Category: Uncategorized Page 1 of 7

An inevitable part of researching historical figures or events is searching through archives, which have original documents and information about people and events in the rawest form possible, unlike published scholarship, which may take some information from archival sources but ignore other important information.^[1] There are also many public and private archives, which means there might be a lot of information about our topic that is scattered around. Archival documents also might not be organized in the way one needs for their research. This means that working in archives can be exciting when someone discovers something new or interesting, but also frustrating, because this takes time and patience going through many documents in many places.

My project is on the early life and memory of Supreme Court Justice Roger Taney. One problem is that Taney did not hold on to most of his letters and other personal documents, and we don’t have a lot of his own material about his personal life.^[2] Taney did begin to write a memoir that was eventually published, but we need to be careful with that source. Even if Taney thought he was being honest, he might have not been as objective as he thought he was. This means I needed to see what material we have on him that might not be in his memoir.

According to ArchiveGrid, several archives have documents on Taney.[3] Johns Hopkins University has an archive on Taney with 66 letters, and 58 of these are in the “Roger Brooke Taney letters” collection.[4] These letters are from Taney to family members, most to his son-in-law James Mason Campbell, between 1838 and 1856.[5] This was an important find, since Taney didn’t leave most of his personal letters. The Yale Collection of Western Americana, in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, also has a few letters from Taney, such as asking President Tyler to help release his relative John Taney from a Mexican jail.[6] The Library of Congress has 110 items that include writings, legal documents, letters, and other documents.[7] There are other archives with similar items, which could help us study Taney’s personal life or legal career.

I also looked through digital archives. One of these was American National Biography, which has biographies on significant American figures. I found one for Taney that provided not only secondary sources, but also primary sources, and quotes directly from Taney himself. Considering how little primary sources there are for Taney, this was an especially good find.

Since I don’t have time and a car to go to all these archives, I was lucky that Dickinson College has an archive on Taney, because he graduated from Dickinson and had an impact on American history. After reading some scholarship on Taney, I headed to the Dickinson College Archives on the bottom floor of the Waidner-Spahr Library. The archive receptionist knew exactly what to give me, and I received folder with nearly one hundred documents. Now I ran into another challenge of working in archives: trying to figure out which documents were useful for my project. There were many short papers from his legal work, such as a document detailing legal letters from small cases, such as divorces. There were documents on more important lawsuits, such as a case defending President Andrew Jackson from accusations of corruption. This would be useful for research on Taney’s legal work, but less on his personal life and beliefs.

Some sources that seem more important to my project do not provide much information or only give an overview of what happened. Other sources that seem more helpful are harder to understand. For example, one source was a transcript from the Belles Lettres Literary Society, where Taney was a member. There had been some debate, but this document did not have the full text of the discussion. I asked for the original document with details about the debate, but this did not solve my problem. First, the text was faded and I could not easily make out what was written. Second, the writing style was very different than what I can read so it was incomprehensible for me to read. For now, I have to rely on the secondary transcript to make sense of this debate.

Even then, this transcript gave me some interesting information. Taney supported the execution of King Louis of France during the French Revolution[8]. This makes him seem more radical than I thought he would be, especially knowing Dred Scott. In a debate about whether wars against Native Americans were justified, Taney “was on the affirm.”[9] Now this was a discovery! Who would have thought that a young man from a slaveholding family, who would go on to write Dred Scott defending slavery, would support beheading the King of France? What happened as he got older to change his views?

One important fact I learned about Taney from this archive research is how diligent and hardworking of person he was. His teachers, such as Professor Huston, praised him as a student. The Belles Lettres Literary Society transcript shows he was very involved with debates, and he would eventually become president of the society after the previous president stepped down. This all suggests Taney was bright, active, and willing to make his views known—something which we see in his later life.

Many materials in the Dickinson archive on Taney provide detailed information and insights into his life, but they are publications, not primary sources. These authors went through some sources and put together a story about Taney. One example is a short story about Taney’s life published in 1894 in St. Vincent’s Journal.^[10] This article brought to light some interesting information about Taney’s early life that I didn’t know. He was a prankster in his youth, and his father got him a tutor after his public school teacher drowned trying to walk on water.

These are interesting details for a general biography, but they do not give me much information about his views on race and slavery. However, these publications in the archive are as much about the memory of Taney as his life. How is someone supposed to know if these texts are accurate or if they are including some information and leaving other information? This does not mean this story is false, but we have to be careful with it. And this is why it is good to go to original sources in archives, to check these publications.

Overall, this research showed me that Taney was more complex than I previously thought he was. While later on he was a reactionary and supported slavery, I learned from this that when he was younger, he had more liberal views, such as opposing slavery and freeing his slaves and supporting the execution of King Louis XVI of France in the French Revolution. Through research like this, one can get a better understanding of a person and their complexities.

In the end, my first experience working in an archive was exciting, as I got to learn more about the subject of my research, Roger Taney. It was also frustrating, because going through all the documents takes time, dealing with possible bias or misinformation is a constant challenge, and making sense of some sources can take up more time than I have. But this is what we do in history: we spend more time as detectives than writers, because we need to know what happened and who people were.

 

[1] Zachary M. Schrag, The Princeton Guide to Historical Research (Princeton, 2021), 188.

[2] Samuel Tyler, Memoir of Roger Brooke Taney, LL.D., Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States (Baltimore: John Murphy & Co., 1872), x.

[3] “Roger Taney,” ArchiveGrid [WEB].

[4] “Roger Brooke Taney collection, 1811-1856,” Milton S. Eisenhower Library, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD. [WEB]

[5] “Roger Brooke Taney letters,” Milton S. Eisenhower Library, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD. [WEB]

[6] “Letter: to President Tyler by Roger Brooke Taney, 1843 Sep 30,” Yale Collection of Western Americana, in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, CN. [WEB]

[7] “Roger Brooke Taney papers, 1815-1859,” Library of Congress, Washington, DC. [WEB]

[8] Minutes of the Belles Lettres Literary Society, Vol 2, Archives and Special Collections, Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA. p.3

[9] Minutes of the Belles Lettres Literary Society, Vol 2, Archives and Special Collections, Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA. p.1

[10] “Hon. Roger Brooke Taney,” St. Vincent’s Journal Vol. 4, #4 (December 20, 1894): 102-108. Archives & Special Collections, Waidner-Spahr Library, Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA.

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An archive is often a necessary step in a research project, but it can be daunting to organize a successful trip. One trip alone might not be enough to fully grasp the materials on hand, and online resources could be scarce. That’s why creating a dialogue with the staff of the archive is necessary. Archivists know their collections better then anyone and can point you toward materials you might not have considered. Equally important is organizing your thoughts and research goals before you go. Archival research is rarely straightforward, and you may find that your subject does not appear in the collection as you’d hoped, or the exact document you’re searching for simply is not there. It can be difficult to approach this kind of uncertainty with an open mind, but it’s an essential part of the process. Explore peripheral materials, related collections, or contextual documents that might offer insight in unexpected ways. Sometimes the absence of a document can be as telling as its presence. Ultimately, archival research requires patience, creativity, and flexibility and some of the most valuable discoveries often come from what you did not set out to find.

Cumberland County Historical Society

The Butchers were a prominent Black family that settled in Carlisle after the Civil War around 1870. In particular, John Butcher, the head of the family and the father of nine children, was well regarded in the community.[1] I have spent the last three journal assignments tracing their history back to its origin, and now I am attempting to develop that history with the help of the Cumberland County Historical Society archives (CCHS). It was clear to me that the Butchers would most likely not appear in the Dickinson College archives, another option for archival research available to me, and since the wayside marker I discovered the Butchers from pointed to the CCHS, that is where I set my sights. I knew documents from the Butchers would be very difficult to come by. Both John and Charlotte, his wife, were illiterate and former slaves, which indicated to me that written material would not be an option.[2] However, I did not know what the CCHS had on hand. Looking at their online website, I saw they had a listing of notes on the Butchers. I was ignorant to the fact that this was not necessarily a collection of records, but instead a more broad account of the very limited resources on their family not a box of primary sources ready to be analyzed.

The first step I took in approaching the CCHS was setting up a visit. On their website, they had an online visitation form, which negated the need for sending an email or making a phone call. This introduction was the only form of contact ahead of my visit, and it was likely this that added some confusion to the eventual event. When I arrived, they laid out the requested materials, along with a few extra documents. “Notes on the Butcher Family of Carlisle” is a binder containing a biographical account of the family’s history, originating in Virginia. It is an expansion of an article I had already found online, published by the Gardner Digital Library and written by Jane Black.[3] This expansion is not published anywhere online and, as I explained in a previous journal post, it stands as an excellent example of the type of research necessary for uncovering the Butchers’ history. The problem was that most of the materials did not add any new information about John Butcher’s life that I had not already understood. Unfortunately, the resources available at the CCHS that related directly to the Butchers, and specifically to John, did not provide new revelations. So, I started by tracing back the sources cited in Black’s paper.

The Photos

Jane Black wrote a unique piece of scholarship that helped guide me in my research, and finally holding the full version of the vague online article was crucial. The rest of the notes included photocopies of the entire collection of direct sources relating to the Butchers. They included pictures of census records and newspaper articles from Newspapers.com, all of which I had investigated prior to my visit. The only primary sources the binder held that were not available online were a series of documents regarding the relinquishment of property to Charlotte Butcher after John’s death, a picture postcard of Charlotte Butcher, and a business directory that includes a picture of John and four of his children.[4] These are the only photos specifically attributed to the Butchers in the archive. I wanted to search for more photos, specifically images of potential groups John Butcher was a part of, and so I began my search for his church.

