People
Danielle Bennett
ERI/PS2 Public Research Fellow
Danielle Bennett (she/her) is a PhD student in US History and Public History at the CUNY Graduate Center where she researches queer historic preservation, works for the American Social History Project on their LGBTQ+ Histories of the US Teaching Institute, and is a WAC Fellow. She has also taught at Brooklyn College and the College of Staten Island, and worked on projects at the American LGBTQ+ Museum and the New-York Historical Society. Danielle received her MA in History and Museum Studies from Tufts University in 2019. Danielle is a 2025 ERI/PS2 Summer Public Research Fellow.
Something had shifted between June and October.
That’s all I knew, as I paged through the folder of calm, administrative memos in the Columbia University Archives reading room. Harry’s job was safe in June, and by October, he was fired. But I couldn’t see what had changed. Time to go to Cambridge.
I’m a US historian who is interested in why and how we develop methods for communicating history to regular folks. In particular, I am interested in the development of the historic house museum, that dusty but ubiquitous structure in your hometown or obscured within a set of rowhouses on a busy city street. I’m also a scholar of queer history, looking to understand how people experiencing same-sex desire or were otherwise not interested in hetero- or cis-normative practices interacted with their culture and society. For me, historic houses are a good place to combine these interests, because I have found a number of people in the early 20th century with these inclinations who worked to create historic house museums. This is how I encountered Harry. Thanks to the PS2 Fellowship, I was able to spend most of the summer with him.
Harry, or Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Dana, was a grandson of the famed American poet, as well as a scholar of Russian drama and an activist for many leftist and Progressive causes. It is possible that the Longfellow House, which itself has a long history that includes serving as a headquarters for George Washington during the Revolutionary War, was always destined to become a house museum. But it was Harry, who lived there most of his life, as well as a likely queer cousin, Anne Thorp, who did the bulk of the work to open the house to the public. As I dug into Harry’s life, I began to see that this house was singularly important to Harry, whose queerness at times interfered with his ability to live there. I found a resonance earlier in his life too, when his political beliefs interfered with his livelihood and home away from home, Columbia University, which fired him in 1917 for participating in anti-war activities.
In Harry’s own archive at the Longfellow House in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I found more information about his dismissal, including dozens of newspaper articles reporting on Harry’s dismissal, and the subsequent fallout, which included the resignation of the famed historian, Charles Beard. I also found a thick folder of supportive condolence letters from friends, family, and fellow travelers. What appears to have happened between June and September is an all too familiar conflict about academic freedom and political expression between school administrators, trustees, and college faculty.
