Fellows celebrate UD-Hagley Program’s 50th year

Carroll Pursell (left) with Arwen Mohun. Pursell was a Hagley Fellow from 1956-58, when he got his master's degree, and is retiring in June from the faculty of Case Western Reserve University. Mohun, a former student of Pursell's, is associate professor of history at UD and coordinator of the UD-Hagley Program.

11:51 a.m., May 13, 2004--Some of the nation’s best-known authorities in the history of industrialization and technology gathered Saturday, May 8, to mark the 50th anniversary of a key experience they have in common, the University of Delaware-Hagley Program.

The reunion drew about 70 current and former Hagley Fellows, faculty members and guests to the grounds of the Hagley Museum and Library near Wilmington, where a busy agenda of talks, tours and opportunities to socialize and reminisce filled the day.

The focus of the graduate University of Delaware-Hagley Program is the history of industrialization, broadly defined to include such topics as gender and technology, work and society, industrial architecture and design, and culture and political economy. Fellows develop flexible programs of study, which might include the history of work, consumption, technology, material culture and social and economic history.

“The Hagley Program is distinctive to the University of Delaware; there’s nothing else like it,” Arwen Mohun, associate professor of history and coordinator of the program, said.

Although there are other programs that deal with industrial history, she said, few are as focused as the UD-Hagley Program, which explores that history in its social, cultural and material contexts. In addition, the program prepares fellows to be either academic historians or museum professionals—or a combination of the two specialties—while most other programs concentrate on one area or the other, Mohun said.

The UD-Hagley Program began in 1954 as a master’s degree program and a joint venture with Hagley Museum. The museum had opened the previous year on the site of the gunpowder works founded by E.I. du Pont in 1802, which became the DuPont Co. Today, the program offers two- and four-year fellowships, leading to master’s and doctoral degrees in history, as well as a certificate in museum studies. About three new fellows begin the program each year.

The Hagley Museum, where fellows can conduct research and work as interns, features restored mills and a workers’ community. The Hagley Library furthers the study of business and technology in America, especially in the Mid-Atlantic region, with collections ranging from the business records of 18th-century merchants to those of modern telecommunications companies.

Bruce Sinclair (left) chats with John Munroe, H. Rodney Sharp Professor Emeritus of History at UD and a cofounder of the UD-Hagley Program 50 years ago. Sinclair was a Hagley Fellow from 1957-59, when he got his master's, and went on to start what is now the Museum of American Textile History in Lowell, Mass., and to teach in higher education.

Saturday’s reunion agenda included a series of talks, many by alumni of the program, tracing the history of the UD-Hagley Program. Former fellow David Hounshell, who received his doctoral degree in 1978, spoke about the program’s successes in the 1970s under the leadership of Eugene Ferguson, who died March 21. Hounshell now serves as David M. Roderick Professor of Technology and Social Change at Carnegie Mellon University. An afternoon talk by George Vogt, director of the Hagley Museum and Library, outlined plans for the institution’s future.

Former fellows who attended the reunion praised the nature of the program over the years, which, they said, has changed in various ways but has continued to offer outstanding opportunities in scholarship, museum experience and networking.

“When I was here, they were still finishing work on the museum, and it was a great deal of fun because we got to learn how to actually make exhibits, and we did other work, such as giving tours on the open-air jitney that drove around the property,” Carroll Pursell, a fellow from 1956-58 who’s now on the faculty of Case Western Reserve University, recalled. “My timing was extremely lucky because I got to be in on it practically from the beginning.”

Darwin Stapleton, a fellow from 1969-75, described the program as similar to “an ongoing seminar.” Now the executive director and adjunct professor at the Rockefeller
Archive Center in Sleepy Hollow, N.Y., Stapleton said the program always attracted a diverse group of fellows.

“People were interested in many different areas of study, and they had various careers in mind,” he said. “What held us together was a strong interest in material culture and a desire to bring history to a broader audience.”

Article by Ann Manser
Photos by Greg Drew

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