When Tristan Brown, an associate professor of history at MIT, first examined a Chinese tea chest label displayed at Old South Meeting House, he had no reason to doubt its story. Descendants of the Boston blacksmith Thomas Wells had donated the label in 1987, saying it had been recovered after colonial protesters threw tea into Boston Harbor in 1773. 

But after a year of research, Brown reached a different conclusion: The label was made nearly a century later. The decisive clue came when he read the Chinese text in Cantonese rather than Mandarin, as previous scholars had done. He found that the characters had been used phonetically, in slightly variant forms across contemporary sources, to represent the name of Smith, Archer & Co., a US firm that acquired Asian tea for shipment to American markets during the 1860s and 1870s.

COURTESY OF MIT GLOBAL HUMANITIES

Working with the Wells family, he traced the label to a relative who traveled from Michigan to California during the Gold Rush era before returning and operating a business known as the California Tea Store. Brown argues that claims for its revolutionary pedigree probably developed later, amid the centennial commemorations of the 1870s.

The discovery does not make the label historically insignificant, he says. Instead, what began as an inquiry into a supposed artifact of the Boston Tea Party became a study of how ordinary objects acquire historical authority, and how historical memory itself is made.

“History is never finished,” he says. “Even objects that have sat in museums for decades can reveal entirely new stories when we ask new questions.” 

Alissa Totman ’13 was a sophomore when she joined MIT BrainTrust, a student-run organization that connects Institute undergraduates and people with brain injuries for support and socializing. “That group was a great way to learn about the human experience of what people go through when they experience a brain injury,” she says. And it laid the foundation for her life’s work.

Today, Totman is a physician specializing in brain injury medicine at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, where she treats adults with head trauma, stroke, brain tumors, and more. 

She is also the founder of Synapse, a nonprofit focused on providing support for such individuals. The organization grew out of a group she started with Jaclyn Konopka ’14 during medical school at Stanford, and Totman launched it as a national service organization in 2016, while pursuing her master’s degree in public health at Harvard. 

There are now chapters at 28 universities across the country—and Totman still runs the organization. “There’s a big need for more resources like this,” she says.

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