Fellowship for Joanne Melish: Making Black Communities: White Laborers, Black Neighborhoods, and the Evolution of Race and Class in the Post-Revolutionary North

The collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society offer a rich array of primary sources for the part of this project involving New England. The BAAD, the Bowditch collection of Boston conveyances and the Clough series of maps and property records will help me to track the development of Boston's black neighborhood on the back side of Beacon Hill. In addition to establishing simple contiguityk I need to identify relationships among blacks and whites beginning in late colonial period and extending through the 1850s, and several sets of institutional records at MHS will help me to do that, including the Overseers of the Poor records and the Boston Port and Seamen's Aid Society Records (since so many black men were sailors).