Paper archives

Manifest | Thirteen Colonies is a photographic project and journey through the repositories of African American material culture found in libraries, museums, and archives of the original thirteen English colonies and Washington, DC. Conceived by photographer Wendel A. White, this project is a personal reliquary of the remarkable evidence of Black agency and racial oppression stored in public collections. Accompanying his imagery, White discusses his approach to finding, selecting, and photographing artifacts—from rare singular objects to more quotidian materials—and highlights their significance as forensic evidence of Black life and history in the United States. 

Manifest: Thirteen Colonies will be open to the public at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology, Harvard University from May 18, 2024-April 13, 2025.

Wendel A. White (b. 1956, Newark, NJ) is currently Distinguished Professor of Art at Stockton University and has taught photography at the School of Visual Arts; The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art; the International Center of Photography; and the Rochester Institute of Technology. His work has received various awards and fellowships, including: Doctor of Arts (hc), Oakland University; Robert Gardner Fellow in Photography, Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology, Harvard University; John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in Photography; Bunn Lectureship in Photography, Bradley University; three artist fellowships from the New Jersey State Council for the Arts; Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts; and New Works Photography Fellowship from En Foco Inc. His work is represented in museum and corporate collections, including the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; and Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL; among many others.

Zuni, Hopi, Copan: Early Anthropology at Harvard, 1890–1893 publishes one hundred letters from John Gundy Owens to Deborah Harker Stratton, currently held in the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University. Owens was one of the first graduate students in anthropology at Harvard; his poignant letters to “Miss Debbie” trace a budding relationship of affection in late Victorian America and offer vivid, highly entertaining accounts of his fieldwork at Zuni pueblo in New Mexico, Hopi mesa villages in Arizona, and the Maya site of Copan in Honduras.

Tragically, Owens died at age twenty-seven in Copan; Stratton never married and kept the letters until her own death, nearly fifty years later. Introductory essays by Curtis M. Hinsley, Louis A. Hieb, and Barbara W. Fash contextualize the annotated letters and shed new light on early anthropological training in the United States.

Jeffries Wyman (1814–74), a pioneer anthropologist of nineteenth-century America and one of its great comparative anatomists, was the Hersey Professor of Anatomy at Harvard University and, later, a trustee of the Peabody Museum and professor of American Archaeology and Ethnology.

Wyman wrote the 59 letters in this volume to his only son Jeffie. Dating from 1866, when Jeffie was two, until Wyman’s death in 1874, when Jeffie was ten, the letters reveal a great scientist trying to instill in his son the concepts of acute observation and wonder. Wyman’s charming, quizzical drawings embellish the text, which will be appreciated by children and adults alike.

Reports 1887-1890 (PDF)

1887 p1
1888 p25
1889 p67
1890 p89