Jabez Choi photo
Morand with New Haven's original charter: "History is everywhere."
From “Dr. Ann E. Garrett Robinson Way” to the Blue Moon Chapel mural to the Q House centennial’s many celebrations, New Haven history is everywhere — and should be accessible to everyone.
For the past eight months, Mike Morand has been working to make that public history ideal a reality – in his official-but-unpaid role as city historian.
Morand was appointed by Mayor Justin Elicker to the post in April.
On Monday, he sat down with the Independent for an interview about his first eight months on the job– filled with historical celebrations and unveilings and tours — and looked to what the next year could have in store for New Haven history.
Nearby, included among the items in his office on the bottom floor of Yale’s Beinecke library, was the original charter of New Haven, enclosed in a box.
The charter is a part of the library’s collection, but Morand emphasized that one can find well-preserved history in just about any part of the city.
“One insight I’ve had is that our town has more historic records, archives, historic architecture, cemeteries, community memory organizations per capita in a very compact place than just about anywhere else,” Morand said. “New Haven’s history is inexhaustible, so there’ll be plenty of material.”
He pointed to the various historical centers, museums, and organizations that include historians and boost public memory — like the New Haven Museum, Yale’s Beinecke Library archive, Southern Connecticut State University’s (SCSU) archive, and the Dixwell Congregational Church, to name a few.
Morand’s ongoing question, and his mission for the upcoming year, is how to democratize and streamline New Haven’s historical archives and resources.
For example, Morand pointed to the fact that the papers of former New Haven mayors are currently scattered across SCSU, New Haven Museum, and Yale libraries. Looking ahead to the future, he would want researchers and civilians alike to know where to find these papers in a streamlined fashion.
Morand’s interest in history started at a young age. He was born in Covington, Kentucky, and was raised in Cincinnati, where his father would take him around to historical sites. But his visits to the local cemeteries, being surrounded by histories of people before him, struck a chord with Morand. Later, when he moved to New Haven to attend Yale, he quickly found the Grove Street Cemetery, and became interested in New Haven’s history. After he graduated in 1987, he attended the Yale Divinity School, where he would graduate 1993. As a graduate student, he served on the Board of Alders and stayed heavily involved with New Haven local politics. He currently works as the Beinecke’s director for community engagement.
Morand’s goal of making local history accessible is in line with the word he kept repeating during Monday’s interview: “connection.” One method Morand has used to connect to a larger audience has been his interactions with the media, such as through newspapers, local news broadcasts, and radio shows.
According to Morand, the job of city historian has been conducted in a variety of different ways. He quoted former City Historian Richard Hegel’s description of the role as “responding to people’s questions.” And in its current iteration, Morand has interpreted Hegel’s words as talking to the media and attending public-facing events, in hopes of reaching people who are “not the normal regular library or museum” goer.
In the end, he wants to make people understand that they, too, are part of a larger history.
He recalled a time when he walked into the studio at WPLR and a producer approached him, saying that he did not look like a “historian.” Instead, the producer said he looked like he was going to a rock concert.
“And I said, ‘What do you mean? What does a historian look like?’ Everybody’s got a historian, right? That’s what I’m really excited about,” Morand said.
With the holidays around the corner, Morand described this time of year as a brief period when people gather with their families and discover their own histories. Those family histories, when crafted together, form a local history. History, to Morand, isn’t necessarily defined by a museum artifact, locked behind an encasement in an archive. Instead, it might be a “VHS tape” or “Aunt Jane’s papers.”
“What I think is really great is reminding folks that history is everywhere. History is not just in a museum or in the center of the town, but history is all around,” he said.
Morand is serving a five-year term through 2028. He said that next year, local histories line up perfectly: Frank Pepe’s Pizzeria, Albertus Magnus College, and the Yale School of Drama will see their 100-year anniversaries, alongside the 150-year anniversary of the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, as well as the 50-year anniversary of Claire’s Corner Copia.
“One of the things that makes New Haven so distinctive is that it is a place where we’ve got some really delicious history,” Morand said. “So we can eat our way through history.”
And in the past year, Morand has been able to attend numerous celebrations of the city’s history, including corner renamings and mural unveilings and the opening of the season at Fort Nathan Hale. All around him, he has said, is a celebration of history.
But while local histories can include light pleasantries, an engagement with history, according to Morand, also requires a stark and honest reckoning with the past. In August, he and now-deceased Beaver Hills Alder Tom Ficklin proposed before the Board of Alders a resolution to issue a formal apology for the city’s actions preventing the founding of a local Black college in 1831. Morand also helped curate the New Haven Museum’s exhibit “Shining Light on Truth: New Haven, Yale, and Slavery.”
He recalled leading a tour for a group of visitors and one participant emailing him after, expressing her gratitude for the exhibit. She said that she was thankful to have experienced and relived some of the traumas at the exhibit in community and in conversation with other people.
“It’s a way of dealing with disconnection, loneliness, and those kinds of things, and it can also be a place where you end up talking to other people,” Morand said. “The answer … is you have to do history if you want to have a better future.”