Session Highlights for the 2024 Mass History Conference

by | Apr 3, 2024 | Conference, Events, News

Session Highlights: Making the Invisible, Visible at the Mass History Conference

Publick Occurrences

April 3, 2024

 

How do we illuminate the people that history forgot? Join us at the Mass History Conference on June 3, 2024 to hear from presenters who are focused on telling the “invisible” stories of their communities.

Collaborators on the Chinatown Stories Project will present on a neighborhood that has been largely invisible and overlooked, and rarely narrated by the voices of its own people.  They will discuss how their project reveals the challenges and discrimination that Chinese faced during the Chinese Exclusion period and beyond, while narrating the building of the network of businesses, organizations, and residents that have created this strong community.

Collaborators Rediscover Mapledale and Interpreting Sports will highlight a community effort to preserve, research, and teach the story of the Mapledale Country Club, the first golf course and country club for Black golfers in Massachusetts. Despite its importance to Black history, the history of sport, and the history of Massachusetts, Mapledale has been all but forgotten. Presenters will discuss the challenges facing a locally-focused organization aimed at telling diverse stories in a racially homogeneous town as well as how we can broaden the use of sports history as a lens for challenging long held cultural ideologies.

Registration for this year’s Conference in Devens opens on April 16. We hope we’ll see you there!

The Mass History Conference is hosted by the Mass History Alliance and supported by the generous contributions of our sponsors, including: Mass Humanities, Premier Conference Partner Massachusetts State Historical Records Advisory Board, Conference Partner Networking and Commons University of Massachusetts Boston Graduate Studies in Public History Scenes from the Revolution – A Quarter Millennial Musical University Archives & Special Collections in the Joseph P. Healey Library, University of Massachusetts Boston Named Session Sponsor Mike Potaski The William G. Pomeroy Foundation Conference Supporter Bridgewater State University Freedom’s Way National Heritage Area University of Massachusetts Amherst Public History Program Conference Friend Dorchester Historical Society Essex National Heritage Commission Five College Center for East Asian Studies Northeast Document Conservation Center Robert Forrant The House of the Seven Gables Conference Contributor Belchertown State School Friends Association Historic Boston Inc. Historic Northampton Lawrence History Center Metropolitan Waterworks Museum, Inc. Museum Textile Services Old Colony History Museum Seed Education Consulting See Through Books Press Swift River Press Public History and Communications The Shirley-Eustis House Association Tsongas Industrial History Center