We are researching the Geneseo archives to obtain a better understanding of how race and gender affected the history of Geneseo and the Geneseo experience. I speak for the rest of my student peers when I write that this is an incredible experience for a number of reasons.
As history majors, the research project is extremely valuable for us because it enables us to utilize skills we have learned in class, but on a greater level. For most of us, research for our classes stops at the library, online databases, and Inter Library Loan. Researching in an actual archive is a useful technique and skill that gives us a greater understanding of what it means to be a historian. It is about primary documents, and access to the archives has given us an opportunity to look at a number of precious primary documents, decipher which ones are relevant, and why. Some of the primary documents that we are working with in the archives include yearbooks, scrapbooks, old issues of The Lamron, Senate Committee minutes, and Student Association minutes, to name a few. We have focused our attention on examining the yearbooks and old issues of The Lamron to give us an idea of what names, dates, and places we should be paying attention to in our future research.
Since the beginning of the semester, we have been uncovering a number of interesting finds. Some of these finds include a picture of a group of African American men wearing Black Panther T-shirts, a Northern Student Movement activist group during the Civil Rights Movement, and campus discussions regarding the Rochester “Race” Riots. A common occurrence during our research has been the prevalence of black face throughout Geneseo’s history. In fact, in one of the 1929 edition of Oh Ha Daih, it reveals that Geneseo students participated in minstrel shows on campus.
Other students are enjoying their involvement with the project. Claire Ruswick expressed, “Researching specifically in our archives provides a view in the history of the college and I think it’s important for us as Geneseo students to know the history of the college that we are attending. Also, researching in the archives brings our history major into a new dimension, because we are actually doing original research in primary documents, instead of just reading what another historian wrote. We get to see what being a historian is all about!”Dan wrote that an “important reason for my involvement is to see the connections between the information I am learning in classes and actual events in the community of which I am a part of at Geneseo. Another reason is to gain a more personal understanding of race relations, a subject which I have very little background in after growing up in a predominantly white town and school district.” The project seems to tie together our desire to become better history students with our interest of the Civil Rights Movement.
