An "Accidental Historian": A Conversation with Stephanie Grauman Wolf

Lee W. Formwalt

When I called Stephanie Grauman Wolf to talk about her life and career as a historian, she was at Cape Cod: "As I'm sitting here, I'm looking out the window watching a great blue heron diving for fish. His legs are dangling down, and he looks very happy. It's not a bad thing to be doing. And I'm also sitting in front of my computer, which is in front of that window. It's a mixed bag." Like many of us, Stevie (as her friends call her) never completely gets away from history—even when she's on vacation.

I first met Stevie when she joined the OAH Leadership Advisory Council several years ago as OAH began thinking about creating a Second Century Campaign that would help fund efforts to strengthen American history teaching at the precollegiate and community college levels. She was an important part of that intellectual give and take that finally resulted in our Second Century initiatives on the OAH Magazine of History and the Community College Workshop project. Stevie and her husband Ted became major supporters of the latter project and helped us shape our case statement as we applied to foundations and undertook a major fundraising effort.

As I got to know Stevie I was fascinated by her career that included traditional scholarly activities—research, writing, and teaching—and a very strong commitment and involvement in public history in the Philadelphia area. In addition, she has been involved with what has become the McNeil Center for Early American Studies and a number of other historical institutions in the Philadelphia area both as a scholar and a fundraiser. But Stevie did not start out as a historian.

Stephanie Grauman went to Wellesley where she "majored in philosophy and minored in English as an undergraduate." Her "career was interrupted because I got married at nineteen and left to go and be in the Navy with my husband in Norfolk, and when I got back, the philosophy department was very nice to me. I started out before the women's movement, although I had parents who were completely committed to the idea of females being considered the same as males, particularly my dad. So I had that in my background, but on the other hand I had in my background that you get married, you do the traditional thing. In fact I got married because the Korean War was on, and we thought Teddy was going off to war on a ship. My father was very unhappy, because he saw me as doing something with my life, and I was doing this ordinary ‘50s-type thing. I promised, I said, ‘Oh no, I'll graduate, Dad,' and he said, ‘Oh no you won't, if you do this you'll never graduate.' So that was always a kind of a prod. I was going to show him."

"While I was in Norfolk I taught at the L. Minerva Turnbull School for Girls. They did not require any kind of certificate or college degree. Maybe that was my first brush with history. They had me teaching sixth- and seventh-grade math. . . .I really was not good at math. The seniors had to take something that satisfied a history requirement, but they didn't want to buy books, so they told me I could teach current events. So I taught out of the New York Times to these privileged children of the rich. It was fascinating to me, and then when I came back, Wellesley let me do my junior year in bits and pieces, but I still had a year of college to do." Stevie got permission to take her senior year courses at Bryn Mawr, near Ted's hometown of Philadelphia, and transfer the credit to Wellesley. Administrators at both schools doubted whether Stevie, now a mother of two children, could do it. "The next day I discovered I was pregnant with my third child. Literally the next day. I didn't want to tell anybody, because certainly that would be proof that I shouldn't do it. So I started back for my senior year at Bryn Mawr. Nobody ever knew except my professors. I took a week off, I had the baby, and I got back. This is not so unusual in this day and age, but in that day and age it was pretty peculiar."

"They allowed me to take my senior year in two years, which was also peculiar, and I took my generals at the end of my first year and then did some hanging over courses. In those I could fiddle around, so I took a history course, which I loved, with Felix Gilbert. When I graduated Wellesley in 1957, I was seven to eight months pregnant with my fourth child. When Danny was born, I took off three years until he was in preschool. "Then I applied to Bryn Mawr for graduate school in history." Stevie had taken only a couple of history courses in college, "so I was very lucky to get into graduate school in history." She "went very part time, and Bryn Mawr was very nice about that. I got my Master's there in nineteenth-century American history in 1964, and my Ph.D. in colonial history with Mary Dunn in 1973, so it was a long stretched out kind of thing."

In addition to her graduate research in nineteenth-century and colonial history at Bryn Mawr and raising her five children, Stevie got involved in a book project—her first—The Sounds of Time: Western Man and His Music (J.B. Lippincott, 1969), of which she is "very proud." She "wrote that book in ‘68, which was somewhere between my master's and my Ph.D. I did it with a friend, Nancy Wise Hess, who ran the program for gifted young musicians at Temple University. We love music, and we talked about it a lot, and I helped her write some grants for her program, because that was not her field of expertise. She would ask me things like why would Mozart write music that sounded like that, which was very much of a history kind of question, and we got really interested in that. I had a friend who was in the book publishing business, and he said that would be an interesting book to do, and we decided to make it as much visual as verbal so that every chapter is illustrated. So we started going through the history of music looking at what kind of technologies were available so the music would sound like it did, and what the social life was of the music. It was a very good book and it sold out beautifully. It has gorgeous illustrations. What we tried to do with the art was to use in each chapter art that came from the period. In the chapter for modern music we used Dali and various art of that period, etc., and went all the way back to Greek vases and artifacts. It was a good book, and I liked doing it."