The Churches

At this point, I asked the archivists for any information on Black churches in Carlisle from the 1860s to the 1920s. This is where the gaps in my knowledge and the lackluster explanation of my visit might have caused some confusion. They gave me two boxes of photo books of members of the Third Presbyterian Church, all dated in the mid-twentieth century. Suffice to say, this was not what I was looking for. I decided to search for any evidence of what church John Butcher had been a part of. After a confusing thirty minutes, during which the archivists on call went back and forth about potential churches, since his obituary stated he was a “member of the Baptist church.”[5] The Archivists then indicated to me that this was referring to the Bethel A.M.E. Church.  They seemingly did not have any significant collection of documents on the Bethel AME Church. Perhaps I was not insistent enough or confident enough in my requests, but they specifically pointed me to the church itself, indicating a lack of tangible files on-site. This search for a photo of church members, or any broader context for John Butcher’s life, ultimately came up short. I was left with nothing but a name and another lead.

 

John Butchers Obituary as appears in the Carlisle Evening Harald on March 13th 1919. (Screen capture of downloaded document taken from newspapers.com, taken by Oskar Martin)

The “Skedaddle Ground?”

Going back to Jane Black’s notes, I decided to trace her contextual research on the Black experience during the time of the Civil War. In her work, she mentions “the Skedaddle Ground” and cites it to the Milton Flower papers.[6] When I asked the archivists for the specific citation, it exposed a conundrum that led to yet another lead. Milton Flower was a professor at Dickinson College who produced a large collection of Civil War research and primary source documents that ultimately went unpublished. When Jane Black was writing the notes on the Butchers, the archivist explained that they must have still been processing the Milton Flower papers, as the direct source listed in Black’s article did not exist. I was, however, provided with the closest match to the citation, and I spent an hour searching through the boxes trying to figure out where this article had gotten the term “Skedaddle Ground” from.[7] At this point, I had two scholars and two unique examples of research seemingly in conversation with each other — but I couldn’t find the link. After more discussion with the archivists they directed me towards the Dickinson College archive perhaps they had the final unpublished manuscript. This discovery of the dubious nature of Blacks mention of the Skedaddle Ground perhaps casts doubt on her article. If anything else I ended my archive trip already thinking about my next one.

Takeaway’s

There were three major portions of my time at the CCHS, two of which raised more questions than answers. I did not find the unconsidered document I had hoped for, and perhaps this is because I had not fully explored the background of Carlisle and the history of the Black community there. This was my first time visiting an archive, and I wasn’t prepared for the kinds of questions I needed to ask to receive the best support. It’s crucial, when approaching an archive visit, to understand your subject and, at the very least, some context. Secondly, it’s vitally important to plan a wide range of questions and get creative in your approach. My trip, however, was not unhelpful. Amidst the new information Jane Black provided and the research I had already done on Newspapers.com, I now have potential grounds to stand on for my next visit. For instance, John Butcher’s obituary mentions his former employer, George Hench, and Black’s article mentions Frank Butcher, one of John’s sons, who was apparently a janitor at Dickinson College. However, this is improperly cited to the 1910 census, which does not list Frank’s employment at the College. Ultimately, I come away from this trip with a resolve to rectify the mistakes I made in my approach. I’m determined to plan a second, more successful trip to both the Dickinson and Cumberland County archives [8].

[1] Jane Black, “Notes on the Butcher Family of Carlisle, by Jane Black,” 2015, Catalog Number L2015.052.001, Cumberland County History Collection, Cumberland County Historical Society, Carlisle PA.

[2] “John Butcher in the 1910 United States Federal Census,” Carlisle, Cumberland Pennsylvania, Thirteenth Census of the United States, 1910, Record of the Bureau of the Census, RG 29, National Archives, Washington, DC. [ANCESTRY.COM]

[3] Gardner Digital Library, “John J. and Charlotte Roy Butcher,” (Gardner Digital Library: Cumberland Historical Society, 2014). [GDL]; Jane Black, “Notes on the Butcher Family of Carlisle.”

[4] Jane Black, “Notes on the Butcher Family of Carlisle,” page 1; “Black History of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania 1865-1976,” Cumberland County Historical Society, Carlisle Pa, page 74; Butcher, Charlotte, Identified Women, Cumberland County Historical Society, Carlisle PA.

[5] “Once a Slave Well Known Resident Died Today,” Carlisle Evening Harald, March 13th, 1919. [NEWSPAPERS.COM]

[6] Jane Black, “Notes on the Butcher Family of Carlisle,” page 2.

[7] The Papers of the Milton Embick Flower Collection, MG-207 Box 12, Cumberland County Historical Society, Carlisle PA, The Papers of the Milton Embick Flower Collection, MG-207 Box 13, Cumberland County Historical Society, Carlisle PA.

[8] “John Butcher in the 1910 United States Federal Census,” Carlisle, Cumberland Pennsylvania, Thirteenth Census of the United States, 1910, Record of the Bureau of the Census, RG 29, National Archives, Washington, DC. [ANCESTRY.COM];, obituary, and notes where frank is mentioned.

Looking Past the Veil: Finding Katharine Drexel in the Archives

When you hear “archives” you probably think of a dim room with tables and shelves and filing cabinets. It’s quiet. You can sit there and rummage through boxes of old documents, uncovering their secrets. Often though, a trip to the archives will look more like mine this past last week but wait to judge. Just because the room is bright and you and handed a folder of modern documents, that does not mean there is not something to learn.

I set out to find primary sources related to Katharine Drexel and her work in Carlisle in local archives. I knew that most of Katharine Drexel’s personal documents and correspondence were kept in the Catholic Historical Research Center of the Philadelphia Archdiocese, but I still hoped there might be a document, letter, or something else that she had actually held left in Carlisle having been in possession of St. Patrick’s Church or Father Henry Ganss, with whom she worked closely in Carlisle.[1]

Before coming into the Dickinson Archives, I emailed first to ask if they had any materials related to Katharine Drexel, St. Katharine’s Hall, or anything else connected to the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament’s presence in Carlisle. The Dickinson Archives focus predominantly on archiving the history of the college, though they also have some materials related to the Carlisle Indian School, so I was hopeful that they might have something related to Drexel.

It wasn’t the primary source I had hoped for, but they did have a photocopy of a 150-page unpublished manuscript, St. Katharine’s Hall: Carlise, Pennsylvania—The Unfolding Apostolate of The Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament 1906-1918, written by Sister M. Georgianna Rockwell of the SBS in the 1980s as an independent research project on the group’s founder.[2]

Preservation can be challenging and expensive. Photocopies mean that more archives can have the same information kept and more cheaply, which is why I could read another photocopy of the same manuscript at the Cumberland County Historical Society [CCHS] two days later, though they don’t have the same feel to them that the original or an actual artifact would.

I had a similar experience at the CCHS archives. When I came in for my research appointment, they had pulled the aforementioned manuscript, and three folders of material for me. A cursory glance of the materials told me everything was a photocopy or an original article written between the 1980s-2000s, most of which honored her for being named blessed in 1988 and then sainted in 2000. Many of them had been printed from Newspapers.com, a digital subscription newspaper database, meaning that even as they were not primary sources, they were items I could not have accessed otherwise.

In the whole folder, I only found one document from the early 20^th century: a photocopy of a two-paragraph article from The Red Man, the Carlisle Indian School Newspaper, saying that Drexel was visiting Carlisle in 1911. It recounted Drexel’s visit and praised her generosity in financial donations towards Indian Schools across the nation.[3]

Though not from the time of Drexel, other items showed great promise, too. Rockwell’s manuscript was a rare item with a rich bibliography citing letters, church annals, newspapers, etc., and one of the folders had a similar style manuscript titled Used Trumpets: The Letters of Blessed Katharine Drexel SBS and Reverend Doctor Hanry G. Ganss 1892-1912, which largely consisted of transcribed letters from Drexel and Ganss. Obviously for a project like this, the original letters would be preferred, but the information was still valid, and I now had statistics from the school and a sense of Drexel’s voice from the way she wrote in her letters.

“Where do you think your Mother and Mother Mary James are, on this 29^th of Jan?” she opens her 1898 letter to her “dear daughters in the Blessed Sacrament.” After answering her own question she continues in a similar style, “Well, why did we go to Carlisle? Let me tell you.” She goes on to explain how and why she came to Carlisle and the prospects of setting up a convent in Carlisle to help educate the Catholic students at the Indian School.[4]  Sister Charlotte, in a 1987 interview, expands upon this warm, bubbly picture of Drexel as a person. Sister Charlotte recounted a time when Drexel’s watch broke before a trip and she opted “to carry a large alarm clock on the train.” Though the sisters eventually persuaded her to borrow a watch instead, the story shows Drexel’s affinity for simplicity and humility.[5]

For this reason that she remarks fondly on how “plain and practical” everything at the Indian School was in her 1898 letter. Specifically, Drexel admits that she “was prepared to see something very grand and was agreeably disappointed” by the plainness.[6] I wonder if she expected something “very grand” because of the government, military, or Protestant influences at the school. Moreover, this comment gives Drexel an air of feistiness that seems so contrary to her occupation. Its easy to imagine a nun being humble, but its harder to imagine a nun being excited, a bit silly, or even a little saucy at times, and yet Drexel feels so much more real in these anecdotes than she does in most of hagiographic or academic sources I looked at before.

My trip to the archives was not what I had expected, and neither was Katharine Drexel. Some part of me wants archives and nuns to remain stuffy and old, but my research would be hollow and sorely lacking if I hadn’t had this experience. After all, learning to move past biases and tell a full story, driven by empathy and curiosity is the job of a historian.[7]

[1] “Archives,” Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, accessed April 10, 2025, [WEB].

