Steven Morgan Friedman (C '98) is taking the World Wide Web forward into the past.
Penn's past, to be specific. After assisting the University Archives in developing its Web site, Friedman went to work creating one for the University itself -- in 1830.
Visitors to the site (http://www.upenn.edu/AR/1830/) can tour the University's new home, two buildings at Ninth and Market Streets -- one for the College, one for the medical department. They can read the address that Penn's provost, the Rev. William Heathcote DeLancey, gave at the opening of the fall semester for the collegiate department of the University. The site also contains a complete directory of students, faculty and courses of instruction, views of the new campus and its two predecessors, and an "online" library catalog -- the University's first, compiled in 1829 and displayed on the Penn Library Web site.
Penn's third campus, at Ninth and Market streets, is shown in this photo from the University Archives. The Medical Department building is in the foreground at left, with the College building in the distance at right.
The site grew out of Friedman's interest in Penn's history, an interest stimulated by his work for the Archives. "Having done a Web site on Penn's general history, I knew I wanted to do a home page that zoomed in on Penn at a specific period in time," he said.
He settled on 1830 for a number of reasons. The year falls in the era between the Revolution and the Civil War, a period that receives relatively little attention from American historians. It was also a period of significant change in Penn's fortunes: enrollment in the college had rebounded from a low point in the 1820s, as had the University's finances, thanks to fresh support from the Trustees that enabled the construction of the new campus.
One thing Friedman discovered about the Penn of 1830 was that it was definitely not Ben Franklin's University. History professor Michael Zuckerman, who supervised Friedman's research project as an independent study course, said of his work, "One thinks of Penn as a secular as well as a non-sectarian university, but what [Friedman] found is an enormous centrality of official Christianity being promoted by the provost of the University."
Provost DeLancey, an Episcopal priest, also taught the required course of religious instruction for all undergraduates. And save for one concession to modern times -- the availability of French, Spanish and German classes, which students could take if their parents requested it -- the undergraduate curriculum at Penn mirrored the classically-oriented, religion-based course of study of the other top schools of the day rather than the secular and modern model Franklin described in his "Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pennsylvania."
Today's Penn, according to Friedman, bears little resemblance to the small, intimate, seminary-like school of the early 19th century. Penn is not only a much larger, more secular and more diverse school than it was in 1830; it's a much better one, said Friedman, who characterized the University's institutional history as a "sine curve." "What [most students] don't realize is that Penn today is at the highest point in its history. People complain about how education at Penn is in decline; actually, it's never been better."
About the only thing that hasn't changed much, he said, is the attitudes of the students: "Human nature doesn't change. The Penn students then misbehaved wildly, much worse than they do now, but they acted on the same sorts of impulses -- they didn't really have a work ethic either, and would much rather go outside than study."
With his project, Friedman built on a successful eight-year tradition of undergraduate historical research using primary source materials in the University Archives. In 1989, emeritus history professor Richard Dunn, who directed the history department's Senior Honors Program that year, approached University Archivist Mark Frazier Lloyd with a suggestion: Encouraging students to use primary sources contained in the Archives, he felt, could enrich the undergraduate research experience at Penn. The following year, Dunn's suggestion became institutionalized in the form of "A Pennsylvania Album," a collection of undergraduate historical essays published in commemoration of Penn's 250th anniversary.
Since then, the Archives have become an important source for undergraduate historians at Penn. Over the past eight years, 75 students have written senior honors theses or major term papers that relied wholly or mainly on materials in the Archives, and in the early 1990s, about one-third of Penn history majors focusing on American history did research on Penn history in the Archives.
The research that has been produced is of high quality: The annual Rose Fund Awards for Student/Faculty Research Projects recognized two of the projects, and for four consecutive years from 1990 to 1993, the history department's highest honor for undergraduate research in American history, the Thomas C. Cochran Prize, went to senior honors theses based on research in the Archives.
But up until now, all of this research has been published on paper. Friedman's project is the first undergraduate history "paper" to appear exclusively on theWorld Wide Web. Zuckerman, for his part, found the effort impressive. "There's both substantive discovery, which is interesting in its own right; then there's the sheer audacity of a college student setting up this esoteric Web site," he said. "You'd think the mere thought of it would put someone off, but he persevered."
Zuckerman added: "I hope he pursues this in a senior honors thesis next year. I think he could have something significant to say on a little-understood period in the history of American education."
As it happens, he is pursuing this further. Friedman traveled to other elite schools over the summer to research their mid-19th-century histories. So far, he has done research at Columbia, Rutgers, Princeton, New York University and Berkeley, and has received a grant to do similar work at Harvard.
However, he said, "if more of these primary source materials were available on-line, I wouldn't need a grant to travel to Harvard in order to use their archives."
Friedman feels that the Web-related aspect of his work is potentially as important as the work itself, as it makes it easier for students and others to do high-quality research of their own. "This is an ideal way to enable honest undergraduate research by taking primary sources and making them available on line," he said.
For researchers and others interested in reconstructing Penn's past, the University Archives and Records Center is the place to locate the building materials.
The Archives also contains source material for those interested in history beyond Penn as well, thanks to gifts and bequests of papers from Penn faculty and alumni. The Henry Howard Houston Estate papers, for example, chronicle the development of Chestnut Hill and its environs, while the Alexander Family Papers tell the story of a pioneering African-American couple who broke new ground in the legal profession and civic affairs.
There are also historical materials from many student organizations, including the Mask and Wig Club and the Student Committee on Undergraduate Education, papers of notable Penn faculty such as E. Digby Baltzell and Elliot Stellar, and minutes of the faculty dating back to 1826.
An important recent acquisition was the papers of the University's first provost, William Smith.
The Archives and Records Center's Web site is http://www.upenn.edu/AR/
- Sandy Smith
