For Matthew Winkler, A25, the assignment was ideal. He was trying to trace ownership of the land that the Tufts Medford/Somerville campus sits on today, starting in the mid-1600s. That meant carefully sifting through thousands of probate records, land deeds, and land grants. Luckily, those records are digitized—but still it was like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack. 

Winkler, a double major in history and music, loves doing research. When he enrolled at Tufts, he was also conducting biographical research for a book author, and he has kept up that sideline since then. So when he saw the listing for the history course Slavery and Tufts: Archival Research Seminar, he knew he had to sign up. 

The class has been offered each semester since 2023. The first half of the semester is lecture based, as faculty provide background on the history of slavery, particularly in New England, and the abolition and anti-slavery movements in the region, as well as delving into research methods. For the second half of the semester, students pick a topic to research and get to work in the archives, assisted by staff from the Tufts Archival Research Center (TARC). 

Some students are focused on finding the stories of early Black and Indigenous students at Tufts. A few of their finds are on display at the current Tisch Library exhibition Deep Roots at Tufts. Other students look for different kinds of connections with slavery, such as how early leaders discussed it publicly. (Tufts was founded in 1852 by Universalist church leaders as a nonsectarian college. Slavery was abolished in Massachusetts in 1783 and abolished nationwide in 1865.)

Winkler’s land ownership research project for the class turned out to be a perfect fit. “I love getting down in the weeds, and it’s why I think I might want to pursue historical research professionally,” he says.

The class is one component of the Slavery, Colonialism, and Their Legacies initiative, led by Heather Curtis, Warren S. Woodbridge Professor of Comparative Religion and director of the Center for the Humanities at Tufts; Kendra Field, associate professor of history and director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy; and Kerri Greenidge, associate professor of history. They team-teach the class, along with others. “The idea is that students can be involved in this groundbreaking research,” says Curtis.

The Raw Materials of History

“An exciting part of the class is that it’s exposing students to the work of archival research,” says Dan Santamaria, university archivist and director of TARC, who works with the students. “It’s like working in a lab, in a way, except the raw materials the students are analyzing are textual documents, photographs, reports, and meeting minutes from the 1850s all the way up to today—and sometimes even much earlier.” 

Archive project manager John Hannigan, also on the team teaching the class, reminds the students how lucky they are to be able to combine hands-on archival research with all the digital tools that are available today. “They can come down to TARC and look at the actual paper transcripts for the early students they are researching, and then go online and use genealogical search tools to fully flesh out the lives of these individuals in ways that 20 years ago just wouldn’t have been possible.”

The breadth of research is new for the students, too. “It’s not as simple as coming down to the archives and finding a single transcript for a single student,” Hannigan says. “We’re trying to get them to work with a bunch of different collections that might at first glance not seem like they relate to their topic, but they can use these to flesh out the experiences of the individuals or the policies of the institution over time.”

Putting Connections Together

Many of the students are history majors. “Whether they’ve had experience with archival research or not, by the end, they are interested in the kind of very meticulous detailed work of the archive,” says Field. 

Margaux Wade, A26, who is double majoring in history and religion, found a research topic that related to both of her interests, looking at the positions on abolition taken by early Tufts trustees, presidents, and honorary degree recipients—most affiliated with the Universalist church. 

She examined two competing Universalist magazines—one founded by first Tufts President Hosea Ballou and later owned by a founding trustee, the other founded by an honorary degree recipient—and discovered interesting differences in how they discussed slavery and abolition in the 1850s. 

At one point in the late 1850s, a Universalist protest letter arguing that slavery was against the Bible was circulating nationally; only about half of Universalist leaders signed it, but that group included early Tufts presidents and almost the entire first cohort of Tufts trustees. “Some church leaders didn’t think that it was a topic that was appropriate to be discussed in the larger Universalist sphere, though, because they were worried they were going to lose followers from Southern Universalists,” Wade says. 

Jaiden Mosley, A25, had taken a course with Field previously, and as a history major was intrigued by the class. For his research project, he delved into the life of Henry Addison Westall, a North Carolinian who attended Tufts starting in 1877. “Westall’s father and uncle fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War, and his mother’s family had been slave owners,” he says. Mosley found that Westall “lived near and was a part of the same charitable society as Charles Sumner Wilson, one of the first African American students at Tufts,” he says. 

“I was interested in the relationship between someone who’s coming from a Confederate slave-owning family and a Black student at Tufts,” Mosley says. There was some connection, too, between Westall and Tufts’ third president, Elmer Capen—Westall’s brother was named Elmer Capen Westall. “I was trying to figure out that relationship between the family and President Capen.”

Tracing the Land

Some of the stories generated by the student archival research will feed into an expanded website for the Slavery, Colonialism, and Their Legacies initiative at a later point, says Curtis. 

“It’s really exciting to be able to contribute to a project like that,” says Winkler. In his research, he was able to find details about land ownership of Walnut Hill, which is what the area where Tufts stands now was once called. Back in the 1600s and 1700s, the area was part of Charlestown and was used for cattle grazing. In 1681, Winkler says, Charlestown voted to split up the land for pastures owned by different families.

One, the Russell family, “had about 35 acres around what is now Teele Square, and expanded it by 1800 to about 127 acres, encompassing a good portion of the downhill part of our modern-day campus and a good portion of our football field,” Winkler says. 

The connection to the class? The Russell family, one of the richest in very early colonial New England, “built their wealth off of the slave trade, and four generations of Russells enslaved people,” he says. 

“This was my favorite class I’ve taken at Tufts,” Winkler says. “I just really love history research, but I think it also reflects on the professors—they were very approachable and very kind, and I learned a lot from them.”