[2] Georgianna Rockwell, “St. Katharine’s Hall Carlisle, Pennsylvania – The Unfolding Apostolate of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament – 1906-1918,” 973.0497 R684s, Photocopy of unpublished manuscript, Dickinson Archives and Special Collections, Dickinson College Library

[3] “Mother M. Katharine Drexel Visits Carlisle,” The Red Man, February 1911, vol. 3, no. 6, 307, photocopy, in Katharine Drexel Collection, L16.0083, Cumberland County Historical Society Archives, (Carlisle, PA).

[4] Katharine Drexel to the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, 1898, in “Used Trumpets: The Letters of Blessed Katharine Drexel SBS and Reverend Doctor Hanry G. Ganss 1892-1912,” L2013.037.002, Cumberland County Historical Society Archives, (Carlisle, PA): 19-21.

[5] “Mother Drexel: Just Two Miracles Away from Sainthood” Bucks County Courier Times, 2 February 1987, photocopy of excerpt, in Katharine Drexel Collection, L16.0083, Cumberland County Historical Society Archives, (Carlisle, PA).

[6] Drexel to SBS.

[7] Zachary M. Schrag, “Historians’ Ethics.” In The Princeton Guide to Historical Research, (Princeton University Press, NJ, 2021): 24–36, [JSTOR].

An assignment that requires you to only use one database seems simple, right? My advice for those beginning to do research in the Ancestry database is to lower your expectations and your ego. Until you get into the groove of things, it can seem like a grueling process that is taking you in circles, and there are even moments like this when you think you have everything figured out. Throughout the research process for this journal, I learned the importance of sufficient background research on the subject and proper utilization of search engines. These two issues caused frustration in my research as they became intertwined, and ultimately, I learned that the more knowledge you have before beginning archival research, the easier it will be to choose keywords successfully, which will make all of the difference. Whether your search is in a database or in person, it is impossible to look for anything if you don’t actually know what you’re looking for.

Beginning with a simple google search of James Miller McKim, I found the House Divided Project: Dickinson and Slavery biographical webpage for McKim. This gave me a basic overview of his life, the time periods I should expect to be looking at, and the locations that he would have lived. He grew up in Pennsylvania, registered as a Presbyterian minister in the 1830s, became a dedicated abolitionist soon after, eventually settled down in Philadelphia, and died in 1874.[1] With this information I thought I would be able to successfully search in databases, but came up short with results for “James Miller McKim” in the Pennsylvania Newspaper Archive and Early American Newspapers, 1690-1922. This is the moment in which I learned the importance of using database search engines to their full ability. After a bit of confusion about my results, I realized that I needed to search for the exact phrase “James Miller McKim” to avoid the random results. However, this also didn’t solve my problems, because there were only two results in the Pennsylvania Newspaper Archive featuring this name. As a public figure in Philadelphia, it didn’t seem quite right for there to be so few mentions of McKim in the news, but I had no reason to think I was still searching the wrong terms.

I decided to focus solely on Ancestry, where I seemed to be finding the most documents, but even on this one database, only a few out of 270 thousand results were about the right man. I would soon come to find out that almost every result that truly was McKim would be a record of his death, of which there are many. At this point in my research, I wasn’t taking notes, which was not a choice I would make again. During this process I learned that writing down any dates, locations, and names that you encounter should be noted, just in case they can come into use later. Even without writing dates down, I quickly read enough to remember McKim’s birth in 1810. Implementing his birth and death into the Ancestry database advanced search narrowed the results from 270 thousand to 17 thousand documents. This seemed to be helpful for a while, but I was still brought in circles between the many, many obituaries for McKim.

In an attempt to escape McKim’s death, I started to look for school records of his time at Dickinson, and realized I needed to know what year McKim graduated. My big breakthrough in research came from this google search, which led me to the Dickinson College Archives & Special Collections website. I did get the graduation date I was looking for, 1828, but I also learned that McKim was referred to by his middle name, at least early in his life.[2] This gave me a new search term that I thought would help me learn more about his time at Dickinson, but actually resulted in documents spanning McKim’s entire adult life. As it turns out, almost every document refers to him as J. Miller McKim, or J. M. McKim, which were likely buried far into the search results for somebody named James.

With new outcomes that accounted for McKim’s different names, I was able to piece together a more intact story of his life. After graduating from Dickinson College, James Miller McKim became a member of the Carlisle Presbyterian Church in 1831 as a minister and is categorized in church records to have joined “by profession.”[3] Another church record states that McKim left that church by dismissal, not by death or suspension, which leads me to assume that he left this position because he was moving to Philadelphia.[4] By 1840, McKim was living in Philadelphia, PA.[5] On October 1, 1840, he married Sarah A. Speakman of Chester County, PA in Chester County, but he is said on this certificate to be from Philadelphia.[6] U.S. Census data from Philadelphia in 1850 tells us the members of the McKim household at this time; the family includes James, Sarah, three children, Anna, Lucy, and Charles, and two Irish women in their mid-twenties, presumably maids.[7] The Census categorizes McKim as a publisher, which aligns with a newspaper article from The Ram’s Horn in 1847 that lists him as a co-creator of Frederick Douglass’ proposed anti-slavery newspaper.[8] I did not, however, see any further mentions of this publication. There are several annual tax records confirming McKim’s residence in Philadelphia, the last of which is from 1866.[9] This causes me to think that he chose to move after his participation with Civil War abolitionist groups came to an end. The record closest to McKim’s death in 1874 is his will, written on November 20, 1872.[10] This record was difficult to read, but I also found a copy of McKim’s will, created after his death, that was much more accessible. This copy was found in the Register of Wills from Erie County, PA, written in 1884.[11] McKim left 500 dollars to Ann McKim, likely his youngest daughter, as she doesn’t receive any part of his estate. He gave 400 dollars to a woman named Ellen M. [Yandly?], and 100 dollars to his brother, John McKim.[12] McKim split his estate between Sarah, Charles, and other daughter, Lucy, with the executors of the will being Sarah, Charles, and Lucy’s husband, a man named Wendell P. Garrison.[13] James Miller McKim died on June 13, 1874 in West Orange, New Jersey, and is buried at Rosedale Cemetery in nearby Montclair, NJ.[14]

[1]  “James Miller McKim,” Dickinson and Slavery, accessed April 3, 2025, https://housedivided.dickinson.edu/sites/slavery/people/james-miller-mckim/.

[2] “Class of 1828,” Archives & Special Collections, accessed April 3, 2025, https://archives.dickinson.edu/college-history-people-alumnusalumna-class-year/class-1828.

[3] First Presbyterian Church (Carlisle, PA), Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Historic Pennsylvania Church and Town Records, March 19, 1831, reel: 275 [Ancestry.com].

[4] First Presbyterian Church (Carlisle, PA), Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Historic Pennsylvania Church and Town Records, 1831, reel: 275 [Ancestry.com].

[5] J Miller McKim, “record of marriage for J Miller McKim and Sarah A Speakman, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Historic Pennsylvania Church and Town Records, Oct 1 1840 [Ancestry.com].

[6] “Record of marriage,” 1831.

[7] U.S. Census Bureau, United States Federal Census, The National Archives: Washington, DC, 1850, series: M432, roll: 818, record group: 29, page: 443a [Ancestry.com].

[8] U.S. Census Bureau, 1850.; Frederick Douglass, “Prospectus for an Anti-Slavery Paper, to be Entitled, North Star,” The Ram’s Horn, November 5, 1847, 3:4, Library of Congress [Ancestry.com].

[9] Internal Revenue Assessment Lists for Pennsylvania, 1862-1866, The National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC, Records of the Internal Revenue Service, 1792-2006, May 1866, series: M787, roll: 27, description: District 5, record group: 58 [Ancestry.com].

[10] Last will and testament of James Miller McKim, Surrogate’s Court (Essex, New Jersey), Probate Records 1794-1902, November 20, 1872 [Ancestry.com].

 

[11] Certified copy of the last will and testament of James Miller McKim, Register of Wills (Erie County, Pennsylvania), Will Books, 1823-1916, October 4, 1884 [Ancestry.com].

[12] Copy of the last will and testament, 1884.

[13] Copy of the last will and testament, 1884.

[14] Rosedale Cemetery (Montclair, Essex County, New Jersey), Find A Grave (https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/147168969/james-miller-mckim?_gl=1*1jszdfs*_gcl_au*NjQxMzc2NjY1LjE3NDI0NDA1OTQ.#source: accessed on April 3, 2025), entry for James Miller McKim [Ancestry.com].

 

Tracing the journey of formerly enslaved individuals across America during the tumultuous years of the Civil War is a daunting task. Because many were illiterate, personal documents are often scarce, making it difficult to reconstruct their lives. Understanding their unique stories requires a combination of educated guesswork, primary documents, and extensive secondary research. Ancestry.com serves as a valuable resource, offering a vast collection of records, including birth and death certificates, enlistment papers, and other official documents. Depending on the depth of available records, it can help piece together a rough timeline of an individual’s life. However, enslaved people were not included in the census, as they were not recognized as citizens. It is only after the Civil War, with the abolition of slavery, that newly emancipated individuals began appearing in official records. John and Charlotte Butcher exemplify both the successes and challenges of using Ancestry.com to uncover the lives of those who were minimally documented. Their story highlights the complexities of historical research and the importance of persistence in uncovering the past.

The False Positive 

Finding an individual on Ancestry often begins with a simple timeline of events accompanied by corresponding records. After your search Ancestry directs you to a separate page where all the relevant documents are plainly laid out. When researching the Butchers, I knew he had lived in Carlisle, and so I narrowed my search and found John Butcher. However, when I looked at the documents Ancestry displayed, apparently John Butcher lived in Suffolk, England before Carlisle.[1] This could not have been the case, but this particular false positive managed to sneak past the perimeters of my search. Evidently, two John Butchers were born in the 1830s and both married women named Charlotte, and the documents Ancestry had for John J’s English counterpart just so happened to plug the holes in his story. This particular false positive demonstrates the necessity of caution and thorough examination. While I knew the specific context of the Butchers that made this false positive entirely unconvincing, this might not always be the case. Successful researchers should take care to confirm every document displayed to them from Ancestry as often things can slip through the cracks.

