Hungry for the Archives

Guest Post by Avery Schulze

One of the greatest experiences for this this semester was the chance to work directly with finding and using primary sources for historical research, an obvious cornerstone to the course. Going back to the previous semester, I was in the middle of developing my central research questions for my capstone research paper for my Urban Studies undergrad on spatial mismatch and public transportation access in the Milwaukee Metro. I wanted to gain access to the library on campus to access primary source documents because I wanted my methodology of research to include some historical research. But Covid-19 came along which prevented me from being able to participate in accessing these primary sources, which really was a blow and letdown, as in many cases I needed to see physical copies.

This class, while online and of course despite still not being able to access primary source physically, has given me a taste of what it is like to work with primary source research. I really appreciated the outlined bibliography of characters for our Twitter reenactment provided by Mark Langenfeld. I searched the UWM online archives and found it difficult to find information on Cleveland Abbe, perhaps because I was inexperienced in my methods of searching or perhaps because Cleveland Abbe, while relevant to our course, may not have been relevant to Milwaukee outside of his collaborations with Lapham. It's possible that I would have found him mentioned in primary sources by Increase Lapham, but I needed primary sources by Cleveland Abbe, which were not abundant in the UWM Archives, or, like I said earlier, maybe I was inexperienced in searching. Overall it would have been great to have had the hands-on experience of sitting in the archive section of the library to find sources; that's something I feel I would love to pursue in future research if the opportunity presents itself. Overall, I had some knowledge on primary sources and how to interpret them but I've learned quite a lot in this class on building that skill. I can say that it has really been a joy being able to get a taste of primary source research in this course. 

The UWM Post

Guest post by Agnes Lopez Flores

My research for this class was done through the UWM library system. Archivists like Abigail Nye set up fantastic resources to teach students how to use the online search engine on the library website. I mainly focused on the Archives and Special Collections for these projects. While it is best to be able to see and interact with the physical documents, I preferred finding a resource that was uploaded digitally in case the library became unavailable due to Covid-19. I believe archives are still working on digitizing many of the items of their collection so I am sure I missed many great primary sources. 

What is good about digital collections is that I get a wider view of the variety of resources in archives. This is the copy of the UWM Post I used for my primary source analysis.

While doing research last year in the same realm, I did not even think about the UWM Post as a source; so this helped me think of other topics I could research.

Searching for Byron Kilbourn

Guest post by Jonathan Santiago

My experience of searching for primary sources was difficult in the beginning, but that is mainly because of what I had in mind for my primary source. This class provided me with very helpful resources and advice that I used to look for primary sources; however, I wanted a primary source from a specific character that I had learned about in class and from the readings. Therefore, this made my experience a little more difficult than it needed to be since I had to do a bit more digging to find the info that I wanted. At first, I had used the library to search for primary sources, but after a while of searching and not finding the information that I wanted I soon went to Google. I ended up finding a secondary source that contained primary sources. This article talked about Byron Kilbourn, which is the person who I wanted to find info on, and gave lots of background info on him and his impact on Milwaukee, but what most intrigued me was the primary source that the article contained which was an advertisement flyer. This flyer dated back to 1851 and was the perfect form of a primary source that I needed since it had a direct connection to the information on Byron Kilbourn as well as his overall impact on this city and its railroads.

Wisconsin’s Voting Rights: The Path to Equality

Guest Post by Clayborn Benson III

African Americans have played a part in Wisconsin’s history since the very beginning of the state’s history, working as trappers, guides, and frontiersmen. They roamed the territory with Pere Marquette; they had strange names like Black Bart, James Pierson Beckwourth, Claude and Mary Ann Gagnier, Toby Dodge, and the Bonga Family (Pierre, Joas, Marie Jeanne, and George).[1] They roamed from Green Bay to Prairie du Chien. They harvested the lumber from Superior, WI and traded with the native Indians in Peshtigo County. The numbers of African American citizens were never significant enough to outpopulate anyone; however, they influenced almost every political decision made in the state. African Americans were encouraged and invited to relocate to places like Freedom, WI, (north of Appleton) named in honor of an African American, James Andrew Jackson, WI. They settled in all kinds of places you would never imagine, and they were a big support to the European citizens. They spoke many European languages and even influenced the architectural design of the round barns, although their population was still less than one percent.

