In the “Historian’s Workshop” seminar at the University of Richmond, our class has been working this semester to process boxes from the papers of Watkins Moorman Abbitt. Abbitt was a 1931 graduate of the University of Richmond law school who served in the U.S. Congress from 1948 to 1973. The collection consists of nearly 130 boxes and remains unprocessed, meaning no other archivists have gone through and organized or preserved the contents of each box. My fellow classmates and I, most of who are history majors, put our historian’s hats down and simultaneously picked up our archivist ones. In this experience, we learned about the importance of archivists, the challenges they face, the work of maintaining objectivity, and ultimately the importance of choosing and displaying the most important documents to the public. Continue reading
Author Archives: mattm
Community-controlled attractions: Locals wield more power than you think
From the 1830s to the Civil War, Richmond was the second largest slave-trading hub in the nation next to New Orleans. Shockoe Bottom, an area located along the James River, is one of Richmond’s oldest neighborhoods and was central in the slave trade. In a battle to preserve this Historic Slave Trade site, Ana Edwards, head of a coalition of scholars, artists, community activists, has argued recently that putting a minor league ballpark in Shockoe Bottom detracts from Richmond’s ability to come to terms with its slave past. Reasoning that if we do not deal with the slave trade history in Shockoe Bottom, Edwards continued, Richmond “will always struggle through this identity crisis that it has.” A museum in Shockoe Bottom would enable both local and national communities to interpret and examine Richmond’s role in the slave trade, shedding light on stories that deserve telling. In this, a slave trade museum or memorial site is important because it preserves the past and legitimatizes it by keeping the local communities incorporated in the past experiences. Continue reading