The McGillicuddy Humanities Center’s new “Hidden UMaine” tour aims to highlight key people, moments and places in campus history that often go overlooked, including the experiences of the first students of color, early efforts to create inclusive student groups like Wilde Stein, or moments of unrest.
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Join us on Tuesday, April 6 at 7 p.m. for a virtual tour of hidden campus history. Free and open to the public. Click here to join the virtual tour.
The MHC’s humanities specialist Karen Sieber is overseeing the project, which stems from work students started in Professor of History Liam Riordan’s fall of 2020 Public History class. Using digital public history and mapping methods, Sieber has been working with history students Luke Miller and Elizabeth Dalton, in collaboration with archivists at Fogler Library, to research and curate a tour featuring a dozen lesser-known stories within campus history.
Miller will highlight stories behind the first Black student on campus, as well as World War II soldiers from the Class of ‘44. Dalton, who is also a McGillicuddy Humanities Center Fellow, will discuss her research into student employment and financial aid during the Great Depression, and numerous stories of remarkable women in campus history. Sieber, too, has added her own research on the Courtney Brothers incident, as well as a tour stop featuring the efforts of Dr. Ted Mitchell to establish the Native American Studies program and the Wabanaki Center on campus.
The team is building the tour in Clio, a website and app that will allow users to take the tour in person or virtually, with options to add additional resources, historic photographs and an audio tour. Dalton has also created an Instagram page to highlight some of the individual stories, which can be found at @hidden_umaine. The tour has the potential to expand in the future through additional classroom collaborations across a number of fields.
Following the event a link to the tour on the Clio app will be found at: https://umaine.edu/mhc/hiddenhistory/.
Contact karen.sieber@maine.edu with questions.