In 1846, when Wisconsin made the decision to become a state, the founders included in the constitution that African American men should have the right to vote, as any other citizen. Not only were there fierce debates in the state legislature over African American suffrage in 1846, they were even referenced as the “N” word in the state legislature, when their numbers in no way represented a serious threat to the percentage of the state’s population.[2] “Free and unequal” is a descriptive term to describe my view of how African Americans have been treated, particularly in Wisconsin. There are three major things that African Americans have had to fight for throughout our presence in Wisconsin, 1) education 2) fair and decent housing, and 3) the right to vote. For the purposes of this paper, I will focus on suffrage or the right to vote.

According to Michael J. McManus, PhD, “Disfranchisement implied that blacks not only were undesirable members of their communities but were incapable of exercising the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. In addition, the attitudes that deprived blacks of the right to vote in the North mirrored those same principles that in the South reduced them to servitude.”[3]

We don’t have to go back very far to see the current and blatant voter suppression tactics used in Wisconsin. In April 2020, during the mayoral election in Milwaukee, only five voting places were made available for the 31st largest city in the United States.[4] On a cold, damp spring day, during the coronavirus pandemic, people stood in line for hours waiting for the opportunity to exercise their right to vote. In addition, African American men and women who have violated state laws, resulting in jail time, also lose their right to vote. This is just one more way that African Americans are disenfranchised.

In 1846 the founding fathers put in Wisconsin’s constitution that all men should have the right to vote. White citizens in the western part of the state, where slavery existed, voted against African American men having the right to vote.

Statehood election took place in 1848, but African Americans were not permitted to vote. The state’s founders realized that giving the right to vote to African Americans was something they wanted to do, so they called for the first of two referendums asking for African Americans to have the right to vote—one in 1849 and another in 1857.

In 1854, Joshua Glover[5], a fugitive slave from St. Louis, was arrested and broken out of jail at Cathedral Square in Milwaukee. This was in direct conflict with the Fugitive Slave Law passed by U.S. Congress just four years earlier. Wisconsin was one of the only states in the Union to openly defy the Fugitive Slave Law. The thing that makes this unique and special is that the governor and abolitionists all believed that defying federal law was the right thing to do. Wisconsin’s Governor Alexander Williams Randall asked that the local militia stand ready to protect the state; because of their actions President Buchanan was threatening the state for violating the Constitution.[6] How did the more than 99.9 percent white citizens justify taking an abolitionist’s position of breaking a slave out of jail yet continue to disenfranchise African Americans by refusing to allow them the right to vote?

There are conflicts between the Irish community, lynchings, and conferences on the issue of voting rights. The 1850s brought a great deal of attention to the question of whether African Americans should have the right to vote. In 1857, the state decided to bring the issue before the public again as a referendum item in a gubernatorial election of William Randall. They won the right to vote but it was contested by citizens in the Western part of the state in court because they saw the right to vote as a path to citizenship, which they opposed. After the Civil War, African Americans began asking when they would get the rights they were entitled to. The issue of voting was not just about giving African Americans the right to vote, but rather empowering them to become equal citizens. After Ezekiel Gillespie, a well-known Milwaukee entrepreneur had a dispute in a barbershop regarding African Americans’ right to vote, he enlisted the help of Sherman Booth and Attorney Byron Paine to petition the court on the matter. The court reviewed the issue and found that it was no more than a mathematical error; the totaling of the votes showed that they had the right to vote dating back to the first referendum ballot in 1849. For more than 100 years no one took the liberty to explain why there were miscalculations of the vote dating back to 1849.

