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.