Tracing Backwards

John and Charlotte Butcher’s journey across America is well documented. Since the Butchers had a recorded residency in Carlisle, locating the family was relatively straightforward. By searching for John Butcher in the Ancestry database with Carlisle, Pennsylvania, as a filter, I was able to eliminate most false positives. The Butchers were residents in Carlisle until at least the 1960s, with the death of Alice B. Butcher, after which their properties were sold by their remaining family members.[2] John Butcher died in 1919 after appearing on three censuses the 1880, 1900, and 1910, respectively.[3] His wife, Charlotte Butcher, died in 1941 after appearing in three more censuses than her husband.[4]

However, like any source, census records are not infallible. For instance, John Butcher’s birth date varies across multiple documents in Ancestry. In the 1880 census, he was listed as 43 years old, which would place his birth year at 1837. Similarly, in the 1910 census, he was recorded as 73, again suggesting a birth year of 1837. However, the 1900 census does not provide an age for John Butcher—only that he had been married to Charlotte for 39 years, dating their marriage to 1861. Looking at his death certificate from 1919, John’s birth year is recorded as 1831, and he is listed as 87 years old at the time of his death. Yet, his tombstone states that he was born in 1835. Which date is correct? The census records also reveal that John and his wife could not read or write, and at the time, census data was collected by representatives going door to door. Could each consecutive census have been inaccurate? What about his death certificate—who recorded that information, and who provided it? And why does his gravestone list 1835, a birth year that does not appear in any of the census records?[5] The story becomes clearer when John and Charlottes history as slaves is investigated.

Joseph M Barton

In a previous journal assignment, I set out to explore the wayside marker at the site of the former Butcher family residences, now a tot lot. Through this exploration, I uncovered their story—tracing their journey from enslavement in Virginia to their settlement in Cumberland County via secondary sources. During my research for that journal assignment, I discovered a series of sources from the Gardner Digital Library. In particular, the article “John J. and Charlotte Roy Butcher” became central to my effort to trace the Butchers’ history.[6] Initially, I used the information to summarize their lives. However, upon reexamining it for a more in-depth analysis of their experiences and historical context, I found myself interpreting much of the article in a new light. Interestingly, the article has John Butcher born in 1932 which is consistent with the death certificate. Nonetheless, the principal interest this article has for my Ancestry search was the similar research the Gardner Digital Library performed. They used the Ancestry records plus records from the Cumberland County Historical Society to push past the boundaries of Ancestry.com alone. For instance, they had access to John and Charlotte’s obituaries in The Evening Sentinel, sources that required a trip to the Cumberland County Historical Society Archives. I did not make this trip during my research for this project, instead choosing to focus on the sources I had access too on Ancestry. Most importantly the Gardner Digital Library uncovered an account in The Evening Sentinel describing an encounter John had with Joseph Barton, his former slave owner.[7]

Born in 1835 in Virginia, Joseph Marx Barton lived in Frederick County, where a Slave Schedule from 1860 records him as the owner of three enslaved individuals: a 28-year-old male, a 29-year-old male, and a 19-year-old female. While their names were not listed, the Gardner Library’s article suggests that the 28-year-old male and the 19-year-old female were most likely John and Charlotte Butcher.[8] I credit much of this discussion to the Gardner Library’s research. Their article serves as a strong example of how to piece together a story with limited documentation, as they continue to explore the Butchers’ lives within the broader context of enslaved individuals following the Union army’s occupation of Frederick County in 1863. Through secondary source research on slave refugees, they also trace the Butchers’ subsequent journey to Cumberland County.[9]

Takeaway’s 

Through Ancestry.com and the support of a secondary source, I was able to solidify my understanding of the Butcher family timeline. However, like all research topics, Ancestry.com left me with more questions than I had initially. Moreover, the Gardner Library provided little information on Joseph Barton or the interactions between John and his former master. This is the central question that has captured my attention. It must have been a profound experience to encounter someone who had once claimed ownership over you. How did this meeting between former master and former enslaved reflect race relations after the Civil War? How does this one experience relate to others like it? The answers to this question cannot be found on Ancestry. If there is one key takeaway from this journal entry, it is that while Ancestry is an excellent starting point, it is ultimately limited. Tracing the Butcher family’s journey from slavery to freedom in Carlisle will require far more research beyond census and death records.

 

 

[1] “John Butcher in the 1861 England Census,” Lowestoft, Census Returns of England and Wales, 1861, Public Record Office, The National Archives of the UK, London, England. [ANCESTRY.COM]

[2] “Alice B Butcher in the Pennsylvania, U.S., Death Certificates, 1906-1971,” series 11.90, Records of the Pennsylvania Department of Health, RG 11, Pennsylvania Historical and Medical Commission, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. [ANCESTRY.COM]; Gardner Digital Library, “The Butcher Family Children and Legacy,” (Gardner Digital Library: Cumberland Historical Society, 2014). [GDL]

[3] “John Butcher in the 1880 United States Federal Census,” Carlisle, Cumberland, Pennsylvania, Tenth Census of the United States, 1880, Record of the Bureau of the Census, RG 29, National Archives, Washington, DC. [ANCESTRY.COM]; “John Butcher in the 1900 United States Federal Census,” Carlisle, Cumberland, Pennsylvania, Twelfth Census of the United States,  1900, United States of America, Bureau of the Census, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC. [ANCESTRY.COM]; “John Butcher in the 1910 United States Federal Census,” Carlisle, Cumberland Pennsylvania, Thirteenth Census of the United States, 1910, Record of the Bureau of the Census, RG 29, National Archives, Washington, DC. [ANCESTRY.COM]; “John J Butcher in the Pennsylvania, U.S., Death Certificates, 1906-1971,” series 11.90, Records of the Pennsylvania Department of Health, RG 11, Pennsylvania Historical and Medical Commission, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. [ANCESTRY.COM]

[4] “Charlotte Butcher in the 1880 United States Federal Census,” Carlisle, Cumberland, Pennsylvania, Tenth Census of the United States, 1880, Record of the Bureau of the Census, RG 29, National Archives, Washington, DC. [ANCESTRY.COM]; “Charlotte Butcher in the 1900 United States Federal Census,” Carlisle, Cumberland, Pennsylvania, Twelfth Census of the United States,  1900, United States of America, Bureau of the Census, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC. [ANCESTRY.COM]; “Charlotte Butcher in the 1910 United States Federal Census,” Carlisle, Cumberland, Pennsylvania, Thirteenth Census of the United States, 1910, Record of the Bureau of the Census, RG 29, National Archives, Washington, DC. [ANCESTRY.COM]; “Charlotte Butcher in the 1920 United States Federal Census,” Carlisle, Cumberland, Pennsylvania, Fourteenth Census of the United States, 1920, Record of the Bureau of the Census, RG 29, National Archives, Washington, DC. [ANCESTRY.COM]; “Charlotte Butcher in the 1930 United States Federal Census,” Carlisle, Cumberland, Pennsylvania, Fifteenth Census of the United States,  1930, United States of America, Bureau of the Census, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC.[ANCESTRY.COM]; “Charlotte Butcher in the 1940 United States Federal Census,” Carlisle, Cumberland, Pennsylvania, Sixteenth Census of the United States,  1940, United States of America, Bureau of the Census, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC. [ANCESTRY.COM]; “Charlotte Roy Butcher,” Union Cemetery, Cumberland County, Carlisle, Pennsylvania. [FINDAGRAVE]

[5] “John Butcher in the 1880 United States Federal Census,” Record of the Bureau of the Census. [ANCESTRY.COM]; “John Butcher in the 1900 United States Federal Census,” Bureau of the Census. [ANCESTRY.COM]; “John Butcher in the 1910 United States Federal Census,” Record of the Bureau of the Census. [ANCESTRY.COM];  “John J Butcher in the Pennsylvania, U.S., Death Certificates,” Records of the Pennsylvania Department of Health. [ANCESTRY.COM]; “John J Butcher,” Union Cemetery, Cumberland County, Carlisle, Pennsylvania. [FINDAGRAVE]

[6] Gardner Digital Library, “John J. and Charlotte Roy Butcher,” (Gardner Digital Library: Cumberland Historical Society, 2014). [GDL]

[7] Gardner Digital Library, “John J. and Charlotte Roy Butcher.” [GDL]

[8] “Joseph M Barton in the 1860 United States Federal Census,” Population Schedule Frederick County, Virginia, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC. [ANCESTRY.COM]; “1860 U.S. Federal Census – Slave Schedules,” District 8, Frederick, Virginia, Eighth Census of the United States, 1860, Bureau of the Census, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC. [ANCESTRY.COM]

[9] Gardner Digital Library, “John J. and Charlotte Roy Butcher.” [GDL]

Katharine Drexel: Founder, Philanthropist, Prisoner?

