise. The novel ends with Ramona marrying Felipe Moreno, her once foster brother, and essentially being rescued from hardship and living a comfortable life. 

Opponents of ‘Affirmative Action’ frame the policy as something that is given, defining it as an unfair advantage extended to the undeserving. For example, Roger Clegg, former president and general counsel for the Center for Equal Opportunity that appeared before the US Supreme Court this June in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, 600 U. S. (2023), exemplifies this misperception, oversimplifying the matter in his 2007 statement to The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission:

How might college instructors introduce students to disabled people in an earlier America who expressed negative views about disability? How can we discuss ableism and internalized ableism in the classroom without chastising or shaming? 

We are excited to share the following essay and podcast (both audio and transcript) from a student who worked with Professor Tara Bynum to develop this podcast as part of their collaborative research on early American literature and the history of Newport, Rhode Island. Melina Hegelheimer recently graduated from the University of Iowa with a bachelor's degree in philosophy and ethics & public policy. They are currently pursuing a master’s degree in library sciences at the University of Illinois, and hope to one day work in public libraries. Melina’s essay and podcast represents one example of how undergraduate student public history writing can be adapted for a publication like Insurrect!, and we hope their post inspires more students to submit their writing to online magazines.

In May 1792, two men put down their tools. They did not intend to pick them up again. Peter and Squier Brown, brothers who together owned a “considerable Estate” in Stamford, Connecticut, informed their family that they intended to sell their land, live off the proceeds, and never work again. Their decision was sufficiently radical to cause frustration and concern among their family and the state authorities. However, permission to sell the land, unusually, resided with their brother, Joseph, and the General Assembly of Connecticut. Why was this? Joseph was the conservator to Peter and Squier, who had been “deaf and dumb from their birth.”

In the summer of 1990, the spirit-name Two-Spirit was gifted to the growing community of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and queer Indigenous people of North America. In addition to giving a name to the unique identities and roles shared by many queer Indigenous people, the widespread adoption of Two-Spirit also almost immediately moved to disrupt the academic complex that had accumulated around the study of “the berdache”—a complex with roots dating back to the eighteenth century. The history of “berdache” and the still-unfolding legacy of the adoption of “Two-Spirit” offers a powerful story about how academic theorizing has been continually built on the bodies of gender-diverse Indigenous people, but it also shows us how Two-Spirit people have been able to disrupt this cycle through communal action.

Dear readers and supporters of Insurrect!,

We are writing to broadcast our solidarity with striking workers in higher education, the publishing industry, and the cultural sector more broadly. In the past months, we’ve seen an incredible uprising among writers, researchers, teachers, editors, journalists, artists, curators, art handlers, and students fighting for better working conditions. These cultural workers are fighting against increased precarity in an on-going COVID-19 pandemic and in an environment with unprecedented health risks due to waves of flu and RSV cases. They are insisting that education, the arts, and humanities sectors deserve fair working conditions, because without such, we are even more vulnerable to the twin evils of fascism and white supremacy. Collective bargaining campaigns and strikes require critical thought and labor that allows the world to see itself unmasked.

The table of contents for Alfred G. Hall’s The Mother’s Own Book (1843) is unusually comprehensive in its descriptions of the practical medical advice contained in the volume’s pages. Readers are told where to look in the text if they need to learn how to cope with painful menstruation, clean their vaginal canals, and read the shape and color of their areolas for signs of possible pregnancy. But folded into this otherwise frank description of the volume’s contents are two subtitles advertising “secret knowledge.” If you follow the second of these subtitles to its corresponding page, you find a step-by-step guide to treating “suppressed menstruation” (54).

On August 3, 2022, Insurrect! hosted a panel on doing history for the public. It featured Dr. Kellen Heniford discussing social media strategy, Adam Xavier McNeil on his experiences with podcasting, and Dr. Elise A. Mitchell sharing her process for public-facing writing. Insurrect! summer fellow Marisa S. Budlong moderated the panel and the question and answer period at the end.

Last spring, Elise A. Mitchell recorded a conversation with members of Recuerdos de Nicaragua, the founder and head archivist, Jasmine Chavez Helm, and Melanie White, the research and content manager. Recuerdos de Nicaragua is a physical and digital archive that chronicles the history of the Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities in the Mosquito Coast of Honduras and Nicaragua. They currently have a GoFundMe campaign to support their collections, digitization, and future programming. This published interview is based on their original conversation and has been edited for clarity.

