7 Questions With Polita Glynn, Documentarian Filmmaker

 

Polita Glynn specializes in documentary filmmaking, screenwriting and creative storytelling focused on history, cultural diversity and environment. She received a State of Florida 1996 Individual Artists Fellowship in Media Arts, a 2015 Sundance Screenwriters Fellowship, a 2022 St. Pete Arts Alliance Artist grant and a 2023 Creative Pinellas Beyond Placemaking fellowship. Glynn has her B.A. in American Studies from Bennington College, Ed.M. from Harvard University Graduate School of Education, and studied film at the University of Miami School of Communication. Along with director and cinematographer Devin Rice, she has produced several documentaries about Florida history, including "Underground History.” For those interested in scheduling a screening or viewing the film can contact Polita Glynn through her website at www. merfolkmedia.org .  A trailer for the film can be viewed at https://merfolkmedia.org/underground-history  .

1. How and/or when did you get you hooked on history?

I think that I have always been drawn to the past and how it informs the present. Maybe

some of that was inspired by my father’s love of history, particularly the Civil War. He

had a whole library of history books in our house when I was growing up, and we would

look at those together. As an undergraduate, I majored in History and American Studies.

My thesis focused on an analysis of historical correspondence between generations of

Vermont families and how they adapted to changing values and culture. I find that I

always want to know about the history of a place and the stories of its people to deepen

my understanding and sense of place.

2. What role does history play or has it played in your personal life?

I am the daughter of a Peruvian immigrant and the granddaughter of Russian Jewish

immigrants. My mother’s family escaped the pogroms in Russia and went to Peru. My

father’s family immigrated to Boston. Their stories, and trying to learn more about my

ancestors, contributed to my interest in understanding history, heritage and ancestry. I

believe that we are all impacted by our own historical stories.

3. How is/How was history a part of your professional life/career?

When I finished my undergraduate degree at Bennington College, I wanted to work in

historical museum research and exhibit design. However, I soon realized there was very

little work in that area so I pivoted to the field of education. My work in Boston in

education addressed school desegregation and cross-cultural communication. I found

that these issues all draw on historical context. So, while not directly working in history

education, I recognized that understanding history was essential to creating a context

for social issues. My professional career took me in other directions, but now that I am

“retired” I have returned to history and my love of filmmaking, research and storytelling.

4. Why is studying/knowing history important?

In many places in the world, people strive to acknowledge the history of the land where

they reside. Known as land acknowledgement, this recognition identifies the past which

erased Indigenous people’s history and culture.  As a broader concept

acknowledgement can be a starting point in recognizing histories which have been

erased, ranging from ancient Indigenous people to contemporary displaced

communities. As someone who cares about social justice, I believe that a community

can develop a deeper sense of place and a better vision for the future through

increased awareness of its history and an expanded understanding of its past.

5. What is your favorite period or aspect of history to learn about and why?

Great question. I think I would like to answer this we a favorite quote:

“For millenniums, humans have told stories to connect, relate and weave imaginative

truths that enable us to see one another more clearly with compassion and courage...

When we do this, we tap into an ancient power that makes us, and the world, more of

who we are: a single race looking for reasons, searching for purpose, seeking to find

ourselves.” Amanda Gorman, Poet, New York Times interview. 12/8/22

6. How did you come to explore the subject of Tampa Bay’s “Underground

History” and what is the heart of the story that you tell in your film “Underground

History:  Exploring Erased Histories in the Tampa Bay Region”?

In St. Petersburg, we have layers and layers of history under our feet, ranging from

ancient to more recent times. When I moved from Miami to St. Pete in 2021, my

imagination was captured biking around the ‘Pink Streets’ and seeing the Pinellas Point

Mound. Who has an ancient Indigenous mound in the middle of a suburban

neighborhood? And were there more or how many were lost? What other histories were

erased and where can we find those stories? I wanted to peel back those layers and

explore that history, as well as amplify the voices of people working to illuminate the

past. I was particularly interested in acknowledging the erased stories that are

sometimes buried but still impact our present and influence the future.

7.       

 

7.  What other products has your company, Merfolk Media, produced?

Merfolk Media Alliance was formed in 2022 after I stepped down from my full-time

position as director of the Pew Fellows Program in Marine Conservation. Merfolk Media

is still a relatively young non-profit organization.  In additional to the Underground History documentary, Merfolk Media developed and produced ‘Underground History Visual Poetry,’ which blends place-based spoken word poetry with filmmaking, music and public outreach to present stories of erased histories in the St. Petersburg community and Tampa Bay region.

Merfolk Media recently produced and directed ‘The Brick Roads of St. Petersburg.’ This

short film focuses the history of brick roads, an iconic historic feature of the city. The film

mixes rich visual imagery of the city’s brick roads with archival images, old newspaper

articles, historic maps and animation. Community outreach is also an essential element of all my film projects. For each of these films, we have organized community screenings and strived to engage audiences in the stories and histories presented in the films.