Combing through genealogical databases requires a positive attitude, a keen eye, and a sense of humor. The positive attitude is to keep you motivated when information and sources are scarce, of poor quality, or little obvious use; the keen eye is for finding useful and interesting items; and the sense of humor is for maintaining your positive attitude when your mistakes or the inadequacy (or inaccuracy) of sources begins to get you down.
I knew if I wanted to find documents pertaining to Mother (Mary) Katharine Drexel in her youth I would have to use her name prior to her taking vows: Catherine Mary Drexel, which is what I put into Ancestry.com.[1] I tried a few other spelling variations, using vs. omitting her middle name, etc. but many of the results were obituaries behind a paywall from Newspapers.com or false positives: both her names were incredibly common, even just within the Drexel family. It felt like an agonizing game of trial and error for what combination of name spelling and degree of exactness I should search with. Moreover, I didn’t want to limit it to Philadelphia or PA, lest I miss anything from while she was living or visiting elsewhere, though eventually I changed my tune and found greater success.
I took a brief pause and looked at ProQuest and a few other niche databases such as Documenting White Supremacy and its Opponents in the 1920’s, looking for newspaper articles on Drexel, specifically for personal articles, obituaries, etc. My favorite find was her petition to Roosevelt to sign the Anti-Lynching bill, but this and similar items were less suited to this assignment which focuses more on genealogy, though I can still use this in later research, so it’s not a loss.[2]
I should admit that the whole time I was really hoping to find a birth certificate or baptism record to prove her birth name, so that was my focus when I returned to Ancestry. Instead of putting “Catherine Drexel” into the search though, I put in her father’s name, “Francis Anthony Drexel.” Francis’ name should be with hers on censuses until his death, as well as on birth records and so on, but could come up better in searches, so it seemed worth a try. This brought me three more census results, two for 1870 and one for 1880, which had M. Katharine listed as Katie and Catharine. Alas, still no birth record, so I returned to trying variants of Kate and Catherine.

Often when these documents get digitized, AI or other programs are used to read the (sometimes hardly legible) handwriting. On the 1930 census, the AI interpreted “President” as “Prisoner”—certainly not the role you would expect for a saintly nun, but a good reminder to not only read the transcripts.[3] Others were more mild, tagging “Catharine” as “Cathaine” or “Drexel” as “Dregel.”[4] Some of these were then manually tagged with “(Mother) Katharine Drexel” but others were not and could have easily been missed without broadening the search to similar results, especially as without misreadings, her name was recorded as Katie, Catharine, Katharine, and Catherine, occasionally with an “M.” added for “Mary.”[5]

Then I found Kate M Drexel’s passport application. Kate was born May 15^th, 1861, three years after Mother Katharine (November 26^th, 1858), as per the SBS website.[6] I would have written it off quickly as a relative with a similar name, but attached to it was a note asking for passports for Kate M, Elizabeth L, and Lousie B, the same names and middle initials of the three daughters of Francis A Drexel both as per secondary sources and as in the census records.[7] The application also featured a description of Kate, which seems to match Mother Katharine pretty well, specifically “large” referring to her nose and “round” for her chin.[8] But for this passport to be hers, either the birthdate must be false, or her birthdate elsewhere must be false, which is unlikely as Katharine’s mother died the month following her birth.[9]

Now I really wanted to find a birth certificate. While I thoroughly doubted that her mother’s death was miss recorded or that she was actually the daughter of her father’s second wife, I wanted certainty. Census records show Katharine’s age matching a 1858 birth give or take one year—not three—pointing to a false passport application. Ancestry evidently did not have Katharine’s birth certificate or baptism record. I went back to the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament website in hopes they had cited something, but all the Archives page had was an announcement that they moved their archives in 2017 to the Catholic Historical Research Center of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia.[10] However, the biography section noted that Francis Drexel married his second wife, Emma Bouvier, in Old St. Joseph’s church.[11] It seemed possible that if they were married there, that Katharine was baptized there, too.

St. Joseph’s website had a similar message to the SBS website, however, it had links to the digitized collections put together by the Archdiocese’ Catholic Historical Research Center and the genealogical research service FindMyPast.[12] Dickinson does not pay for a subscription to this service, but I was able to make a free account, which strictly limited my access, but I was lucky, and my first search brought me directly to the baptism and birth record of Mother Katharine, dating her birth to “Nov 26, 1858.” Though, troublingly, it’s hard to make out if her name is Catharine or Catherine.[13] Still, I am amazed by how far things came from dead ends and false positives to dozens of documents, future research topics, and a genuine excitement to find more. First on my mind is answering why the false birthday on the passport application or was there another Kate M Drexel just three years younger than the Catholic saint going abroad with the saint’s sisters the same year the saint was meeting the Pope in Rome?[14]

[1] “Katharine Drexel,” Wikipedia, March 23, 2025, [WEB].

[2] “Requests that Franklin D. Roosevelt Promote Costigan-Wagner Anti-Lynching Bill.” In Department of Justice Classified Subject Files on Civil Rights, 1914-1949; Department of Justice General Records, Entry 112-B, Straight Numerical Files, #158260, 1934. [ProQuest].

[3] 1930 United States Census, Bensalem, Bucks Country, Pennsylvania, digital image s.v. “M Katherine Dregel,” [Ancestry].

[4] 1880 United States Census, Philadelphia, Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania, digital image s.v. “Cathaine Drexel,” [Ancestry]; 1930 US Census.

[5] 1870 United States Census, Philadelphia, Ward 08, District 23, Pennsylvania, digital image s.v. “Katie Drexel,” [Ancestry]; 1870 United States Census, Philadelphia, Ward 08, District 23 (2^nd enum), Pennsylvania, digital image s.v. “Catharine Drexel,” [Ancestry]; 1880 US Census.

[6] “St. Katharine Drexel,” Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, accessed March 27, 2025, [WEB].

[7] “St. Katharine Drexel,” SBS; 1870 US Census; 1870 US Census (2^nd enum); 1880 US Census; 1900 United States Census, Bensalem, Bucks Country, Pennsylvania, digital image s.v. “Katharine M Drexel,” [Ancestry]; 1910 United States Census, Bensalem, Bucks Country, Pennsylvania, digital image s.v. “Catharine M Dorexel,” [Ancestry]; 1920 United States Census, Bensalem, Bucks Country, Pennsylvania, digital image s.v. “Mother M Katharine Drexel,” [Ancestry]; 1930 US Census; 1940 United States Census, Bensalem, Bucks Country, Pennsylvania, digital image s.v. “Catherine Dresel,” [Ancestry]; 1950 United States Census, Bensalem, Bucks Country, Pennsylvania, digital image s.v. “Catherine M Drexel,” [Ancestry].

[8] U.S. Passport Applications 1795-1925, July 1886, digital image s.v. “Kate M Drexel,” [Ancestry].

[9] “Hannah Jane Langstroth Drexel,” Find a Grave, accessed March 27, 2025, [WEB]; “St. Katharine Drexel,” SBS.

[10] “Archives,” Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, accessed March 27, 2025, [WEB].

[11] “St. Katharine Drexel,” SBS.

[12] “Genealogy,” Old Saint Joseph’s Church, 2023, [WEB].

[13] “Philadelphia Roman Catholic Parish Baptisms,” Philadelphia, Philadelphia South, Pennsylvania, 1858, FindMyPast, [FindMyPast].

[14] “St. Katharine Drexel” SBS.

St. Katharine’s Hall Wayside Marker

It’s a crisp February day, and the sun is finally showing its face again. In the sunlight, it feels almost like spring. A brisk walk from campus, with admittedly a few wrong turns, brought me to St. Katharine’s Hall and the wayside marker in front commemorating the site. Situated beside the old St. Patrick’s Church, now called the Shrine Church, is the hall built at the directive of Katharine Drexel, as a location for teaching the Native Americans at the Carlisle Indian School. [1]

Drexel was born in 1858 as the heir to an incredibly rich and prominent family in Philadelphia. She was raised firmly in the Roman Catholic faith. After her father’s passing in 1885, Drexel and her sisters inherited his $15 million-dollar estate.[2] In 1889, Drexel made her monastic vows, adding the additional vow to be a “mother and servant of the Indian and Negro races” which is quoted on the marker in front of her hall in Carlisle. [3] Using her immense wealth, Drexel traveled about the nation funding, promoting, and teaching at schools for Black and Native American children.[4] St. Katharine’s Hall in Carlisle was one of these schools.

Being far more familiar with the more infamous legacy of the Indian boarding schools, generally hearing about them in the context of phrases like “cultural genocide,” “forced assimilation,” or, worse yet, with Captain Pratt’s quote “kill the Indian and save the man,” I was instantly perturbed by what I saw as benign platitudes on the wayside marker.[5] I immediately painted Drexel as the stereotypical cruel nun, with high standards and harsh punishments, paired with images of Native students being taken from their families and having their hair cut forcibly. Not a pretty picture—nor an accurate one.

Drexel was certainly guilty of a “White Savior” bias, believing that she was “saving souls” particularly, she said “‘in the case of a pagan people, [where] the children may carry into the home the lessons of faith and morality’” taught at the schools she funded.[6] For this reason though, she favored building schools on reservations, allowing students to stay with their families. Some Native communities recall her mission sites as “places of abuse and neglect,” while others are considered “models of cooperation and cultural enrichment.”[7] Though none of these schools were nearly so infamously problematic as the Carlisle Industrial school.[8] It is also worth noting that despite the way it sounds from the marker, she did not actually work at the Carlisle Indian School itself, rather at the hall bearing her name where she provided only religious education to specifically the Catholic students at the Indian School, which was otherwise Protestant affiliated.[9] The “Select Free Colored School” and many of her other schools provided academic education primarily with religious and moral education as well.[10]

While some would argue that her bias alone makes her a participant in culturicide, I would argue that she was more so a bystander to the attempted eradication of the Native American culture, having worked so near to schools like the Carlisle Indian School, allowing them to commit abuses. Still, in the 21^st century there is a hesitance to honor individuals involved with the Carlisle Indian School or the early 20^th century Indian education initiative in general because of the stains of racism and abuse on the initiative as a whole. However, this marker was put up by the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament—which was founded by St. Katharine—not a government or secular organization, making it seem less out of place.[11]

The marker looks remarkably similar to those put up by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, though. (See the image of St. Patrick’s Church marker for reference.)[12] Both are dark blue, rectangular, with a flourish at the top, etc. The one for St. Katharine’s Hall has a different insignia on top, though, because it is not a state ordained marker, as those by the Commission are. Other historical markers in Carlisle that aren’t put up by the state come in different colors or shapes to differentiate themselves, such as the “Hot-Chee Dogs” marker by the Hamilton Restaurant.[13] The marker for St. Katharine’s Hall seems to be attempting to emulate the official historical markers, as though by doing so it presents itself with greater authority and importance.

