From the Editor's Desk

Abstract

Hello and welcome to the Fall 2021 issue! As the newly minted editor of Connecticut History Review, I would like to share a little bit about myself and why I am honored to usher the journal forward. My name is Marie Basile McDaniel, and I am an associate professor of history at Southern Connecticut State University. I have been there since 2010 after receiving my PhD in American History at University of California, Davis. My research interests are Colonial America, especially religion, ethnicity, and material culture. Although not originally from Connecticut, the state quickly captured my heart, and now my favorite course to teach is Connecticut History. As with many courses, Connecticut history helps students connect the past with their own lives.This issue includes three articles that provide just such an experience. First, Yale doctoral student and New Haven Alderman Eli Sabin takes a hard look at how Connecticut's uneven and ultimately inequitable state representation evolved in the headline article “Steady Habits in the Constitution State: Connecticut's Inequitable System of Representation, 1639–1965.” As Americans yet again re-examine voting and the meanings of representation, it is useful to understand how earlier Americans thought and argued over the same issues.In the second article, our own book review editor, Peter Baldwin, examines Connecticut's move towards school busing in “Riding to Learn, Learning to Ride: Early School-busing in Connecticut, 1900–1945.” This fascinating experience into the urbanization of Connecticut and the changes to children's school routines may put the past two years of remote school and bus driver shortages into historical perspective.Our final article “Troops and Tribes: Masculinity, Playing Indian, and the Social Politics of Ernest Thompson Seton's Expulsion from the Boy Scouts of America” comes from anthropologist, William Farley. The article focuses on Ernest Thompson Seton's creation of the Woodcraft movement, which became inspirational and central to the Boy Scouts of America, while Seton lived in Greenwich. While Farley focuses more on Seton's struggles with the Boy Scouts of America than on Connecticut's role in that struggle, it still reinforces the idea that Connecticut is often at the nexus of ideas and people in American history.An update from the Connecticut State Library by project archivist Sarah J. Morin reveals a National Archives supported initiative to make the New Haven Court Records more accessible to the general public. The “Uncovering New Haven” project unveils the judicial records of the county from 1700 to 1855, to which Morin offers a glimpse.Another update from New Haven is a synopsis of the holdings of the Southern Connecticut State University Hilton C. Buley's New Haven Mayoral Archives by professors Jonathan L. Wharton and Jodie Gil. Focusing on the controversial DeStefano Papers, Wharton and Gil also reveal the many opportunities in the holdings available to students and researchers.As in each Fall issue, this issue also includes a report from Connecticut History Day. Despite the continuing pandemic, Connecticut History Day 2021 virtually brought together 3000 middle and high school students, with fifty-six students continuing on to the National Competition. The projects, as always, illustrate that history will be in good hands. Congratulations to all the students.Tying in nicely with the articles and archival holdings are three book reviews. The first is a review of the newly compiled and edited New Haven Town Records, 1769–1819, which will nicely complement the holdings of the Connecticut State Library. The second is a review of Paved Roads and Public Money: Connecticut Transportation in the Age of Internal Combustion by Richard DeLuca, which will interest anyone who has ever had an opinion on Connecticut's roads and highways and public transportation—I assume this is all of us. And the third is a review of Shipwrecked: Coastal Disasters and the Making of the American Beach by Jamin Wells, which forever reshaped how I thought of Connecticut's beaches too.Finally, thank you to Bob Imholt who has edited this journal for the past three and a half years, and has been an invaluable resource in the transitional period.