In July 2018, MHA held our annual meeting and voted in a new board. Over the next few months, we’ll be highlighting your MHA board members.
Jon Green will be serving as co-chair of communications for 2018 – 2019. Jon was not always sure that the field of history was for him and he entered college with no intention of becoming a history major. Fulfilling his Gen-Ed requirements, he surprised himself by loving his history class and that charted his future. In 2010 he graduated from Stonehill College and began working in Stonehill’s Archives and Historical Collections, a site of one of his undergraduate internships.
In the eight years Jon has worked at Archives and Historical Collections, his role has shifted but his love for the job has not. He has worked on digitizing the collections, a task he sees as critical because it opens up access to the collections. In recent years he has spent more time teaching at Stonehill, a transition that he’s grown to love.
Jon found that in the early days of his career, his biggest challenge was building a sense of confidence in his abilities as a professional archivist. Training himself to examine all angles of a research question and taking the time to fully engage the tasks at hand have allowed him to explore his work with confidence and pleasure. In fact, the diversity of tasks and challenges is one of the things he likes most.
Beyond Stonehill Archives, he has been involved in numerous historical initiatives. Directly after graduating, he joined the Whitman Historical commission in Whitman, MA. Working with the WHC, Jon learned how local organizations and town politics function. In 2014, he and his partner took on the role of caretaker and curator of the Suffolk Resolves House. The Suffolk Resolves House, an historic home in Milton, is the site of the signing of the “Suffolk Resolves,” an important document and precursor to the Declaration of Independence. The SRH is owned by the Milton Historical Society; with the caretaker role came a seat on the Society’s board. Both roles pushed Jon forward on his journey in understanding his role in preserving history. In 2016 he received a year-long grant to revamp Plimoth Plantation’s digital collections. In that position, he set up an online database still in use today.
Jon attended the Massachusetts Historical Alliance conference and found that the group’s goals aligned with his own. He wants to help build a community that respects the field of history and believes MHA will help with that. Since joining the board in June he has been working to build a communications infrastructure that will be critical to the group’s future. In five years he hopes MHA will have strong regional networks, be a recognized asset to local historical societies and be relevant in the historical conversation in Massachusetts .