History Grad Produces Documentary Film for International Women’s Day
Allison Smith, a recent graduate student with an MA in Public History, has produced a film called Mary Ann Shadd Revisited: Echoes from an Old House that will be launched on Tuesday, March 8, 2016 for International Women’s Day. The launch will take place on the Heritage Toronto website as a part of their programming for the day.

The documentary film is about a collection of letters to and from African American abolitionist Mary Ann Shadd between 1851 and 1863 – years that she lived in Canada. The letters were left in her house and eventually forgotten when she returned to the United States. They were rediscovered in 1974 by the then owners of the house after it had been torn down and just before the rubble was burned. The letters were accepted by Archives of Ontario for preservation.

The premise of Smith’s film is that, had the letters been found before the 1960s, they might not have been offered to or accepted by the archives. Smith argues that it was the emergence in the 1960s of ideas about social history and the civil rights movement that led the owners of the letters and the archives to realize their importance.
Smith’s completed the film as part of her master’s research project (reflections) supervised by the Department of History’s James Miller and John Walsh, with David Dean as third reader. She drew upon experience gained in Michael Ostroff’s undergraduate history class in documentary filmmaking.
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