ACLS Community Message for June 2025

When posed with the inevitable “So what do you do?” in social situations, my short version goes something like this: I lead the communications practice for a non-profit dedicated to promoting and supporting the humanities and social sciences. We award fellowships and grants to scholars, as well as advocate for these fields and their important place on campuses and in society.

I’ve had a few instances where the polite nods are followed by “That’s great, but do we really need that stuff right now? It’s not that important in the real world, is it?” 

As a non-academic, I often shape my response around personal examples. I point to Seneca Village, a community founded in 1825 by African Americans who purchased plots of land on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. This closeknit, working class community provided an alternative from the unhealthy conditions and housing discrimination further downtown. In its prime, Seneca Village was home to approximately 225 residents, including some Irish and German immigrants. Yet, in 1857 residents were forced to leave, through a law enacted by the New York Legislature to acquire that and other area settlements. The village was destroyed in order to build what is now Central Park. 

As is often the case, history is written by the victors. While some African American landowners filed suit, much of the local media pushed the narrative that Seneca Village was nothing more than a swampland shantytown inhabited by “squatters” and “vagabonds and scoundrels”: nothing worth saving. For more than 100 years, that narrative persisted. The story of a thriving, multi-cultural community with three churches, two schools, and three cemeteries was buried to serve the interests of the city’s powerful upper class.

It was not until the late 1970s when New York City tour guide Peter Salwen, doing research at the New York Public Library, discovered a map used in condemnation proceedings that disputed the shantytown narrative. Public interest surged with the 1992 Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar F’12 book The Park and the People: A History of Central Park, which provided more detail into the displaced communities. In 1997 the New York Historical presented the first exhibition about Seneca Village; in 2011 archaeologists from Columbia University and The City University of New York conducted the first dig of the site. Research on the site and its history continues today.

The value of this research and public access to it goes beyond “interesting.” As a child growing up in the suburbs of New York City at a time when stories of bussing and breaking housing color barriers filled national headlines, I wish I had known about Seneca Village to balance the standard textbook narratives presented to me at school.

Today, we—as African Americans, New Yorkers, Americans—need this information to better understand our past, as well as our relationship to our communities, and to better inform current debates about affordable housing, eminent domain, racial and economic disparities, urban planning and development, and more.

The current wave of anti-intellectualism in the United States discourages curiosity and creates fear around the prospect of changing or even questioning long-held narratives. It is important to keep in mind what those narratives are: stories. Now more than ever, it is important for our community of academic societies, institutions, national organizations, and scholars to share these stories beyond our core audiences and further, to share with the public why this work, this research, and these people matter.

To better inform current discussions on policies related to professional military institutions and the US Armed Forces, we need share the story of recent actions taken by the Society for Military History. In addition to academics and museum curators, its membership includes serving and retired military officers and national security professionals. In April the society issued a rare public statement speaking out against ongoing actions by the current White House administration. “The censorship of museum exhibits and the removal of public-facing online historical publications undermines the ability of American citizens to learn about the nation’s military history, from the opening shots of the American Revolution at Lexington and Concord to the Navajo Code Talkers during the Second World War,” the statement reads.

This action aligns with the society’s ongoing archiving initiative, which aims to preserve materials and publications removed from federal and state entities since January 2015 so that “the lived experiences of both servicemembers and civilians, whose lives are shaped by militaries and the work they do in the world” are not lost.

To understand how our world and its communities are changing with every expanding cross-cultural interaction, we need to share the story of how Patrick (Pratikaditya) Das F’25, a University of Colorado Boulder PhD linguistics student, is using his Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship to collaborate with the Tikhir community in applying spatial analysis to tracking and documenting shifts in an endangered and politically marginalized language in India.

To truly understand the history of the modern environmental movement, we need to recognize the contributions of people of color that have been historically left out of common narratives. Brian McCammack F’25, Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at Lake Forest College, aims to do this with his book project Black, Brown, and Green: The Origins of Environmental Justice in the 1970s, a “collective biography of environmentalists of color who have been lost to history.”

In the coming months and years, we are going to need as many people as possible to stand up for the humanities and social sciences. Let’s not just promote our conferences and the awards we give, or what we offer in terms of our membership. Let’s elevate stories of why we matter – to society at large.

Heather Mangrum
ACLS Communications Director