7 Questions With Susan Wels, Author of An Assassin In Utopia

 

Susan Wels is a New York Times-bestselling author, historian, and journalist. Her new nonfiction narrative history book, to be released February 7, 2023, is An Assassin in Utopia: The True Story of a Nineteenth-Century Sex Cult and a President’s Murder. This true-crime odyssey explores a forgotten, fascinating chapter of American history—leading the reader from a free-love utopian community in upstate New York to the assassination of President James Garfield in 1881 by a former member of the community. It’s the first book to weave together these stories, in a tale of utopian experiments, political machinations, and murder. Susan lives in Northern California and spent more than twelve years researching and writing this book. Her website is  https://www.susanwelsauthor.com/. 

1. How and when did you get hooked on history?

I was an English and journalism major in college and thought that history was just about dry-as-dust names and dates. But when I was in my forties, I worked on a book, called America: Then & Now, that paired old photographs of American events, places, and daily life with contemporary photos of the same subjects. My job was to write brief essays that tied each of the then-and-now photographs together. All of a sudden, I found myself researching historical topics from baseball and weddings to jazz and hemlines, and I fell completely in love with researching and writing history. I went on to write published histories of Stanford University and the Titanic before enrolling in graduate school to get a master’s degree in history, and I’ve never looked back. Researching and writing history is my joy.

2. What role does history play or has it played in your personal life?

History has sent me off on some of the greatest travels and adventures of my lifetime. In 1998, after my New York Times-bestselling Titanic history book came out, I was invited to be the correspondent on the Titanic Research & Recovery Expedition. I spent six weeks on a small vessel in the North Atlantic reporting daily about the expedition and weaving the history of the Titanic into my reports. Two years later, I spent nearly two months in Belfast, Northern Ireland, researching the history of the shipyards that built the Titanic. I’ve learned that “shoe-leather research”—actually being in places where the history I’m writing about occurred—is incredibly illuminating. So my research has taken me to places as diverse as Alaska, Hawaii, New York, Washington, D.C., Jerusalem, Belfast, and Geneva, Switzerland.

3. How does history play a part of your professional life/career?

I have been writing history since 1992, when HarperCollins published America: Then & Now. Since then, I’ve researched, written, and published histories including The Olympic Spirit: 100 Years of the Games (Collins 1995), Titanic: Legacy of the World’s Greatest Ocean Liner (Time Life Books, 1997), Stanford: Portrait of a University (Stanford 1999), Pearl Harbor: America’s Darkest Day (Time Life Books, 2001), San Francisco: Arts for the City—Civic Art and Urban Change, 1932-2012 (Heyday 2013), and my latest book—to be released in early February 2023—An Assassin in Utopia: The True Story of a Nineteenth-Century Sex Cult and a President’s Murder. Since 2005, I’ve also been editor for the Stanford Historical Society at Stanford University. I think it’s fair to say that history has been my career for the last thirty years.

4. Why is studying/knowing history important?

First, because it adds so much context to current events. For example, the presidential election of 1876—which I write about in An Assassin in Utopia—set the stage in many ways for the contested elections of 2000 and 2020. History repeats, although not exactly, and it can be helpful to see and recognize those patterns. Secondly, it’s great to study history because it’s fascinating. As the late historian David McCullough said, “History is human.” It’s made and moved by human beings whose beliefs, misapprehensions, talents, passions, fears, foibles, and collisions create world-changing events. History is driven by personalities and human nature, and it’s often much stranger than fiction.

5. What is your favorite period or aspect of history to learn about and why?

I’ve spent a lot of time studying, researching, and writing about late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American history. The primary sources from that era are deep and rich, and it’s close enough to our own time to make it relatively easy to understand the psychology and motivations of historical figures. But I also love learning about the history of Africa, ancient Rome, and Napoleonic Europe. To be honest, there are few historical topics that don’t interest me.

6. What led you to write An Assassin in Utopia?

I first read about the Oneida Community as a graduate student in history. I was gobsmacked. It was incredible to me that they existed and even thrived in Victorian America. Ever since, I had it in mind to write a book about Oneida. Back in 2009, I was looking for a crime committed by a member, because I thought it would give me a human-interest angle. But I couldn’t find a crime. The Oneidans were upright, respected citizens, despite their eccentric sexual practices, and I got frustrated. But I knew that The New York Times had recently put its archives online, and I thought there was a small chance that the Times would have reported on a crime committed in upstate New York, where the Oneida Community was located. So, as a last-ditch effort, I typed “Oneida” and “crime” into the search bar—and was inundated with hits. I found my crime—a presidential assassination—and knew that I had a book. I spent the next twelve years fascinated and entertained by what I was discovering as I researched every detail of the story.

7. Aside from its effects on Charles Guiteau, was the Oneida Community anything more than an obscure footnote in American history?

The Oneida Community was a prime example of the social and religious experiments that blossomed across the country after the War for Independence. The American revolution shattered institutions and religions, and charismatic leaders filled the void with new, imaginative social structures. Ralph Waldo Emerson said that almost every reading man “had a draft of a new community” in his pocket. The country saw more than seventy utopian experiments between 1800 and 1860. Upstate New York was such a hotbed of these movements that it became known as the “Burned Over District.” And the Oneida Community, which prospered for more than thirty years, was the most successful utopian experiment in American history.