I asked Stevie for what audience they wrote the book. "We thought we were directing it toward high school. But it was reviewed in the newspapers and sold as an adult book. It was fun working with Nancy because she is much more genteel than I. One thing we had a whole lot of trouble with was how to handle the castrati. She didn't want to say what they were, and she wanted to end up saying that they had an operation that meant they kept their voices. Well, really it sounds like they did something to their throat. I got to her because in the end when I was proofreading the final copy, I was reading the part on Louis XIV, and we had written inadvertently how he had people who did everything for him, people who arranged his food, and people who helped him get dressed, and those who arranged the royal balls. I saw this and I thought, shall I let it go through, or should I tell Nancy? I did tell her, and they did change it. You know, that's why you always proofread."

Stevie mused, "I would call myself maybe the accidental historian. I love history, I want explanations for everything, but as a career, much of what happened to me happened just by luck, just being in the right place at the right time." Her first job at the University of Pennsylvania was to run the NEH funded Bicentennial College that explored early American history at the time of the American Revolution Bicentennial. The grant recipients needed a project director and they turned to Caroline Robbins for a suggestion. Robbins recommended Stevie who was working for her on the microfilm edition of the William Penn papers. "It was a two-year grant. But, essentially it is what morphed into the Philadelphia Center for Early American Studies. My best friend there who is still really one of my best friends, was Mike Zuckerman. He didn't look down his nose at me, he took me out to lunch, and he was charmed by what we were doing. He started this evening seminar that met every six weeks or so, which still meets to this day, and it's sort of loosely attached to the center, but it's something Mike has just always done with undergraduates and graduates; he's a very generous scholar and a very generous person. So he was sort of my best contact, I would say. The way I set up the center was it was strictly a postdoctoral or a doctoral fellowship program. Drew Faust was in it the first year. We had a variety of doctoral dissertation students and people—this is how I got to know everybody in the field. We had ten of them a year, which was an exhausting experience if you're also trying to run a household with four kids in it. But I had an office, I had a secretary, I had a certain kind of status at Penn."

"At the end of the bicentennial college project, I applied for the job at the University of Delaware to run the Winterthur Program out of the history department and I got it. I liked the Winterthur Program in material culture, I thought that was cool. I had never done much with material culture, but actually my philosophy honors paper was in aesthetics, and I realized I've always been interested in this stuff. Personally, Teddy and I had always collected stuff, so it became an interesting thing. I would've stayed there forever except that the drive got to be too much. I was there for nine years."

"I'm very grateful for that job. Those students taught me more about material stuff than I ever would've learned on my own. When I went to Delaware, I had been very much a social economic historian. You know, the new social history was the thing." Stevie referred to her revised dissertation on Germantown, Pennsylvania, Urban Village—"it's more statistics than you would ever care to know. That was where we were, and I still believe at least in basic nose counting. I think that's part of my wanting to work with the public. There's a pragmatic streak that you need, not just to have ideas that are wonderful and that you can toss around at 2:00 a.m. over a bottle of Amstel, but to have something concrete that you can start with. Then you can get into the ideas. So social history really appealed to me from that standpoint. The students at Winterthur initially hated me, because my introductory course there was statistics. They would say something like ‘Oh, I saw an ad in the 1764 Pennsylvania Gazette for a man down on Second Street who sells mirrors, so that means that everybody in Philadelphia had mirrors.' I said, ‘No, it means one man tried to sell them. A) we don't know whether he sold them; and B) we don't know whether there was anybody else, and you can't say that.'"

Stevie resumed her connection with the Philadelphia Center for Early American Studies after Winterthur. She became codirector, but "there was no money. We started the seminar project, and the seminars were terrific, and they tied in with Mike Zuckerman's evening seminars. Eventually Penn dribbled out a little bit more support and we moved around. We were in a bunch of places. Always moving around, because they would find the cheapest quarters nobody else needed and stick us in it. I ran the center with Richard Beeman for awhile, then I ran it with Richard Dunn and Richard Beeman, and Richard Dunn took it over, and he was the one who got Bob McNeil to invest in it. Once that happened, it really took off, because it got some fellowships." Robert McNeil's multimillion dollar gift resulted in the construction of a "very prominent building right on the corner of 34th and Chestnut. It's this big Georgian building. We have sixteen offices, and it's beautiful." Stevie is still connected with the McNeil Center—"I'm what they call a senior fellow, and I'm on the advisory committee, I'm on the executive committee, and I'm on the editorial board of the journal. I mean, I do whatever. . . . Yeah, I'm still happily involved."

