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Some Uses of History The Nantucket Humanities Program The John A. McCarthy Foundation of Palo Alto, California has awarded a grant to the University of Massachusetts at Boston to continue its Nantucket Humanities Program. Operating the past year on funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, this Program allows a select group of upperclassmen to come to the Island for a semester to study its history and culture. Joined by Island residents enrolled either as auditors or for university credit, the students take an intensive course on "The History and Culture of Nantucket" taught by Edouard Stackpole and a course taught by Wes Tiffney and Clint Andrews, of the UMass Field Station at Quaise, on the ways in which Nantucket's natural en vironments influenced its human history. The center of the students' academic experience rests in the extended independent research project they complete in the Peter Foulger Museum. Through the interested support of the Nantucket Historical Association, they are able to spend long hours in the Museum working with the wealth of p r i m a r y m a t e r i a l s h o u s e d t h e r e . L i g h t s h i p s a n d t h e w r e c k of t h e E s s e x , early criminals and The Sons of Temperance, Indians and Irish, Peleg Folger, Anna Gardner, and Elizabeth Coffin, schoolteachers and whaling wives — these are some of the subjects which the UMass-Boston students have chosen to research. Or perhaps it is more precise to say that the subjects chose them: at first, attracting curious attention; then, capturing sustained interest; becoming, finally, part of the way a student understands and measures experience. The completed research papers will become part of the Peter Foulger's collection. The experience made available by the Historical Association represents, in the words of Carlo Golino, Chancellor of UMass-Boston, "the most rewarding educational opportunity available to our students." Most undergraduates never see an original historical document or artifact: History is known only as something written about. Participants in the Nantucket Humanities Program can study the thing itself; they gain a new — and vivid — sense of its reality. Squinting over the handwriting and the grammatical vagaries of another age, smelling the very mustiness of an aging page, they also get a sense of History's historicity, its temporal place, that textbooks and lectures could never suggest. These realizations solidify, of course, when the students leave the Museum each afternoon: in ways few communities can begin to duplicate, Nantucket remains in touch with its past and insists on the continuities of historical experience. The students can feel a small part of the process of bringing the past into the present: uncovering it, clarifying it, preserving it. They have the
