Abolitionist Legacy Preserved with Digital Exhibit

San José State Professor Jennifer Rycenga is retiring at the end of the semester with a real sense of accomplishment. With almost 30 years of teaching for the Department of Humanities, she has approached her career with an interdisciplinary lens that spans across the university, mentoring and guiding SJSU students, who she says are some of the most diverse and engaged she’s ever encountered. 

In addition to teaching, over the last two decades, she has examined how alliances across race and gender contribute to making abolitionism the first truly integrated and intersectional political movement in the United States. And to cap off her research, she is excited to launch The Unionist, Unified, a digital project created in partnership with the SJSU King Library’s new Digital Scholarship Services unit. 

The digital exhibit tells the fascinating story of The Unionist newspaper, which was created to provide a voice for the Canterbury Female Academy in Connecticut in 1833. The Canterbury Female Academy featured the highest level of education open to women of any race in the United States at that time, but the academy was met with constant verbal harassment and vigilante violence from many local white people. 

by Lesley Seacrist

Read the full story from SJSU