Introduction to the Project
Beyond the Archives is a digital gathering place to witness, in action, the concepts of “expansion,” and “settler colonialism”: letters where settlers discuss dispossession. We hope you utilize our digital archive to show your publics how historians document and construct narratives based upon sources but also upon an investigation of what sources lack.
The History academic profession relies on oral and written documents (sources) as evidence to construct the past. Sources are what structure historical narratives. State documents, settler correspondences, and English-language print media overwhelmingly shape the texture of the nineteenth-century United States historical narrative and imagination. Yet, this digital project demonstrates what historians can do to underline the erasures of Indigenous voices and gendered voids in these documents.
Beyond the Archives is an epistemological exercise in which Connecticut College student historians from History 317: Borders, Empire, & Immigration grapple with themes of expansion, dispossession, and survivance while examining the archive of the Western Reserve, which documents life in late-eighteenth- to nineteenth-century-Connecticut and beyond. Working with the College’s Linda Lear Special Collections and Digital Scholarship & Curriculum Center, eleven students, Linda Lear Special Collections Librarian Bailey Rodgers, Director of Special Collections Benjamin Panciera, and Assistant Director for Digital Scholarship Lyndsay Bratton, all digitized letters of the archive while working on transcribing the letters for publication in this public digital archive. From there, students interpreted the documents, assessing the transcriptions for their content and also for who authored the correspondences and whose interpretations molded a predominant narrative. These student scholars want you, the visitor, to peruse our letter collection and read through our rich palimpsest of historical narratives.
Contributors
World Builders
Tasked with analyzing the maps as well as creating visual aids for the site:
- Itzel Medina, ‘24
- Ian Rawlings, ’25
- Danna Sandoval, ‘24
Historians of Indigenous History
Tasked with writing an Indigenous perspective/counternarrative to this project:
- Teagan O’Hara, ‘24
- Samantha Chapin, ‘26
Historians of Settler Colonialism
Tasked with analyzing the Connecticut Land Company and settler colonial actions of this archive:
- CJ DeLuca, ‘24
- Victoria McGuigan, ‘24
Biographers of Families Wyles and Bissell
Tasked with writing the histories of these settlers via the letters and outside research:
- Christian Pappas, ‘26
- Johana Portillo Velasquez, ‘27
Historian of Contacts and Interactions
Tasked with bridging narratives between settlers and Native people:
- Maya Daly, ‘27
Military Historian of the Western Reserve
Tasked with writing about the military’s presence since 1790 in CT, PA, etc.:
- Miles Houston, ‘24
Course Instructor
Archival Research Support
- Benjamin Panciera, Director of Special Collections & Archives
- Bailey Rodgers, Linda Lear Special Collections Librarian
Web Design and Technical Support
- Lyndsay Bratton, Assistant Director for Digital Scholarship