A Reflection on History as Conducted by a Historian

Guest post by Arcadia Rose Schmid

Primary source research for this course was among my favourite that I have ever had the pleasure of conducting. For all of the larger assignments, I used archival sources – most of them, if not all, primary – to find out information on what I was researching. This specifically included Frank Zeidler, Emil Seidel, and J.M. Klotsche, all of whom had files in the UWM Archives department. I utilized online searches and finding aids to determine what UWM offered in terms of sources, and was able to use two digitized projects to view files on Zeidler and Seidel. The Oral History Project at UWM has had transcripts of some of their interviews, along with the audio, made available, and all of the Emil Seidel papers are online. The greatest joy was found in requesting nine different boxes from the Archives from the Chancellor’s Records, however. I spent hours sorting through files that contained letters from Klotsche, newspaper clippings – my personal favourite was finding a diary that he kept from his time in Brazil. I prefer the physical archives because it is easier to come across something that was not of original interest but was found to be extremely useful; particularly, in Klotsche’s case, newspaper articles about him that gave valuable insight into public opinion of him.

This research differed from work that I had done previously: Much of the work I have done as a historian relied heavily on synthesis of secondary sources, with a few primary sources scattered in between. This was the first time that I relied heavily on primary sources, by analyzing them, drawing connections and ideas from them, and then used them as a foundation for original ideas that I came up with. I distinctly recall being distraught that I could not find secondary sources on the topics I researched but can confidently confide that my work with primary sources has allowed me to make new discoveries and has made me a better historian – and a better learner.

The Processes of Writing in the Voice of Fred Harrington

 Guest post by Nathan Brown

When conducting the primary source research for the reenactment, I knew that a lot of source material was available to me. Fred Harvey Harrington left an enormous paper trail from his life, especially while he was president of the University of Wisconsin. It would have required too much time to sift through all the primary source material and then pick interesting events to add to the reenactment. An outline was necessary to guide what information I wanted to find in the primary sources. I was able to use multiple secondary sources to create a general outline of Harrington’s career. Once I had this outline, I could direct my search into the primary sources.

The main primary sources that I used were the archives of the minutes from the meetings of the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents. Fortunately, these minutes were digitized by the University of Wisconsin-Madison, so I did not have any trouble accessing them. My strategy for finding specific references to events in these minutes was to use keyword searches based on the outline I created earlier. Once I performed the keyword search, I could then narrow down the results based on the date of the meeting. With the correct document that discussed the event relevant to the reenactment, I could create a post from Harrington’s perspective.

However, there were several instances in my research that strayed away from my outline. An example would be when I conducted a simple Google search about Harrington and received a search result from the CIA. This source consisted of a newspaper clipping that the CIA kept in its archives that covered the controversy over their contracts with the University of Wisconsin. While this was not mentioned in the secondary sources that I used, and was not on my outline, I knew that I stumbled upon an excellent source that would bring depth to the reenactment of Harrington and add more context to the setting.

One area of primary research that was disappointing was that I could not search through the Fred Harvey Harrington papers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This would have consisted of all the documents created by and sent to Harrington. An analysis of these sources would have greatly helped with my reenactment. Unfortunately, these sources were not digitized and there would have been difficulty accessing them. However, the other primary sources I utilized provided a great picture of the events in this reenactment from Harrington’s perspective.