In 2020, Wisconsin, along with the nation is celebrating the 100^th anniversary of women’s suffrage.[7] It’s clear that the right to vote brings about citizenship, equality and empowerment, while at the same time African Americans continue to be disenfranchised through voter suppression, photo ID requirements, closing polls in the African American community to control election outcomes and refusing to reinstate voting rights to individuals previously incarcerated.

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[1] Barbara J. Shade, “Afro-Americans in Early Wisconsin,” Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy of Science, Arts and Letters 69 (1971): 113-116.

[2] Michael J. McManus, Political Abolitionism in Wisconsin, 1840-1861 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1998), 19-21.

[3] McManus, Political Abolitionism in Wisconsin, 21-23.

[4] Brennan Center for Justice, June 24, 2020 and David Haynes, Want to Make Voting Easier in Wisconsin? Here Are Nine Ways to Do It,” JSOnline, https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/solutions/2019/12/20/want-make-voting-easier-wisconsin-here-nine-ways-do-it/2700442001/ April 9, 2020.

[5] C. C. Olin, The John Olin Family History, 1678 to 1893 (Indianapolis: Baker-Randolph Co., 1893).

[6] James Doolittle Papers; Message of Governor Alexander Randall to the Citizens of Wisconsin, in the Milwaukee Sentinel, January 16, 1858.

[7] Remarks by Dr. Turkiya Lowe, Chief Historian and Deputy Federal Preservation Officer, National Park Service, Wisconsin Historical Society Virtual Annual Conference 2020, https://wisconsinhistory.zoom.us/rec/play/HyXHrMNT84s9ol2KBvlnNHSLE5CC8M4FEC50iB3q9UveQLu7u_zNBQRjjfx9CWKJUvA-ApBLi7PvKgpK.a_u_1PIeai2Sfv5H.

Conducting Primary Source Research in a Pandemic

Guest Post by Lillian Pachner

Conducting primary source research for this class proved to be a pretty big challenge for me. I have never really done primary source research at this level before so I had to learn a new skill. On top of that, this is a skill I will have to re-learn in the future, because I had to learn to navigate doing primary source curation and research completely virtually. Eventually I will have the learning experience of going to the archives in person, post pandemic. I began conducting my research by virtually meeting with Abigail Nye. She walked me through how to find relevant digitized archives and other aspects of doing academic research. She was extremely helpful. This whole experience was entirely out of my comfort zone. Talking to new people, especially virtually is a huge challenge for me (social anxiety), so that was definitely something I had to overcome to get through this experience. All in all though, I feel really good about what I did under these circumstances. I am leaving this semester feeling so much more prepared and equipped as a history student. I can’t wait until this pandemic is over so I can really dive deep into archival research.

Researching Cleveland Abbe

Guest Post by Avery Schulze

One of the greatest experiences for this this semester was the chance to work directly with finding and using primary sources for historical research, an obvious cornerstone to the course. Going back to the previous semester, I was in the middle of developing my central research questions for my capstone research paper for my Urban Studies undergrad on spatial mismatch and public transportation access in the Milwaukee Metro. I wanted to gain access to the library on campus to access primary source documents because I wanted my methodology of research to include some historical research. But Covid-19 came along which prevented me from being able to participate in accessing these primary sources which really was a blow and let down as in many cases I needed to see physical copies. This class, while online and of course despite still not being able to access primary source physically, has given me a taste of what it is like to work with primary source research. I really appreciated the outlined Bibliography of characters in our Twitter reenactment provided by Mark Langenfeld. I searched the UWM online archives and found it difficult to find information on Cleveland Abbe, perhaps because I was inexperienced in my methods of searching or perhaps because Cleveland Abbe while relevant to our course, may not have been relevant to Milwaukee outside of his collaborations with Lapham. It's possible that I would have found him mentioned in primary sources by Increase Lapham, but I needed primary sources by Cleveland Abbe which were not abundant in the UWM Archives, or like I said earlier maybe I was inexperienced in searching. Overall it would have been great to have had the hands-on experience of sitting in the archive section of the library to find sources, that's something I feel I would love to pursue in future research if the opportunity presents itself. Overall, I had some knowledge on primary sources and how to interpret them but I've learned quite a lot in this class on building that skill. I can say that it has really been a joy being able to get a taste of primary source research in this course. 

