Oral History

My minor is public history. One example of public history is oral history-- a field and research tool I intend on using for my own research. However, there are organizations and social justice activists that use oral histories to give voice to marginalized people in the here and now. One great example of this is the Voice of Witness nonprofit book series. They are taking volunteers.. summer project? 

GIS

Last week I met up with a visiting grad student, Kyle, from UT-Austin who is doing research on Houston's highways for his dissertation. My former topic was the 610 loop, and highway designs and how they construct space and change the the ethics of place, but I am gladly ceding that field of investigation to him. When I learned that Kyle is hoping to use Geographic Information Systems, or GIS, in his project, I remembered how interested I was in using GIS as well. I don't think I would use it in the traditional sense, to show movement (or people, resources, etc) over time, but I think it is a useful analytic tool for all types of disciplines, and the humanities (and the historian) just needs to harness it in the way that is most beneficial to their research. Historians of the 20th century would find GIS especially useful because of all of the data that we have access to. Going beyond the written word to visual representations of changes in the historical record is an innovative way to address different types of historical problems and reach out to different types of audiences in a more interactive way. Colin Gordon's study on St. Louis, Mapping Decline, made exclusive use of historic data on redlining and racial zoning in St. Louis to write his book and create a GIS web project. He is an inspiration.

Jobs? Jobs!

I thought this article posted on the American Historical Association website was great. It talks about the reaction to the job market for American History Ph.Ds. To those of you outside of academia, it probably seems like common sense, or something similar to what you have experienced on the job market. I liked that they mentioned that there are already a cohort of PhDs with jobs outside of academia that are perfectly happy and publishing with academic presses, so this "dilemma" is nothing new. I have always thought the skills I am learning from my experience are valuable and marketable and don't think there is just one job out there for me because of that. 

ASEH Graduate Student Liaison

Some graduate professionalization updates: 

-The American Society for Environmental Historians is meeting in Madison, Wisconsin from March 28-31 and I intend to be there! I'm applying for the graduate liaison position, which would make me the leader of the ASEH's graduate caucus (new as of 2011) and the representative of the society's graduate student community, which is somewhere around 80-90 people. I'm really pumped about this opportunity and will start drafting ideas about how to expand and retain membership and serve its members. I talked to Will Knight, the current liaison, this morning via Skype and I learned a lot about the group. They seem to have strong participation and involvement, so it's going to be important to keep the momentum going! I find out in December about the position, but either way I will be a member of the caucus just to be more involved and help build community. 

-I am working on finding funding to do research in Chicago for a couple of months this summer. I think I need to be at the Chicago Botanic Garden Archives, the Newberry Library and the Chicago History Museum, to examine the Garden's history and background, but I will also be looking for other archives and libraries in the area that might reveal the urban culture of the city in the post-war period. The history department has funding for the travel for this type of trip (Murray Miller Scholarship), but Dr. Brosnan also has an application for grant money for a research assistantship at the Newberry in the works. Fingers crossed!

-Finally, Dr. Cathleen Cahill from the University of New Mexico came to UH to give a talk on her new book, but she also came to our environmental reading group to talk about her project on Highway 101. It was really interesting to see the very beginning stages of a new book project and somewhat relieving to see that it is not all that different than what I am going through with my dissertation proposal. A major difference seems to be that she has more resources accessible to her in the form of colleagues she can reach out to and the simple knowledge of where to find sources from her past research experiences. I guess it just goes to show the benefits of networking and reaching out to your academic community.

Intro to Public History Crash Course

By historical standards, my project time period is pretty recent. Some academics might think that writing about people that aren't dead yet is risky because these people still have a perspective and memory of what happened and because we might not have a complete understanding how the processes historical actors set in place have effected society. I, however, as a public historian believe that studying such a recent time period is an invaluable opportunity because I have access to the individuals I am writing about! 

I will have to keep in mind how big a role I want interviews (in the form of oral histories) public history I want to play in my work. There are a lot of examples of how oral histories can contribute to written historical works. Monica Perales' Smeltertown goes beyond using her oral histories merely as accounts to examine how events, places and people are remembered and the role memory plays in inventing and reinventing their identity. Other historical works utilize oral histories as layer of perspective otherwise lost to the historical record. There are always a bias to the historical record, which does not exclude written sources. Given this fact, it is important for historians to approach their subject from as many perspectives as possible to have a multi-dimensional and holistic approach when forming an argument about what happened.   

Findings

My trip to the Chicago Botanic Gardens last weekend was so great! The library director pulled material for me from their archives and had everything waiting for me in their rare books room. I spent two and a half hours pouring over Chicago Horticultural Society records, newspaper clippings and newsletters from the 1950s through the 1970s. I have a basic understanding of how the institution came together and a list of VIP who made it happen, but there were a couple of great nuggets that I think could be connected to large historical issues. For example, the horticultural society had to fund a dam to divert water from their property that was polluted and purchase water from Northbrook and another suburb. Also, how significant to the chosen location of the garden is the fact that the majority of members were from the northern suburbs?

