2023 Mass History Conference

“Seeing Like the State” focuses on the long relationship between state and local government in Massachusetts and the resulting documentation and historical resources. As the central repository for public, permanent records of state government, the Massachusetts Archives holds hundreds of manuscript collections documenting every aspect of life in the Commonwealth. Some of these are well known to researchers: town vital records and decennial census schedules, for example, have long been go-to sources for local history. This talk will instead focus on some of Archives’ lesser-known resources to highlight other ways in which the state has traditionally “seen” its residents at the local level. Highlights will include: petitions and maps concerning the original organization of many of the towns in the state, treasury accounts documenting local aid provided to the “state poor” in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and architectural plans for public buildings collected by the Department of Public Safety.