ABOUT US
We are a collective of students from Knox College in Galesburg, IL, researching the pre-history of the college under the supervision of Professor Catherine Denial, Bright Distinguished Professor of American History. We were also helped in this work by our teaching assistant, James Stratton.
The vast majority of the work you see on this website was conducted during spring term (March-May) of 2021 in the course HIST 347: Museums, Monuments, and Memory.
In that course, we studied public history in multiple forms, welcomed museum professionals to our classes, and discussed issues of decolonization, settler colonialism, racism, and bias, and the impact those categories have on museum work.
We are juniors and seniors at Knox, and our majors include History, Anthropology and Sociology, Computer Science, and Education, with minors in a range of fields, including History, American Archaeology, Chemistry, Creative Writing, Dance, Education, Journalism, and Religious Studies.
For spring term, 2021, all of us were working historians, immersing ourselves in local and national archives to find out the history of this region. Roughly half of us are white, and roughly half are Asian, Biracial, Black, or Latine. Half of us are working class, and half are middle class. We represent a range of different gender and LGBTQIA+ identities.
Knox College was founded in 1837 by abolitionists who wanted to build a manual labor college as a stop on the Underground Railroad.
The men and women who ran the college and lived in Galesburg were almost entirely from upstate New York. While this story is familiar to us, we wanted to know how it was possible for migrants from the eastern part of the United States to move west into Native territory and found a college.
We think of this work as the first step in reckoning with our earliest history in what is currently western Illinois, and establishing relationships with the Native nations on whose land Knox College stands.
We conducted our research and built this website during a pandemic. Before the pandemic, students in HIST 347 usually constructed a physical exhibition on the Knox campus as the culminating project for the term, but that was impossible for us. Instead, we worked with web designer Laura Pochodylo (an alum of the college) and her coding partner, Casey Reed, to produce the website you see here.
This website will be maintained after spring 2021 by post-baccalaureate students and student workers in the History department, under Professor Denials’ continued supervision.
If you have questions about us or the site we have produced, please use our contact form to be in touch.
In alphabetical order, we are:
Emma Bohman
Nick Burbules
Milo Camaya
Maggie Cheng
Emily DiBenedetto
Ryan Earles
Alan Gallo
Phoenix Haessler
Lydia Hanrahan
Bea Hartman
Riley Jin
Anna Neubauer
Liv Palepoi
Michal Pavlik
Abbey Scholwin
Kyra Smith
Daniel Springsteen