Courtesy of Washington College
After more than two decades since its inception, the Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College has put Chestertown on the academic-history map.
Political forces in the United States, especially over the past year, are being compelled to reckon with the way the nation looks at its own 245-year history. With place-names already being changed and statues toppling, one side denounces such a movement as a “cancel culture.” The opposite outlook perceives it more as an awakening and a “culture correction” to tell all sides of the story. How does the picture-postcard yet cosmopolitan and culturally vibrant Maryland community of Chestertown fit into the discussion? Its most visible educational institution, Washington College (chartered in 1782 as the 10th oldest college in the United States), is having an indelible impact on the way we look at our own checkered past.
Namesake Cornelius Vander Starr
In the thick of the national discussion is the Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, one of several philanthropic endeavors advanced by the estate of Cornelius Vander Starr, a relatively quiet supporter of journalism, education, and the arts after making his fortune mostly from AIG, the global insurance and investment conglomerate. A 1970 biography of this renaissance benefactor summarizes the man’s core values:
“Those who knew Starr well have commented that he was an atheist or at best agnostic. His real religion, of course, was humanism, an abiding faith and trust in his fellow man.”
The Starr Foundation, launched in 1955 and focused on “human needs, culture, public policy, medicine and healthcare, education, and the environment,” carries a current endowment of $3.5 billion, according to the organization’s website. It established Washington College’s Starr Center in 2000 with $4 million.
Courtesy of Washington College
With grants from the Maryland Heritage Areas Authority and Stories of the Chesapeake, The Starr Center’s Chesapeake Heartland Project outfitted its African American Humanities Truck. The Truck, decked out with Chesapeake Heartland’s signature golden Sankofa Bird, is a mobile lab that travels to sites within the community, digitizing, interpreting, exploring, and celebrating African American history.
An Interview with Director Adam Goodheart
And so, a perfect illustration of Starr’s “humanism,” even though he did not live to see it, exists to all our benefits at Washington College. Spearheading this eye-opening approach to American history since 2006 is the Hodson Trust-Griswold Director of the Starr Center, Adam Goodheart, also an essayist and journalist whose work has appeared in National Geographic, Outside, Smithsonian, The Atlantic, and The New York Times Magazine, among others. In addition, he was a regular columnist for The New York Times’ online Civil War series, titled “Disunion,” for which he was eminently qualified as the author of the book 1861: The Civil War Awakening (New York: Knopf, 2011), a national bestseller published during the 150th anniversary commemoration of the war.
The New York Times Book Review referred to Goodheart’s book as “exhilarating,” “inspiring,” and “irresistible,” creating “the uncanny illusion that the reader has stepped into a time machine.” It went on to be a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History, and the History Book Club featured the work as its Book of the Year for 2011. Such acclaim earned Goodheart an invitation from President Barack Obama to the Oval Office in the White House in recognition of the book’s role in the president’s declaring parts of Virginia’s Fort Monroe as a national monument on November 1, 2011 because it “was integral to the history of slavery, the Civil War, and the U.S. military,” Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar announced in a statement.
While Director Goodheart was quick to urge our consultation with other members of his staff, he obliged us with an interview (his answers here in italics), and we found his enthusiasm addicting. Following is our discussion, edited for brevity and clarity, from his office in Chestertown.
First, we asked the historian why the center is located at an institution such as Washington College.
The college has a very deep connection to American history as the first institution of higher education chartered after American independence. It was also the first fully secular college or university in the United States—and possibly even in the world. We’re a place with particularly deep connections, both to American history and to a tradition in innovation and in higher education and teaching.
Chestertown, and indeed the Maryland Eastern Shore as a region, is a wonderful laboratory of American history. The phrase sometimes used for Maryland, “America in Miniature,” really gives you a sense here on the Eastern Shore of so much that is encapsulated just within a compass of a few square miles. We have incredible history from Native American times, through colonization, the American Revolution, the Underground Railroad, the Civil War, and beyond.
Revolutionary War soldiers marched out from Chestertown to fight in some of the great battles of the nation’s struggle for independence. And we had Freedom Riders rolling in during the 1960s to desegregate restaurants and theaters in Chestertown. We have a panorama of American history that we can investigate, teach about, and write about. And we’re lucky enough to be nestled in the center of it all here.