It may seem that up to this point, I have neglected Drexel’s service to the African American community as noted on the marker. That is because I wanted to end on a wholly positive note. This marker clearly wanted to remember the good work that Drexel did in her life. It instantly led me to skepticism because of its proximity to and mention of the infamous Indian School. While her involvement with Indian schools is checkered, her work with the African American community could be called patronizing at the worst. She stood up for anti-lynching bills, fought against racial profiling, and she educated Black youths without expecting their conversion to Catholicism in return. Being positioned across the street from Carlisle’s historic Bethel African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Church, it’s a pity the marker didn’t give greater emphasis on Drexel’s egalitarian work.[14]

Coming at the marker with so much historical, emotional baggage, I felt that the wording of the marker was trying to praise someone with their flowery vow to conceal the reality of their work. Whereas, in reality, the marker’s use of her monastic vow is problematic for an entirely different reason: the vow was spoken before she had actually done the service to the Black and Native American communities, so it fails to really convey the full depth of her service. I wish instead it spoke plainly to her devotion to education and equality, admitting where at times it was misguided but using that to emphasize her opinions on equality that were actually quite progressive at the time. Ironically, a more secular and nuanced marker would paint Drexel as more of a saint than the current one because readers would find it more believable and be able to more fully honor and commemorate her for the truly impressive human that she was.

 

[1] “About Us—St. Patrick Church,” St. Patrick Church, Carlisle, last modified 2020, accessed February 28, 2025, [WEB]; Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament (S.B.S.), “St. Katharine’s Hall,” marker (Carlisle, PA).

[2] Amanda Bresie, “Mother Katharine Drexel’s Benevolent Empire: The Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions and the Education of Native Americans, 1885–1935,” in Remapping the History of Catholicism in the United States, ed. David J. Endres, Catholic University of America Press, 2017), 72,  [JSTOR]; “St. Katharine Drexel,” Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, accessed March 2, 2025, [WEB].  

[3] Rachel Bulman, “‘Think It, Desire It, Speak It, Act It’: St. Katharine Drexel on Racial Equality,” Word on Fire, March 3, 2021, [WEB]; S.B.S., “St. Katharine’s Hall”

[4] Bresie, “Mother Katharine Drexel’s Benevolent Empire,” 71-94; Bulman, “‘Think it, Desire It, Speak It, Act It’”

[5] Arnold Krupat, “Introduction,” in Boarding School Voices: Carlisle Indian School Students Speak, (University of Nebraska Press, 2021) xiv-xv, [JSTOR].

[6] Bresie, “Mother Katharine Drexel’s Benevolent Empire,” 92.

[7] Bresie, “Mother Katharine Drexel’s Benevolent Empire,” 93-94.

[8] Krupat, “Introduction,” xiii-xxx.

[9] Amanda West, “St. Patrick Church and the Indian School” Dickinson College Wiki, last modified December 13, 2007, 00:18 [WEB].

[10] Elisabeth Davis, “‘Our Colored and Indian Charges Furnish So Much Amusement for Us’: Catholicism, Assimilation, and the Racial Hierarchy in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, 1883–1918,” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 91, no. 1 (2024): 47–64. [Scholarly Publishing Collective]

[11] S.B.S., “St. Katharine’s Hall”

[12] Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Comission, “St. Patrick’s Church” marker, Carlisle, PA, 1986.

[13] Shane Oliver, “Hot-Chee Dogs,” Historical Marker Database, last updated July 12, 2022, updated by Carl Gordon Moore Jr., [WEB].

[14] Bulman, “‘Think It, Desire It, Speak It, Act It’; Davis, “‘Our Colored and Indian Charges’”; For more on the Bethel A.M.E. Church’s history see “200 Years of History” Bethel AME Carlisle, 2025, [WEB].

The coolest primary source find I came across while researching Christopher Miniclier ’57 was the Associated Press Name/Subject Card index, which organized the articles AP authors had written by date under their author. It was the key to figuring out Miniclier’s story. Reading through the article titles alone is enough to get an idea of what he experienced, but its research value is so much more than that.

It was a real cipher, both in the sense that it was like a code and in the sense that it symbolized his impact on the public perception of events. I decided to look deeper into the index as a case study of historical research: what did they represent? who saw them? what did they not say? what contradictions could they give up? More importantly, what conclusions could I draw from my analysis of them? (And most importantly, how much could I work on the project at the same time as doing research for my thesis?)

Being an index, the cards did not tell me nearly enough information to tell what was going on when Miniclier was writing his articles; they could only point me to other things. While I was organizing my database of evidence, I had to do some on-the-fly historical research: many of the titles in his Name/Subject index cards contained names with which I was unfamiliar. He had spent seven years as a foreign correspondent in Northern Africa and the Middle East in the late 1960s/early 1970s, and he’d written about coups, wars, tenuous alliances, drought and political assassinations—there was a lot going on.

Conclusion #1: The cards didn’t have all the information I needed to understand their full value. But that much was obvious. They did, on the other hand, often hint just enough at something that I could either look up the article in a newspaper database or look up the figures, places and events the subject titles referenced.

For example, Miniclier wrote several articles about George and Joy Adamson, who were European wildlife conservationists in Kenya. Both would later be murdered.¹

I wanted to see what I could learn about Miniclier’s job as a reporter in general and a foreign correspondent in particular, so I used JumpStart to find some sources related to the Associated Press and foreign correspondents. Some parts of Ulf Hannerz’s Foreign News: Exploring the World of Foreign Correspondents were not relevant to my research, because they dealt with a later time period, but one passage particularly struck me:

On New Year’s Eve 2001, Leif Norrman (2001), in Cape Town, had a reflective piece in Dagens Nyheter, occasioned by a telephone call he had received from a young woman from a Swedish radio station. She was doing a program on foreign correspondent life (I was also on it) and asked him how his experience compared to that of foreign correspondents in the movies. He felt a bit embarrassed because it was not much like that. […] Yes, there were times of fright, and uncertainty, and the stench of dead bodies. But the most destructive part of a correspondent’s everyday life, he concluded, was emptiness: the emptiness that comes when one’s beat is out of focus, when nobody seems to care what happens there.²

The burden to “represent groups to spectators” who are quite far away is a heavy one.³ And as Hannerz points out, these representations often have to compete for primacy in the public sphere, shared by a public that may be interested in the goings-on around the correspondent, but not necessarily more so than they are the goings-on around themselves.⁴  Hannerz (and Norrman) articulate a tension between “communication” and “publicity,” where communication—what the foreign correspondent may wish to engage in—involves a transmission of information, and publicity involves a sense of shared spectatorship.⁵

This aspect of publicity is effected by the newspaper medium, which visibly and invisibly links acquaintances and strangers alike by creating “a collectivity consisting of strangers who realize each other as the spectators of the same thing,” because newspapers, and the “pieces” of news they contain, are understood to be distributed among the public.⁶

Conclusion #2: The index represents not just Miniclier’s story but an impression of his audience (including the AP) and their impact on him; it is the story of a negotiation between their expectations and his work.

Skimming through the two databases that list articles Miniclier wrote—the Associated Press Name/Subject card index and Newspapers.com—I noticed that many of the articles I was finding in the newspapers were not the same ones listed in the AP index. Most of the ones listed in the AP index were published without a byline that named Miniclier, instead giving the location (“Nairobi, Kenya (AP)”). The hiddenness of the author contributes to the publicity of whatever event the article describes, and it obfuscates any personal bias or subjectivity on the part of the author.

Yet, some people obviously knew which articles Miniclier had written. The AP Name/Subject Card index, then, is the site of a power differential between the author (Miniclier), the Associated Press and the two groups—his countrymen/reading public and the people he wrote about—for which Miniclier was, in a way, responsible.⁷ It is a removed site, placed out of reach of the general public, and even out of reach to those who have access to archival databases, because deciphering the story still requires effort. Removed sites, though, are still accessible.

Conclusion #3: The index disrupts the publicity/passive spectacle of current events/history built up by the uncredited AP articles by assigning subjects to their authors, grouping titles together by author and date to create a subjective narrative.

That’s what the work of history is about: it’s the grouping of facts that counts more than the finding.

If journalists manipulate time, lists that put the events journalists write about right next to each other condense it even further, creating a strange temporality.⁸ Events just keep on happening. Or, if one pays attention to the dates next to each subject listed in the index, sometimes there are gaps between articles that last months. Did nothing happen? Were the events put on hold for a bit? Because newspapers report on things of note, descriptions of the everyday are likely to be only incidental to setting the scene.

The subject lines for 1971-74, during which years Miniclier was in Egypt, reference the 1973 war between Egypt and Israel. They don’t mention what was doubtless another topic of much discussion among the residents of Cairo: the monthly radio concerts by Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum that were broadcast all over the Arab world, and that singer’s illness and death in the latter half of Miniclier’s stay.⁹ Did Miniclier and his family listen to these concerts? How immersed were they in the culture of the countries he reported on? The articles don’t tell us very much.

Conclusion #4: By grouping together all the articles in a (relatively) full list, the index betrays what storylines were privileged over others, and gestures toward the ways public perception is shaped by the intersection of political agendas.

