Since 1974, Mass Humanities has preserved and curated the stories of Massachusetts. Over that period, we gradually collected quite a few records, documents, objects, and artifacts. When we moved our headquarters from Northampton to Holyoke in 2024, we invited local archivist Thomas Doyle to help us organize our “living archive” of humanities projects in Massachusetts. As we sorted, labeled, and organized our organization’s treasure trove of materials, we asked Doyle a few questions about the importance of maintaining an archive. Watch this short video interview to learn more.
“Archives serve as storehouses of history, of knowledge, and of culture.” — Thomas Doyle
And, if you’re curious to learn more about the history of Mass Humanities, visit our #MH50: Five Decades of Mass Humanities page, where you’ll find introductions to four short films chronicling different aspects of our work, including:
- Rural by Choice, a film exploring the complexities of rural identity through an examination of documentarian Lawrence Hott’s films and the Smithsonian’s Museum on Main Street Program;
- Love Letters to Lawrence, a film about the long tradition of gathering oral histories to document community experiences, including those of blue collar workers and immigrants.
- The Speech is the Star, a film highlighting the rapid growth of public readings of the words of Frederick Douglass through the Reading Frederick Douglass Together program;
- Reliquary of Blackness, a film about a storytelling project done at Wistariahurst Museum in Holyoke to uncover the little-known Black history of the city.
