Recovering Black History in the Monadnock Region - Keene

The Recovering Black History in the Monadnock Region is a citizen-archivist project. The lead archivist, Jenna Carroll, the Director of Education at the Historical Society of Cheshire County, volunteers, and a Northeastern University-based research team are tracing the history of African Americans in the Monadnock region of New Hampshire from the 1730s to the 1930s. 

This site is a digital collection of material relating specifically to the Black history of Keene, a city in Cheshire County. The material has been located in regional digital and physical archives; it includes documents from censuses, vital records, newspapers, probate records, family papers, etc. to identify Black individuals and experiences in 19th century Keene.  Ellie Witham, a Public History Master's student at Northeastern University, created this site as part of the Digital Humanities certificate program, in collaboration with those researching Keene. Ellie Witham joined the project as a student researcher in June of 2023, joining Dr. Kabria Baumgartner and fellow Northeastern graduate students. Dr. Kabria Baumgartner is a professor at Northeastern University in Boston and a historian of the nineteenth-century United States, specializing in the history of education, African American women’s and gender history, and New England studies. She came onto the Keene project with the help of the Keene Heritage Commission and the Black Heritage Trail of New Hampshire, leading a team of student researchers from Northeastern University.

During the Fall 2023 semester, Ellie began building this OmekaS site as a part of the project, and the Digital Humanities Certificate program at Northeastern University. Ellie's goals for the webpage are as follows:

1. Organize primary source material for the Recovering Black History in the Monadnock Region as it relates to the city of Keene
2. Center Black experiences through collecting and metadata practices
3. Be able to use this primary source information to create exhibit pages to highlight the histories of Black individuals and families from Keene
4. Provide resources and tips for researching 19th century Black history in America
5. Highlight the work being done by the Recovering Black History project as a whole, and the contributions of community volunteers, citizen archivists, students, and scholars

Additions to the site are ongoing.