My name is Lynette Taylor. I am currently an undergraduate in the IU School of Liberal Arts at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis (IUPUI). Here, I am an active student leader which has provided me with several opportunities to lead and participate in many community education and engagement projects, like the project “Invisible Indianapolis” for which I will also be presenting a paper at a workshop during the National Council on Public History Annual Meeting. I am majoring in History and Sociology and minoring in Africana Studies, Anthropology, Geography, Labor Studies, and Philosophy. I will be graduating in May 2017. From there I plan to attend graduate school to pursue degrees in public policy and law.
I have worked as a research assistant for the Frederick Douglass Papers (FDP) since August 2014. Working on that project has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. Indeed, I wanted to continue my work with the FDP so much that I located and secured new funding sources multiple times to enable me to stay. Though my work for the project has primarily been focused on transcribing writings and correspondence of Frederick Douglass, we have also been working on appealing to a wider public than the academics that our work is typically aimed. This includes co-hosting an annual symposium with the Africana Studies department as well as establishing more of a digital presence through social media, our new website, and experimenting with other media forms. Furthermore, the FDP is becoming increasingly embracing multidisciplinary study to discover new ways to present information to the wider public.
With the FDP, our primary source material is drawn from Frederick Douglass’s autobiographical writings, texts of speeches printed in newspapers, the newspapers for which Douglass was editor, letters to and from Douglass, and even a work of historical fiction written by Douglass. In each of these source formats, with perhaps the exception of the autobiographies, there are associated difficulties. One of the primary troubles related to the study of early American history, however, is finding the material. In the case of letters, we found we have significantly more letters to Douglass than from. Frederick Douglass was a meticulous saver; however, many of his correspondents either were not or their materials were not preserved because their lack of notoriety made saving their things less of a priority to preservationists. Frederick Douglass’s belongings were only able to be saved because of the tireless efforts of his second wife, Helen Pitts Douglass, to have his home in Anacostia adopted as part of the National Park Service as well as the sheer volume of material Douglass produced as one of the most prolific and photographed Americans of the time.
Another issue is the decentralized nature of these materials. Frederick Douglass, as an important, iconic national figure, has a great many institutions and places that claim ownership of his image and legacy. For this reason, the FDP has no original source material. Our work is conducted entirely from photocopies, most of which date back to the 1970s when the project first began at Yale University, and microfiche. This, too, makes public engagement difficult as we do not have the physical artifacts with which people can connect. This makes the use of digital platforms even more important for the FDP and similar projects to more explicitly make connections between distant pasts and the present and make the information more accessible to scholars of today.
Not only does digitization help bring early American scholarship to the public’s attention but it also provides opportunities, such as this work group opportunity, for collaboration among partners in disparate parts of the country and from a variety of backgrounds. Through this cross-communication, we can learn new ways to display information such as mapmaking, interactive timelines, or even virtual museum websites. As we continue making connections with one another, we can also find new ways to look at contemporary issues such as race, gender, immigration, environmentalism, and global trade based on a more thorough knowledge of where we came from, areas that have been neglected or suppressed, and precedents from the past that can guide our path forward. The adage attributed to George Santayana—another historical figure whose papers are housed at IUPUI—that “those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it” rings as true now as it ever did, which is why it is imperative that we make history not only more available but also more applicable to twenty-first century people.
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