Unboxing the Archive

Unboxing the Archive is a digital storytelling video project that explores the rich and complex history of African Americans in New England. Using archival collections at historical societies and libraries, it features ten-minute videos covering fascinating, often overlooked stories on a range of topics, from slavery in New England to successful Black entrepreneurs. This project is committed to centering African Americans and their contributions to the economic, cultural, and intellectual life of New England.

Listen to Episode 1 of the Unboxing the Archive Podcast below:

Read Victoria Dey’s blog post: “Changing the Design: A Proactive Approach to Community Archiving”

Project Lead

Full Profile

Kabria Baumgartner

Dean's Associate Professor of History and Africana Studies

Kabria Baumgartner is a historian of the nineteenth-century United States, specializing in the history of education, African American women’s and gender history, and the New England region.

Reckonings Co-Creation Team

Full Profile

Hunter Moskowitz

Research Assistant, Ph.D. Student in History

I am a doctoral student in World History at Northeastern with a B.S. in Industrial and Labor Relations from Cornell University. My research interests include examining how workers have resisted, shaped, and mediated colonialism. I hope to understand how power operates in eighteenth and nineteenth century communities through studying the intersection between race, labor, and gender. I am also currently a research assistant at the Worker Institute at Cornell University working on projects involving the role of labor unions in creating climate change policy.

Full Profile

Shavaun Sutton

Research Assistant, Sociology PhD Student

Shavaun Sutton is a second-year doctoral student. She holds a master’s in public health in Community Health Sciences from SUNY Downstate School of Public Health. She strives to promote equity via the analysis of nuanced narratives and lived experience. Seeking to amplify voices silenced by oppression and marginalization, Shavaun critically engaged with Black girl- and womanhood, state-sanctioned violence, and erasure as epistemic violence, particularly the erasure of Black narratives in white-majority spaces, through the lens of Black Feminist Thought.