By Joseph D’Andrea
The excitement of the summer can mean a break from straining your mind from facts, research and maybe even turning a physical page at all. For Vincent Calvagno, however, the end of the semester led him to go even deeper into the archives.
Calvagno, a third-year history major, was awarded several internships this past summer, including a Summer Research Fellowship by the Adelphi Honors College.
Initially being most interested in mid-nineteenth-century history, Calvagno’s focus shifted to early American history after he took Professor Edward Reno’s course on the Renaissance and Reformation, “which prompted me to ask questions about how I might connect pre-Enlightenment Europe to America.”
The timetable of early American history is compelling to Calvagno as it sits at the intersection of several historical and intellectual traditions.
“After some extensive reading and research on this subject, I found that Reformation theology and Renaissance political theory both played a role in shaping the American founders' worldview,” said the Honors College student who is also minoring in Italian. “Studying Early America became a way for me to apply my knowledge of European texts to American history, the field for which I have the most passion. Early America is embedded in our national legend as a prologue to the United States, but we ought to recognize that prologue as both a continuation of old stories and a beginning for new ones. In a larger sense, too, we ought to recognize Early America not just as a prologue but also as its own book, rich with transatlantic syncretism, buzzing with memorable characters, and full of mysteries to solve.”
Working with History
The opportunity to browse centuries-old archives was “thrilling” for a student of history such as himself, allowing for more discovery and experience working with tangible history. In June, he worked for several days at the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston, in addition to his visits to the New York Public Library in which he regularly viewed Colonial-era manuscripts. His extensive jotting down of old facts and new discoveries will not simply remain on his notepad, though; they’ll hopefully take shape as a journal article in the coming months.
“Vincent has put in a tremendous amount of work — reading voraciously, regularly conferring with his professors, applying for different research opportunities, visiting archives to dig up primary source material, and, of course, writing,” said Assistant Professor Benjamin Serby. “Such self-direction and intellectual curiosity are precisely what the Honors College is all about. My colleagues and I are excited to see where Vincent's research takes him in the years to come.”
His accolades didn’t stop there. In late June, the Gilder Lehrman Institute awarded Calvagno their prestigious College Fellowship in American History. Launched in 2022, the program “enables young historians to do research using the Gilder Lehrman Collection — a repository containing more than 85,000 items documenting the political, social and economic history of the United States — and other New York City archives.”
“[I plan to] research at New York City archival institutions in which I will be hoping to better explain and contextualize the imprisonment of 13 Native Americans whose story I first came across in a collection of Revolutionary War papers last year,” he said.
He also received the National Collegiate Honors Council’s Portz Interdisciplinary Fellowship within the month, allowing him to develop his past work on Revolutionary resistance theory “by studying the evolution of religio-political rhetoric in the period of the Early Republic.”
Conducting Preliminary Research
Research fellowships like those awarded to Calvagno typically require applicants to submit a proposal of what they’re interested in further researching, which is then reviewed by an institutional committee. For each of Calvagno’s three fellowships, he conducted preliminary research to determine what projects were worthwhile before submitting proposals.
“I spent several days in Boston this past June working with some incredible Colonial-era manuscripts at the Massachusetts Historical Society, but I view this as a dream come true more than an inconvenience [that kept me away from home],” he said. “It was truly magical for me to experience Boston, a city where three-century-old bricks meet three-week-old skyscrapers, from the perspective of a working historian.
“There’s nothing quite like the rush of making an unexpected discovery in the archive,” he continued. “Every time I enter the reading room, I am preparing to participate in a forgotten letter correspondence or rediscover someone’s lost life’s work. For a few hours at a time, I am inhabiting Early America through its documents, and for this, I feel incredibly lucky.”
Calvagno’s rewarding work has not only aided him in his studies but “uncovering these dusty stories from the past gives me a real sense of purpose,” which has made him further embrace his role as founder and president of Adelphi’s new History Club, which started up last year.
“One of the History Club’s number one priorities for the upcoming semester is to facilitate an archival visit during which students can experience the excitement that accompanies work with original manuscript materials,” he said. “As students of history, it is easy to arrive at premature conclusions about the people and periods we study, but a visit to the archive renders us direct pupils of our subjects, who teach us through their own words. I often find my preconceptions overturned after spending time with a manuscript collection because of its unexpected contents.”
Aside from intellectual work, Calvagno spent his summer cycling — training for a 100-plus mile ride — and working as a tutor for Adelphi’s Center for Academic Support and Enrichment.
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