On the unbuilt
historic site that I’d love to help make happen.
Hartford,
Connecticut is already home to a couple of America’s most famous historic or
cultural sites: the Mark Twain House and the Harriet Beecher Stowe House, both located in the city’s historic and picturesque Nook Farm neighborhood. Both houses are
great, and I recommend a visit to both (which can and should be accomplished at
the same time, as they’re next door to each other and speak to each other in
interesting and important ways). But over the last year or so, as two of my
ongoing scholarly interests have intersected—the 2016 Northeast MLA conference, for which I’ll be President and which will be held in Hartford; and the
story of Yung
Wing and his Chinese
Educational Mission, which was housed in the city and about which I wrote a
good deal in my
recent book—I’ve come to feel that Hartford needs another historic and cultural
site, and it needs it now.
The complex, inspiring,
and profoundly American stories of Yung and of his CEM students unfolded around
the country and world, from the Chinese communities out of which they all came
to the many New England towns where they studied, from Washington DC where Yung
volunteered for the Union Army during the Civil War to San Francisco where the
CEM baseball team played its final, triumphant but ironic game. But it was in
Hartford where Yung settled with his wife, Avon (CT) woman
Mary Kellogg, helped raise their two sons, Morrison and Bartlett, and (per his
New York Times obituary) passed away in 1912; and it was in Hartford that
Yung decided to construct the Educational Mission’s headquarters and that thus
served as a central American home for the
120 CEM students during their near-decade in the US (between 1872 and
1880). Moreover, just as Twain’s and Stowe’s lives included and impacted many
places and communities but have been focalized in their Hartford historic
sites, so too do Yung and the Chinese Educational Mission need a particular
place to be most fully remembered—and there’s no better American place to do so
than Hartford.
There’s just one
problem—I have no idea how to get started advocating for the creation of a
historic site; and it’s a particularly
difficult and challenging time even for well-established and longstanding such
sites, much less for not-yet-constructed or even –envisioned ones. Okay,
maybe that’s more than just one problem. But it’s also where the
AmericanStudies Elves come in. So Elves, I have, well, more than one wish: that
I can find ways to connect to multiple communities who would have an interest
and stake in helping make a CEM site happen (from fellow AmericanStudiers to the
Chinese American community, the Connecticut Historical
Society, and the Define American
project, among many others); and that I can live to see Yung Wing and the
Chinese Educational Mission remembered in a Hartford site that does justice to
their amazing American stories.
Next wish
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. Thoughts on
this wish? Wishes you’d share?
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