Archives and Special Collections

Archives, Historical Records, Special Collections

BPS Desegregation Project: Pedagogical Exhibits

The following is a series written by archivists, academics, activists, and educators making available primary source material, providing pedagogical support, and furthering the understanding of Boston Public School’s Desegregation history. View all posts BPS Desegregation Project would like to highlight two wonderful exhibits built by students from Desegregation related collections.
Screen Shot of Stark and Subtle Divisions exhibit

Screen Shot of Stark and Subtle Divisions exhibit

Stark & Subtle Divisions: A Collaborative History of Segregation in Boston http://bosdesca.omeka.net/ Created by graduate students in the History and American Studies departments at UMass Boston, this site showcases letters, photographs, legal documents, artifacts, and interviews that explore de facto segregation in Boston and the federally-mandated desegregation of Boston Public Schools. Students unearthed materials from various collections in separate Boston archives, selected a representative sampling, and presented them here, together, in new collaborative context.    
Screen shot of Boston Before Bussing Exhibit

Screen shot of Boston Before Bussing Exhibit

Boston Before Busing http://dsgsites.neu.edu/desegregation/ Activism for educational civil rights in Boston began well before 1974, when the “Garrity” decision mandated busing to fix de facto segregation in Boston schools. This exhibit introduces key people, groups, and events in Boston from 1964–1974, describing the community effort that led to the desegregation decision that still affect s Boston today. This not a complete portrait—many narratives, including Latino and Chinese voices, are lacking. All exhibit materials are from the Northeastern Archives and Special Collections, supplemented by research at the Suffolk, UMass Boston, and Harvard Schlesinger Library Archives. Common historical narrative has painted the busing crisis in Boston in the mid-1970s as an inevitable but spontaneous change in Northern race relations. After exploring this exhibit, think about whether that’s a true portrait of events. This exhibit was created for Martha Pearson’s public history fieldwork for HIST 4901/4902 at Northeastern University in collaboration with adviser William Fowler. — Giordana Mecagni is Head of Special Collections and University Archivist at Northeastern University

BPS Desegregation Project: Using metadata to support collaborative collections

The following is a series written by archivists, academics, activists, and educators making available primary source material, providing pedagogical support, and furthering the understanding of Boston Public School’s Desegregation history. View all posts   Subject headings The simplest way to collocate our materials in a shared portal like Digital Commonwealth or DPLA is to consistently apply an agreed upon subject heading. There are numerous Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) and Thesaurus of Graphic Materials (TGM) topical terms that could be applied to desegregation materials, including:
  • Busing for school integration [LCSH]
  • Busing (School integration) [TGM]
  • Segregation in education [LCSH]
  • School integration [LCSH and TGM]
  • Segregation [LCSH and TGM]
Working in a vacuum, one institution could decide to apply the term “Segregation in education” to all desegregation materials, while another could decide to apply “School integration,” making it more difficult to connect these materials in a shared system. As a collaborative, we chose to apply “Segregation in education — Massachusetts — Boston — History” as an umbrella heading that can be used to collocate items related to desegregation and busing across institutions. Recognizing that relying on a single subject heading may be too simplistic an approach for some collaborative collections, we’re also planning to explore the possibility of creating a DPLA App that would allow us to pull together a result set that combines multiple subject terms, which DPLA’s search functionality does not currently support. Locally controlled list of names Participating libraries agreed to apply name authorities from LCNAF whenever possible; however, many of the key local players in the desegregation movement do not have authority files with the Library of Congress. To ensure that we are expressing these names consistently, we created a shared document where we can list new non-LCNAF names used in our digital collections as they come up. In these cases, names are formed according to RDA rules. Geographic data Desegregation in the city of Boston is a particularly place-oriented topic; the issues, experiences, and reactions to busing differed greatly from one neighborhood to another. For this reason, we felt that adding geographic information, at least at the neighborhood-level, would be an especially valuable enhancement to our metadata records. We chose to express geographic data using TGN codes because it easily allowed us to apply values at the neighborhood level that would be automatically displayed in a linked, hierarchical form in Digital Commonwealth. For example, applying the TGN code for the West Roxbury neighborhood of Boston (7015008) to this record results in the following linked, hierarchical display on the user end: Places:  Massachusetts > Suffolk (county) > Boston > West Roxbury This geographic data will also allow users to visually explore items plotted on a map. — Written by Jessica Sedgwick, Metadata Project Manager at the Boston Library Consortium

Congratulations to the 2016 Hockey East Men’s Champions, our Northeastern Huskies!

