Author: Dr. Maria Mazzenga

Historian, Archivist, Teacher.

The Archivist’s Nook: Roving Students Save Rector from Wreck

Posted on by Dr. Maria Mazzenga
Brookland Streetcar
Let’s face it. That night, the trolley would have been the better choice for Rector Denis O’Connell.

Catholic University, Fall 1904: Unpaved roads. No streetlights. A moonless November evening. A horse and buggy, and a wobbly trolley car. A formula for disaster? As it turns out, that night it was. But guess what? A fearless group of wandering CUA undergrads saved the day!

The first thing you need to know about this tale is that Trinity College was established across the street from Catholic University in 1897 to educate young women. At that time, CUA educated only men, and these were mostly diocesan priests and members of religious orders. In fact, many faculty members walked back and forth across Michigan Avenue, teaching at both CUA and Trinity. But the dynamic changed when CUA’s first male undergrads arrived in 1904. There was all manner of fretting over these young men fraternizing inappropriately with Trinity women (and vice-versa). One night, a group of men could be heard serenading the girls at Trinity outside their windows. No one ‘fessed up to the crime and the perps managed to escape with their pipes intact, but Rector Denis O’Connell (1903-1909) let it be known that no CUA men were allowed outside the dorm after 10 p.m. at night. Continue reading “The Archivist’s Nook: Roving Students Save Rector from Wreck” →

The Archivist’s Nook: On McMahon’s Oldest Resident

Posted on by Dr. Maria Mazzenga
McMahon Hall, undated photo
McMahon Hall, looking pretty timeless in this undated photo.

Good Old McMahon Hall. Built in 1892 to house the school of philosophy, arts and sciences, and the school of social sciences, this Romanesque structure has had many occupants across the last 123 years.  Sociology, biology, languages, math, a plethora of administrative offices—all have been in, out, and back again across the decades. The second building erected as part of CUA’s young campus, McMahon was made possible by a $400,000 (yes, buildings were a lot cheaper way back then) donation by Monsignor James McMahon, an Irish-born priest who had served as a New York pastor. The Monsignor lived in the building in his retirement, passing his final days there until his death in 1901 at the age of eighty-four.

McMahon would surely have had good company there, not only with the professors and students who roamed the halls and occupied the classrooms, but with Giuseppe Luchetti’s imposing Leo XIII, a 12-foot high marble statue with which Theodore Roosevelt explicitly requested an audience. Continue reading “The Archivist’s Nook: On McMahon’s Oldest Resident” →

The Archivist’s Nook: Trashing the Trailers – A Short Genealogy of a Space

Posted on by Dr. Maria Mazzenga
trailer being removed
Trailing into the sunset. Perhaps not as (un)dramatic as it looks, however: The trailers were gutted and many of the furnishings were donated to Community Forklift for discount resale and to other charitable organizations serving homeless veterans.

University archivists save university stuff.  Our mission entails preserving university-related historical materials that enable us to make observations about our school across time.  This includes the physical space of CUA.  The Archives holds files and blueprints detailing the history of most every building of the University, and even some that no longer exist.

Which brings me to the recent trashing of the trailers.  Back in the 1990s, twenty-six trailers were placed on Curley Court to house an overflow of students—this was before the grand Opus Hall was built to accommodate the incoming numbers.  This past March, however, it was time to remove those trailers, and especially for those of us here on the upper campus who pass by the units daily, it was something of an event. Continue reading “The Archivist’s Nook: Trashing the Trailers – A Short Genealogy of a Space” →

The Archivist’s Nook: The Fledgling Field of Educational Archivy

Posted on by Dr. Maria Mazzenga
Mr. Jefferson, archives-promoter and denizen of CUA pre-history.
Thomas Jefferson, archives-promoter and denizen of CUA pre-history

Way way back in 1791, at the dawn of the American experiment in democracy, Thomas Jefferson put something prescient to paper:  “Let us save what remains: not by vaults and locks which fence them from the public eye and use in consigning them to the waste of time, but by such a multiplication of copies, as shall place them beyond the reach of accident.”  Surely Mr. Jefferson put his money where his mouth was when he donated his collection of 6,487 books to the Library of Congress, forming its core collection, and preserved his own papers for future scholars.