Courtesy of Washington College
Top: Washington College’s Starr Center Director Adam Goodheart and students explore the 18th Century Custom House in Chestertown, headquarters for the Starr Center. Bottom: Washington College’s Starr Center provides students with an experiential education or learn by doing. It’s not unusual to find Starr Center Director Adam Goodheart examining and interpreting historic documents with interns inside Starr’s headquarters at Chestertown’s Custom House.
How do you think Cornelius Vander Starr would feel about how the center has evolved?
I think he would be delighted. His foundation would be, and in fact is, delighted, because it gave us a follow-up grant of a million dollars last year to mark the 20th anniversary of the founding of the Starr Center. Cornelius Vander Starr himself was very innovative in his field and had a strong commitment to multiculturalism. He really believed in empowering people on the ground in the countries where he was doing business. He didn’t believe in a sort of American economic or cultural imperialism. Instead, he believed in building authentic local partnerships in other countries with people who knew those places well. I think that is very much in the spirit of what the Starr Center does. It’s all about meeting people on their own terms. That’s what Starr stood for, as well.
You mention the word “multiculturalism.” For anyone paying attention, the focus on diversity and equality has decidedly shifted, at least by most accounts. How do you see it?
I think that, in our 20 years of existence, multiculturalism has been central to the center’s identity. In particular, the African American experience is absolutely central to the entire history and identity, not just of the Eastern Shore but of the entire Chesapeake region. From the very earliest days, when the Starr Center was involved in everything from helping to preserve the historic Sumner Hall—which is the African American Civil War Veterans post in Chestertown—through 2003–2004, when I was teaching visiting students from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh in Chestertown for the summer about the American Civil Rights Movement, all have engaged with African American history.
Most recently, over the past four years, we’ve had a very exciting and innovative collaboration with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. That has been a combination of many of our programs and projects on that subject. Panning out from the Starr Center itself, we’re very pleased to see, finally, recognition of greater diversity, equity, and inclusion when we talk about the composition of American history and those who made it.
You’re apparently responsible for much of that. For example, your book, 1861: The Civil War Awakening, reinforces that year as such a pivotal one in our history.
I’m obviously a small player in all of this. Certainly, if we talk about the Civil War in particular, I’m very pleased that over the past ten years or so, the work that a lot of people did around the 150th anniversary of the war really advanced the public understanding that this really was a conflict over slavery. And the Confederacy really was centrally about slavery and White supremacy.
Courtesy of Washington College
Starr Center regularly provides programming and experiential learning opportunities for its 30 paid student interns. These interns, pictured with Starr Center Deputy Director Dr. Patrick Nugent, spent the summer of 2017 recording, preserving, and sharing auto interviews they captured of civilian men and women who experienced World War II for Starr’s National Home Front Project.
What impact have recent theatrical offerings, such as “Hamilton,” for example, had on what you’re striving to accomplish at the Starr Center?
Every year, the Starr Center, together with George Washington’s Mount Vernon and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, present a $50,000 award—“The George Washington Prize”—for the best work in early American history. After “Hamilton” premiered, we actually awarded that prize to “Hamilton” creator Lin-Manuel Miranda in 2015, just a few months after the play opened on Broadway. It was tremendously exciting to be there with him and having Washington College students meeting and chatting with him as we presented him and other cast members with this prize in New York. Already we were finding that we had students arriving at Washington College knowing the lyrics to “Hamilton” by heart. It’s great that they understand that history can be something that’s exciting and dynamic and can be picked up and experimented with to find new ways to narrate it and communicate it. It’s also exciting to have students arriving in college with strong opinions already formed about Hamilton versus Jefferson or the Federalists versus the Democratic Republicans, the Patriots versus the Tories. There are also things they must “unlearn,” such as that Hamilton was an abolitionist leader, which is promulgated to some degree by Lin-Manuel Miranda and is not exactly the case.
How do you feel about statuary being torn down and inanimate objects being renamed?
Each of these situations should be handled separately. Places are important to people. And names of places are important to people. The existence of statues and other parts of the landscape are important to people. They are literally the landmarks by which we orient ourselves and the places in which our memories are formed. And I’m saying that about both the positive and negative.
A landscape or a statue can be something that is beautiful and inspiring and an anchor in our lives. Or it can be a place that threatens or alienates us. One way or another, each of us is invested in those places that surround us. Anytime a space like that becomes a center of contention, I think there should be a conversation around it, where people within the community are able to speak and share their feelings, their reflections, and their ideas. It then becomes an opportunity for learning, on all sides.
