Session Highlights for the 2024 Mass History Conference

Session Highlights: Making the Invisible, Visible at the Mass History Conference

Publick Occurrences

April 3, 2024

 

How do we illuminate the people that history forgot? Join us at the Mass History Conference on June 3, 2024 to hear from presenters who are focused on telling the “invisible” stories of their communities.

Collaborators on the Chinatown Stories Project will present on a neighborhood that has been largely invisible and overlooked, and rarely narrated by the voices of its own people.  They will discuss how their project reveals the challenges and discrimination that Chinese faced during the Chinese Exclusion period and beyond, while narrating the building of the network of businesses, organizations, and residents that have created this strong community.

Collaborators Rediscover Mapledale and Interpreting Sports will highlight a community effort to preserve, research, and teach the story of the Mapledale Country Club, the first golf course and country club for Black golfers in Massachusetts. Despite its importance to Black history, the history of sport, and the history of Massachusetts, Mapledale has been all but forgotten. Presenters will discuss the challenges facing a locally-focused organization aimed at telling diverse stories in a racially homogeneous town as well as how we can broaden the use of sports history as a lens for challenging long held cultural ideologies.

Registration for this year’s Conference in Devens opens on April 16. We hope we’ll see you there!

The Mass History Conference is hosted by the Mass History Alliance and supported by the generous contributions of our sponsors, including:
Mass Humanities, Premier Conference Partner Massachusetts State Historical Records Advisory Board, Conference Partner Networking and Commons
University of Massachusetts Boston Graduate Studies in Public History
Scenes from the Revolution – A Quarter Millennial Musical
University Archives & Special Collections in the Joseph P. Healey Library, University of Massachusetts Boston Named Session Sponsor
Mike Potaski
The William G. Pomeroy Foundation Conference Supporter
Bridgewater State University
Freedom’s Way National Heritage Area
University of Massachusetts Amherst Public History Program Conference Friend
Dorchester Historical Society
Essex National Heritage Commission
Five College Center for East Asian Studies
Northeast Document Conservation Center
Robert Forrant
The House of the Seven Gables Conference Contributor
Belchertown State School Friends Association
Historic Boston Inc.
Historic Northampton
Lawrence History Center
Metropolitan Waterworks Museum, Inc.
Museum Textile Services
Old Colony History Museum
Seed Education Consulting
See Through Books Press
Swift River Press Public History and Communications
The Shirley-Eustis House Association
Tsongas Industrial History Center