Georgetown’s history stretches back more than two centuries to 1789—even before the U.S. Constitution took effect. A new book by Paul O’Neill (C’86) and Bennie Smith (C’86) traces that history in text and photos.
Making Georgetown’s history accessible is one of the goals of Georgetown University, part of Arcadia Publishing’s Campus History series. “It’s a place of many firsts—the first Catholic school in the nation, the first university in the capital, the first school of foreign service, and the first Congressional university charter,” O’Neill said. “We want more people to be able to understand how remarkable the Georgetown story is.”
“In light of the fact that Georgetown doesn’t have an official historian, we hope this book can add to the work that others have done before us,” such as History Professor Emeritus Robert Emmett Curran’s The Bicentennial History of Georgetown University, added Smith. Where Curran’s three-volume work goes into tremendous detail, Smith and O’Neill’s offers an entry to begin investigating Georgetown’s history.
Smith and O’Neill organized the book around a series of “founders.” First among these are the University’s actual founder John Carroll, S.J. “When John Carroll founded Georgetown, he promised three things: to educate students, that the school would be open to every religion, and that it would be open to every class of students,” O’Neill said. “The fact that those three principles still animate Georgetown’s work is remarkable.”
Other “founders” include Presidents Patrick Healy, S.J.; Coleman Nevils, S.J., and Timothy Healy, S.J.; who all led Georgetown during times of great transformation. “In the absence of financial resources commensurate with expectations, there were men of extraordinary leadership who determined that Georgetown was going to take a leap forward,” O’Neill observed.
Of course, University leadership is only one aspect of the history of Georgetown. “The things I was really drawn to were related to student life,” Smith said. Particularly fascinating was the establishment of the Athletic Association in 1874. The Association provided a means for organizing intramural and intercollegiate sports, but—as Smith and O’Neill write in the book—”By 1880, the meetings of the Athletic Association functioned as an informal student government.”
The 1971 May Day riots reflected a shift in how students saw themselves in relation to the University. “They crystallized the idea that students should take more of a role in their academic lives,” Smith said. Students of Georgetown Inc.—better known as The Corp.—was founded the next year with a mission “to assert and protect the inherent rights of its members and the community.”
Working in the Archives
The book is driven by its images. “It was important to have access to as wide a trove as possible,” Smith said. They found most of the items in that trove in the University Archives. University Archivist Lynn Conway and Assistant Archivist Ann Galloway provided immeasurable assistance to help them find what was available.
“I don’t know how many documents we looked through, but it’s not an exaggeration to say they’ve got a catalog between their ears,” O’Neill said. The archivists helped Smith and O’Neill to review the hundreds of images and narrow them down to what could be included in the book—as well as to find and reproduce them digitally.
They also provided context and detail. “Lynn always knew about related materials, and additional information about each piece, and could usually say, ‘Here’s a funny story about this piece,’” Smith recalled.
“The University Archives, as a collection of records, a space and a staff, connect people who have questions about University history with resources that help answer those questions,” Conway said. “We collaborate with faculty to incorporate archival materials into the curriculum and we are always happy to assist with research projects large or small.”
“Before this project, I never knew anything about the archives except the story of how they hold a lock of George Washington’s hair,” O’Neill said. “The fact that you can go in and see these parts of Georgetown’s history is a great gift.”
O’Neill and Smith are donating all proceeds from the book to the Library. The University Archives and the Booth Family Center for Special Collections are currently open by appointment only, but they support learning and research by digitizing materials, conducting virtual instruction sessions and presentations, and sharing collections in online exhibitions.