I had a really interesting conversation with Daniel Greene, the VP for research and academic programs at the Newberry Library today about my project and teasing out the issues of class--perhaps by bringing in the Missouri Botanical Garden into my analysis. I think class and place are both important themes to my project. Class, because a more affluent community's easier access to money can make projects happen faster (though there are always challenges and opportunities that accompany your status, high or low), and place, because the version of nature that is valued and created by a community is related to both its topography and culture. Keeping these larger issues in mind is critical as I continue to research, because they contribute to a framework for my argument that I can lean on when my source material gets overwhelming.

Parks and Rec

Quick mental break for a show about a parks department. I wish I could somehow work this into my dissertation... sugar rush!

Politics and Representation

As I am looking at how these institutions were founded, one if the questions that comes up is what is the difference between receiving government support and being privately funded by donations? What are the implications? Is non-profit a uniform category no matter how you are supported? I am going to have to do some research on non-profit environmental organizations...

I'm also trying to figure out what perspective best tells the story of urban dwellers' relationship with natural spaces. Is it as important to explain the top-down governing structure of how and why these gardens were created than to chronicle people's reaction to them? I'm hoping my research will reveal the loudest and most powerful voices so I know where change comes from. The 1960s were characterized by a fast-growing number of activist groups that started to protect or fight for a certain interests related to the environment. In the 1970s, quite a few of those groups came together to fight corporate conglomerates and lobby local governments. One of the best ways to examine environmental groups in this period is to look a their correspondence with other local environmental groups. Here's hoping I find some good dirt!

activist groups vs. institutions

When I started this project, i wanted to look at how institutions reflected and shaped a community identity and its issues. The problem I am wondering if I will encounter now that I have done more research on the historic environmental culture of some of the large urban areas was that it might have been in large part driven by activism - groups with specific reactionary agendas most often concerned with getting rid of pollution and protecting private property than preserving natural spaces. I think I am going to have to do more research about the relationship of these groups to one another. I need to put myself into the context and culture of the 1970s to make sure I am addressing the most influential perspectives and initiatives as well as the everyday persons motives and values. 

RESEARCH UPDATE

Just got off the phone with Library Director Leora Siegel about visiting the Chicago Botanic Garden archive. Leora green-lighted my visit for October 21 at 1o a.m.! I am very excited. This will just be preliminary findings trip to get a feel for the state of the archive and their holdings. In the mean time I'm going to have to talk with my advisor about what types of records I should be looking for and about coming up with a searchable list of topics. The CBG's archive is pretty rough, there isn't a finding aid yet and the topics are searchable via Excel (sigh, wouldn't it be cool if they hired me to catalog?), so I am going to have to spend some serious time there, which means I should be as organized as possible before I go.

I haven't been in an institutional archive in over a year, so I'm also going to try and ask other grad students around the department for tips and advice on prelim visits. Any words of wisdom are welcome!

Blogs and sources

While my research doesn't carry over into the 21st century when blogs become a common method for organizations to get the word out, looking at them does bring up questions about how botanic gardens have reached out to their audience in the past. Member newsletters and press releases (the main modes of reaching people) are still around today, but compared to blogs they seem much more institutionalized and formal, almost impersonal. It would be interesting to know how (or if) garden public relations made those personal connections. I've posted a couple of examples of garden blogs--some are more formal than others, but they all function as supplemental to e-newsletters and are updated weekly or bi-weekly with news and pictures.

Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Garden

I liked the LACABG's blog because it included a Blogroll of other related blogs and websites, this is kind of an old-school format for the blog world, but it was really helpful for me to have all of those websites in one place.

Brooklyn Botanic Garden Blog

The BBG's blog is my favorite because it is very user-friendly and interfaces with twitter and facebook and is updated often, which may be because there is more than one contributor.

Chicago Botanic Garden Blog

The CBG's blog is high tech with videos, it's more like a garden TV channel that highlights different aspects of the garden and isn't necessarily the best place to get the newest news and happenings at the garden. It was also buried in the garden's website, which doesn't make it very accessible to viewers.

websites

I like to think that because I took online media classes in college that I have a pretty good eye for judging the format and accessibility of institutional websites. There is, believe it or not, criteria for that sort of thing. I know that internet access doesn't fall into judgeable criteria for my dissertation (which as of right now is set in the 1970s), but I still think its relative to the larger scope. So here are a few botanic garden websites prime for judgement.

