AASLH 2025 Leadership in History Awards
United Lynn Pride of Lynn, Massachusetts,
Recognized with Albert B. Corey Award

For eighty years, AASLH has given Leadership in History Awards to establish and encourage standards of excellence in the collection, preservation, and interpretation of state and local history in order to make the past more meaningful to all people. This week we are announcing the 2024 Leadership in History Award recipients.

The Albert B. Corey Award recognizes primarily volunteer-operated historical organizations and projects that best display the qualities of vigor, scholarship, and imagination in their work. This is an award made at the discretion of the Awards Committee and is AASLH’s most prestigious award for all-volunteer institutions and initiatives.

The 2025 Albert B. Corey Award goes to United Lynn Pride of Lynn, Massachusetts, for the project Through a Rainbow Lens: A Reflection on Lynn’s LGBTQ+ History.

This project documented, shared, and preserved the city’s LGBTQ+ stories and places with the support of a grant from Mass Humanities. Lynn is a working-class town with a large immigrant population whose important queer history had been relegated to the shadows. Lynn was home to the oldest gay bar in Massachusetts (now closed) and the place where two union activists met, who were the first same-sex couple in America to get a marriage license in 2004. As one reviewer wrote, “[This project] is a model of how history can be used to build bridges, challenge assumptions, and inspire change.”

The TRL project team gathered and shared interviews, transcripts, indexes, topics, timelines, news clippings, maps, images, objects and documents on a website, at an exhibit at the Lynn Museum, in a 360° Virtual Museum, in pamphlets, and in various public talks and tours. This multifaceted project preserved essential history and experiences and shared them in diverse ways that engaged their community and reached new audiences.

Through a Rainbow Lens conducted thirty-two oral history interviews with key members of Lynn’s LGBTQ+ community, covering the past fifty years. The narrators reflect the vast diversity of the Lynn community, including people from various generational, racial, national, religious,, class and gender backgrounds, and include both native and foreign-born Americans. The team also recovered two audio interviews and three transcripts from the 1980s from the archive at the History Project, bringing these primary sources back into the record for a new generation.

Ths project researched articles on LGBTQ+ issues from the Gay Community News, InNews Weekly, Lynn Item and Boston Globe going back to the nineteenth century. Overall, they collected two hundred news clippings and displayed them as an online timeline to show both change over time and the continuity of queer life in the city. They also collected 1,400 images consisting of photos, fliers, advertisements and other documents relating to the community. They researched the dates of operation and locations of bars, and discovered nineteen different business names at nine locations, providing a map of Lynn’s LGBTQ+ landscape through history.

At the exhibit opening at the Lynn Museum in June 2024, the LGBTQ+ community and allies came together in one space as they had not done since the last gay bar closed eight years earlier. A multigenerational panel discussion at Salem State University presented this history to a younger audience. Through a Rainbow Lens addresses historic erasure and community resilience with thorough research and scholarship, empathy, and joy. In the words of one reviewer, “This is so much more than a history project.”

Learn more about this project here.

More awards will be announced this week! Look for announcements on Wednesday for the History in Progress awards and on Thursday for the Awards of Excellence.