One goal of this project is to embed our work and our approach into the Loomis Chaffee history curriculum. Throughout our curriculum, the website serves an essential model of ethical and original research and writing. As the project was getting started, all College Level United States History students completed a research assignment that benefited the project’s timeline (see below) and allowed students to practice some key research skills. Now, as ongoing class activities, CL US History students work with an object from the school archives using a methodology developed by Marisa Fuentes, whose work deeply influenced our project. They also propose ideas for deepening the school community’s engagement with the complicated narratives of the Pequot War.
Please view details below about these efforts, and look out for additional teaching resources as the project develops.
Slavery & Loomis Chaffee Lesson | CLUSH
Context: This lesson is designed to bring CLUSH students into the ongoing work of a student-faculty collaboration called Slavery and Loomis Chaffee: An Ethical History Project. For two summers, students and HPR faculty have worked together to investigate the school’s ties to slavery. This group has established that at least eighteen people were enslaved by members of the Loomis, Chaffee, and Hayden families. Loomis Chaffee is the second high school invited to join the University of Virginia’s Universities Studying Slavery consortium. You can read more about our involvement with that group here.
One element of our project website is an interactive timeline that is meant to give readers key historical context on the lives of the Founders and the people they enslaved. We seek to understand more fully the lives of the enslaved beyond the status of their enslavement.
Here’s where you come in: we have selected 37 pieces of historical context from the timeline that require careful sourcing and concise explanation. The work you do to source and explain our data and note its historical significance will be featured on the website. We have divided this data across the eleven sections of CLUSH, and so each section will be responsible for 6-7 pieces of information. Each piece of data will have two possible write-ups, and we will select the one that is most accurate and helpful and written in clear, concise prose.
Assignment: Work with a partner to complete the sourcing and explanation for the data point assigned to you. You should consult reliable sources only. These subscription databases, Pelicat, and these lib guides to reference sources on the KBL webpage are useful places to begin your work. Thoughtfully chosen keywords will be essential. Keep in mind that your intended audience is an introductory reader who is not an expert in the history of race and slavery in the antebellum United States. We recommend that you draft three to five sentences after you’ve completed your research. Then, revise with intention, keeping in mind your audience, the importance of concise, direct prose, and the overall purpose of the timeline. Your goal is to submit three sentences. Finally, here is a helpful guide to citation in Chicago style. Thanks for your work!
Odiah Loomis Ship Manifest
Context: Before this in-class activity, students have read and discussed the introduction to Marisa Fuentes’ Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive. (book info here). Students considered the methodological and ethical interventions of Fuentes’ work and how they align with the goals of the course. Students also tested out their understanding of Fuentes’ ideas by examining “Musical Passage,” an innovative digital history project.
Activity: The class began with a dialogue between a history teacher and our school archivist, Ms. Karen Parsons. We sought to reflect on our experiences in archives and with archival objects as well as to underscore and explain Fuentes’ work and that of a scholar who influenced her, Michel-Rolph Trouillot.
Then, students had access to a ship manifest from the school archives’ collection. This object concerned the business dealings of Odiah Loomis, whose handwritten 1741 account of the ship Larke contains a great deal of information and raises important questions for students beginning a study of the history of Atlantic World slavery. Odiah Loomis (1705-1794) was a great grandfather of the Founders.
As students pose clarifying questions about the object, they typically begin to ask deeper questions about the presence of an enslaved person on the ship manifest: “Do [ditto] a Negro girl named Febow.” This one line illustrates for students the presence of violence in archival documents as well as the power dynamics of historical production.
Without Professor Fuentes’ work and the ongoing work of Slavery and Loomis Chaffee: An Ethical History Project, these essential moments in class would not have been possible. We feel students will leave CL US History with clearer and more ethical approaches to history.
Next Steps for Loomis Chaffee: John Mason and the Pequots
Context: Students in College Level US History learn about the Pequot War of 1636-1638, the role played by Capt. John Mason in the Mystic Massacre of 1637, and the many ways he has been memorialized through history, including the 1914 naming of a dorm at The Loomis School in his honor. They also learn Pequot perspectives on their history, this land before and after encounters with the English, and their “survivence.”
Assignment: The Loomis Chaffee Board of Trustees’ 2016 decision to rename Mason Hall encourages students to consider whether and how Loomis Chaffee should improve our community’s relationship with this history and advance our understanding of the Pequot people, the Pequot War, and the role that John Mason played in the war.
Students write a two-paragraph letter answering the following questions, keeping in mind current contemporary culture here at school and the larger world.
Should Loomis Chaffee do more to engage with this history? Why or why not? Address your response to any member of our community. All possible answers are acceptable.
Now imagine that the school has committed our community to a greater engagement with this history. How can Loomis Chaffee continue the trajectory begun with the removing John Mason’s name from the dormitory? What are next steps in working towards a more fair and equitable narrative of the events, before, during, and after the Pequot War? Address your response to an audience here at school.