
Beinecke Library | Culture & Community | Arts & Culture | History | Elicker Administration
Morand outside of the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. Lucy Gellman.
Michael Morand leaned over a stack of papers, ready to kick it old school with the New Haven Women’s 20th Century Club. On the first page, it was March 1900, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett was making a stop at 65 Edgewood Ave. No one knew it then, but her visit would make history—and then be largely lost to the city’s collective memory. Now, the most immediate association with the address is a Pizza House.
“History is in every block,” Morand said. The words hung low in the air for a moment..
A former alder, longtime New Havener and steadfast and vocal champion of the Elm City, Morand is New Haven’s new city historian, a voluntary, five-year position to which he was appointed by Mayor Justin Elicker earlier this year. As he takes on the role, his priorities include planning for two semiquincentennial celebrations, building out new city partnerships, and expanding opportunities for public history across the city.
He takes over from Judith Schiff, a research archivist at Yale who passed away in 2022. When he’s not working as city historian, he is the director of community engagement at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, and most recently the curator of Shining A Light on Truth: New Haven, Yale, and Slavery at the New Haven Museum. He lives in the city’s Fair Haven neighborhood with his partner, the curator and scholar Frank Mitchell.
“New Haven has an extraordinarily rich and diverse history, and when we engage with and learn from the events and lessons from our past, we can better understand not only who we have been, but who we are and where we can go in the future,” said Mayor Justin Elicker. “Historians have a special charge to help illuminate these stories and truths for us, and every time I speak with Michael Morand, I learn something new and interesting about New Haven.”
“There’s almost no place in New Haven where there’s not the presence [of] and access to history over time, and diversity of human history,” Morand said. “Which also means, particularly for young people, that this is a good place to learn local history, and local history as a portal to national and global history.”
One of the first items on Morand's list is New Haven’s role in America's semiquincentennial, which takes place on July 4, 2026. The date, two years from Thursday, will act as a sort of prelude to New Haven's semiquincentennial in 2034 (it also corresponds with the city’s comprehensive planning process). The city was incorporated on January 8, 1784.
Like partners on the state's America 250 commission, he is most interested in centering histories that haven't always been in the spotlight, including those of Black and Indigenous New Haveners past and present. New Haven, where slavery was legal until 1848, sits on the unceded land of the Quinnipiac, Wappinger and Pagusset peoples.
While the city has in recent years done considerable work to bring attention to figures like William Lanson, Constance Baker Motley, Margaret Bonds and activist Fred Harris, there are hundreds of Black histories that remain understudied or not studied at all. Morand pointed to the importance of both community memory making—that is, archiving the stories that are still here, before they are lost—as well as recognizing moments in the city’s history that have collected dust over the decades, because of who and what they remember.
“This is an extraordinarily long history, and it is such a diverse and dynamic history,” he said. “But it’s in such a compact place. In many ways, scale is among New Haven’s superpowers. And when we harness that to our advantage, we can do incredible things.”
“It’s not as if these things are hidden,” he added. He pointed to examples like the Fairfield Museum and Mystic Seaport’s exhibition Entwined: Freedom, Sovereignty, and the Sea. “It’s just a question—Do you shine the light and do you look?”
So how does that happen? In the two years between now and 2026, he’s interested in “being a catalyst and connector”—bringing together resources that exist across over a dozen institutions, from cemeteries to Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU) to the Blessed Michael McGivney Pilgrimage Center to the New Haven Free Public Library to the Connecticut Freedom Trail
On their own, each space has its own trove of New Haven history—archived mayoral papers, digitized manuscripts, old newspapers on microfilm, landmarks that chronicle the linked histories of enslavement and abolition in Connecticut. Morand likes to imagine what would happen if they worked together more often.
He looked to New Haven’s “Dictionary Day,” a celebration of Noah Webster that takes place each year on his birthday, Oct. 16. The fête, which narrowly follows recognition of Indigenous Peoples Day on the New Haven Green, has been slowly growing since 2022.
Currently, the Yale Library holds the Webster Family papers. Nearby, Webster and his wife are buried at Grove Street Cemetery. Less than half a mile away, a small marker commemorates the Temple Street property they once owned and lived in. Up Whitney Avenue, the New Haven Museum also lays claim to Webster’s legacy, with several portraits and pieces of old family furniture.
