Historians for Hire is a public history course at Carleton College that connects undergraduate students with community partners in Northfield, Minnesota to complete a historical research project. Students engage in discussions surrounding museums and history education throughout the course while also gaining hands-on experience in archival research, exhibit building, collaboration, and community service. I took this course in Winter 2020 and again in Spring 2021, focusing on two different projects.

In Winter 2021, I worked with a local historian, Sarah Entenmann, to conduct oral history interviews of African-American alumni from the 1970s. The purpose of the project was to document the experiences and feelings of Carleton’s earliest cohort of Black students, particularly those that received scholarships through the Rockefeller Grant. In doing so, we sought to restore Black voices to the archives, assess Carleton’s degree of success in supporting Black students, and identify areas of improvement for the future.

This first project involved a large degree of archival research. I sifted through records of Carleton’s official school newspaper, The Carletonian, to find stories relating to the Rockefeller Grant and the Black experience at Carleton during the 70s. I also visited the Carleton College archives where I read through hundreds of documents related to the Rockefeller Grant and Carleton’s initiative to recruit students of color during the 60s and 70s. Following my research, I completed an oral history interview with Clifford Clark, a professor at Carleton who helped many of the Rockefeller Grant recipients.

In Spring 2021, I worked with the Executive Director of the Rice County Historical Society, Susan Garwood, to research the history of the Wahpekute tribe from 1600 to 1850. As the smallest Dakota tribe, there exists very little historic documentation on the Wahpekute tribe and the available sources are often from the perspective of the white settlers. We sought to rectify this by compiling a history that highlighted Wahpekute voices and experiences.

For the first part of the project, I used library resources and databases to find texts and documents related to the Wahpekute. This involved building an annotated bibliography and taking detailed notes on my research, as well as uploading digital files to a shared drive. For the second half of the project, I worked in ArcGIS to create historical maps that showed the transformation of Wahpekute land over time. My partners and I created a StoryMap that tells the history of the Wahpekute people through the change in land, emphasizing the importance of land to Wahpekute culture.

This class sparked my love for public history and showed me how the digital humanities can bring visibility to and recenter marginalized communities and histories.