Revolution, Marketing, & the Legacy of the Moravian Seminary for Young Ladies

I’ve been working on a project examining poetry at the Moravian Seminary for Young Ladies since the fall of 2014. Of course, when I began this exploration I had many questions. I had the big research questions.

And I also had logistical questions: Was there an archival record? Where was this archival record?

Looking for an archival record of the Moravian Seminary for Young Ladies naturally led me to the potential of exploring materials related to Moravian College. Was there a connection? Did they have materials? Information on the webpages for the library and the school archives seemed to indicate an avenue of pursuit, but it wasn’t screaming “hey, look here! Hey, start here!” Additionally, there was the issue of access. Library websites made it clear that there was not a full-time archivist available.

Eventually, I sorted out my archive questions out and have since spent a lot of time at the Moravian Archives in Bethlehem.

The connection between the Moravian Seminary for Young Ladies and Moravian College wasn’t exactly clear when I began exploring this project in the fall of 2014. On the surface, however, that connection seems to be clearer today. Sort of. Or, at least, the connection Moravian College wants to make to the Moravian Seminary for Young Ladies and a revolutionary past has become clearer.

Moravian College’s embracing of its historic past is interesting to me as someone involved in higher education. My composition classes in the spring of 2015 and the fall of 2015 addressed on higher education. In class we frequently explored the marketing of colleges. Together we took a critical eye to the marketing rhetoric of colleges and universities. One of my classes in the spring of 2015 was a dual enrollment class. We often focused on Lehigh Valley colleges and universities since many of the students were going to schools in the area. A local focus also made sense since we could frequently use local media coverage of area schools as a jumping off point for discussion. The online presence of Moravian College was something we explored often.

The above paragraph is an attempt to build my ethos. I remember what the website for Moravian College looked like a year or so ago. It certainly doesn’t look like it does at this moment. Just trust me: it was a rather typical website of a small liberal arts college in a nice community. When I began initially exploring the website of Moravian College in the fall of 2014, there wasn’t anything distinctive about it. It was what one expected from the website of a small liberal arts college in a bucolic setting.

Last fall, I found myself again visiting the webpage of Moravian College. Things had changed.

Navigating to Moravian College’s website forces the viewer to confront immediately a revolutionary past. It isn’t subtle.

When a viewer of the website scrolls down, the call to “Be a Little Revolutionary” recedes and they’re confronted with a very short history of the origins of Moravian College.

The “16-year-old girl” mentioned in the short history blurb is Countess Benigna von Zinzendorf, daughter of Count Nicholas Ludwig von Zinzendorf.

Taking ownership of that “revolutionary” claim.

When I visited the Moravian Archives in the fall of 2015, I noticed that the streetlights surrounding the campus of Moravian College featured flags proclaiming their motto for all to see. “Be a Little Revolutionary” is a marketing campaign that seems to be everywhere. Again, these streetlight flags were not something that I saw present in the summer of 2015 when I first visited the Moravian Archives.

wow much revolution such colonial past wow

The new list of best places to work in the Lehigh Valley came out recently and there was a profile of the award winners in the local newspaper. Each workplace profiled is listed with a little bit of information, including the founding date. The local paper, The Morning Call, lists the founding of Moravian College as 1742 and in another article, featuring factoids, lists the claim of “the sixth oldest college in America and the first school to educate women.”

Competition for students is difficult. I understand the drive of colleges and universities to undertake attention-grabbing ad campaigns and to develop buzz phrases for marketing purposes. I do know that the history of education in American, especially women’s education, is complicated. It is far too nuanced for sloganeering. I’ve not delved too far beyond the #18C in tracing the connection between the schools. It is certainly much more complicated than what a marketing campaign tries to make it. This use of the idea of revolution, The Revolution, and a historical past is driven by marketing. It is a clever and organized campaign.

#Brand

This isn’t an all-inclusive post about the history of the Moravian Seminary for Young Ladies and it isn’t a post about the history of Moravian College. It is a post drawing attention to branding and marketing of higher education today. I think this post is a starting point for highlighting the collapsing and simplification of a rather complex historical past, not just of the boarding school and Moravian College, but also American history and the history of women’s education in the United States.

Find a Grave Editing Marathon: Could it Work?

In the process of writing my blog post on the poet Caroline M. Congdon, I came across an entry for her on the website Find a Grave. Congdon’s entry includes nothing more than her name, birth and death dates, and an image of her tombstone. There is no other biographical information about her listed on the site. The sparse nature of Congdon’s entry started me to thinking: Could the model of Wikipedia editing marathons be applied to addressing the scarcity of the historical record with regards to women’s history on Find a Grave?

Editing-thons of Wikipedia allowing users to create, add, and curate content have been incorporated into successful scholarly and classroom endeavors, especially in the case of women’s history. Many of these efforts have sought to broaden the exposure and the qualities of entries dedicated to women in the fields of science, the arts, and literature. These editing marathons have provided a way for scholars and classrooms to broaden the way that they connect to a larger public. Of course, these collaborative endeavors are facilitated by Wikipedia’s promotion of collaborative editing, but more on that later on in the post.

The entries on Find a Grave, especially those related to women writers, could benefit immensely from a Wikipedia-style collaborative editing project. The quality of the entries on Find a Grave varies greatly in the level and detail, and often the narrative of entries is framed by a specific goal of the entry’s author. For instance, the entry for Caroline M. Congdon contains no biographical information about her beyond her birth and death dates and a listing of possible family relations. On the other hand, Sarah Helen Whitman’s Find A Grave entry seems like an improvement from the entry on Congdon, but as you can see, there are some particular problems:

In this Find a Grave entry, Whitman’s fame and her entire life story derives from her relationship with Edgar Allan Poe, not her own merits as a person and a poet. Find a Grave users have their hearts in the right place and appear to genuinely consist of individuals interested in history and genealogy, the preservation of cemetery records, and a commitment to often marginalized and forgotten personal and local histories. However, many Find a Grave biographical entries are sparse when it comes to details, derived from sources like Wikipedia, or contain inaccuracies.

Find a Grave seems ripe for an organized exercise in public scholarship similar to the Wikipedia editing marathons; Find a Grave, however, is vastly different than Wikipedia, and a massive editing project could be a difficult undertaking. The content generated on Find a Grave shares some similarities with Wikipedia, namely the investment of the users in the subjects that they write about on the website. Content on Find a Grave is created by users invested in documenting cemeteries and graves across the United States and the world. In large part, that desire to document graves is what drives the creation of entries on Find a Grave, not necessarily biographical or contextual information.

Beyond user initiative in creating and maintaining individual records on the site, Find a Grave lacks Wikipedia’s relatively easy and simple collaborative form of editing. Once an entry on Find a Grave is created, any suggested edits must be approved by the user that maintains the particular entry. Editing entries on Find a Grave relies on not only a willing user, but a still active one, too. Find a Grave allows the transfer of individual grave entries from user to user, but such transfers are predicated on specific genealogical criteria. Requesting users must be within a prescribed number of generations in relation to the subject of the entry they request to take over.

An organized project of editing entries on Find a Grave could be a significant undertaking, but it is possible that it could work, and it could offer a significant public engagement opportunity between Find a Grave users, historians, and literary scholars. Find a Grave is driven by a community of dedicated users invested in the histories and personal stories of the topics they are write about, and it is possible that passion could translate to a collaborative partnership with those seeking to highlight women’s history on Find a Grave.