Developing Fredric Neubauer

Guest post by Ryan Janowski

            I enjoyed my experience conducting primary source research for the re-enactment of the UWM Planetarium. I conducted all my research at the Golda Meir Library on the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee campus. The sources I used either were found there or online. I used search terms like “Milwaukee public schools,” “Milwaukee teachers,” “Milwaukee state teachers’ college” and others to conduct my initial research for sources. These terms brought many sources to my attention that I could use. I found old school directories, old yearbooks, surveys, and reports from the Milwaukee Public School system. I initially gathered around 15 sources to look through while formulating my re-enactment posts. I really enjoyed the researching portion of the re-enactment. All the sources I gathered came to life while analyzing them and I gained the perspective of each source as I read it. This helped when creating the language used for my re-enactment posts. The main source I used for the re-enactment posts was surveys of teachers’ attitudes and opinions in the central city of the Milwaukee Public School district.[1] These sources provided insight into the way my character, Fredric Neubauer, might have carried himself. The more challenging aspects of the re-enactment for me were creating posts that connected to real life events. Connecting my characters’ perspective to events provided a fun challenge to my creativity and historical imagination. A few things that were missing or that I could not find were first-hand accounts from teachers in the Milwaukee Public Schools and images to accompany my posts.

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[1] Attitudes and Opinions of Milwaukee Public School Teachers in Central City Schools (Milwaukee, Wis: Milwaukee Board of School Directors, Special Committee on Equality of Educational Opportunity, 1965).

Research Reflection

Guest post by Bennett Ryan

For me, doing primary source research for course work in this class was mostly done through online resources such as the UWM Digital Collections and the Wisconsin HistoricalSociety Digital Collections. The benefit to doing my research using these platforms was the convenience of not having to go to a separate building. Additionally searching using keywords can make it easier to a wider range of sources about specific topics. However, this method of research is not without its drawbacks. For instance, there are certain items that could only be found within physical archives because they have not, or cannot be digitized. Additionally, while it is certainly convenient to be able to search by topic within digital collections, sorting items by location of origin can allow you to stumble upon interesting information that may pertain to your research, but doesn’t contain keywords that make the connection obvious. It takes more effort to find a wide diversity of sources on digital collections because you are searching based on keywords contained within the source; therefore, if you do not make sure to search multiple different keywords you risk making the research you conduct have too narrow of a focus. Doing research for my primary source presentation at the Milwaukee Public Museum, I found that it was easier to use these resources to find information on institutions, especially within Milwaukee, such as the physics department or UWM, but it was much more difficult to find information on specific people and events in their lives. It was very difficult to find any information on Manfred Olson, even when you would expect information to be available. I was expecting there to be something talking about his time as planetarium director, maybe something in a student newspaper talking about a demonstration he put on, but I couldn’t find anything like that. Maybe this is something that I would have had more luck with had I gone to the archives to research him, but searching for that kind of information requires knowing where to look in the first place.

History is Odd and Uneven: My Toe Tap into Primary Source Research

 Guest post by Bryan Rogers

For the museum tabling I spent a good amount of time in the March on Milwaukee digital archives, mostly poring through Lloyd Barbee’s seemingly endless papers. I also travelled to America’s Black Holocaust Museum and the Wisconsin Black Historical Society, not so much on a specific line of research as for general inspiration.

Last month, we had to take the Clifton Strengths assessment for a sustainable peacebuilding course and I discovered that my number one strength is called Input and involves the collecting, absorbing, classifying, and archiving of information. In other words, viewed through the Clifton framework, I’m a natural archivist and curator of information. Conducting primary source research for this course allowed me to discover the advantages and disadvantages of being, essentially, a wanton glutton for facts and figures. On the pro tip, it makes for wonderfully dense and compelling connections across themes, eras or geographies. On the downside, the process of distilling that ever-widening web of curiosity into something digestible, metabolizable, can feel at times Sisyphean.

Also, in the development of the historical composite character, Leonard Grant Jr., I ended up purchasing a trial for Ancestry.com so I could view photocopied yearbooks from North Division High School classes of 1961 - 1965. They’re stunning.

