Education Internship at the Boston Athenaeum

Because I've been in the hospital and have had a ton of doctors' appointments the past couple of weeks, quite a bit of my work has been remote and research-based so far for this internship. Fortunately, my supervisor, Director of Education Hannah Weisman, has been very understanding. There are a lot of small projects within this project, but the overall aim is for me to write some more diverse historical perspectives into our education materials. (Full disclosure: I've already worked at the Athenaeum for two years in a different department, so I say "our" for simplicity's sake and I hope that's not too weird.) As an example, here's the subject of my first project-within-the-project:

From the Boston Athenaeum website. Artist: Thomas Sully. Date: 1831-1832.

Thomas Handasyd Perkins. He's treated like a superhero in Massachusetts. He founded or gave lots of money to a pretty big list of institutions, such as Massachusetts General Hospital, the Perkins Institute for the Blind, and of course the Boston Athenaeum, just to name a couple of super relevant highlights. However, guess how he made his money? Slaves and opium. Not only that, but he was highly involved in some of the nastiest parts of each of those businesses, from what I've been discovering. That's all I'll say for now, because I'm still fact-checking. So, my job is to highlight some of those points, as well as the more well-known ones about his good deeds, for docent talks that are given when non-members come in for tours. I'm supposed to do this with quite a few historical figures represented in our collections, not necessarily to air dirty laundry, but also to highlight contributions of women, people of color, and otherwise diverse groups that have not often been celebrated in old New England institutions like ours. The idea is to present a fuller picture of our history, and not just to pretend it was all rosy... or that it wasn't the labor of enslaved people and opium addicts that made Boston's prosperity possible. (Cue Ta-Nehisi Coates quotes here.) Stay tuned for how well I fare and how many angry people throw things at me.