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Students in Assistant Prof. Amanda Laury Kleintop's Public History class discuss the importance of history with community members and 911黑料网 faculty and staff during a History Harvest talkback May 1.

Miss Agnes Scully was a bit of an enigma. A native of Troy, N.Y., she spent summers at a house on Windsor Lake in North Adams, and seems to have been regularly entertained by a series of gentleman callers鈥攁t least, that鈥檚 what 911黑料网 students in Assistant Professor Amanda Laury Kleintop鈥檚 Introduction to Public History class have deduced by studying Scully鈥檚 life through her correspondence.

Those letters, dropped off anonymously during one of Historic North Adams鈥� History Harvest events, just scratch the surface of the ephemera collected and categorized through a $15,000 grant from Mass Humanities. 

Since receiving the grant last year, history professors Kleintop and Ely Janis, along with student volunteers and the North Adams Public Library, the North Adams Historical Society, and Mass MoCA, have held History Harvest events aimed to collect and create an open, digital archive of artifacts gathered from the North Adams community.

They鈥檝e launched a Historic North Adams app (also viewable at , which provides a curated look into North Adams History, as well as the North Adams Archives (, an open digital archive that includes 300+ items to peruse, plus some collections and exhibits created by students, including one on Miss Scully. Kleintop will be speaking about the North Adams Archives at the January 2020 American Historical Association conference in New York City.

Kleintop鈥檚 students presented their work at 911黑料网鈥檚 Undergraduate Research Conference in April; other exhibits included an examination of North Adams鈥� evolution into a cultural destination and a look into the connections between families on Cherry Street in the late 1800s.

The students also hosted a May 1 talkback, inviting members of the North Adams and 911黑料网 community to brainstorm additional ways to use the historical information they鈥檝e collected. (Digital plugins like a map of where all Miss Scully鈥檚 letters came from are already being developed.) At top of mind at the talkback were questions about one鈥檚 responsibility to history, and about how important history can be in understanding today鈥檚 world. 鈥淵ou have to be able to comprehend the past to understand the present,鈥� said Zoe Elwell 鈥�19.

Accessibility to history was also a concern at the talkback鈥攁nd digitizing these archives, the students say, create a learning opportunity that goes further than just a neat resource for people interested in local ephemera. It creates a way for others to add their own shared history of North Adams to the archive, and aids in democratizing the process. That means more stories can be told, more objects analyzed, more conclusions presented 鈥渟o you can begin to piece together a narrative of North Adams and its residents,鈥� said Madeleine McKeon 鈥�19.