Page of Reason | February 2025
Dispatches from your most humble servant
Page of Reason is the newsletter of the Institute for Thomas Paine Studies (ITPS) at Iona University in New Rochelle, New York. Learn more about the ITPS and our activities at our Research Portal. You can follow us on Twitter @TheITPS, BlueSky @theitps.bsky.social, and Mastodon @ITPS@historians.social.
In this newsletter, you’ll find:
Iona Students Decode the Past
New AI Training Workshop for Undergraduates
Upcoming Paine Scholars Field Trip | March 30
Register for Quaff & Quill | April 10
Two undergraduate internship opportunities
Iona Students “Decode” the Past
As programs in computer science and technology teach Iona students to code in computer languages, a new opportunity offered in partnership by the Institute for Thomas Paine Studies and the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania trains students to “decode” the written languages of the past. In “The Lost World of Handwriting,” Dr. Heather Wolfe (Curator of Manuscripts at the Folger Shakespeare Library) trains students in paleography, the study of historical writing. Students selected for “The Lost World of Handwriting”—who submitted applications for the workshop last fall—gain experience during hands-on sessions in how to decipher, read, and transcribe manuscripts (handwritten documents) from early modern England, roughly the period from 1500 to 1850. Over the course of the semester-long workshop, five Iona students joined by an equal number of students from the University of Pennsylvania will learn how to proficiently read historical handwriting, understand how archives and libraries preserve and catalog manuscripts, and how to transcribe and digitize them.
Last week, the five Iona students in the program and ITPS public historian Professor Nicole Mahoney traveled to the McNeil Center for Early American Studies in Philadelphia to meet the other University of Pennsylvania students and Dr. Wolfe in person for the second session of the workshop. Students first examined and analyzed a printed facsimile of a 1588 letter (pictured above) from William Cecil, Lord Burghley to Charles Howard, Baron Howard of Effingham, Lord Admiral of England, about supplying munitions to two English ships and the recovery of a Spanish ship spotted near Newhaven. A close reading of the envelope (bottom right) revealed notes about the various places and times when mail carriers received the letter, tracing its 80-mile journey along the road from London to Dover.
Students then tried their own hand at writing in secretary hand (the dominant style of formal European writing at the time) with a quill pen and ink made according to an early modern recipe. Dr. Wolfe explained the construction, use, care, and maintenance of quills as well as the ingredients most commonly used by women to prepare and store ink, a chore that would have been done in the kitchen and was recorded in recipe books alongside instructions for preserving other things such as jams and pickles. (You can check out a list of ink recipes from Folger Library manuscripts here). Everyone was grateful to shake out their fingers, put down their quills, and wash the ink off their hands at the end of the day. The workshop continues with weekly virtual sessions and concludes at the end of April with another in person workshop in Philadelphia. Stay tuned for more adventures in paleography!
New AI Training Workshop for Undergraduates
Current undergraduates at Iona are invited to apply for a new AI training workshop in partnership with the graduate program in book publishing at Portland State University. During the three-day workshop, students will learn to digitize archival items related to Thomas Paine from the Ryan Library and then train an AI program based on these materials. Then students will evaluate and fact check program — called pAIne — as well as the methodology behind building it for accuracy and potential uses. Students will receive a stipend at the end of the workshop and do not need any prior training or experience. All majors are welcome to apply!
WHAT: AI Training Workshop
WHEN: May 19-21, 2025
WHERE: Iona University, New Rochelle
DEADLINE: March 1, 2025
Interested? Send a short email to Dr. Nora Slonimsky (nslonimsky@iona.edu).
Upcoming Paine Scholars Field Trip | March 30
Iona students in the first cohort of the Paine Scholars Program will head off campus for a field trip on Sunday, March 30 to the Van Cortlandt House Museum, the oldest standing building in the Bronx. Built in 1748-1749, the house is the centerpiece of a 1,000-acre urban park that was once part of the family’s plantation. Three generations of the Van Cortlandt family enslaved Africans on the property from about 1698 to 1823. During the visit, students will learn more about the history of enslaved labor on the Van Cortlandt’s plantations, as well as the house’s role in the Revolutionary history of the New York City region.
Register for Quaff & Quill: A Book Talk with Eran Zelnik | April 10
Join us on Thursday, April 10 from 6:00-7:00pm on the Iona University, New Rochelle campus for a talk with Professor Eran Zelnik (California State University, Chico) about his new book, American Laughter, American Fury: Humor and the Making of a White Man’s Democracy, 1750-1850, to explore how humor helped to define whiteness and masculinity in early North America. Light refreshments will be served.
For more details and to register, click here.
The Quaff & Quill program series is presented by the Institute for Thomas Paine Studies in partnership with the Huguenot & New Rochelle Historical Association.
Internship Opportunity at the Dyckman Farmhouse Museum Alliance
The Dyckman Farmhouse Museum, located in the northern Manhattan neighborhood of Inwood, is seeking two dynamic individuals to work as Outreach and Engagement interns for 10 weeks from April to June 2025. Interns will have the opportunity to connect with our community through outreach and engagement projects. This is a paid internship. Fluency in Spanish (written and verbal) is a requirement for this position. Learn more here.
Apply for the C. Dallett Hemphill Summer Internship
The McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania will sponsor two undergraduate internships in the summer of 2025, at Historic Trappe and the Dialogue Institute of Temple University. The stipend for each internship is $4,500. These internships are open to undergraduate students enrolled at McNeil Center Consortium institutions and are designed to introduce students to professional work in public history settings. Interns are expected to work 35 hours per week for 8 weeks. Beginning and end dates will be arranged between the partner institution and the intern, but internships should be completed by September 1, 2025. One-half of the stipend will be paid at the beginning of the internship, and the other half will be remitted at its completion.
Please submit applications by April 25, 2025.
Please submit applications and inquiries by email to Peter Olsen-Harbich, Associate Director, McNeil Center at peteroh@sas.upenn.edu.
For more details about partner institutions, position descriptions, and application instructions, see the McNeil Center website here.