I’m of course a great believer in the value of conversation. In fact, part of the Starr Center’s vision statement is that we foster thoughtful conversation informed by history, which is a succinct way of saying what I would like to happen when those debates come up. That said, I am a strong believer in the fact that, when there is a statue on public land, or a military base owned by the federal government, for example, or a county, state, or national road, that naming those things after people who fought in a war that killed hundreds of thousands of Americans in order to preserve a system of White supremacy that enslaved millions of Americans, I think there’s no question that those names should come off or those statues should come down.
But I also think there needs to be a public conversation about that, as it happens, or preferably before it happens. The situation with the Confederate monument at the courthouse in Easton, as far as I’m concerned, is a travesty. That’s a public building, where people of all ethnicities and backgrounds in Talbot County go to get married, to be plaintiffs or defendants in legal cases, and to transact their public business. There is no reason that Black citizens should be forced to walk past a monument to White supremacy, on public ground, maintained with public tax dollars, when they go into their courthouse. In fact, I’m astonished and appalled that the Talbot County commissioners, in this day and age, fail to understand that.
Courtesy of Washington College
It’s become a tradition that The Starr Center at Washington College treats freshman, including its prestigious Quill & Compass Scholars, to a trip on the schooner Sultana. A reproduction of a Boston-built merchant vessel that sails out of port just a short walk from the Starr Center’s historic Custom House, students learn the history of the Chestertown waterfront—their home away from home—during the sail.
Tell us about the Asterisk Initiative. What does that involve?
This is not a Starr Center project but a larger Washington College project. It is trying to mark the geography, the physical spaces, of our campus and the less visible history that happened here, specifically the college’s often troubling history with the African American community. A marker in front of the building where the Starr Center is headquartered, the Custom House, calls attention to the fact that it was originally the colonial mansion of a man who was deeply involved in the slave trade. There are also markers that commemorate more positive things about Washington College, such as one that commemorates the first Black student to attend the college, who came in 1958. The college was officially segregated until that year. In fact, for about three quarters of the college’s history, it was officially segregated. Another marker honors an African American, a free Black employee of Washington College who saved the main college buildings from fire in the 19th century.
So, we’re trying to make visible this history on our campus that was previously invisible. The reason it’s called The Asterisk Initiative is that in academia, the asterisk indicates that there’s more to the story to be told here, and you have to look deeper for it. Plaques around campus actually have asterisks on them. Each has a QR code that you can scan with your phone, which brings up text and images and videos with narration that you can share with other people.
“Chesapeake Heartland” is another exciting initiative, which is in collaboration with the National Museum of African American History and Culture at the Smithsonian. The first African American Smithsonian Secretary, Lonnie Bunch, paid a couple of visits to Kent County and was very impressed with what he saw and was especially excited about the vibrancy of Washington College and other local institutions and nonprofits and of the Kent County community more broadly. He sees potential here to be a kind of African American history in microcosm. He suggested that the Starr Center should build a partnership with the African American museum, and the product of that was “Chesapeake Heartland: An African American Humanities Project.”
Its goal is to preserve, document, chronicle, and share four centuries of African American history and culture in Kent County, Maryland. Consequently, we’re digitizing everything from Underground Railroad documents from the 1850s to people’s home movies from the 1970s. We’re developing a new model for history that can take root in other communities around the Chesapeake region. We’ll be working over the next few years to build partnerships with other communities in the entire Chesapeake region. We have over a million dollars in funding from the Mellon Foundation, the state of Maryland, and private donors. It’s an exciting project, and we believe it truly has national significance. But perhaps that’s a story for another time.
If It’s Thursday . . .
Last spring, the Center’s virtual event series “Thursdays with the Starr Center” hosted some of today’s top thinkers and creators. It had more than 200 attendees for the virtual film screening of the documentary Freedom Riders, which was followed by a conversation with director Stanley Nelson. Another popular event was a discussion with MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki on the roots of today’s political divisions. And the Center brought together authors Ted Widmer and Neal Gabler to discuss their new biographies of President Abraham Lincoln and Senator Edward “Ted” Kennedy, respectively.
Other events featured artists, musicians, and activists from the region. “As we look to the fall, we are excited to continue to host events that explore a diverse range of American history, politics, and culture,” says Kelley Wallace, Public and Media Relations Director at Washington College. “We will continue to do virtual events, but as conditions allow, we will also be holding hybrid and in-person events. Keep an eye out for our Chesapeake Heartland van, a mobile museum and digitization station that will be making the rounds this summer and fall.”
