Call for Papers on “Monumental Narratives”

The Grace Slack McNeil Program for Studies in American Art at Wellesley College and Historic Deerfield are teaming up to sponsor a one-day symposium on “Monumental Narratives: Revisiting New England’s Public Memorials.”

This event will take place on Saturday, 10 March 2018, at Wellesley College.

The symposium’s call for papers is out, asking for proposals by 10 November. It says:

As southern Civil War memorials have become a flashpoint for politics and protest, it is vital that we turn the same critical gaze to New England’s public monuments. This day-long symposium will explore commemorations of people, places, and events in New England’s past, with attention to design, construction, naming/renaming, reception, preservation, destruction, and/or reconfiguration. How do these public acts of memory tell a particular story of New England? What histories might they celebrate or, whether explicitly or implicitly, conceal, devalue, or erase? How can historians recast these monumental narratives without simultaneously sweeping aside uncomfortable histories of colonialism and discrimination?

We invite papers that critically examine memorials in New England from the 17th century to the present. We look for explorations of a diverse range of media including (but not limited to) sculpture, mural programs, buildings, and landscapes. Discussions of proposals for contemporary commemoration or for interventions in existing monuments should explicitly address the ways in which these activities fit into a broader historical context.

Papers should be theoretical or analytical in nature rather than descriptive and take approximately 20 minutes to present.

Scholars interested in presenting at this symposium should submit a 250-word proposal and a two-page c.v. via electronic mail to Martha McNamara (mmcnamar@wellesley.edu) and Barbara Mathews (bmathews@historic-deerfield.org). Proposals should include the title of the paper and the presenter’s name.

The call says, “Speakers invited to present papers are expected to participate fully in the symposium program.” Which means you’re not supposed to deliver your talk and then duck out for some other event. The symposium will offer overnight accommodation for people delivering papers.

Looking for Washington’s “Welch Mountains”

Yesterday I quoted from the minutes of Gen. George Washington’s first council of war in July 1775, establishing “the Welch Mountains near Cambridge & in the Rear of Roxbury lines” as the place where American commanders and troops would regroup in case the British military broke through their siege lines.

Nineteenth-century authors struggled to figure out where those “Welch Mountains” were. In his 1855 biography of Washington, the Rev. Aaron Bancroft wrote that they were “the heights of Cambridge,” but that “This name is not known in their vicinity.” In fact, the minutes suggest the “Welch Mountains” weren’t in Cambridge but nearby; Joseph Reed’s preliminary notes suggest they were five miles away (but away from where?).

Sen. Charles Sumner read Bancroft’s book and in 1867 told a gathering at Arlington, formerly West Cambridge:

“The Welsh Mountains” are the hills which skirt your peaceful valley. Since then I have never looked upon those hills, even at a distance—I have never thought of them—without feeling that they are monumental. They testify to that perfect prudence which made our commander-in-chief so great. In those hours, when undisciplined patriots were preparing for conflict with the trained soldiers of England, the careful eye of Washington calmly surveying the whole horizon, selected your hills as the breast-work behind which he was to retrieve the day. The hills still stand firm and everlasting as when he looked upon them, but smiling now with fertility and peace.

(Incidentally, the statue of Sumner in Cambridge, a block or two from where Washington convened his council, will be rededicated on 19 May.)

The most recent edition of Washington’s papers hazards a different guess: ”The Welch Mountains were probably the hills at Newton, Massachusetts.” That would make more sense as a fallback position for troops from both Cambridge and Roxbury.

Another possibility is that the Massachusetts generals at the meeting referred to the land of Samuel Welles, who in 1763 started to assemble an estate in Needham that eventually became Wellesley. As a Philadelphian, Reed might have misheard what the local members of the council were referring to.

But I can’t find any references to “Welch Mountains” (or “Welch Hills,” “Welles Mountains,” or other variations) in eighteenth-century Massachusetts newspapers. Nor have I found independent mentions of them in the histories of Cambridge, Arlington, Newton, or Wellesley. So if “Welch Mountains” was a colloquial term for some range of hills west of Boston, it doesn’t seem to have been a common term that lots of people used.

And that, of course, reduces the value of designating that place as a rendezvous. (Not to mention that no hills in the area, even the Blue Hills of Milton, really qualify as “mountains.”)

Only a month before this council, Massachusetts commanders had argued about what “Bunker’s Hill” referred to—did it include the lesser prominence that locals called “Breed’s Hill”? This seems to be another dangerous combination of informal geography and rosy-eyed planning.