Chicago Botanic Garden

New York Botanical Garden

Houston Arboretum and Nature Center

Missouri Botanical Garden

Santa Fe Botanical Garden

Brooklyn Botanic Garden

Garden memories

Thinking about Botanic Gardens has made me nostalgic for the Chicago Botanic Garden in the fall. When I was little, my parents would take me and my sister to their Halloween celebration and volunteers wrapped up like mummies would pop out of the lagoons and chase us to scare the pants off of us. Haha, I don't know whether or not those are happy memories.. More recently, on trips home for my birthday or Thanksgiving I would go for walks or a run on the path that circles the garden with my dad (and on one occasion with my mom, too). I am grateful to the Garden for giving my family the space to be together. What is it about natural spaces that are perfect for bringing people together? What's the draw?

Closer to Christmas maybe I'll dig out the Christmas pictures that were taken at the Garden that never made it to reprint. Yikes. Erica and I with braces... the only time John was ever a fussy baby...

Theme song

This week I've been thinking about what idea I should keep at the center of the early stages of research that will determine the directions I will take and questions I will ask/attempt to answer. I've decided to go with "concepts of urban natural space and access to them." This is vague on purpose so that my work can ask more questions. For example, what enables or prohibits access? Socio-economic factors? Transportation? Cultural beliefs? Also, who creates natural space? Why? How does this change people's access?

This idea of access is a big deal. What does it mean that some urban dwellers will never get to go to an Arboretum, or that some children will never roll down a giant hill that overlooks an English garden? I certainly never gave a thought to how (or if) inner-city school kids got to the Chicago Botanic Garden because I was privileged enough to have it practically in my back yard. But why does it matter? Historians reveal those answers when they put a community's access to nature in the larger context of how that community treats the environment and whether or not they have a say in how the environment is used. A person's relationship with the environment is shaped by their access to natural environments.

What is often hidden from sight are the motives behind the economic and political forces that create the natural spaces (which shape our relationship to the environment) in urban areas. How and why a city government (or a private organization) chooses a specific site for a community garden can influence their community's relationship to the environment depending on who has access to that site. These forces thereby have power over how a community thinks about and uses the environment. Crazy, yes, but not conspiracy theory crazy. These forces don't shape our environments in dark board rooms with men in suits laughing maniacally like Mr. Burns. However, they are done with a social, political or economic agenda, which may benefit or harm a community in multiple and complex ways that aren't revealed until after the fact. Access to natural space matters because it has the potential to give people power over their environment.

Other questions I'm thinking about:

There are sociological and historical studies on how ecological education fosters an appreciation and connection to nature. How much more difficult is it to get this type of education and appreciation from city parks or walking paths or forest preserves? Do we get just what we put in? If so, does the value a community gets from an ecological institutions like a Botanic Garden or Nature Center go as far as the people it reaches?

Gardens

Garden Inspiration #1: The Weatherby rain boot from J.Crew.

I like my topic because I like gardening culture. I don't call myself a gardener, because I'm sure my family would have something to say about that, but do come from stock that can grow amazing tomatoes from seedlings and turn a backyard into a tropical plant sanctuary. As a garden groupie, I naturally gravitate toward garden attire. Rain boots actually double really well as gardening boots. They also contribute really well to my vision of a metaphorical garden groupie--who goes to a botanic garden? Why do they go? Do you have to know anything about nature to appreciate it? How do different types of people appreciate and interact with nature? Do botanic gardens or arboretums do enough to address all of those different types of garden groupies?

Introduction

A formal research proposal is in the works. Here is what I know:

• I am interested in the history of urban areas in the 20th century after WWII, how transportation growth and change during this time changed access to social and cultural resources for people living in these urban areas, especially their access to natural spaces and the environment.
• I grew up a five minute bike ride from the Chicago Botanic Garden, but it was in Northbrook, a suburb at least 30 minutes from the Chicago city limits. I have a special place in my heart for the CBG's English garden and their free access to walkers and bikers year-round, but know this type of easy access is not typical for all Chicago residents.
• I want to know how transportation and socio-economic status facilitates or restricts people's access to public and private natural spaces. I am focusing on botanic gardens and arboretums in urban areas because of their specific mission to reach and educate the public about environmental issues like conservation and sustainability. I want to know how these cultural institutions have transformed or overcome geographic and socio-economic hurdles to reach their intended audience. I also want to know their intended audiences, because they may be different!
• Finally, I need to narrow down the cities where I will locate my study. Right now the list is pretty long and includes New York, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, Denver, St. Louis and Memphis. Each city differs either by tradition of environmental institutions, size, level of public transportation/major modes of transportation, and how they were affected by urban growth and decline in the post-war period.

I'm super excited about working on answering these questions and conducting research, but it's daunting sometimes, especially because my project needs to be narrowed down. One step at a time!