Meet the Anton Fellows: Building confidence
Interview with Stefanie Bator
At the tender age of seven, Stefanie Bator '05 made her parents take her to
Plimoth Plantation in Plymouth,
Massachusetts. That visit was the beginning of her fascination with colonial
American history. During the past two summers she's worked as a costumed guide
for the Lexington, MA,
Historical Society, informing visitors about Lexington's role in the
Battle of Lexington and Concord.
An Anton Fellowship for
summer 2003 provided funding for original research on colonial Lexington that she's
conducting under the guidance of history Professor
Amy
Richter. Next semester, Stefanie is planning to study colonial history from a British
point of view at the
University of East Anglia's School of American Studies in England. Below is a summary
of a recent conversation in which she talked about her work and her fascination with history.
In your Anton Fellowship proposal, you said you wanted to explore the connection, if any, between the geographic layout of the Lexington and its social structure, and how those factors may have influenced who fought at the Battle of Lexington on April 19, 1775. As a history major, what prompted you to be interested in the geography of Lexington?
I work at the historic Buckman Tavern in Lexington, Massachusetts. From the Tavern there is a perfect view of the Lexington town green. It's a triangular area of grass in the middle of what is now a modern, suburban town not far from Boston. When you study the New England colonial era, you learn about the physical layout of colonial towns. A town typically centered on a "green" or common with a meetinghouse. A nucleus of houses clustered near the meetinghouse, and the surrounding area consisted of farmland. Each landowner owned strips of land distributed throughout the total arable area. In that way, both good and poor quality farmland was equally distributed.
Living in Massachusetts, you can't escape history, no matter where you go. It's all around you. One day I was looking at the green, and wondering why the men of Lexington turned out to fight on April 19, 1775. What was it about this particular town that 77 of its men took their muskets and assembled on the green to protest against the British troops marching to Concord? Nobody has ever answered that question to my satisfaction. I started to think that clues might be found in the town structure itself. I started with a basic hypothesis that there was something about the geography of Lexington that influenced these men. I have yet to find hard evidence of that, but there seem to be factors that point in that direction.
How did you get started with your research?
The project started when I took History 120: Writing History, a course required of all history majors. Each student was required to write a research proposal. Mine focused on this particular question. I suggested that the answer might be found in an examination of topography and social geography (where people lived in relation to each other). Last spring I transformed that question into an Anton Fellowship proposal.
Most people say that as you go along in your research, your focus narrows. Mine, in fact, has actually ballooned outward, because I haven't been able to find evidence of a geographic connection. Now, rather than trying to prove my original thesis, I'm just trying to find an answer to why those men turned out to fight.
What are your thoughts so far?
There are a lot of interesting things that I've discovered. I've mainly focused on economic characteristics because tax records are available for Lexington residents from 1772-1775. I learned that the typical fighter was someone who paid between 50 and 150 pence per year in taxes--the middle tax bracket. These men were economically stable or on the rise. The men least likely to fight were those with the least to lose-- men paying less than 50 pence per year in taxes. That suggests to me that those who had less money felt a disconnect, perhaps because they didn't have as much to fight for. There also didn't seem to be quite as much willingness to fight among men in the highest income bracket. Those men had the most to lose. Perhaps they were caught between wanting to fight to protect their property and a fear that if they did so unsuccessfully, they might loose everything.
I don't think that the men of Lexington were revolutionaries in the way that everyone pictures them today. Initially, they had no intention of completely redoing their entire political system. Rather, they wanted to turn the clock back to 1763, a time when England minded its own business. Up until this time, the men in the colonies were getting rich quick. They had few taxes or regulations governing what they could trade. It's what historians have called a period of "salutory neglect." At that time, England valued the colonists more as consumers of English goods, rather than as suppliers of needed raw materials. The colonists saw the taxes that the British eventually started to impose around 1763 as an infringement, not only on their civil liberties, but also on their right to get rich. My findings seem to suggest that men fought when their economic mobility was challenged.
I understand that Lexington men turned out for two battles, one in the morning when the British marched west to Concord, and one in the afternoon when the British retreated east to Boston.