Last spring, Elise A. Mitchell recorded a conversation with members of Recuerdos de Nicaragua the founder and head archivist, Jasmine Chavez Helm, and Melanie White, the research and content manager. Recuerdos de Nicaragua is a physical and digital archive that chronicles the history of the Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities in the Mosquito Coast of Honduras and Nicaragua. They currently have a GoFundMe campaign to support their collections, digitization, and future programming. This published interview is based on their original conversation and has been edited for clarity.

Last spring, Elise A. Mitchell recorded a conversation with members of Recuerdos de Nicaragua, the founder and head archivist, Jasmine Chavez Helm, and Melanie White, the research and content manager. Recuerdos de Nicaragua, is a physical and digital archive that chronicles the history of the Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities in the Mosquito Coast of Honduras and Nicaragua. They currently have a GoFundMe campaign to support their collections, digitization, and future programming. This published interview is based on their original conversation and has been edited for clarity.

This summer, Insurrect! is excited to work with Marisa S. Budlong as a public history fellow. We are able to support Marisa’s work on the project thanks to a generous and thoughtful donation from American Literature Professor Jonathan Beecher Field. If you’d like to join Prof JBF in donating to Insurrect!, check out our support page. If you are a graduate student or early career scholar interested in learning more on how to write for a public audience, mark your calendars for our upcoming Zoom panel, “Writing History for the Public,” on Wednesday August 5th at 5 pm EST.

As an undergraduate at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, I could not escape history. There, the country’s oldest continually active academic building separates the college’s grounds from a reconstructed colonial town complete with cobblestone roads, cannons, and tri-fold hats. Elsewhere on campus, memorializations of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Monroe attest to their attendance at the college – over a half century after it was founded. Against this long history, only very recently has the college married its academic efforts to the public work of comprehensively acknowledging its past in which the curated memory of America’s founders is supported by the historical erasure of the college’s enslavement of Africans and African-Americans, as well as Indigenous displacement. One of the main initiatives through which the college pursues this goal is the Lemon Project, an archival, public-facing and academic project that has, since 2009, conducted research, facilitated symposia, and proposed institutional changes aimed toward some modicum of accountability. The Lemon Project is a rigorous, if underfunded, academic initiative that has uncovered a crucial local archive. But it is also irreducibly linked to the College’s larger goals. As many of the project’s initiatives, and especially the college’s use of these initiatives make clear, Lemon’s task of historical recuperation is also a project of liberal humanist recognition that assures the present through descriptions of the past.

Editors’ note: Insurrect! was founded as a publication in part because we wanted to create more scholarly networks of support for graduate students that supplemented, rather than relied upon, the formal academy. Like many junior scholars, this week the editors of Insurrect! have been consumed by the ongoing fight against sexual harrassment at Harvard University led by Margaret Czerwienski, Lilia Kilburn, and Amulya Mandava and their supporters; and also overwhelmed by the incredibly disheartening way that senior scholars at that institution have responded. As an online magazine that is devoted to critiques of colonial legacies, and to the foundational work of Black Studies, Indigenous Studies, and postcolonial feminist theory, we cannot ignore how institutions today uphold these legacies through the gendered mechanisms of power and abuse, even within fields designed to analyze them. To that end, we are sharing a personal narrative from one of Insurrect!’s co-founders that speaks specifically to the ways that our working lives as scholars and academics cannot be divorced from gendered institutional power. We are incredibly fortunate to work with and know someone as brave and brilliant as Kellen Heniford.

Transness is a theory of change, of futurity. As trans people, we reject pre-written narratives to build more livable futures. Maybe this is why transsexuality is a recurring trope in science fiction, why whenever transness receives media attention it is framed as unheard of and new. Perhaps this also has bearing on why our histories are so often difficult for many of us.

Eamon Schlotterback is a doctoral candidate in literature at Northeastern University. Her dissertation project seeks to understand gender transition and memoir as technologies of self-making. She is currently Lab Coordinator at the Digital Transgender Archive.