Bring your hardest question to the reading-room table. Every Thursday, our resident historian holds free one-to-one consultations: forty-five minutes, your topic, and the full weight of eleven miles of shelving behind you. Students arrive stuck; they leave with a stack of call slips and a plan.
What happens in a session
First, ten minutes on what you actually want to know — the real question is often hiding behind the polite one. Then a tour of the sources most students miss: city directories, probate inventories, church registers, and the magnificent, underused vertical files. You leave with photocopies, a reading list and a follow-up date.
“I came in with a surname and left with a street, a trade and a trial transcript.” — a Thursday regular
Three consultations that changed a thesis
- A genealogy that jumped the ocean via a sailor’s discharge paper nobody had indexed.
- A housing essay rewritten around fire-insurance maps, found in twenty minutes.
- A slavery-era shipping ledger that named the street a student had walked for years.
Book your Thursday
Sessions run Thursdays 2:00 – 6:00 PM and book out two weeks ahead. Reserve a research consultation online, or catch Professor Vance’s public lecture at An Evening with Historian Eleanor Vance.
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