I’d argue, too, that Jefferson was an outreach kind of guy.  He wanted “what remains” of lives lived, as in the archival records of public servants in particular, out in the public sphere, where future generations could examine and learn from them.  So went the way of archives in America.  Generally speaking, American archives are open and accessible to the public, and have become more so over time.

Thanks to archival records, in fact, we know that Jefferson had ties to the Catholic University of America here in Washington, D.C.  It was Jefferson who advised Samuel Harrison Smith, a Philadelphia native, to relocate to what is now the campus of Catholic University, in order to establish Washington’s first newspaper, the National Intelligencer. Smith and his wife, Margaret Bayard Smith, followed Mr. Jefferson’s advice and built a home that would remain part of the Catholic University campus until it was demolished in 1970.

The circulation of archival information is the province of the Education Archivist. Continue reading “The Archivist’s Nook: The Fledgling Field of Educational Archivy” →

Congratulations 2014 Mohler Grant Winners!

Posted on by Dr. Maria Mazzenga

Congratulations to our 2014 Dorothy Mohler Research Grant winners Jeanne Petit and Peter Cajka!

Jeanne Petit, Ph.D. is the recipient of a $500 Mohler Research Grant for her project “Protestants, Catholics, and Jews in World War I America: The 1918 United War Work Campaign.”  Dr. Petit is professor of history at Hope College in Holland Michigan and the author of The Men and Women We Want: Gender, Race, and the Progressive Era Literacy Test Debate (2010, in the Race and Gender in American History Series, University of Rochester Press).  She is currently working on a book on Catholic laywomen in World War I America.

Peter Cajka is the recipient of a $200 Mohler Research Grant for his project  “The Greatest Awakening and Its Discontents: The Formation of Conscience and the Renewal of Moral Autonomy, 1939-1991.”  Pete is a historian of religion and morality in postwar America whose work intersects often with political, legal and intellectual history. His main interests are in American religious history, the history of morality and ethics, the history of the American and Global Catholic Church, secularization and religious devotions. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Boston College.  Pete’s dissertation, provisionally entitled “The Greatest Awakening and Its Discontents: The Formation of Conscience and the Renewal of Moral Autonomy, 1939-1991,” explains why during and just after the 1960s, the conscience became the premier moral and religious solution of its age.

Awarded yearly, the Dorothy Mohler Research Grants help defray research and travel costs for those using the collections at the American Catholic History Research Center and University Archives at The Catholic University of America (ACUA).

American Religious Responses to the Holocaust Course

Posted on by Dr. Maria Mazzenga

The American Catholic History Research Center and University Archives and the Catholic University Department of Education announce a new professional development course for Catholic High School teachers to be held on the campus of Catholic University and at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.  The course, American Religious Responses to the Holocaust, will run from July 8-12, 2013.  For details, see American Religious Responses to the Holocaust Course.

Congratulations to our 2013 Mohler Grant Winners!

Posted on by Dr. Maria Mazzenga

Deborah Beckel, Ph.D., has been awarded a Mohler grant for her project examining women and the Knights of Labor in the South.  She is the author of Radical Reform: Interracial Politics in Post-Emancipation North Carolina (University of Virginia Press, The American South Series, 2011). Originally from Georgia, Beckel received her undergraduate degree magna cum laude from Mount Holyoke College, her masters’ degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and her Ph.D. from Emory University. She has worked as a librarian and archivist, and as a documentary editor.  A resident of Virginia, she previously taught women’s and gender studies at Sweet Briar College and currently teaches history at Lynchburg College.