Albert Myer

Guest Post by Kayla Berendt

Albert Myer was in the US Army during the Civil War. He devised the wig-wag-signaling during the Civil War, which led to him becoming the Chief Signal Officer of the Signal Corps. After the Civil War ended, he was nominated to be ranked Brigadier General by President Andrew Johnson. When the U.S. Weather Bureau was created, it was put under the U.S. Signal Services Division, which put Albert Myer in control of it. He hired Increase, Lapham who laid down the groundwork for producing the first official forecast. Myer was Chief Signal Officer until 1880. Although Albert Myer and Increase Lapham didn’t always see eye-to-eye, they were important historical figures in the first forecast.

Grain Trader

Guest Post by Stephanie Serrato

My character is Grain Trader and I am a fictional composite figure. My twitter handle is @TraderGrain and I have conceptualized the character to be a trader of grain in the years leading up to and continuing after the first storm weather forecast made by Increase Lapham in Milwaukee. I was born in 1817 to Father Grain Trader and Mother Grain Trader. My character’s career and twitter account were started on the same day in the year 1837 when I was 20 years old.

Increase Lapham

 Guest Post by Henry Wehrs

Increase A. Lapham (1811 - 1875) is the central figure of this Twitter reenactment. He is a real historical figure, and he will be represented by the Twitter handle @IncreaseLapham. 

An engineer by trade, Lapham was also a self-taught geologist, botanist, cartographer, naturalist, and writer. He was a key figure in the development of natural sciences of the growing “western” frontier, especially in Wisconsin. Brought to Milwaukee in 1836 by the notorious capitalist Byron Kilbourn, Lapham played an important role in the development of the city. Initially working on development efforts with Kilbourn, Lapham built a career for himself as a scientist, writing the first thorough works on Wisconsin botany, geography, and American Indian effigy mounds in the state. 

Increase Lapham is also regarded as a founding father of the National Weather Service. Along with colleagues in across the U.S., Lapham pushed for a storm warning system that could serve the public, and especially commerce on the Great Lakes. After the end of the Civil War, Lapham’s efforts paid off. On November 8th, 1870, Lapham was appointed Assistant to the Chief Signal Officer of the U.S. Army, and he delivered the first official weather forecast in Chicago, Illinois. 

Byron Kilbourn

 Guest Post by Agnes Lopez Flores

The character I’ve chosen for the Twitter reenactment of the first weather report is Byron Kilbourn. Kilbourn was a real historical figure and important in the founding of Milwaukee, later becoming the city’s mayor twice. He was also a surveyor, state engineer and an executive in the emerging railroad industry. He was considered stubborn and not very popular among his contemporaries. Kilbourn was known to be ruthless and lacking a moral compass in business and politics. However, he did help the struggling residents of Milwaukee. He was a friendly and loyal figure to Lapham, assisting in Lapham’s scientific goals.

The Twitter handle I have set up is @ByronKilbourn with a drawing of him serving as the profile picture. I have set the location to Jacksonville, Florida as this is where he retired to prior to the weather announcement, and where he ultimately passed.

