T H E.  H A R T F O R D.  S T U D I E S.  P R O J E C T.

The following feature story appeared in the campus publication MOSAIC in April, 2000.  Although some courses, students, and faculty members referenced in the story may have changed, it still provides a full and accurate picture of the Hartford Studies program.  For current course information and a faculty listing we encourage you to visit the program's homepage.

Studying Hartford’s past to create its future

Like many post-industrial cities across the nation, Hartford looks to the future across a complex present. A capital city with a vibrant mix of peoples, Hartford possesses powerful political, cultural, and financial resources. Yet, like cities elsewhere, it faces an array of social and economic challenges. Associate Professor of History Susan D. Pennybacker, an urban social historian, believes that if Hartford is to develop solutions for the future, it must look to its past to examine the particular political, social, economic, and demographic forces that have shaped the city since the late 19th century.

Pennybacker is director of the Trinity Hartford Studies Project (HSP). Since the early 1990s, the HSP has been discovering new and buried archival finds on the city’s cultural history, facilitating new scholarship on Hartford and its denizens, taking new documentary photographs to add to the historical record, and making historical resources available to researchers, students, archivists, activists, and regular citizens. Complementing its research activities are its outreach initiatives — exhibits, lectures, presentations, and publications on Hartford’s heritage. Pennybacker says that the HSP seeks to understand and explain "who and what came before as a way of clarifying and dealing critically with the city’s present situation."

An understudied city
The wide-ranging project began in 1989, when Pennybacker and two colleagues, Associate Professor of Sociology Stephen M. Valocchi and former faculty member James A. Miller, then the head of Trinity’s American studies program, recognized an exceptional teaching opportunity. "We realized that the recent history of the city was not being engaged curricularly," says Pennybacker. In response, they developed a course called "The History of Hartford, 1865–Present" and began sending students out into the city on research missions. Pennybacker and her colleagues also began establishing connections with many of Hartford’s most important institutions, such as the Connecticut Historical Society, the Hartford Public Library, and the Connecticut State Library.

Despite its prominence as a state capital and the wealth of historical resources pocketed in small collections throughout the Greater Hartford area, Pennybacker says that Hartford is a singularly "understudied" city. So, each year, the HSP helps to build upon a growing body of work, and Trinity students and faculty have been important contributors. In one massive research effort, Valocchi compiled oral histories of more than three dozen elderly people who had lived in Hartford during the Depression and who were representative of a variety of different ethnic groups. Since then, Trinity scholars have recorded oral histories of the politics of the 1960s and of the history of the West Indian community.

Visiting Assistant Professor of History Andrew Walsh ’79, who is assistant director of the Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life and currently co-teaches the history of Hartford course with Pennybacker, used the city’s resources for his 1996 Harvard University doctoral dissertation, "For Our City’s Welfare: Building a Protestant Establishment in Late 19th Century Hartford."

And the course that was the HSP’s genesis – and is still offered today -- requires students to conduct major research projects. One current student, Kelly J. Karcher ’01, an international studies/comparative development major, says that her project "focuses on the different uses of StateHouse Square and the transitions it has gone through historically." Karcher says that her research is based on archival material from the Hartford Courant, Hartford Times, and colonial records.

Sandra Wheeler M’93, coordinator of the HSP since 1995, states that researchers from all over the country use the HSP as a resource and a facilitator. "We act as a sort of clearinghouse for information," she says. "There are so many wonderful repositories in the city. We are neutral turf, and we have connections with so many other institutions that we’re able to let everyone know what everyone else is doing."

David Kahn, executive director of the Connecticut Historical Society, points out that while several organizations in the state have important holdings relating to Hartford, none has Hartford as its primary focus. In the absence of a Hartford historical society, he says, the HSP "fills something of a void." With its emphasis on bringing to light the hidden histories of Hartford’s African American, Latino, and West Indian communities, Kahn believes the HSP is "an important catalyst spurring research into the diverse ethnic history of Hartford."

The HSP's activities include retrieving historical materials that provide important primary sources for scholars. A few years ago Connecticut State Archivist Mark Jones traveled to Washington, DC, on a mission for the HSP. From the Library of Congress, Jones brought back to Hartford a variety of records and documents — a treasure trove for researchers — on the Hartford chapters of the NAACP and the Urban League.

Outreach
In recent years the HSP has found a variety of ways to share its resources with the Hartford community. Last year, the HSP teamed with the Hartford Public Library and the Hartford Courant’s Northeast magazine to sponsor the "Conversations with a Camera" exhibit. Displayed at the Hartford Public Library, Capital Community Technical College, and Hartford Stage, the exhibit included images of individuals and public gatherings in Hartford between 1945 and 1976 and depicted a vibrant city in transition.

Many of those images came from the photo "morgue" of the defunct Hartford Times newspaper and are part of the HSP’s 3,000-slide collection, which is used for presentations at schools, historical societies, and other outreach venues. Says Pennybacker, "These images really illustrate the progression of political and social events in the city from the post-Civil War to the present." Copies of the slides in the HSP’s collection are also kept in Trinity’s Visual Resources Collection, which plans to digitize images to make them more accessible to Trinity’s future researchers and students.

Images and feature articles derived from the HSP’s resources have been printed in Northeast magazine, a long-time collaborator. Steve Courtney, deputy editor at Northeast and an alumnus of the history of Hartford course, believes that in helping Hartford to know its history, the HSP has offered an intangible but real benefit. "A sense of place is something that helps give cities an identity," he says. "The Hartford Studies Project has given Hartford that sense of place."

Reaching out to other educators and local schoolchildren, the HSP worked with the Connecticut Humanities Council to develop a historical education curriculum that was taught to Hartford’s sixth-graders. In addition, local activists and teachers’ union officials serve as guest speakers for the history of Hartford course. Students in the course also take field trips to public schools to gain an understanding of the emergence of various communities in the 20th century and their involvement in the school system. "The HSP has deep roots in the schools," notes Pennybacker, "and many of our contacts and supporters are teachers."

Hope for a more livable city
In June, the HSP will co-sponsor with the Connecticut Historical Society the "Livable Cities" lecture series. Speakers from various U.S. cities will discuss innovative solutions and programs to combat the challenges that many urban areas face today — challenges that Hartford Studies Project participants believe must be viewed within an appropriate historical context. Every day on her way to work, Wheeler drives through the Rice Heights neighborhood and thinks about the HSP’s images showing construction of Hartford’s housing projects in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s. "It was such a hopeful, exciting time," she says. "There was the sense that this was going to solve a whole lot of problems. And now we’re tearing down those same projects because at this point in time we believe that is the solution to a whole lot of problems." She muses, "The past always seems like the Golden Age. The reality is that things have always been complicated — and difficult."

-Leslie Virostek