As a fixture in Philadelphia for more than half a century, Stephanie Wolf has been involved in numerous historical institutions and served as a consultant for various historic places and programs. She helped develop History Hunters, a program for middle school students that involves four historic Philadelphia homes—Stenton, Cliveden, Wyck, and the Johnson House. The kids "hunt for history stuff in these four houses. Each house has a theme. They go to each of the houses over the course of a month or two months, spend a lot of time, and then they are responsible for writing up newspaper articles and turning out a little newspaper. It has acquired other funding and has really been a tremendous success." Stevie's most recent consultation at Stenton concerns Dinah, "the black woman at the time of the Revolution who was the ‘caretaker,' the ‘loyal servant,' who saved the home when the family was away, by misleading the British soldiers." Stevie looked into that story, "as I had looked into the Betsy Ross story and really was able to pinpoint, with the help of some research that Jean Soderlund had done, some of the key facts in Dinah's story, and none of it jibed with the original Dinah story. What, of course, turns out is that Dinah, like Betsy Ross, was a much more interesting and complex person, as a person, she has a story."

"This is my thing," said Stevie, "You can make real history, instead of ghost stories, very interesting, get the public totally fascinated by it, but it has to be real. The only people who can do that are professional historians, and unfortunately the profession does not reward public history the way it should. I think that the way it's structured you get absolutely no kudos and no brownie points for being involved with public history. They call it service to the community and you have to put it on your self-evaluation every year, but it counts for little."

"When historians go out to talk to the public, nobody gives them any training in ‘talking to the public.' They don't understand that the public is not interested in historiographical disputes between historians. I make it an absolute rule never to talk about another historian that that group of people is unlikely to have ever heard of. You can say this is much contested, but these are the facts, and this is the way I see it. People get interested in that."

I wanted to know if Stevie had a role in the recent public debate in Philadelphia over recognizing the location of the 1790s President's House near the Liberty Bell. Although her role was small, Stevie spoke with passion about the controversy.  "It really started earlier with the new Liberty Bell pavilion, and Charlene Mires and some other folks including myself took umbrage" that the National Park Service was building the Liberty Bell pavilion right over part of the location of the President's House." A number of historians, including former OAH president Gary Nash, "finally came up with a list of demands concerning what they were going to put in that museum, and we did get it changed. I've always thought the executive as a branch of government needed to be represented here. You have the place where Congress was, you have a place where the court was, and you don't have the place where the executive mansion was. If you're going to have a mall that shows the constitution, you need to have the executive branch."

The controversy in Philadelphia "then gets into George Washington and slavery. It's the poison pit on which this whole country was founded. They couldn't make up their mind about that. So we have fights over the President's House because we never did really make up our minds about that. The only way we can have a hero is to ignore what he did that was unheroic. Nobody wants to talk about Martha Washington sending her slaves to New Jersey to keep them in bondage. Pennsylvania had passed a gradual abolition law. There were still slaves being held in Pennsylvania as late as 1840, but essentially they passed it in 1780. One of the things about the law was if you kept a slave in Pennsylvania, and specifically in Philadelphia, for more than six months, the person became free. George Washington didn't think it applied to him because it specifically exempted members of Congress who were in Pennsylvania. He thought it exempted members of the government. It didn't. It just exempted members of Congress. So suddenly he was faced with the fact that that law applied to him, so he began rotating his slaves, and Martha Washington had a fit, because she really didn't want to rotate them. Somebody told her, because New Jersey was still a slave state, that if you took them for one day out of Pennsylvania, the six months began counting all over again. So that was a loophole that became available to folks."

"We started with all this controversy . . .Then they did the archaeology, which is required, and everyone had assumed that in the early 1820s when they tore the building down and put up three stores there, that everything was gone. Certainly when they built the mall, they just shoveled everything under in the 1950s, and it was all gone. When they started doing the archaeology on that spot, lo and behold they came up with a piece of the oval office, where the oval window was. They came up with the corridor through which the slaves went underground so nobody would see them walking above ground probably, between the president's part of the house and the kitchen, and they came up with a piece of the kitchen. You could actually see the oval of the oval window, and you could see the corridor, and you could see the corner of the kitchen."

"The National Park Service has become a real ally in many ways, having first dug in their heels. They built a little platform over it. It has been filled with the public. People are fascinated. They come and watch it, and so now they will have to have to go back and reevaluate the plans that were chosen in the face of needing to keep this recovered bit visible. Everybody understands that this is what turns the public on. I don't know if you know that old museum rule, the three most important questions that get asked to a museum. Number one is where's the bathroom? Number two is when do you close? And number three is is it real? And that really fascinates the public. Here it is, and it's real, so you can't just cover it over and put something pretend there. The mayor has come out strongly in favor of working with it, as have other folks, and it looks like a go. It looks like we will actually get something worth having on that site, and it sure took years. But it is very exciting."

Over her long career, Stevie Wolf has made an important contribution to the study of history. She helped transform students into cultural historians at Delaware. She facilitated the scholarship of numerous colleagues from around the country at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. Her own scholarship in her study of Germantown and her As Various As Their Land: The Everyday Lives of Eighteenth-Century Americans (Harper, 1994) is significant. But the history that has affected more people than any of this has been her public history in Philadelphia. Thousands of middle school students and adults have a better understanding of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century America because of her work at places like Stenton and other historic homes, as well as her support of efforts to have a more accurate presentation of the executive branch and slavery on Independence Mall in Philadelphia. In Stephanie Grauman Wolf, we see the union of what is best in academic and public history and the challenges of practicing our craft in both areas.