And yet, the tradition hasn’t quite caught on in the city. Two years into celebration, it’s still very much figuring out the collaboration piece of it.
It dovetails with an interest in a working people’s history of New Haven, he added. Inspired by the work of historians and educators—Joan Cavanagh, Colin Caplan, Leslie Blatteau and the late Doris (Deb) Townsend among many others—he hopes to increase the amount of and interest in public history in New Haven. Thus far, that work has happened largely in silos, rarely leaving a given school or institution to become an enduring (and safely archived) part of public consciousness.
He's been inspired by cities that have community memory labs—often located in public libraries—where people can record and document their memories before they are lost to time.
He pointed to his colleague Jennifer Coggins, community engagement archivist at the Beinecke, who has in recent years held workshops on preserving personal history at the New Haven Free Public Library and the Dixwell Community Q House. The Q House, for instance, had a “Community Archive Day” in March, during which it invited people to bring photos, documents, and ephemera that could be digitized and kept in the public record.
Going forward, that’s exactly the kind of thing he’d like to do on a larger scale. While those moments are already happening—think of Dr. Anne Garrett Robinson, whose discovery of a document buried in the research papers of the Greater New Haven African American Historical Society led to a corner renaming for the city’s first recorded Black resident—there’s not yet the formal infrastructure for it.
“If you activate more people to be the makers and keepers of records, that’s a really good use of time,” he said. “A little bit of time and investment in building up the community memory infrastructure will yield lots of history and records now and for the future.”
A Love Of History, A Love Of New Haven
Born in Covington, Kentucky and raised outside of Cincinnati, Morand felt the tug of history long before his move to New Haven in 1983. As a kid, he visited old cemeteries with his dad and geeked out to “This Day in History” calendars. He discovered the city’s public library, delighted when it opened a branch within walking distance of his home.
“The world was available, and history was part of it,” he said.
Since that time, he’s soaked up history wherever he has the chance—and has, in New Haven, been a living part of it too. Five years after moving to the city for Yale, where he studied English Language and Literature, Morand began his first of two terms on the city’s Board of Alders, jumping into what would become decades of civic engagement. In 2000, he became associate vice president for New Haven and State Affairs at Yale, a role of town-gown intermediary that he has continued to play across many of the city’s institutions in the years since.
It has made him an outspoken, endearing, and at times wonderfully dorky advocate of the city. On his desk, which looks out onto a giant sculpture in the Beinecke’s lower level, he keeps a running tally of how long he’s been in New Haven (this August will mark 41 years; at the time of this interview, it was nearly 15,000 days). In those four decades, he’s ventured into St. Bernard’s Cemetery on Columbus Avenue in search of Mayor John Murphy’s grave, mused over neighborhood histories, and watched New Haven transform.
Twenty-six years ago (at the nation’s bicentennial), he was also a co-founder of Friends of the Grove Street Cemetery, enthralled by the resting places of James Hillhouse, Martha Townsend, Alexander Du Bois and hundreds of others.
When asked about his favorite places in the city (“can I give you 100?), he can, from memory, quote John Barber’s 1831 musings on “the seat of happiness” in New Haven (Barber was one of just four people who voted in favor of a historically Black college in the city) and just as quickly walk mentally through dozens of the city’s greenspaces without so much as cracking open a book.
He has high praise for city parks—the New Haven Botanical Garden of Healing is a favorite—and the Fair Haven neighborhood, which has been his home for just over four decades. His interest in libraries also never left him: he has served on and chaired the boards of the New Haven Free Public Library (NHFPL) and NHFPL Foundation, and helped steer it through both a global pandemic and the loss of beloved City Librarian John Jessen in 2022.
He also isn’t shy about addressing failures that litter the city’s history, including the omission of Indigenous histories and narratives from the record, the mistreatment of Black activists, advocates, and abolitionists of all races over centuries. The most egregious, he believes, may be the vote against a historically Black college in 1831.
And yet, he sees that too as a learning opportunity. It’s the same approach he brings to his role, every time he thinks of the way to help New Haven tell its story.
“We can’t go back and rewind the clock, we can’t get a do-over in that way, but we can use it as a way of taking inspiration from the people who fought the good fight, who didn’t give up,” he said. “There is inspiration for those who persisted. And while we can’t rewind the clock, we can say, who are we now? And what do we need to do now?”