We're talking about the College history, but let’s start with yours.
Well, Bowdoin is the second and last job I ever had. I taught for nine years at Appalachian State University, which is a regional state university, kind of akin to the University of Southern Maine. They had about 12,000 students, with a very heavy teaching load, four courses every semester. With a stiff teaching load like that, it's very hard to get research done, so after nine years, I began applying for jobs. The Bowdoin job came open, and it was like a miracle. I had never set foot on a small, liberal arts college until I came to Bowdoin for the job interview. I got the job and I was here thirty-one years. I retired in 2019.
You say in the introduction that there were fascinating discoveries along the way. What were some of those?
We think of these liberal arts colleges as liberal, and I had always thought that Bowdoin was a progressive institution in its history and its DNA. But, in fact, I couldn't have been more wrong. For the lion's share of its history, Bowdoin was a conservative institution; it was an institution that was affiliated with the Congregational church, and the faculty were very conservative in their outlook. They were suspicious about newfangled, educational initiatives, and they held fast to their traditional view of what kinds of courses and majors should be offered. It was very surprising to me that it really wasn't until the '60s and '70s that Bowdoin was sort of dragged into the modern world, and even then, it struggled to do that.
It didn't embrace it wholeheartedly, and Roger Howell, who was the president during that time, and Dick Moll, who was the head of admissions, received tremendous pushback. There was a backlash. What seemed so promising in the '60s and '70s, which had a huge student component, students were actively involved and progressive in trying to bring about change, it hit a wall. Moll left in '75, Roger stepped down three years later, and the efforts to diversify the College ground, I wouldn't say to a halt, but they didn't really build on the impetus that was there in the '60s and '70s. A lot of the change we've seen has happened since I've been at Bowdoin, which I didn't realize.
So that was one big thing that surprised me. The other thing is I had always known that Russwurm was the first African American student to come here, but I didn't know much about Russwurm. It turns out Russwurm was a fascinating individual, and he was from the Caribbean, which is an area that I had known about. He's a transnational figure, born in the Caribbean, educated in North America, and then he spends the bulk of his life in West Africa. I found him to be a really fascinating figure I wanted to know more about. In doing that, I found out that his views about the abolition of slavery were nuanced and very different from others.
We tend to think of abolitionism as being a major force in the North—that's what I had always thought—during the Antebellum period. But in fact, support for abolitionism in New England was tepid at best, and Russwurm became convinced eventually that immediate abolition of slavery wasn't the way to go, that colonization was much more a preferred outcome. The more I began working in the archive here, I saw that there was much more support among the faculty and the administration for colonization than abolition. There was one major abolitionist on the faculty at that time, William Smyth, a mathematician, and he was criticized roundly, on campus and, more importantly, off, where abolition was thought to be not in the economic interests of the shipping industry, the coastal trade, the sugar trade, and the cotton trade—and Maine was firmly tied to those industries and businesses.
Things were thrown at this guy, and he was almost fired from the faculty. Students stood up for him and defended him. Colonization—where you took free Blacks, those who had been manumitted from slavery or obtained their freedom elsewhere, and sent them to Africa, where they could, in a sense, reconfigure themselves—was the preferred option for many at the College. Professors like Thomas Upham and presidents like Leonard Woods, they all were huge promoters of colonization. That was surprising to me. Russwurm was their man, because he was going to go and become governor of a colony in Liberia, so that chapter was fascinating.
Another thing that surprised me was that there were other Black students on campus during the nineteenth century besides Russwurm. That got me into the whole history of the Medical School of Maine, which was affiliated with the College for over a century, from 1820 to 1921. What they experienced on campus was not always easy. It was tumultuous, there was a tragedy. Because I'm a history type, I wanted to know what their lives were like before they came to Bowdoin, what happened to them when they were here, and then what happened to them afterward. Their after-Bowdoin lives were absolutely fascinating.
Two of them became surgeons in the "colored" regiments during the Civil War. Out of 186,000 Black enlistees, there were eight surgeons who worked on Black troops, and two of them were Bowdoin graduates from the medical school.
There was the first student of Latin American ancestry, also a medical student, Salustiano Fanduiz. Fanduiz practiced medicine here in Brunswick for seven years after he graduated, and became a sulky driver, a harness-racing driver, while he was here in Maine, had his practice off Union Street in downtown Brunswick for seven years, and then went back to his native Dominican Republic, where he became one of the leading practitioners of public health, worked on malaria and yellow fever in the port city of San Francisco de Macorís—where so many baseball players come from these days. All of a sudden, I was working on the Dominican Republic, a country I had written about, and thinking, "Wow, this is so cool.”
So many connections.