Alexander Mitchell

Guets Post by Brian Calabrese

Alexander Mitchell is one of the most successful men to ever reside in Wisconsin, having been a businessman, banker, railroad magnate, and Congressmen. His Twitter handle is @Alexand75158367 and his main relationship to the event will be to support the people in Wisconsin. He encourages the growth of the city through the grain trade, while also laying praise on Increase Lapham in order to convey the message that his storm warning system will help ensure the delivery of the cargo on the railways he owns. He was not a man of a large circle, havening been reserved in his public life; he is a man who is truly all about business. The son of a successful farmer and born in Scotland, one can look to Alexander Mitchell’s story in America as a great immigrant success upon his arrival to in May 1839.

Chuck Miller the Farmer

 Guest Post by Jesus Sanchez

For the Twitter re-enactment, I am planning on being a farmer. Given that it is difficult to pinpoint an individual farmer with significant connections to the theme, I will be portraying a general farmer or the mass of all farmers into a single character. Therefore, my farmer character will essentially be a fictional individual. The Twitter handle I will be using is @ChuckTheFarmr.

 The farmer that I will be portraying will be named Chuck Miller and his farm was located in southeastern Wisconsin. Chuck has a relatively nice sized plot of land of about 115 acres where he plants corn, wheat, potatoes and cranberries. As a farmer, he faced a lot of issues such as overproduction, high interests rates, as well as high transportation costs. And the low crop value was not making their life any easier. However, the creation of railroads made it much easier to transport their produce and livestock to and from the farm and into cities. However, railroads were monopolistic and charged an unfair amount to use them.

The following is the image I plan on using for my profile picture because it exemplifies what a farmer is and looks like in the 19th century.

Cleveland Abbe

Guest Post by Avery Schulze

My Twitter reenactment character for History 450 at UW-Milwaukee is Cleveland Abbe. Cleveland Abbe, born in New York City December 3rd 1838, was raised by a prosperous family of the era. He went on to be most notably known as being among the very first weathermen in the nation. Abbe was a founder of the National Weather Bureau in 1870, which now known as the National Weather Service, which remains a top source of information on dangers presented by weather along with forecasting aimed at providing safety and information for the nation. Abbe was well educated, studying at prestigious universities of his time like Harvard. He was a man of great scientific background and exceptional observational skills with a keen eye for scientific process. He has many recordings of observational work in the science field, including published scientific observations on solar eclipses, sunspots, earth temperatures and more. Cleveland Abbe, leading up to his contributions to the founding of the National Weather Bureau, worked at the Cincinnati Observatory as the executive director. He went on to work directly with Increase Lapham in the creation of the very first official weather report in the United States in the wake of a deadly and powerful storm in 1869 that acted as a sort of wake up call to people of the time. He would go on to continue a successful career, being appointed as chief meteorologist in 1871 and the chief editor of numerous weather bulletins. Cleveland Abbe is also the founder of the scientific journal Monthly Weather Review, which he founded in the year 1872. For this year’s Twitter reenactment for History 450 at UW-Milwaukee I will be using the twitter handle @AbbeCleveland.

A Weather Prophet

 Guest Post by Jonathan Santiago

My character’s name is Joe. He is a 26-year-old white man who was always curious about the weather and who was also in desperate need of a job. This is how he ended up stumbling upon the career work of a weather prophet. He made good money banking on the curiosity of folks and even increased his prestige further after his publication UNDERSTANDING THE SKY gained a lot of traction. He wanted to keep this job; however, with the advancement of science as well as educated folk like increase Lapham around, things were not exactly in his favor, which greatly upset him considering the reputation he’s built for himself. So, as you can imagine, he was not happy when the huge first Milwaukee weather forecast event went down.

As indicated above, my Twitter character is known as a weather prophet. They were those that used to predict the weather since there was no way of telling what the weather would be like day in and day out. Therefore, they took on the responsibility to predict and prophesize the weather to people and would gain attention since no one knew what the weather would be like before Increase Lapham came along. They were real people I believe who used symbolism and folklore to make their weather predictions. They did not think fondly of those who were involved in science as well as other educated folk who were in the field of weather forecasting because they had seen this as a loss to their business and prestige. Their relationship with the theme of the Twitter re-enactment is that they would predict the weather before Increase Lapham came along, so with the huge event of the first weather forecast this would surely not only affect the people but also the weather prophets as well. They would also try to discredit increase Lapham or others in general who were involved since this event affects their livelihood.