On Saturday night the Northeastern Huskies, led by head coach and alum Jim Madigan, won the Hockey East Championship by beating the UMass Lowell River Hawks in a 3-2 thriller at TD Garden.  The winning goal was scored on a 3rd period power play by junior forward Zach Aston-Reese.  Sophomore forward Nolan Stevens and freshman forward Adam Gaudette contributed the other two Husky goals. The win ended a 28-year drought since the Northeastern men’s last Hockey East Championship in 1988, when they beat the Maine Black Bears 4-3.  That year Northeastern goaltender Bruce Racine was named the tournament’s MVP.  Racine and head coach Ferny Flaman were later inducted into the NU Athletics Varsity Club Hall of Fame (2001 and 1989, respectively).  One of the assistant coaches for that championship team?  Jim Madigan!
1988 MVP_lo

MVP Bruce Racine makes the save for the 1988 Hockey East Men’s Champions!

The current season marks 87 years of hockey at Northeastern.  The Huskies have been playing in Matthews Arena since their inaugural 1929-1930 season.  At that time the arena was known as Boston Arena, and also served as home ice for other Hockey East teams Boston College and Boston University.  In fact, until the year before the Boston Arena had been home to the Boston Bruins, whose current home, TD Garden, is the site of Saturday’s triumph.
1929_lo

Northeastern’s first hockey team (1929-1930 season), led by coach H. Nelson Raymond.

Now on to the NCAA’s Final 16, where we play No. 1 North Dakota (30-6-4) on March 25!

The Boston Phoenix: St. Patrick’s Day, Busing, and a Divided City

The following is a series written by archivists, academics, activists, and educators making available primary source material, providing pedagogical support, and furthering the understanding of Boston Public School’s Desegregation history. View all posts For many, St. Patrick’s Day is undoubtedly one of the most important dates in the Boston calendar, highlighted by the annual South Boston parade. But in 1974, St. Patrick’s Day occurred at the beginning of the Boston busing crisis, a controversial solution to court-ordered citywide school desegregation. From 1971-1976, The Boston Phoenix covered the crisis with over 70 in depth articles. On March 26, Phoenix journalist Michael Ryan penned “Where was everybody on St. Patrick’s Day?” addressing the conspicuous absence of politicians at parties and the parade.   19740326_hi   At the center was State Senator William “Billy” Bulger’s, brother of mob boss Whitey Bulger, cancellation of the traditional St. Patrick’s Day party at Dorgan’s restaurant in South Boston. Bulger canceled “to draw attention to his contention that South Boston would be irreparably damaged as a neighborhood, its cohesion destroyed and its spirit shattered, if the forced busing plan for school integration were to go into effect as scheduled for September.” Instead, he held an open house after the parade which was only attended by one political figure, Father Sean McManus. In response, State Representative Royal Bolling held his own party, “Roxbury’s Salute to St. Patrick’s Day.” Bolling, unlike Bulger, was a supporter of the court-ordered desegregation as author of the Racial Imbalance Act of 1965. He also secured funding for METCO (Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity) which assisted with school desegregation. However, his party also garnered very little attendance from politicians. Were the politicians at the South Boston parade, which normally drew 200,000 spectators annually in the 1970s? Yes, and no. Billy Bulger attended before his party. Mayor Kevin White, who in 1967 ran a tough campaign against anti-desegregation Boston School Committee member Louise Day Hicks, decided at the last minute to attend the parade. More importantly, Hicks—by then a Boston City Council member—and fellow member Albert Leo “Dapper” O’Neil, both ardently anti-busing, were in attendance and received cheers from the crowd. The busing crisis clearly had divided the city. The Phoenix’s Ryan concluded that “the political leadership of the state, so conspicuous on the busing issue, had done it again.” The Boston Phoenix Collection and METCO records can be viewed at Northeastern University’s Archives and Special Collections. In addition, Northeastern University’s Archives and Special Collections is coordinating a multi-archive scanning project whose goal is to make available archival material that relates to how and why busing happened in Boston, as well as the after effects it had on the community. The project announcement is available on Snell Snippets.

Happy 50th to the Boston Phoenix!

March 2, 2016 marks the 50th anniversary of the birth of the Boston Phoenix! In 1965, the paper began as “Boston After Dark,” a four-page insert in the Harvard Business School’s newspaper The Harbus News. On March 2, 1966, Boston After Dark became a free, independent newspaper – “Boston’s only complete entertainment weekly.”   The paper featured event, music, theatre, and film listings and reviews. Theatre reviews were penned by Larry Stark, a prominent local journalist who later was nicknamed “Boston’s dean of theatre critics.” The first issue features a review of “The Subject Was Roses” at the Wilbur Theatre in which he writes about its long run as “perhaps the cast is a little tired by now, but the script was a little tired to start with.” BAD 19660302_1 In 1972, Boston After Dark acquired the Cambridge Phoenix and was reborn the Boston Phoenix. It became an invaluable source of reporting on not just Boston’s arts and culture but major local subjects—from school desegregation to LGBTQ issues to Occupy Boston. Over its 47 year run, the paper received multiple awards in journalism from the New England Press Association, the Penny-Missouri Newspaper Awards, and the American Bar Association Gavel Awards. The Boston Phoenix Collection can be viewed at Northeastern University’s Archives and Special Collections. The first issue can be viewed or downloaded in Northeastern University’s Digital Repository Service.