For his work examining the Protestant image in the Catholic mind William Cossen will receive a Mohler grant in 2013.  Mr. Cossen is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History and a member of the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center at The Pennsylvania State University, studying under the direction of Philip Jenkins and Amy Greenberg.  His dissertation is currently titled “The Protestant Image in the Catholic Mind,” and it will examine the construction of Protestant identity by American Catholics in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.  Mr. Cossen is the recipient of a Bachelor of Arts degree in History and Political Science from Emory University in 2008 and a Master of Arts degree with honors in History from Penn State in 2012.

The American Catholic History Research Center and University Archives accepts applications for Mohler Travel Grants every year.  For more information on the Mohler Grants, see: http://archives.lib.cua.edu/Mohler.cfm

 

Congratulations 2011 Mohler Grant Winners

Posted on by Dr. Maria Mazzenga

The Dorothy Mohler Research Grants help defray research and travel costs for those using the collections at the American Catholic History Research Center and University Archives here at the Archives. We are pleased to announce this year’s winners:

John Sharpe, currently an ABD Hagley Fellow in the History Department of the University of Delaware, received a Mohler grant to conduct research in the papers of John Ryan, George Higgins, and John Cort among others, toward the completion of his dissertation, currently titled: “The Owner-Operator Tradition: Reverberations of Catholic Teaching on Productive Property from the Early Republican Through and Beyond the Progressive Eras.” Mr. Sharpe is a 1993 distinguished graduate of the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland, where he received a Bachelor of Science degree with honors in English, and emphases in political thought and history. Following graduation from Annapolis, he graduated from Naval Nuclear Power School (Orlando, Fla.), Naval Prototype Training (Charleston, S.C.), and Naval Submarine School (Groton, Conn.). Following his naval career, he received his Master of Arts in History from Old Dominion University (2010).

Robert N. Gross, a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, received a Mohler grant to conduct research in the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops/National Catholic Welfare Conference and the National Catholic Education Association records. Mr. Gross specializes in American social, legal, and educational history. His research is toward the completion of his dissertation, titled “Regulating the Educational Marketplace: School Competition and Choice in the Urban North, 1870-1929.” The project explores how public officials, intellectuals, parents, and children navigated and responded to the dramatic growth of urban Roman Catholic parochial schools in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.

Congratulations Mohler Grant Winners

Posted on by Dr. Maria Mazzenga

The Archives is pleased to announce its 2011 Dorothy Mohler Grant recipients. The Mohler Research Grants help defray research and travel costs for those using the collections at the American Catholic History Research Center and University Archives here at CUA. This year’s winners are Gráinne McEvoy of Boston College, and Trygve Throntveit of Harvard University.

Gráinne McEvoy graduated from the University of Edinburgh in 2005 with a Joint Honors degree in History and English Literature, and from Trinity College, Dublin in 2006 with a Masters in Modern Irish History. She is currently a doctoral candidate in History at Boston College. Her dissertation examines the response of American Catholic intellectuals to the United States’ immigration restriction policies from 1917 to 1965. In 2007 she received a scholarship from the Irish Fulbright Commission to undertake doctoral work in the U.S., and has been an Irish Studies Fellow at Boston College since 2008. Ms. McEvoy is the recipient of a $500 grant toward travel here to conduct research in the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops/National Catholic Welfare Conference Bureau of Immigration papers.

Trygve Throntveit is Lecturer and Assistant Director of Undergraduate Studies in History at Harvard University, where he received his Ph.D. in History in 2008. He is the author of several articles and book chapters on Woodrow Wilson’s domestic and foreign policies and on the intellectual history of pragmatism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Dr. Throntveit is currently revising a book-length manuscript entitled Power without Victory: Woodrow Wilson and the American Internationalist Experiment. Dr. Throntveit is the recipient of a $250 grant toward travel here to conduct research in the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops/National Catholic Welfare Conference papers related to international affairs.

We look forward to working with our grant recipients this year!