Date of Award

Summer 8-1-2025

Document Type

Campus Access Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

History

First Advisor

Vincent Cannato

Second Advisor

Timothy Hacsi

Third Advisor

Frederick Dalzell

Abstract

This thesis is both a history and an examination of Thompson Island’s Boston Asylum and Farm School for Indigent Boys (BAFS) and the Farm and Trade School (FTS). From 1835 Thompson Island functioned as a site of educational innovation. The school’s core mission was to rescue “worthy” but impoverished young boys from the temptations of city streets and shape their characters through productive labor, education, and moral guidance. The impacts were both consequential and enduring for the boys who attended. This study focuses primarily on the period between 1850 and 1920, a transformative era shaped by the leadership of superintendents Alfred B. Morse and Charles H. Bradley. Drawing on a wide range of primary sources housed in the Thompson Island Collection at the University of Massachusetts Boston’s University Archives and Special Collections, including institutional publications, headmasters’ reports, admission and discharge papers, Board of Directors’ reports, photographs, student records, and the Thompson’s Island Beacon this project employs a close analysis of the lived experiences of the boys and the ideological frameworks that governed the school’s daily operation.

This project also adopts a critical stance that blends institutional history with archival pedagogy. It recognizes the interpretive limitations of the historical records, particularly the absence of student-authored material, and embraces a methodology that reads with and against the grain of official documents. By employing this approach, it seeks to participate in broader conversations about education, youth, reform, and the politics of the archive. The analysis situates Thompson Island within intersecting histories of charity and regulation, arguing that the island school operated not only as a benevolent refuge but also as a space of physical labor, institutional surveillance, and ideological reproduction.

Included in the Appendix is a reflection on the use of the Thompson Island collection in undergraduate pedagogy. This study considers how place-based and archival learning can foster student agency and critical inquiry in the classroom and through course design. By extending historical inquiry into the undergraduate classroom, the project also argues for the transformative potential of teaching novice students in the archives by employing an ethically grounded inquiry-driven pedagogy rooted in historical complexity. These complementary values support the broader mission of universities to cultivate for students a sense of themselves as active participants in both a larger scholarly discourse and a shared physical community.

Comments

Free and open access to this Campus Access Thesis is made available to the UMass Boston community by ScholarWorks at UMass Boston. Those not on campus and those without a UMass Boston campus username and password may gain access to this thesis through Interlibrary Loan. If you have a UMass Boston campus username and password and would like to download this work from off-campus, click on the “Off-Campus Users” button.

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