I knew Miniclier’s time as a correspondent had to have been characterized by the Cold War. Although he was not near Vietnam, he probably felt its impact as a journalist: the New York Times and the Washington Post published the “Pentagon Papers,” documents about that war, in 1971, in a move that declared their control of public information against government interests.¹⁰

That wasn’t the first time a news company had used news as leverage or as property. Miniclier himself was employed by one of the organizations that worked to “establish control over news reports through contracts that excluded other providers,” a strategy that “shaped the business of news and competition” and put the investigation and dissemination of information firmly under the yoke of capital.¹¹

Conclusion #5: Even if certain storylines are privileged over others, the index reminds us researchers to be compassionate to the author of the source and to consider all nuances, no matter what the storyline is.

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[1] “Joy Adamson,” Britannica Academic, Accessed April 3, 2023, https://academic.eb.com/levels/collegiate/article/Joy-Adamson/485.

[2] Ulf Hannerz and Anthony T. Carter, Foreign News: Exploring the World of Foreign Correspondents (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 213.

[3] Ari Adut, “A Theory of the Public Sphere,” Sociological Theory 30, No. 4 (December 2012): 244.

[4] Hannerz, 213.

[5] Adut, 244.

[6] Adut, 244.

[7] James L. Baughman, “The Decline of Journalism Since 1945,” in Making News: the Political Economy of Journalism in Britain and America from the Glorious Revolution to the Internet, ed. Richard R. John and Jonathan Silberstein-Loeb, first edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 169.

[8] Hannerz, 208.

[9] Virginia Danielson, “The Voice of Egypt”: Umm Kulthūm, Arabic Song, and Egyptian Society in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 1.

[10] Baughman, 169.

[11] Heidi J. S. Tworek, “Protecting News Before the Internet,” in Making News: the Political Economy of Journalism in Britain and America from the Glorious Revolution to the Internet, ed. Richard R. John and Jonathan Silberstein-Loeb, first edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 198.

Bibliography

Adut, Ari. “A Theory of the Public Sphere.” Sociological Theory 30, No. 4 (December 2012): 238-262. [JSTOR]

Associated Press File Drawers of National, International, News Feature Name/Subject Cards, 1937–1985. Microfilm, 1114-1154. Associated Press Corporate Archives, New York, NY. [Ancestry.com]

Baughman, James L. “The Decline of Journalism Since 1945.” In Making News: the Political Economy of Journalism in Britain and America from the Glorious Revolution to the Internet. Edited by Richard R. John and Jonathan Silberstein-Loeb. First edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. [EBSCO]

Danielson, Virginia. “The Voice of Egypt”: Umm Kulthūm, Arabic Song, and Egyptian Society in the Twentieth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.

Hannerz, Ulf, and Anthony T. Carter. Foreign News: Exploring the World of Foreign Correspondents. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. [ProQuest]

“Joy Adamson.” Britannica Academic. Accessed April 3, 2023. https://academic.eb.com/levels/collegiate/article/Joy-Adamson/485. [BRITANNICA ACADEMIC]

Tworek, Heidi J. S. “Protecting News Before the Internet.” In Making News: the Political Economy of Journalism in Britain and America from the Glorious Revolution to the Internet. Edited by Richard R. John and Jonathan Silberstein-Loeb. First edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. [EBSCO]

“FM SECSTATE WASHDC,” the message read, “TO AMEMBASSY NEW DELHI.” Dated September 28, 1979, the telegram from the Office of the Secretary of State to Richard Smith contained only one line of message text: “KIT MINICLIER SAYS HE IS LOOKING FORWARD TO MEETING YOU ON OCT. 3.” It was signed merely “VANCE”—Cyrus Vance, then Secretary of State.¹

When I first saw this telegram in the Central Foreign Policy Files database in the National Archives on my initial search through the archive databases available through Dickinson, all I knew about Christopher “Kit” Miniclier was that he had graduated from Dickinson two decades before the message was sent, in 1957, and that he had written an editorial in the Dickinsonian protesting the dismissal of Professor Laurent R. LaVallee the year before that, in 1956.²  How had the Secretary of State come to know him?

An Intriguing Story

I had decided to do an preliminary search on Miniclier to see if there was any more to the LaVallee story from the perspective of students on campus, but my first stop—Ancestry.com—turned up a much more interesting story that held the key to deciphering the telegram. Among the passenger records detailing the travels of a teen-aged Christopher, his parents Louis and Lois, and other members of his family; the high school and college year books; the city directories; and the birth records were several Name/Subject index cards for the Associated Press, which list articles written by AP journalists. Under “Miniclier, C. C.” there were forty cards in all, from 1964 through 1978—a year shy of the telegram to New Delhi.

The first card has story titles like “Eric Goldman, the new idea man for Pres. Johnson” and “What’s a wife worth?” and the last lists “Institute for Religious Studies opens its doors (Peking),” but in between these are titles that reference places and political leaders in Burundi, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Israel, Jordan, Kenya, Libya, Nigeria, Palestine, Somalia, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, Yugoslavia and Zambia.³ As I skimmed through the cards, I quickly realized that Miniclier’s life was a story in its own right, independent of the LaVallee case. Here was a sprawling story about journalism, international politics and interpersonal ties—from Fairfax County, VA (where Miniclier attended high school), all over North Africa, and then back to Denver, CO, and through the turbulent years of the Cold War.

And in the middle of all that, Dickinson College: first during his undergraduate days, and then in 1979, when he sent an article describing his impressions of China to the Dickinson magazine after he became “the first American news agency journalist to be granted a working visa, and permission to travel extensively without a delegation” in the People’s Republic of China.⁴

Dickinsonian Editor… and Mermaid Player

In order to find out more about Miniclier’s time at Dickinson, I browsed the digital collection at the Dickinson College Archives and Special Collections, which gave me an idea of what materials would be easy to find and what might be lurking under the surface, so to speak. In addition to Miniclier’s 1979 article on China, I found a few photographs, including one that does not seem to come from a yearbook (though it is not in his drop file). The close-up of his face (right) helped me identify him in other places, such as photographs in the Microcosm yearbooks.

The Microcosm yearbooks were a great way to find out what sort of things Miniclier had been involved in on campus. His senior portrait was accompanied by his oft-used sayings and a list of his on-campus activities, which included the Mermaid Players (started the year before he arrived to campus) and ROTC.⁵ Searching through the Dickinsonian for his name proved not as fruitful as I had hoped, because the editors, including him, were listed on multiple pages. However, I was able to find out that he had majored in political science and minored in economics.⁶

At the Dickinson Archives, archivist Malinda Triller-Doran helped me find out more about Miniclier. Although the drop file for “Miniclier, C. C.” only contained the magazine article about China, Malinda knew that he had been in a production of Our Town in 1954.

There was a drop file for the production, which contained photographs, as well as a file for the 1954-1955 Mermaid Players season. Although only one photograph was labeled, I was able to identify Miniclier in other photographs. It turns out he was only a named character in one production that season—he was the “First Dead Man” in Our Town (and credited as “Kit Miniclier”).⁷ Tickets were 75 cents apiece.

My visit to the Archives didn’t turn up much that aided me in figuring out what had happened to Miniclier after he’d left Dickinson, but it gave me some background on him. I’d gotten a general sense of his character—actor, journalist, smiling in nearly every photograph. It was time to dig a little deeper.

Organizing Evidence

The AP Name/Subject Card Index had given me a good starting point for analyzing Miniclier’s journalistic activities. I headed to Newspapers.com to see what I could dig up there. Searching “Christopher Miniclier” brought up hundreds of results, most of them about our man. He’d authored so many articles! I had to scroll through the repetitive ones—“What’s a wife worth?” must have been reprinted in at least thirty papers. There were a few that were credited to him that matched the ones in the AP Name/Subject Card Index. One thing I learned by browsing through those newspapers, though, is that articles weren’t always attributed to an author. One article would have “by Christopher Miniclier (AP)” printed at the top, but the next one would simply say something like “Nairobi (AP)” without crediting an author.

Being able to see not only the individual articles but also the whole pages on which they appeared helped me to see the context in which the articles might be read. Sometimes they appeared next to sensational stories of murder. Sometimes they were the sensational stories—Miniclier himself wrote about coups, wars, child murderers, famine and assassinations—and appeared next to advertisements for baby clothes. I guess not much has changed in that respect—the biggest differences between that kind of newspaper and Twitter are the time-frame and format—but a lot has changed in the world since Kit was acting in plays at Dickinson, and Miniclier was right there in the middle of it, documenting, analyzing and exploring.

How many articles did Miniclier actually write, and where did he actually go? To get a sense of the scope, I picked out some of the more interesting articles gleaned from Newspapers.com and put them in a database using Notion. I also input the headlines of the articles in the AP Name/Subject Card Index, as well as all the evidence I’d gathered so far. By noting the date of publication (or date of event) and tagging for region and source type, I would be able to organize the list of references in a timeline, or by region. For each entry, I included all relevant photographs and notes.

I didn’t only find articles written by Miniclier, though. Keeping in mind his nickname, I searched for both “Christopher Miniclier” and “Kit Miniclier” and found a few articles that mentioned him and his family. The earliest examples are from 1944, when he and his grandmother visited relatives in York County, PA. The “County” section of the September 6, 1944 Gazette and Daily included a segment “Brief News, Notes of Stewartstown,” which included the following paragraph:

Mrs. Arthur H. Carver and grandson, Kit Miniclier, Oak Park, ill., have returned home after spending several weeks here with Mrs. John H. Kurtz, Dr. and Mrs. Evans M. Free and other relatives and friends in this section.⁸

Twenty-four years later, on April 3, 1968, the same newspaper reported that Lois Carver Miniclier, Kit’s mother, was “fatally injured” in a car crash. Surviving her were her husband and three children, including Christopher, who was in Kenya for the Associated Press.⁹ I had collected the titles of the articles Miniclier had written during that year, but this new article put those in a new context. There was an emotional punch hidden in the puzzle of evidence that only revealed itself once I put the databases in conversation with each other.