Yes, and what I really want to look at is who fought in the morning engagement as compared with who fought in the afternoon. I call the latter the "bandwagon battle," because by that time blood had already been spilled. The morning battle is particularly interesting to me. Only 77 Lexington men fought then, and my research suggests that 70% of those men were economically independent. So I'm really interested in looking at their economic status as compared to everyone else's.
Considering how much research has been done on New England history, and the importance of this battle, it does seem amazing that no one else has studied this question.
That's what's been both frustrating and exciting. Exciting because no one is looking at this--everybody looks at Concord, the town next door. Concord is bigger; it's where British soldiers were actually killed at the Old North Bridge. Dr. Robert Gross wrote the definitive book on Concord, and he's been of tremendous assistance to me in my research on Lexington. He looks at all sorts of questions, and seeks to answer what was it about these guys in Concord that made them decide to fight. He considers economic and social factors. Who were these men? Why did they choose to fight? So by focusing on Lexington, I feel like I'm really doing something that's groundbreaking. But it's also scary and frustrating. When I look through the records and find mistakes, who am I, a 20-year-old undergrad, to question them? There's no one to tell me whether I'm right or wrong.
Why do you study history?
When I go home for Thanksgiving, I'll get the same question I get every year: "What are you going to do with a history degree?" I study history because I love it. I'm going to get my doctorate and do this for the rest of my life.
But the fact of the matter is, why is history so important, and why do I like it so much? It's because you can search and search, and never find just one answer to why something happened. After all, history is a story of people, and half the time, we as people don't know why we do the things we do! So how can I, hundreds of years after an event, look back and say definitively why something happened? I can't. What I can do is try to reconstruct the event and the circumstances surrounding it.
When you read a book, there are characters in a book. When you close the book the story is over and you will never be able to get at anything else than what is written in those pages. You can make stuff up, and you can pretend, but you will never know what goes beyond those characters except what's written in the pages. With history, it's not like that. When you close the book, you can keep digging, and the story keeps going.
There's so much richness to it that you can get completely caught up in it. When I walk through the tavern I walk on floors that have been there since the building was erected. And I'm walking on floors that these men walked on. And the building itself breathes, and there are portraits of these people and you become familiar with them. It becomes almost like you're writing a novel. You're writing a story, you're creating something. My job is just to make sure that I don't make stuff up. That if these men were to come back and to look at what I've done, and if they were to read what I wrote about them, would they recognize themselves in that? And that's all I can do.
A lot of people say that we study history to make for a better tomorrow. I don't believe in that at all. I think it's a load of garbage! Honestly, people have been studying history since the dawn of man, and has it really made us get that much better?
I study history because I liken history to memory. I feel like a human being without a memory is not really a human being. You can't place yourself in time. We are all humans, but what makes us different are the life experiences that make us who we are. And without the memories of those life experiences, we don't know who we are. History to me feels like a collective memory. It defines what it is that we are as nations, as people, as communities, and groups. It doesn't define who we will be, but it shows us where we are and where we have been.
Can you use that as a way to go forward? Yes. Do I recommend it? No! Because looking backward to go forward means you're going to trip over something or walk into something, and you don't want that. But it's a good way to at least know who you are. So we don't have to be happy with who we are, but we have to reconcile with who we are, and that will help us to go forward. I think it's extraordinarily important.
And I also think it's extraordinarily important because people will distort the past for their own means. Historian David Blight recently came out with a book on the Civil War,* about how the memory of the Civil War has been twisted and used. You need to see, you need to see what things meant at that time and not twist them to shape the future.
Can you comment on the advantages and disadvantages of participating in research as an undergraduate?
The disadvantages have to do with time and respect. When you go places to conduct research as an undergrad, many people don't take you seriously. And as an undergrad, you're always pressed for time. You can't focus entirely on your research. I have other classes, other things that need to be done.
An important advantage is that doing research builds confidence. When you do research on your own, it becomes your own. And I joke now with my history professors, that I can call myself a historian now, because I'm doing research. I'm out there doing what historians do. I am a historian. I am a scholar. And that's incredibly confidence boosting. That confidence carries through into your other classes.
Also, it's just fun. It's a lot of fun.
*Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory.
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Additional Resources
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Buckman Tavern, where Stefanie works as a guide. Photograph courtesy of the Lexington Historical Society.
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 Stefanie with her Fall Fest poster. |
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Being a historian.