Some Uses of History: The Nantucket Humanities Program

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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 environments 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 o f p ri m a ry m a t e ri a ls h o u se d t he r e . L i g ht ship s a n d t he w re c k o f t he 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 Most undergraduates never see an original historical document or artifact: History is known only as something written about.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

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satisfaction, unusual for an undergraduate, of doing original research. Although the independence of this independent project is qualified by frequent give-and-take with other students in the Program; by the enthusiastic help provided by "Mr. Stackpole" and "Mrs. Hussey," by guidance from a campus-based faculty advisor and by general supervision from the resident director of the Program, the students can know that essentially their own individual efforts represent genuine contributions to scholarship, however modest in scope. Theirs is real work, not make-work.

One of the most pervasive frustrations of traditional academic study is its fragmentation; the separate courses of study seem to have little or no relationship to each other. And one of the most exciting things about studying in the Nantucket Humanities Program is that the student can realize how parts comprise a whole. Because Nantucket's historical and cultural development is both contained and sharply defined, academic research refuses disciplinary limits. The study of scrimshaw, for instance, reaches far beyond the traditional questions an art historian would ask: it involves consideration of Quakerism and Quaker views on art, the nature of shipboard life, the relationship of a crewman to his family, the economics of whaling, and a host of other questions. The student researching the Irish immigration to Nantucket can look at court records, land deeds, editorials, letters, church records, journals, logs, diaries; his completed work is distinguished both by inclusiveness and by a sense of cultural coherence.

The study is also distinguished by its depth. Normally, an undergraduate is juggling the demands of four or five courses and is painfully aware of the limits which must be placed on each assignment. Although the students in the Nantucket Humanities Program invariably conclude with the wish for more time in which to continue their work, still they are permitted a depth and concentration of focus which traditional study precludes and which a semester in the Peter Foulger generously supports. The student who concerned himself with the Irish immigration to Nantucket could discover just about everything that could be known about that phenomenon, and could pursue with rigor its social implications.

Moreover, what he learned in studying the Irish immigration to Nantucket enables him to understand the Irish immigration to Boston — or, for that matter, to Cincinnati. For the clear and dramatic specialness of Nantucket's historical experience time and again distills much of the American experience generally. An understanding of its whalemen, for instance, helps us to comprehend the more modest adventuresomeness which opened up the western frontiers and settled this country. An understanding of Nantucket Quakerism can throw light on religious currents infusing all New England. Questions of community versus individual needs, of economic development, of land use, of political identity — all assume a particular Island form which very often crystalizes and clarifies general questions which this country faced and which it still faces. So the student returns to Boston after a semester on Nantucket wLth':d richly

enlarged sense of his or her own cultural beginnings and continuities. History has been touched and understood — in this loveliest and most unusual and most interesting of microcosms. Barry Phillips, Director UMass-Boston Nantucket Humanities Program

A Nantucket History Course Conference. Mrs. Louise Hussey, Librarian at the Peter Foulger Museum, and Dr. Barry Phillips, University of Massachusetts, confer with Miss Sarah Slive, one of the students, busy with her research project. Photo by DrurKahn