Research in Progress

Research in Progress Mary Ellen Chijioke & Claire B. Shetter Quaker scholars are never afraid ofbig projects! Having completedhis biography ofGeorge Fox, H. Larry Ingle (1 106 Collins Circle, Chattanooga, TN 3741 1) ofthe Department of History, University of Tennessee, is starting work on a history of Quaker social thought. Thomas D. Hamm (314 E. Main St., Spiceland, IN 47385), Associate Professor of History and Quaker Archivist at Earlham College, is working on his next book, a study of Hicksite Friends and communitarianism. Student projects at the Quaker colleges indicate that the field will not lack for ambitious workers in the future. A combined student and faculty effort at Earlham College, coordinatedby Margaret Benefiel ofthe Religion Department, has gathered materials for a microfilm anthology of seventeenth-century Quaker women's writings, to be publishedby U.M.I. Another group at Earlham has been working with T. Weston Miller, Director of the Media Resources Center, to create a videotape introducing the use of Quaker history resources, illustrated by images depicting American Quakers before 1 900. The Quaker collections are also used to support not only the standard courses in Quakerism but other seminars and theses in social history, with topics as diverse as the silver question of the 1890s and horse-drawn carriages. We do not normally list individual undergraduate research projects in this column, but it is worth noting that they come not just from the Quaker colleges. Examples of "outside" projects in the spring of 1993 are: Anna M. Lawrence from Carleton College Department of Religion, studying women's leadership in Quaker social reform and religious reform during the nineteenth-century schismatic period; Paul A. Levengood from Davidson College Department of History, working on North Carolina Quakersjust prior to and during the Civil War, with an emphasis on dissent, conscientious objection, conscription, and war deprivation; Elise Cappella (Box 3133 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520), a Yale University History student examining pre-Civil-War Quaker women in America; and Dylan Penningroth (Box 158, Yale Station), also of Yale's History Department, studying the free produce movement. In the history of Quaker religious thought, Gilbert R. Pugh (Box 340, Valley Forge, PA 19481) is studying the development of the concepts of unmediated revelation, the inner light and revelation, and the inward light and mediation. A number ofresearchers have been using Quaker sources for African-American history, whether or not the topics are specific to Quakerism. Kenneth E. Marshall (117 Louis Street, East Lansing, MI 48823) is doing an M.A. thesis in History at Michigan State University on slavery in New Jersey. Velma Clark (3908 Powell Road, Brookhaven, PA 1 901 5-2005) is planning her M.A. thesis at the University of Pennsylvania on Quakers and African-Americanassociations. For her University of Pennsylvania Ph.D. in the History and Sociology of Science, Nina Lerman (4600 Spruce St, #33, Philadelphia, PA 19139) is doing a dissertation on technical education in nineteenth-century Philadelphia, including the Institute for Colored Youth. Patricia Theodore (8 Stoneridge, Media, PA 19063) has been preparing a staffpaper for the Colonial Pennsylvania Plantation on the manumission of slaves 120Quaker History in Edgmont Township and history of the Pratt family of Edgmont. Finally Edward C. Papentusa (206 Oakdale Rd., Baltimore, MD 01210) of the Maryland State Archives is studying Robert Goodloe Harper and the colonization by AfricanAmericans of Africa. Spanning two popular areas in social history, Meryl Carmel (3259 Gwenlee Circle, Glenwood, MD 21 738) is doing her M.A. thesis in History at the University of Maryland on Quaker women and antislavery: Duck Creek, Delaware and Third Haven, Maryland. From the opposite perspective, A. Faulkner Watts (785 West End Ave., Apt. IB, New York, NY) is using all available sources in his search for documentation on the African slave woman in the diaspora, expecially as protagonist for freedom. Two women are studying Quaker women in southeast Pennsylvania. Margaret Haviland (27 Webb Road, Chadds Ford, PA 19317) has been exploring a number of related issues: women in the meeting, both specific women like Rebecca Darby and Anne Mifflin, and the way women's meetings operated; and women's role in creating and sustaining the Quaker community in the region...