Tag Archives: local history

First steps toward knowing a suburb

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Residents of the suburbs can take a few easy steps to start learning about a community and what really is going on behind the scenes. Here are six seven easy steps:

  1. Check out the community’s website. How does the community present itself? What words are used and what photos are displayed? There is often a wealth of information available but also a lot of stuff that may not tell you much. At the least, the website will give you an idea of how the local government wishes outsiders to see them.
  2. Look at the zoning map of the community – this is often on the website and also can be viewed at the city/town hall. This provides an overview of how the community allots its land. The colors used should quickly tell you what takes up a majority of land – typically housing – but can also reveal where other pockets of activity are located (whether commercial districts, industrial parks, institutional land, or other options).
  3. Read some local history in books, local museums or historical societies, and websites. Local histories are often pretty positive about a community – many suburbs don’t want to talk about darker moments – but they can provide an overview of a community’s broad trajectory.
  4. Talk to some long-time residents about their experiences. While such conversations can highlight idiosyncratic individuals, residents can give a sense of the feel of a community as well as highlight important communal moments.
  5. Walk around. This is highly underrated and often appears quite difficult since so many suburbs are auto dependent. Walking gives you an opportunity to slowly see what is happening at the street level. If walking doesn’t work, try biking. If neither are a good option, driving around repeatedly can still be helpful since so much of the suburban landscape is designed to be seen from the road.
  6. Look at Census data for the community. Use the QuickFacts feature to see latest estimates from the American Community Survey and dicennial data. You can quickly see demographic and economic data for the whole community.
  7. Identify important institutions in the suburb. This could include groups that have a long presence in the community or organizations that consistently come up in discussions with residents or documents from the local government. Important institutions could include schools (since suburban life is focused on children and their success), local businesses, religious groups, non-profit organizations, and civic groups.

Through these steps, someone should get a sense of what community members think separates their suburb from all the others. In other words, what is the character of this suburb? One step that almost made the list: read a local or regional newspaper. However, these don’t exist in many communities now and even if they do, the news reported is highly selective.

In a soon to come post, I’ll provide follow-up steps to the six listed above.

[UPDATED with a seventh step on 5/9/19]

100 years of Carl Sandburg’s Chicago poem

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One hundred years ago, Carl Sandburg published a famous poem about Chicago:

For its issue of March 1914, Harriet Monroe’s Poetry magazine accepted Carl Sandburg’s “Chicago” and seven of his other poems about the city…

And a city — in the first five lines of the work of an obscure socialist poet in a 2-year-old magazine founded by a Chicago Tribune art critic — had found its enduring descriptors…

“The poem was absolutely revolutionary when it first came out,” says Bill Savage, who teaches the poem as a distinguished senior lecturer in English at Northwestern University…

“They have a kind of omnipresence that makes it a little bit difficult for us to think and feel our way back to how original and daring this was,” Polito says. “You show something like ‘Citizen Kane’ to a group of young students. The techniques of that film have been imitated so many times, they don’t see what was startling about it. That’s a little bit true here. It’s a little bit hard for us a hundred years later to recapture. It’s almost as if it’s a combination of the Book of Genesis and the national anthem for Chicago. It’s the founding myth and the celebratory lyric.”

Reading this, it strikes me that this poem is really well-known in the Chicago area because residents feel like like it embraces all the contradictions that they enjoy (or at least acknowledge) about the city. But, is this poem well-known elsewhere? The article suggests academics elsewhere often didn’t think highly of Sandburg’s work. Is their a poetic equivalent for New York (perhaps the recent Jay-Z and Alicia Keys hit “Empire State” might be a modern version?) or Los Angeles? If so, perhaps I wouldn’t know as I’ve only really heard of Sandburg’s poem…

Old New York law says each community must have a historian

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Strange laws that are still on the books are occasionally rediscovered and make headlines. For example, here is an interesting 93 year old law from New York:

Back in 1919, the New York state legislature mandated that every “city, town, or village” must have an official historian. It’s a regulation that’s unique among the 50 states, and basically unenforceable. Towns are not required to pay these record-keepers, who are appointed by a town mayor or manager. Municipalities that fail to find a volunteer are sent a strongly worded letter, but little else can be done.

But this law could tell us a lot about American culture and our quest to preserve and understand our own history:

The phenomenon of local historians came of age in the early days of the Industrial age. As Americans began populating “the frontier,” they struggled to define themselves and their role in the places they called home. “In the late 19th century, you see a local history rush,” says James Grossman, Executive Director of the American Historical Association.

This fascination with ourselves was fueled by commercial firms that drafted early town histories, books that resemble the Who’s Who franchise of today. For a couple of dollars, anyone could contribute a piece about their own place in the history of their town, be it the story of their family, their house, or their autobiography.

It was around this time that city historians also became part-time urban boosters. “Cities began using history as an economic asset,” Grossman says. Many early historians were “people who had relationships with commercial interests, trying to promote city growth.”

A couple of reasons are given here: Americans wanted to understand themselves and there was money to be made in this business of local history. This second reason would fit right in with the growth machine model of urban growth: local boosters, leaders, and businesspeople promote development in order to make more money.

One might wonder how much this boosterism affects the actual reporting and interpretation of history. I suspect it influences things quite a bit. This doesn’t necessarily mean a local historian gets the facts wrong but it is more about how the story is told and what parts of local history are revealed. I have read a lot of local history for research projects and several features of local histories stood out across communities:

1. The local histories are often most interested in big and exciting facts and less about day to day life in the community or how these big changes occurred. We might call this the “peak view” of history – you only see the highest or noteworthy points.

2. Tied to the first observation, these histories tend to report only positives about the community. The histories leave out some of the most formative elements about a community if it doesn’t paint the community in a positive light. For example, I’ve uncovered information about racial prejudice in action in some suburban communities but based on the “official” histories, you would never know there was even any tension.

3. It is suggested later in the article that local historians need some training before they are set loose to collect and tell local history. From what I have seen, many local historians got the job because they wanted it, not because they necessarily had qualifications. This person might have had a particular interest in the community and so had done a lot of research or perhaps they knew a lot of people in the community. This has changed somewhat in recent decades with the rise of museums and degrees regarding operating museums as there are now often “official” keepers of a community’s history.