Touching History: UB Students Visit Archives
- Randy Laist
- May 8
- 3 min read
By Dr. Rebecca Pawel
The Bridgeport History Center welcomed UB students in my recent English 101 class. Archivist Elizabeth Van Tuyl and public librarians Jaime Pettit and Michael Hawkins introduced students to the collections at the Bridgeport History Center, which is attached to the Bridgeport Public Library. The librarians mentioned that students can get public library cards by showing their UB student IDs and urged them to consider the library as their “home away from home in Bridgeport.”
English 101 students spend the final month of the semester working on a research paper which is supposed to incorporate original research. While most students opt to do personal interviews or surveys on a contemporary issue, the trip to the archives was designed to show them how historians and literary scholars conduct research using older primary sources that may not be digitized. I work a lot in archives myself. So when I found out there was a large set of local archives just down the road, I thought it would be a great opportunity to introduce students to the nitty gritty details of working with archives – identifying box and folder numbers in a finding aid, carefully pulling out only one folder at a time, and handling old letters and documents gently, with clean, dry hands. It’s great that so many resources have been digitized and are available online, but there’s still lots that only exist in hard copies, sitting in libraries. And there’s nothing quite like the thrill of handling a letter written decades or even centuries ago and seeing the notes made by someone who has been gone for a long time. It’s like touching the past.
The Bridgeport History Center archivists pulled out sample boxes from the institutional collections of the Grand Army of the Republic, a fraternal organization for Civil War veterans, to show students the pamphlets and programs of the organization’s meetings in the early twentieth century. Students also got to practice finding and examining folders in the collection of papers belonging to the Bridgeport chapter of the League of Women Voters. International student Najibah Galib Nudar picked out a folder on the League of Women Voters and international relations. “I’d heard people talk about archives, and now I know what they look like,” said Ms. Galib Nudar as she picked out the folder. When she found documents relating to the League’s position on the Vietnam war in the 1960s, history became personal for one of her fellow international students, who is Vietnamese.
Most of my students are in the engineering program, and their research topics are not history focused. Still, I hope that having them understand how professional historians “do history” will contribute to their understanding and appreciation of history as a discipline. History Center archivist Elizabeth Van Tuyl has a simpler hope: she’d like more English 101 classes to come back.
Rebecca Pawel received a PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University in 2020 and has taught at Columbia and Vassar. She has been a faculty member at UB since 2023 and has taught various literature and composition courses. Her special interest is African American literature.
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