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It's finally May, which means a lot of NE historic homes are reopening for tours for the season! Had the chance to visit the Hale Homestead today, which the home not only of Nathan Hale but also of Abigail Cobb Adams Hale (his step mother) who "stars" in my dissertation!
In 1731, Abigail Cobb was a servant in the Rose household in Groton, CT when the Roses were involved in the theft of a bunch of bee hives from a neighboring home -- this case has been really significant to my thinking about collaborative household labor!
The otherwise v well-informed tour guide had done a lot of reading in the records and yet knew little about Abigail, a reminder of the real difficult of uncovering the lives of women even when they were related to very well-known and well-studied figures like Nathan Hale.
Like many of these historic home tours, the stories told were almost exclusively about the white men and women who lived in the home, and mostly about the men. This is largely the consequence of the limited funding for these types of historic sites.
We NEED to support these sites because these are the places where most people learn history, and the stories they are hearing are, with some notable exceptions, very white and male.
I've seen some really great projects for reinterpreting various museums, historic sites, etc., but I fear that these smaller historic home sites will suffer because they often lack the funds to do this type of reinterpretation.
All this is to say, support historic sites, houses, and museums. Support local historical societies/ archives. These are the places where most people interact w history & we have the opp to tell more inclusive & diverse stories at these places, but to do so requires resources.