The Widow Doomship

 Guest Post by Alexa Safer

My Twitter reenactment character is the Widow Doomship. She is a fictional composite character. Her Twitter handle is @Widow_Doomship. I imagine her being born in New York in 1819, getting married in 1838 to a young ship hand named Amadeus Doomship, and having her first child, @Captain_Doomship, in 1840. She moved to Milwaukee in the summer of 1849 with her husband and her first 4 children. She is a devout Catholic and has 5 children with Amadeus. He eventually rose in the ranks to become a captain but drowned during the storm of 1869. The storm and resulting death of her husband had a profound impact on her life. I imagine her being very nervous about her eldest son risking his life in the same way her husband did. Her outlook will be hopeful but also reflect the magnitude of her loss. Her relationship with @Captain_Doomship will offer an element of personal interaction. She will represent how everyday people’s lives were affected by the weather and how they may have reacted to the new storm alert system.

Julia Lapham

Guest Post by Lillian Pachner

Julia Alcott Lapham was a real historical figure. She was the daughter of Increase A. Lapham. Julia Lapham wrote extensively about her father's work with the weather. She wrote of the trials and tribulations her father went through to get people to get on board with his idea of a weather forecast. Julia also did a lot of work in local history and made a name for herself apart from her father. According to A Standard History of Sauk County, Wisconsin, Julia did work in women’s clubs. According to this same book, Julia, like her father did work preserving Native American burial mounds. She was even a chairwoman on the Landmarks Committee in Wisconsin. Interestingly she had a personal relationship with poet Ralph Waldo Emerson. Julia is also known for founding the Oconomowoc Library, and being its second Librarian. I will be using the twitter handle @JuliaAlcottLapham to tweet as her in the twitter re-enactment. Her relationship with the theme of the twitter re-enactment theme is that she was the daughter of the key figure, Increase Lapham, and was involved with his work.

 

Syllabus for History 450, Fall 2020

If you are interested in how I set up History 450, The Growth of Metropolitan Milwaukee, please feel free to follow this link to the syllabus. All of the major assignments in the course are public facing, and the course as a whole is ungraded.

Thinking about the Fall Semester

Dear History 450 Students

The truth is, I am full of doubts.

In the early summer, I requested that the university give us a classroom to meet in during the fall semester. I was (and am) excited to debut History 450 in its new form, in partnership with the Milwaukee Public Museum. I felt some optimism that Wisconsin’s infections would fall. I had never taught online, and I had some anxiety about whether what I could offer online would rise to the level of quality I expect from my face-to-face classes. Asking the university for a classroom was the only way to keep open the options for the planned in-person experiences, including behind-the-scenes professional development opportunities with MPM staff.

Now, with just over two weeks before we are scheduled to start meeting, my feelings are in constant flux and pulled in different directions. I have spent most of the summer studying how to teach online and building our course, and I am now confident that I can offer you a strong course experience through Canvas. The university has given us a classroom with an adjusted, socially-distant capacity of 30 people, half again as much space as the minimum we require with twenty students registered for the class. Since the introduction of mask mandates in July, Milwaukee County’s numbers have fallen sharply. Wisconsin’s numbers are in a slow decline, or perhaps steady. Several Ivy League universities abandoned their plans for undergraduate in-person education before the semester started. Yesterday, a week after starting the semester in person, the University of North Carolina abruptly shifted all of its undergraduate classes online after four separate clusters of cases emerged. I am full of doubts and questions, but I also have a strand of hope pulling me forward: working with you.

My plan for History 450 has some important flexibilities built in.

