Congratulations to the 2025 Bay State Legacy Award, Mass History Commendation, MHA STAR Award, and Rising Star Award recipients!
The Massachusetts History Alliance is proud to announce that the 2025 Bay State Legacy Award, presented to an individual who has made an outstanding contribution to the interpretation and presentation of Massachusetts history, is awarded to Timothy C. Neumann.
Tim Neumann has led the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association (PVMA), a small regional history museum in western Massachusetts, for fifty years as of 2025. Whether responding to community needs and partnering to create local programs or nationally-recognized websites, Tim inspires those he leads. His work is innovative and creative with grassroots partnerships, and educator and scholar collaboration. His many contributions include raising awareness of Native American histories through PVMA’s programs, responding to community members’ interest in recovering and sharing local African American history by launching multiple community partnerships, and working with local schools to develop one of the earliest museum education websites that has now served hundreds of thousands of educators. His nominator notes, “Tim Neumann has devoted his life to meeting the needs of his community and achieving PVMA’s vision that understanding the past makes better citizens and a better world.”
Tim Neumann is an outstanding historian that works hard to ensure Memorial Hall Museum (which is run by PVMA) is for everyone and anyone. 50 years as a leader in one of the oldest museums in Western Mass is a feat in and of itself. But continually morphing the museum to be relevant each decade is nothing short of amazing.
Learn more about the Bay State Legacy Award here.
Mass Humanities is honored to award the 2025 Mass History Commendation to the Porter Phelps Huntington Museum. The award recognizes excellence by a Mass Humanities grantee.
The Porter-Phelps-Huntington Foundation, Inc. is a unique historical resource for immersion in the lived experiences, complexities, and inequalities of this landscape. The Porter-Phelps-Huntington Museum of Hadley includes surrounding structures, gardens, agricultural property; furniture, textiles, and works of art; books, papers, photographs and related items, all pertaining to the history of a site known as “Forty Acres and its Skirts” on what had long been Nonotuck land.
The site interprets the histories of one extended family and the enslaved, indentured, and female laborers, Indigenous peoples, and free Black people associated with this site over a period of more than three hundred years. The Foundation partners with individuals and institutions to explore how history is made, and to evolve and influence the communal heritage of the Connecticut River Valley.
It hosts an ongoing discourse between the known and hidden histories of life in this place so that the collective experience will be fuller, richer, deeper — truer.
The former Baystate Historical League’s Local History Hero award was resurrected by the Massachusetts History Alliance in 2021 as the MHA Star Awards. With this award, we honor members of the history field who have demonstrated long term commitment, outstanding work with concrete results, exemplary innovation, local leadership for change, or contributions to equity and justice. MHA Star Awards are granted to Massachusetts people who have made outstanding contributions to the research and interpretation of the history of their communities. We call them our local history heroes. The winners of this year’s MHA STAR Awards are:
Lucy Allen – Historian – Barre, MA
Lori Austin – Plainfield Historical Society – Plainfield, MA
Charan Deveraux – Somerville Museum – Somerville, MA
Patricia J. Fanning – Old Parish Preservation Volunteers – Norwood, MA
Cinzi Lavin – Musical Dramatist – Hull, MA
To recognize those growing in their careers in the field of public history in Massachusetts, the Mass History Alliance instituted the MHA Rising Star Awards for the first time at the 2024 Mass History Conference. MHA Rising Star Awards are granted to Massachusetts people who have made or show promise of making outstanding contributions to the research and interpretation of the history of their communities, regions, or across the Commonwealth. MHA Rising Star Award recipients are recognized for commitment, outstanding work, innovative approaches, local leadership for change, or contributions to equity and justice in our state. Anyone who has been in the field for fewer than 10 years can be nominated – that can mean a young professional, student, volunteer, or someone who has recently made a career change into the local and public history field. The winners of the 2025 Rising Star Awards are:
Gregory Jundanian – Armenians of Whitinsville
Brie Zulkiewicz, Storrowton Village Museum
Plan to join us on Monday, June 2, 2025 to celebrate Tim Neumann, Porter Phelps Huntington Museum, all of our STAR and Rising Star Award honorees, and their dedication to preserving and interpreting Massachusetts history.
Register today for the 2025 Mass History Conference!
Image by Harry Lustig