When I was living in Santiago, Chile I would visit the Museum of Memory & Human Rights at least once a month. They had this exhibit on the second floor, panel after panel after panel, fully composed of letters written to General Pinochet by loved ones of the disappeared. Kissinger just died and I always wondered how his resolve would’ve held up if he had had to walk through the museum. If he’d had to read a tear-soaked plea from a grandmother searching for her only living relative, a thirteen-year-old boy whose name happened to be Henry. For all the sleep Kissinger claims not to have lost while condemning millions to death by carpet bombing and the many millions more to displacement and desperation, it’s hard to imagine this kind of primary source material failing to produce at least a second thought, a widening regret, a reflective pause on the utter tragedy of our human tendency to destroy each other.

Coming into direct contact with the words, images, and people of the past - and especially the contradictions therein - makes a very compelling case for the idea that historical facts and the production of history are two very different yet interdependent phenomena. In all, my brief foray this semester into primary sources felt phenomenal and I see myself doing more of it when the time for history presents itself.

Researching Henry W. Maier

Guest post by Avarie Daly

While researching Henry W. Maier for both the first tabling activity and the final re-enactment, I explored 3 places to find primary sources. The first was the UWM library digital collections, where I found videos and audio of press conferences, photos, and digitized documents. The digital collections contained Maier’s State of Emergency Proclamation, which was the foundation of my presentation, and I found an interview with an NAACP demonstrator. I originally didn’t plan on finding an interview with someone on the “opposition” of Maier’s interests, but it ended up supplementing the documents quite well and allowed me to explain the situation better than if I just used my own description.

For the re-enactment, I first visited the library to check out Maier’s autobiography. The book helped me write blog post #1. There were only physical copies available, so I had to flip through the book until I found a chapter that would possibly contain the information I was looking for. It was good for information about his mayorship, but not for details about his life. I decided to look in the physical archives to see if I could find out about his time at UWM. People in the archives suggested looking through a few of his boxes, which I did, and it was interesting to see copies of messages to other major figures in Milwaukee history, including Joe Klotsche. However, primary sources here were also limited to career-related events. I found that his autobiography was a better indicator of his personality than these official documents. I ended my archives trip by looking through UWM yearbooks from the time he supposedly attended grad school for his M.A., but there was no proof that he went there. Overall, it was still cool to see old newspaper clippings, memos, photos, and yearbooks – I even noticed that the final pages of the 1960s yearbooks contained job advertisements for big companies that I researched for my research paper on deindustrialization, like A.O. Smith and Allis Chalmers!

 

References

Maier, Henry W. The Mayor Who Made Milwaukee Famous: An Autobiography. Lanham, MD: Madison Books, 1993.

 

Semester Evaluation

 Guest post by Brady Steinbrecher

For my research on this course, I feel that I took a different approach than most of my peers. Each project we completed required the selection of an idea, event, or person and then complete a copious amount of research regarding our selected topics. However, one thing that I did differently from most of my peers was relate the topics I chose, connecting all my research with the culmination of the re-enactment.

From the beginning of the class, I was planning out my re-enactment, with the original idea being to portray a former chancellor of UWM. I was working through my research for our presentation in the museum when I began to get enthralled by the history of Manfred Olson. By working with the UWM archives and utilizing the scrapbook curated by Olson, I was able to begin to develop an in-depth profile of the construction of the planetarium as well as Professor Olson himself.

I really enjoyed doing research through the UWM archives, looking through the old school yearbooks and photos, as well as looking at online publishing about Professor Olson. I was able to cobble together my semester’s long research into one final reenactment. By beginning with the planetarium as my subject, I was able to get an introduction to Olson, then I worked backwards through his life. I think that the biggest tool I used to construct his life was the UWM Post and yearbook archives available from the school. Professor Olson was very involved with it, as well as the construction, and it really allowed me to build a good profile of my character.

Through this project I was able to learn not only about the construction of the planetarium, but also the mind behind it. I enjoyed the fact that all my research culminated at the end of the semester, I think it helped me get a much more in-depth understanding of Olson’s life because I spent so long working on it. With the history project at the beginning of the semester I was able to plot out the end of Olson’s life through his work on the planetarium, then working backwards for the final project, I felt like I had a good foundation to build my re-enactment.