First, I have made the entire course available through Canvas so that you never have to come to our classroom if you do not want to. If your best rational judgment or your gut-level instincts tell you to stay away; if you are ill or quarantined or caring for someone who is sick or immune-compromised; if you have to supervise children whose schools are operating virtually; if you have recently been in a situation where you might have been exposed, such as a party or a work environment; or if something happens and there isn’t time to check with me—just do the work for the week as indicated on Canvas. You don’t have to ask to be excused; just show up in the online spaces instead of in person.

Relatedly, at any time we can also decide as a class that we would prefer to operate virtually instead of in-person. We can decide this on a week-to-week basis. We can decide to spend part of the semester operating remotely and then come back to our classroom later when things look better. We can decide to do most of our work online and then come together only for the live Twitter reenactment on November 5. You can decide individually, and we can also decide together.

Additionally, the course is ungraded instead of graded. That means that you are in charge of deciding what each assignment is worth to you in terms of time and effort. I will give you feedback, but you will assess your own work. At the end of the semester you will tell me what grade you think you earned and will show up on your transcript. My hope is that the ungrading approach will reduce the pressure on you to perform and increase your learning and the fun we can have as a class, even in these anxious times.

Two weeks from now, my feelings might not be the same as they are today. And there are twenty of you—you surely all have different hopes, fears, and expectations for the fall semester. And, like mine, they are probably constantly changing.

Please feel free to reach out to me and let me know how you are feeling about how our class should operate. This class foregrounds two skills: collaboration and communication. Both start with honesty and are embedded in relationships. I want to know what you think we should do.

This pandemic is unprecedented for all of us. This is our class. We are in this together.

Sincerely (truly),

 

Amanda

History 450 trailer

What Is a Live Twitter Reenactment, Anyway?

In 2019, Jaclyn Kelly, an educator from the Milwaukee Public Museum came to me in search of a permanent course partner for a project that she had been running since 2015. In a series of four live Twitter reenactments of historical Milwaukee events, students and other volunteers had used words, images, and hashtags in a coordinated set of tweets to re-create standout moments of local history as if they were happening in the present. Together they told the stories of the 1892 Third Ward Fire (2015), Milwaukee’s Ice Wars (2016), the 1939 Green Bay Packers championship game against Giants (2017), and the 1940 Armistice Day storm (2018). By the time Ms. Kelly left my office, partnering with MPM on the annual reenactment had become the core of my vision to revive History 450, UWM’s class on the history of the Milwaukee area.

What is a live Twitter reenactment, you ask? Even people who are not professional historians are fascinated by history. Adult Americans willingly use their leisure time to absorb history through relatively passive means—in the form of memoirs and biographies, books about history written by professional and amateur historians, in movies and TV shows. They also take part in more active approaches to exercising their historical imaginations by immersing themselves in recreated historical contexts: they attend Renaissance Fairs, visit living history museums such as Colonial Williamsburg and Old World Wisconsin, and participate in cosplay and live reenactments of Civil War battles. A live Twitter reenactment brings the elements of historical reenactment to the fast-moving microblog platform. Participating educates both those who put it on and those who read the tweets.

In a live Twitter reenactment, participants reconstruct a specific historical event on Twitter, from the point of view of actual and composite historical “characters” who did (or might have) participated in it or observed it as it was occurring. Before they start, reenactors research the event and their specific characters, draft and revise Tweets from their character’s point of view, and sequence their release with the whole group. Finally, during the designated live-tweeting period, participants release their tweets to the world, in the pre-planned order, in one sitting. They can also make their reconstruction of the past more vivid Twitter enhancers such as @tags, hashtags, images, and links.