The connections were just fascinating, and they continued. I could have stopped this and just focused on slavery, and the legacies of slavery, but I just kept finding more and more interesting stuff. There were instances of tolerance and intolerance related to religious minorities who started coming to the College in the nineteenth century—Baptists, Methodists, other Protestant denominations, Jews, Catholics. Suddenly, I'm learning about the first Jewish professor at Bowdoin, who had a fascinating life story to tell, so I wrote about Jim Abrahamson in the economics department. He worked for five US presidential administrations. All of a sudden, I'm writing about the War Refugee Board, the first time in American history that the US government tried to save foreign lives, and Jim Abrahamson was actively involved.
What do you mean when you say that this is a work of historical recovery?
At heart, historical recovery is recovering histories about something that hasn’t been told before. That, in essence, is what this book is. It talks about people, institutions, aspects of the College's history that have been either overlooked or neglected in past histories. Bowdoin has rich histories. I think it's striking how many histories have been written about Bowdoin. Most of them have been about the institution and the institution's leadership, and the changes that those leaders have tried to bring about, so sort of top-down. Recovery sort of works from the bottom up. It tracks aspects that are buried in the archive that need to be excavated, if you want to put it that way. It brings to life aspects of the College that maybe have been overlooked, not necessarily intentionally. That's really what historical recovery is all about—unlike what I would call typical historical scholarship, where the historian is supposed to make an intervention in the scholarship that is different from what other scholars have written.
That's not necessarily the case here because, really, Bowdoin's history is comparable to the histories of other liberal arts colleges, or other colleges and universities. In some ways, Bowdoin's history is different, but in other ways it's very similar. Just to give you one example, there are ties between Bowdoin and slavery, and I track those ties in the manuscript, but Bowdoin's history is not as deeply connected as others. For example, at Davidson College every professor and every administrator owned slaves. Not the case for Bowdoin. The only example I have is James Bowdoin II, who owned a few household slaves. It makes sense: Davidson was in the South, so Bowdoin's ties are more indirect in terms of slavery.
You mentioned instances of tolerance and intolerance existing over the entire arc of the College. Do you think we will always see this?
I think so. You have instances where the College sort of bent over backward to live up to its creed of the common good, and we should celebrate those, and I try to in this book. Those are the instances of tolerance, tolerance in ways that were unexpected. But then there were instances, and there were constants, of what I would call a chilly reception for students who were different—international students, ethnic minorities, Native Americans. Tracking those instances of intolerance was also part of what I thought I should be looking for as a scholar going through this material. I found them up to the present day, because this book goes all the way up to the present day, another way it is unique.
Most of the books that colleges and universities have been coming out with, or reports that have been issued on their history and ties to slavery, have focused just on slavery and its legacies, whereas here, I'm tracking instances of tolerance and intolerance throughout the entire arc of the College's history. I think that makes this book distinctive and different than others.
Why is it important to do this?
We should understand our past because it helps us understand our present. Not because the present is a replica of the past, but it tells us where we were and how we got there. Therefore, we should be able to improve on where we are. I think Bowdoin has been a work in progress from the get-go. As Martin Luther King said, the arc of history does not go immediately toward justice, it goes back and forth. We've had moments where we've gone backward, or we have regrets, and we've had to learn from those experiences. Studying the past offers us a window on that. If I didn't believe that, I wouldn't be a historian.
I believe it in my bones. I just did a cable news program (PMC Watch) with [host] Harold Pachios [P’98] about US immigration history, and Harold was asking, "What about ICE here in Portland? Have we done this before?" And the answer is yes. We have done this before. We have done deportations before. We deported hundreds of thousands of Mexicans during the Great Depression, and we did it again under Eisenhower, Operation Wetback. We don't think about that, but we have done it. That doesn't mean we should do it again, but it shows that we could learn from our past experiences.
You mentioned other Bowdoin histories. Why do we need to keep revisiting all this?
Because I don't think any one history can tell an entire story, because different historians approach their tasks differently. My approach is very different from Charles Calhoun’s [A Small College in Maine, 1993]. Charles wrote a beautiful book, and I learned a tremendous amount from it. But his focus was culture, Bowdoin's culture. My focus is different. That's why you can have so many books on the Civil War. There are endless streams of books on the Civil War because historians write about it differently, they approach it differently; they use different sources. I probably read things that were different from what Charles read, or what Hatch [The History of Bowdoin College, 1927] read. Using those sources leads me to write about different aspects of the College's history. Hopefully this is a different story that's been told about, and hopefully it will be an interesting one.
Do you have a picture in your mind of what the next history would focus on?
