Susan S. Lukesh, PhD, MLS, is an experienced researcher and freelance writer. As a higher education administrator for over 20 years experience in developing, managing and reorganizing schools, departments and organizations, she also maintained a limited but satisfying excavation schedule with her long term colleague. In 2007 she began a three-year contract working in the mid-East, specifically in Qatar. She has spent the years since her return to the U.S. (2010) from working in the mid-east to researching and writing about many of her ancestors from the early 1600s through the early 20th century. These studies and her writings connect to her earlier work in researching prehistoric populations in continental Southern Italy and Sicily. The bottom line, she suggests, is that we can and should reconstruct some of the secret worlds that Evtushenko suggested could not be regenerated. More on publications, as well as ongoing work, available on this website.
Agatha Snow was born in 1886 after the height of New Bedford, Massachusetts’s wealth from whaling. She learned some of the history and much about her great-grandfather, Henry Taber, from her grandmother, Abby Taber Hunt, who introduced Agatha to the photo album she had compiled in the 1860s. In the late 1880s, as grandmother taking care of one of three granddaughters, Abby “read” the album to Agatha and told stories of the people in the album over and over again—family as well as additional movers and shakers of New Bedford in the 1860s. In the 1940s, after the death of her sister (March 1942) and mother (October 1942), and decades after the death of her grandmother in 1906, Agatha annotated in pencil the album with the stories her grandmother had told her as a child, over and over, her, leaving us with a rare—perhaps even unique—instance of one of the verbal narratives that typically accompanied the display of an album, narratives whose importance “to the experience of photo albums cannot be overstated.”[i] Agatha’s niece, Deborah Snow Simonds and the cousin of the author’s mother, entrusted the album to her for study and indicated that she had thought to erase the pencil annotations. The author assured her that she did the right thing, leaving us with some of the storied that Abby told when she displayed the album.
Thus Agatha herself ties the two books together—the original effort separated by close to 50 years (1860s and 1912), with the books by Lukesh about those works appearing more than a century later.
Frozen in Time: An Early Carte de Visite Album from New Bedford, Massachusetts
In Frozen in Time, Susan Snow Lukesh takes a mid-nineteenth century photo album from New Bedford, Massachusetts, created by Abby Taber Hunt against a backdrop of the Civil War, and Lukesh moves the people seemingly frozen in time backwards and forwards.
This album with its very cast thus unfolds to offer a glimpse of the rich panorama of nineteenth-century New Bedford. The biographical sketches of the players reveal a snapshot of New Bedford’s citizens, New Bedford’s history and industries, and, importantly, New Bedford’s part in the Civil War.
I am starting slow development now of a spin-off from this book to a play based on the history in the book for a New Bedford: Our Town. This will follow the model of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, in this instance with historic people and their roles in New Bedford set against the backdrop of the Civil War.
Agatha! Agatha Snow Abroad: A Sketch Book from her 1912 European Tour
Agatha! presents a sketch book created during a three-month 1912 tour of Europe by four young women, a tour nestled between the horrific sinking of the Titanic and the subsequent outbreak of WW1 in the Austrian-Hungary Empire through which the women passed as Agatha noted.
From the Foreword we read that “In truth, we experience here only one episode from Agatha’s life early in the 20th century, aboard a ship to—and then on a grand tour of—continental Europe and England and then on the homeward bound ship. We know of it partly through Agatha’s words, more of it through the background discovered and set forth by Lukesh . . . and wondrously by way of the cartoon studies created by Agatha Snow.”
[i] Walker, Andrew L. and Moulton, Rosalind Kimball. Photo Albums: Images of Time and Reflections of Self, Qualitative Sociology, 12, 2, Summer 1989, 155-182.