As the American Historical Association is constantly reminding us, everything has a history—including Twitter reenactments. As far as I have been able to learn, the idea of the Twitter reenactment originated with a group of graduate students at Utah State University led by Marion Jensen. They developed a practice and a website called Twhistory, which they described in a short open access 2010 article. Brian A. McKenzie, of the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, published a longer article in The History Teacher about how his class reenacted the Battle of Stalingrad and the Paris Commune in 2012. A crucial refinement of McKenzie’s reenactment included posting Tweets with a shared hashtag such as #stalinsim[1] that allowed the Twitterverse to watch the reenactment unfold and to search for it later. McKenzie writes that he “encouraged students to think of [their] tweets as roughly falling into one of three categories: direct, first-hand tweets—for example a Communard tweeting about the fall of Courbevoie; indirect, second-hand tweets, such as Zhukhov tweeting about the capture of a factor; and ‘ideational’ tweets illustrating inferred expectations, attitudes and opinions.”[2]

Several history instructors in Midwestern US universities have also incorporated Twitter reenactments into their curricula. Reenactors at the University of  Kansas recreated the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, while a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay centered local history with a reenactment at the Green Bay Fire of 1880. Residents of Lawrence, Kansas (home of the University of Kansas) used the public library to reenact Quantrill’s Raid from US Civil War. Alwyn Collinson, a one-person Twitter reenactor based in the United Kingdom, tweets to more than half a million followers from @RealTimeWWII. As you might expect from the handle, Collinson’s goal is to “livetweet the Second World War as it happened on this date in 1942 & for 4 years to come (2nd time around).”

At the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where History 450 will re-debut in fall 2020, the collaboration with the Milwaukee Public Museum uses three main criteria for choosing topics. The ideal focus event 1) relates in some way to the STEM fields, which is an important MPM education area; 2) allows us to showcase archival collections held at UWM; and 3) is somehow related to the history of the Milwaukee area.

For our inaugural event, we have selected the first official weather forecast in the United States, which was issued by Wisconsin naturalist Increase Lapham on November 8, 1870. Since 2020 marks the 150^th anniversary of that forecast, it seemed like the perfect kick-off event for History 450. On Thursday, November 5, 2020, the class will release our Twitter reenactment (hopefully from inside the Public Museum, depending on the state of the pandemic). Please follow our work and the reenactment itself with the hashtag #mke70. If you can’t wait until November to know what the weather will be like, Increase Lapham’s 1870 forecast is available here, on the website of the Wisconsin Historical Society.

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[1] Clearly #stalinsim is short for “Stalin simulation,” but it also appears to be a frequent misspelling of “Stalinism.”

[2] Brian A. McKenzie, “Teaching Twitter: Re-enacting the Paris Commune and the Battle of Stalingrad.” The History Teacher 47 (3) (2014): 355-372.

Introduction to History 450

Welcome to the first blog post for History 450. This companion blog documents the course "The Growth of Metropolitan Milwaukee," a course I will be teaching at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee for the first time in fall 2020, and, I hope, every fall semester until I retire.

This course is a research-intensive class in which the students' assignments are public-facing. They will write blog posts, curate primary sources, interact with members of the public, and engage in a live Twitter reenactment of a historical event connected to the history of Milwaukee. Every year the course has a different theme as its research focus. In fall 2020, the theme is the first official weather report in United States history, issued by Increase Lapham in November 1870. (If you can't wait for the Twitter reenactment to find out what the forecast was, you can view a facsimile of the original report on the Wisconsin Historical Society's digital archives).

This course benefits from the work of several institutional partners. The idea for the course originated in the live Twitter reenactment, which the Milwaukee Public Museum's Education Department developed and put on for several years. I have partnered with MPM in designing the course;s professional development activities, which include multiple opportunities for students to visit with museum staff. In addition, this course is sponsored UWM's Office of Undergraduate Research, which offers several Course-Based Research Projects every year. Finally, teaching students about how to do historical research would be impossible without the archivists and librarians who staff the UWM Libraries.

In future posts, I'll have much more to say about the purposes and activities of this class, including why I am "ungrading" instead of using traditional assessment. So stay tuned! In the meantime, if you want to follow the course on Twitter, just search for the hashtag #mke70.