Distinguished Alums of the History Department

Heather Palmer '81, Curator and Author

This article on Heather Palmer inaugurates a series the Department hopes will interest long-term friends of the Department and of the College, as well as inspire current and prospective students.  We will feature alumni/ae who have gone on to exceptionally interesting careers in which their History major has been important.  Not all will have become professional in history-related fields, but all will have built from their work on the past to find their present passion.

Our first featured alum is a historian's historian.  After graduating from CC she received her M.A. from the outstanding program in museum studies at the State University of New York, Cooperstown.  Her graduate studies emphasized women's history and historical editing.  Both these specialties have been recurrent themes in twenty-three subsequent years of her professional career.  Heather served in the late eighties and early nineties as historian of the President's Guest House, Blair House, and as curator for the National Trust for Historic Preservation at both Decatur House and Woodlawn Plantation in Washington, D.C.  She has since the late '90s been involved in historic preservation in Sherman, Texas, as director of the C. S. Roberts Historical House Museum and, more recently, as director of the Sherman Preservation League, which she now manages from her and her husband Mark's home in Massachusetts.

An outstanding feature of Heather's historical career is how far it has extended from curatorial work strictly speaking.  Her interest in material culture as a window on the lives of the people of the past has led to repeated teaching gigs at Austin College in Texas and at own own Colorado College.  Meanwhile she has produced many articles and museum publications, four history books for adults, and three for children.  This webpage was inspired by and celebrates Heather's most recent book-length publication, The Family of Sukey Lewis in the Plantation South, a collection of beautiful and moving letters from the Lewis family about births and deaths, about separation from loved ones.  These letters memorialize the courage and joyfulness of succeeding generations of Lewis descendants from 1973 to 1865, from Virginia to Texas, from the early years of the American republic to the stress and privation of the Civil War.

You can join the History Department in congratulating Heather @ historian19thc@yahoo.com  Or you can ask her questions about "Victorians and the Daily Bath" or "Alcoholic Recipes for Those Tea-Total Ladies," both among her articles for Victoriana.

If you are or know of an alum whose work might be similarly interesting for this webpage, please contact contributing editor Carol Neel @ cneel@coloradocollege.edu