A note on searching

With databases at our fingertips, it’s easy to get bogged down in the weeds of newspaper articles, passenger lists and duplicate records. Taking a step back can be helpful: big-picture stuff, things that wouldn’t be in an archive but are still primary sources for a biography. To get a sense of what was “out there” on the Internet, I asked Professor Google, and found a few more items of note, including an interview with Miniclier’s daughter and a 2020 death notice for his wife, Olga, whose photographs appear in the 1979 Dickinson magazine article about China.

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[1] Department of State to Embassy New Delhi, Telegram 255731, September 28, 1979, 1979STATE255731, Central Foreign Policy Files, 1973-79/Electronic Telegrams, RG 59: General Records of the Department of State, National Archives (accessed April 3, 2023). [AAD]

[2] “Without Due Process Can There Be Unity?,” Dickinsonian, 23 March, 1956.

[3] Associated Press File Drawers of National, International, News Feature Name/Subject Cards, 1937–1985, Microfilm, 1114-1154, Associated Press Corporate Archives, New York, NY. [Ancestry.com]

[4] C. C. (Kit) Miniclier, “No Fortune Cookies Here,” The Dickinson College Magazine 56, no. 2 (May 1979): 2.

[5] “Christopher Carver Miniclier,” Microcosm (1957): 67.

[6] “Miniclier heads 1956 ‘Dickinsonian,'” Dickinsonian, 13 January, 1956.

[7] Mermaid Players, Our Town program, 1 December, 1954, Mermaid Players, 1954-1955, Archives and Special Collections, Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA.

[8] “Brief News, Notes of Stewartstown,” The Gazette and Daily (York, PA), September 6, 1944, Newspapers.com.

[9] “Former Resident Of Stewartstown Killed in Crash,” The Gazette and Daily (York, PA), April 3, 1968, Newspapers.com.

Bibliography

Alesbury, Elizabeth. “What’s in a Name? Giving the PA Counterpart a Global Connection.” PAEA, August 25, 2015. Accessed April 3, 2023. https://paeaonline.org/resources/public-resources/paea-news/giving-the-pa-counterpart-a-global-connection.

Associated Press File Drawers of National, International, News Feature Name/Subject Cards, 1937–1985. Microfilm, 1114-1154. Associated Press Corporate Archives, New York, NY. [Ancestry.com]

Department of State to Embassy New Delhi, Telegram 255731, September 28, 1979. 1979STATE255731, Central Foreign Policy Files, 1973-79/Electronic Telegrams, RG 59: General Records of the Department of State, National Archives (accessed April 3, 2023). [AAD]

Fairfax High School. “Fair Facts.” Fair Fac Sampler. Fairfax, VA: 1952. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/farefacsampler1952fair/page/92/mode/2up. Accessed on April 3, 2023.

Mermaid Players. Our Town program, 1 December, 1954. 1954-1955, Mermaid Players, Archives and Special Collections, Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA.

Microcosm (1957).

Miniclier, C. C. “No Fortune Cookies Here.” The Dickinson College Magazine 56, no. 2 (May 1979): 2-4.

“Olga Johanna Miniclier.” Starks Funeral Parlor. Accessed April 3, 2023. http://www.starksfuneral.com/obituary/2389-v0nipvhxys.

Photograph of Christopher Carver Miniclier, 1957. Photograph Archives, Students, Archives and Special Collections, Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA.

“Brief News, Notes of Stewartstown.” The Gazette and Daily (York, PA), September 6, 1944. Newspapers.com.

“Miniclier heads 1956 ‘Dickinsonian.'” Dickinsonian, 13 January, 1956.

“Without Due Process Can There Be Unity?” Dickinsonian, 23 March, 1956.

“Former Resident Of Stewartstown Killed in Crash.” The Gazette and Daily (York, PA), April 3, 1968. Newspapers.com.

Beginning secondary source research, in my opinion, can be even tougher. But I have found two key takeaways, so far when it comes to secondary sources. One is that the difficulty in finding secondary sources comes in choosing the correct key terms- not too specific or too broad- and applying them to the correct databases. So, finding these terms and choosing the right databases is essential. Moreover, after class discussions and readings this semester, I have found it helpful to imagine the perfect source and then design key terms around what that source might include. For me, this came from developing good research questions, and then imagining the source that might perfectly answer that question.

War and Labor Board

For this project, I began by attempting to discover the role of Regional War and Labor Boards in the early 1940s. LaVallee served on one in Denver, and this is where he was accused of communist activities. As such, I figured it would be important to discover the roles he held and duties for which he was responsible. Honestly, in my original search, I could not find many sources that specifically dealt with regional labor boards and communism. So, I widened my search and tried to do some research on roles of the Regional War Labor Boards in general. This too was frustrating and produced few results.

It was then that I decided it was time to close my laptop and send an email to Professor Pinsker, asking for advice on where I might find more sources on this topic. The email was sent via scheduled send, of course, because at this point it was about 1:30am. When you find yourself in the dark, over an hour deep in failed searches about World War II labor administration, I’ve found it’s a good time to temporarily call it quits.

When I resumed the search at a more respectable hour, I realized that I might have to not only expand my topic, but also expand my database list. I had mostly limited my search to JSTOR and America: History & Life. When I expanded my search to Google Books (at Professor Pinsker’s suggestion), I was still not able to find much on regional labor boards. But, I did find a book which included a chapter on the National War Labor Board. Though it wasn’t exactly what I was looking for, it still gives me some information generally about War Labor Boards, and I know that I will keep trying, more creatively, as I continue researching.

Red Scare

Another main question I wanted to answer surrounded the role that communism played in universities during the Second Red Scare. For LaVallee, an academic accused of once being a communist sympathizer, the answer to this question would have been extremely influential. I was able to identify the correct combination of keywords and databases more quickly for this question and immediately got more hits than previous searches about the War Labor Boards.

Terms that worked for this second topic included: AAUP (including spelling out the acronym), Cold War, House Un-American Activities Committee, and the best term: academic freedom. Terms like WWII (spelled out) and communism seemed to confuse the search engine – I believe they were too broad either geographically or chronologically. Curiously, McCarthyism did not turn up many usable results. The combination of Cold War and academic freedom was particularly useful. Using JSTOR and America: History & Life I quickly found a few journal articles that loo

-ked worth my while. I expanded my search to Jumpstart, which produced a journal article, Google Books, which did not have much, and EbscoHost which generated a book that had a section dedicated to the topic.

Though this process was certainly frustrating, I think it taught and continued to remind me that it is important to keep topic in mind when you are deciding where you look for sources. Because of the nature of academic freedom as a topic, it makes sense that academics at universities would write about it. This explains the abundance of journal articles: the topic is directly pertinent to a large demographic that writes and researches in peer-reviewed sources. The first topic, though, is uber specific and seemingly lacks as natural an interested audience of historians and researchers. This means that I will have to be more creative in locating sources related to it.

A final quick takeaway: book reviews are your friend, especially in the initial stages of research! From the book review that I found, I know that I probably won’t read the whole book, but I did get some others in the historiography section that seem helpful and about half of the book sections look like they could be useful.

Once I had my sources organized, I went through them more carefully than a quick skim, and these were my findings:

One of the main contributions these sources made to my project was giving me more ideas for how to research the Times section of Life and Times. I would like to look into further O. John Rogge, a lawyer who fought against the House Unamerican Activity Committee and several other professors that were removed during the McCarthy era under the guise of being communists. I will be interested to see if these professors were granted a hearing by their universities because while LaVallee was, other professors were not even given that opportunity to defend themselves.

I want to learn more about the Hiss and Smith Acts and the following trials, as well as the other active institutions which fought for academic freedom such as the ACLU and Progressive Education Association. I would also like to find out if LaVallee was tenured as one of the articles discussed in detail the factors of public vs private institutions and tenured vs untenured status as protections for academic freedom.

Closing Thoughts and Discoveries:

First, the California Plan held that communists could not be employed at academic institutions, not because of their political beliefs, but because they had abandoned objectivity which, its creators hold as vital for employment in an academic institution. This plan guided institutions in their “trial” process and determined what due process meant in these situations.

Secondly, the sources also suggested that LaVallee’s case was not particularly out of character in students’ reactions to the situation. In other, similar, cases of the suspension/firing of professors, it seems as if students protest the removal intensely. However, the extreme faculty upset at Dickinson seems unusual for the time. In most cases, the administration is painted as paranoid villains, out to get pillars of academic freedom. Recognizing this narrative will help me in attempting to prevent bias when I write more about this story, myself.

Bibliography

“Academic Freedom – Censure List.” American Association of University Professors. Accessed March 27 2023. [URL]

Brown, Ralph S., Kurland, Jordan E. “Academic Tenure and Academic Freedom.” Law and Contemporary Problems 53, no. 3 (1990): 325-55.[JSTOR]

Cain, Timothy Reese. “’Friendly Public Sentiment’ and the Threats to Academic Freedom.” History of Education Quarterly 58, no. 3 (2018): 428-35.

Deery, Phillip. “Political Activism, Academic Freedom and the Cold War: An American Experience.” Labor History 98, (2010): 183-205. [JSTOR]

Franklin, RW. “Lessons from the Past Illuminate the Curran Affair: ‘No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities.’” Review of No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities, by Ellen Schrecker. College Teaching, 35, no.2 (1987): 50-52. [JSTOR]

Kersten, Andrew E. Labor’s Home Front: The American Federation of Labor During World War II. NYU Press, 2006. [Google Books]

McCumber, John. “Rationalizing Academic Repression: The Allen Formula.” In The Philosophy Scare, 135-153. Chicago University Press, 2016. [EbscoHost]