Allison Smith, who recently graduated with her Master’s in Public History, submitted a Master’s research project that comprised a 30-minute historical documentary film and a short reflexive essay. Her 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 when she returned to the U.S.A. and eventually forgotten. They were accidentally rediscovered in 1974 by the then owners of the house, after it had been torn down, just before the rubble was burned. The letters were accepted by Archives of Ontario for preservation. The premise of her film is that, had the letters been found before the 1960s, they might not have been offered to, or accepted by the Archives. She argues that it was the emergence in the 1960s of ideas about Social History, the Civil Rights Movement and the Women’s Movement that led the owners of the letters and the Archives to realize their importance.
The telling of the story of Mary Ann Shadd’s letters on film presented challenges for Allison both as a historian and a filmmaker. Relatively new to both roles, she tried to be diligent in ensuring that her research was thorough and the messages well presented in a film medium. The research was complicated by the fact that the letters had two histories and that these histories lived in what she came to understand as a complex borderland. The process of making the film also had several challenges. One involved shepherding a wide array of distinct components through the film-making process and staying within tight time constraints. She was conscious of two specific concerns that are of particular importance to public history today: that of cultural appropriation in that she is a white person telling Black history; and wanting to balance her desire to challenge her audience while at the same time keeping them interested, emotionally engaged, and aesthetically pleased.