Warren Center Fellows in Emerson Hall. Sitting from left are Gerald Sweeney, visiting scholar; Sharon Wood, visiting scholar; Claudia Goldin, professor of economics; and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, professor of Early American history, professor of women's studies, and director of the Warren Center. Standing from left are Hal Hansen, visiting scholar; John Bezis-Selfa, visiting scholar; Susan Levine, visiting scholar; Heather Cox Richardson, visiting scholar; and Kathleen Dalton, associate of the Warren Center.

A peanut butter cookie, Jell-O, and a container of milk -- it wasn't gourmet food, but there was something oddly familiar about it.

At a seminar earlier this year, visiting scholar Susan Levine distributed this humble fare as an edible illustration of her research topic, the history of the school lunch program.

"It's really a very complex subject," Levine said. "It's connected with a lot of different things: agricultural policy, poverty and social welfare programs, nutrition and health, socialization."

Levine, who teaches history at East Carolina University in Greenville, N.C., is one of six scholars spending the 1998-99 academic year at Harvard as resident fellows of the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History.

Each of the fellows is working on a book on some aspect of American history -- topics ranging from the rise of the iron industry in New England to contemporary Mayan immigrants employed on chicken farms in North Carolina. The Warren Center gives scholars the opportunity to spend a year working on their research projects and affords them access to Harvard's incomparable research facilities.

But it also does something more. By selecting fellows whose topics fit a general theme, by settling them in a suite of offices on the airy, light-filled fourth floor of Emerson Hall, and by bringing them together in biweekly workshops to discuss one another's work, the Center encourages the kind of collegiality and intellectual exchange that scholars thrive on.

The topic for this year's group is "Divisions of Labor." The leaders of the ongoing group discussion are Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, the James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History and director of the Warren Center, and Economics Professor Claudia Goldin.

"People come from very different perspectives, and this variety helps the scholars to think through their topics," Ulrich said. "Someone with an orientation toward the history of ideas, for example, is going to ask very different questions from someone who is more focused on the physical world."

Levine's husband, Leon Fink, is also a resident fellow at the Warren Center. A professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Fink is writing a book about Mayans from Guatemala who came to the United States in the mid- to late 1980s to escape persecution and political turmoil in their own country. A large proportion of these immigrants ended up working in poultry factories in North Carolina where they have engaged in efforts to organize themselves and obtain better working conditions.

"It's been a marvelous year for me," Fink said. "I've been able to dip into the riches of Widener, and I've also enjoyed the stimulus of being in the Harvard community. It's a kind of intellectual utopia."

Sharon Wood, an assistant professor of history at the University of Nebraska, Omaha, who is writing a book on the political activism of a group of women workers in a midwestern city in the late nineteenth century, said that her year as a Warren Center fellow has been a stimulating and productive one.

"We're all working on very different projects, but we're facing similar theoretical and methodological problems," Wood said. "Being here challenges me to think in directions that might not have occurred to me otherwise."

John Bezís-Selfa, an assistant professor of history at Wheaton College, is writing about the rise of the iron industry in America from the mid-17th to the early 19th centuries with a special focus on the social and cultural meanings of work during that era.

"It's been helpful to me to be able to run my work by people who are specialists in this area," Bezís-Selfa said. "In my home institution, I don't have that opportunity."

The Warren Center, founded in 1965, is named for Charles Warren, Class of 1889, a wealthy lawyer and historian, whose widow, Annielouise Bliss Warren, left a large bequest to Harvard to further the study of American history.

"In the 30-odd years of the Center's existence, a great many major American historians have spent a year here as visiting scholars," said Susan Hunt, the Center's administrator.

In addition to establishing the Center, income from the fund supports professorships in American history throughout the University. The Warren Center also reaches beyond Harvard. Most of its seminars, workshops, and colloquia are free and open to the public and have attracted a diverse audience, including scholars from area institutions as well as the general public.

For Ulrich, one of the Center's goals is to bring diverse groups of scholars together.

"There are lots of historians at Harvard who are not in the History Department," she said. "They're in the Divinity School, the School of Education, the Business School, and the Law School. One of my goals is for this to be a real area studies center where scholars with an interest in American history can come to share their work."

Goldin, an economics historian who served as co-leader of this year's group of fellows, is one scholar who has benefited from Ulrich's inclusive vision.

"For me, it's been a chance to get back into real history," she said. "It's been very stimulating in the sense that it's led me to think more about historical detail, to pay more attention to narrative."

At the same time, Goldin was grateful for the chance to share her knowledge of economics with scholars who needed that expertise to more fully understand the materials they were interpreting.

"This is a group that wanted to know more about economics. They asked for it, they welcomed it. For me it was a grand experience."