More than a century and a half ago, Bates College was birthed from the will and devotion of people who deemed that a college in Lewiston-Auburn would greatly benefit the advancement of society. It is quite fascinating, when you come to think of it, that the construction of a college be the intersection between people’s vision for a better future and the means they had at that time to concertize an idea of such a scope. As such, the vision which Benjamin Bates and Oren Cheney had back in the 1850s was brought to fruition with the material means which donors provided them with. With this in mind, we can rephrase our opening statement in the following fashion: more than a century and a half ago, Bates College was birthed from the monetary donations of donors.
It goes without saying that, had these donations not occurred when they did, because of any justifiable reason, the college as we know it today would probably not be standing. It is only natural that we might want to investigate the actual reasons behind the donors motivations to donate to the college or the circumstances under which they effectuated these donations. Other relevant tracks of investigation might also be to find out who these donors were and what their relationship to Bates were after they had donated the money. However, there is a question which, to me, encompasses or supersedes all the others due to its multi-layered and convoluted nature.
“Where did the money come from?“
The corollaries which flow from this one monumental question are quite numerous. What were the occupations of the donors? Where did they live? How did they make their money? Did they come from families of enslavers? How wealthy were they?
In a practical sense, we would answer these questions, by obtaining more records and archives from the time period in question, but we would also want to go even further in time if the donations are suspected to come from the donors’ generational wealth, for example. Quantitative records such as tax records and financial records from the towns from which the donors were from would be good starting points. However, qualitative data would also prove useful in this endeavour by providing us with more qualitative context. Newspapers or journals would be invaluable sources of information especially if we find our quantitative resources to be limited in the information they tell.
After the process of data collection, we would benefit in putting the information in a readable and understandable format. I am thinking of tabulating these results on histograms or scatter plots. This would help us greatly in the analysis we would want to undertake, especially if we want to notice correlations between, say, the donors’ professions and the amount of their donations, or the amount of donations and whether these donors made money through slavery plantations.
In a broader sense, I want to find out what percentage of the total amount of money Bates received stemmed from slavery. However, I recognize that due the fact that much of the information needed to answer this question might not be available or, if available might be extremely costly or time consuming to process. Hence, we might need to use a sample of donors instead of the whole population of donors to perform our analysis. In choosing our sample and in the process of sorting through the data, it will be crucial to apply the many principles we have learned about in this class. I am thinking about the considerations put forward by Muñoz and Rawson in particular.