I think that happens with everything I've ever written. For example, I didn't get into gender and issues of sexuality. Now, there has been great work on this. The women's studies program did a really great report. I was able to use some of that material and work it in, but I couldn't give it the space that it deserved, and it deserves a good history. I'm sure just in the way that my book offers a corrective and fills in gaps, someone is going to come along in twenty or thirty years and say, "Well, Wells, he got it wrong," or "He didn't cover this," and that's the beauty of history, that it's constantly being rewritten and added to, and new interpretations are coming out. Hopefully, I've added something to the canon about Bowdoin's history, and others will come by afterwards and do the same. I'm confident of it, I know it's going to happen.
You mentioned collaborating with others—how did you get help in your research for this project?
I had tremendous help from [Bowdoin Archivist] Caroline Moseley, who was a godsend, [Special Collections Education and Engagement Librarian] Marieke Van Der Steenhoven, and others in the library and special collections. Two professors had their students go to special collections and work with Marieke, and she was amazing. [Barry M. Wish Professor of Social Studies] Chuck Dorn’s history of American education classes and [Professor of Sociology] Ingrid Nelson's sociology of organizations class were wonderful. Maybe sixty or seventy students working on research papers on different aspects of the College's more recent, contemporary history, and I had access to all their papers. They had all different kinds of interests, and I could pick and choose from the research they did and incorporate that and cite them in the footnotes. So, Chuck and Ingrid were awesome, and Ingrid was working on a manuscript herself with the University of Chicago Press. The first chapter of that manuscript was about affirmative action at the College in the ’60s and ’70s, sort of the origins of affirmative action.
Ingrid said the editor told her, "You know, this doesn't fit with the rest of the book, maybe you want to send it off for an article somewhere." When Ingrid started talking to me, she said, "If you think you can use some of this, I'll give it to you," so that became part of Chapter 9, where I took some material I found in special collections and melded it with Ingrid's material, so we co-authored that chapter. Then, [Associate Professor of History] David Hecht, a historian of science, did an awesome job working on The Bowdoin Orient during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, looking at issues of race, immigration, and science.
When I was writing about the dispossession of Native American lands and how the College benefited from that in the first chapter, I asked Strother Roberts [associate professor of history and expert on the environment and economy of early modern North America whose research focuses on Indigenous and Euro-American communities of New England], “Am I on strong ground here? Does what I'm saying make sense?" He gave me such great feedback, and that's just an example of how generous the faculty here was. I could talk to colleagues I had worked with before and renew my friendship with them, bribe them with a beer, and get them to give me feedback.
There are so many examples. I cite them in the acknowledgements, but there were just so many who read chapters or parts of chapters and gave me feedback. It was so nice to have that collaboration. It was just such a great experience for me, and it shows you how generous people are. They could take time out from their own work, their teaching, their committee meetings and read my stuff. I was blown away. It was just a wonderful experience.
So, I had help from faculty, staff, and from students—which was wonderful because we're an educational institution, we should be incorporating students into projects like this. Incorporating students was an important component of this project, and getting some faculty buy-in was just the dessert. There were so many who read chapters or parts of chapters and gave me feedback. It was great to have that collaboration, and it shows you how generous people are.
That was an aspect of this project that I really enjoyed, because that's what we're here for, right? We should use this history as an opportunity to educate the campus, the community as a whole. That's what I hope comes from this, that people learn aspects of Bowdoin's past they didn't know about before. If we do that, I'll be so happy.
Some of these examinations of the past can feel like a critique. This doesn’t.
I think it is uplifting. Of course, we have to recognize what was done and where it came from, and there are parts of this institution’s past that aren’t the most edifying. But there are also aspects of our past that are surprisingly uplifting and give you faith in the institution. I was terrified when I started since it was not my specialty, but I’m so glad I worked on this project.
Yes, we have a lot of things that we should live down, and we're not the only institution that has that, but I think we should also celebrate some of the students who lived through tremendous discrimination here while they were here during their four years and then did incredible things. I'll just give you one example.
Arthur Madison. He's the third African American to graduate from the College, in 1910. He goes on and becomes a lawyer in Harlem, but he’s originally from Montgomery, Alabama. His family history is absolutely fascinating. In the 1940s, he goes back to Alabama to his native Montgomery. He works with the NAACP on voter registration drives. For this, he is jailed, and he is disbarred by the Alabama bar, although they made him a member of the bar again posthumously, for the work that he did to get Black Alabamans registered. None other than Rosa Parks was one of those voters Arthur Madison registered. We should celebrate Arthur Madison.
What are you going to do next?
I think I'm going to retire.
This story first appeared in the Spring/Summer 2026 issue of Bowdoin Magazine. Manage your subscription and see other stories from the magazine on the Bowdoin Magazine website.
