Omnia History

Fall 2022 Newsletter

This has been a year of tremendous change for Omnia History. Check out our Fall 2022 Newsletter to learn more!

Fall 2021 Newsletter

We at Omnia History have been hard at work using the past to promote social change. Check out our Fall 2021 Newsletter to learn more!

Job precarity in public history: pandemic edition

Here is a round-up I put together for the National Council on Public History on the state of precarious labor in public history, and how the pandemic is accelerating already existing trends toward unstable, part-time, and temporary work.

Still grinding? How the pandemic is accelerating job precarity in public history

Big Ole and Minnesota’s imagined white past

In a recent article for Belt Magazine, I chart the history of Big Ole, a 28-foot-tall Viking statue that stands in the heart of the Minnesota town where I went to high school. Although many consider Big Ole a kitschy tourist attraction, I argue that he promotes an imagined white past like a cross between Paul Bunyan and a Confederate monument. I believe it’s important for white settler Alexandrians–myself included–to reckon with this harmful symbol of our cultural heritage. Check out the link below to read more!

The Legend of Big Ole

The Notorious Women of Biler Avenue

Our scholarship informs our work at Omnia History, whether engaging public audiences online, through exhibits, or in classes and workshops. Understanding the past is a critical part of our mission to promote change in the present. In an upcoming adult education seminar at the Newberry Library, we will be focusing on women in turn-of-the-century Chicago to explore the changing nature of gender and violence in an industrial city. Check out this excerpt from my research to get a glimpse of what we’ll be discussing in the course.

“Biler Avenue” was the nickname for a two-block stretch of Pacific Avenue in late nineteenth-century Chicago made notorious by “women without husbands” who “got ‘biling drunk,’ and were in a “state of constant riot and effervescence,” according to the Chicago Tribune. The women of Biler fought, drank, stole, and engaged in sex work to forge tenuous lives in an unforgiving industrial city. Although the women’s economic activity rarely translated into expanded wealth, it did provide the foundation for ward bosses to secure personal fortunes and political power.

The Chicago Tribune had a lot to say about the Women of Biler Avenue

No more collections: How one local historical society changed course to better serve its communities

The board of directors of the Rogers Park/West Ridge Historical Society (RPWRHS) is currently in the process of transferring ownership of the bulk of the society’s collections to the Sulzer branch of the Chicago Public Library. Collections have generally loomed large in local historical societies and so the decision by the RPWRHS board to voluntarily rid the society of its collections might seem unusual to anyone familiar with local history groups. Many societies formed with the express purpose of saving local historical material from disappearing when long-time residents passed or moved away and have spent the decades since meticulously collecting and cataloguing local documents and artifacts. The RPWRHS is no different, and society volunteers had been growing and caring for the RPWRHS collections since founding the group in 1975.

In this post, I’ll share why RPWRHS leadership made the decision to divest the society of its collections and how they’re managing the transference of their material to the Chicago Public Library. Their decision to find a new home for their collections isn’t a good fit for every collecting institution, and that’s exactly the point. The RPWRHS board took a step back, reevaluated their institutional priorities, and made a decision that reflects the needs and interests of their constituents. Their story exemplifies how creative problem-solving can help local history groups navigate tough conversations about institutional mission and purpose and come out the other side better prepared to serve their communities.

“The Inflamed Egotism of Women” on Nursing Clio

At the end of an alimony hearing in Chicago in 1919, Emma Simpson brandished a gun and fatally shot her husband in a courtroom full of witnesses.

Head over to the Nursing Clio to read my latest piece on the murder trial of Emma Simpson in 1919. Was she a hysterical victim or dangerous New Woman? Read to find out!

“The Inflamed Egotism of Women:” Emma Simpson and the Limits of the Unwritten Law

Let’s Change the Way We Talk About the Midwest

Movement, changing urban landscapes, and environmental violence are all Midwestern stories. A 4-11 Fire Alarm, Chicago. Source: The Newberry Library

For the past several years, articles on Midwestern History and Culture seem to follow this same basic outline:

~ Personal anecdote about author’s small town roots or first visit to the Midwest~

~Inevitable description of a cornfield~

~Cutting remark about liberal coastal people’s perceptions of the Midwest made by an author from a liberal coastal publication~

~Tired revelation that Midwesterners are not simple provincial folk~

~Obligatory reference to 2016 election~

~Cautionary warning against generalizing a region at the end of an entire article generalizing the Midwest~

Even as Seemingly Every Article on Midwestern History and Culture aims to complicate understandings of the Midwest, they still start with the assumption that the Midwest is a static, white, rural place. This assumption is not reflected in the historical record, contemporary scholarship, or the lived experiences of so many Midwesterners (including myself); rather, it is a harmful and political statement. For example, in Minnesota the narrative justifies elevating violent legacies of colonizers while erasing past and present Indigenous presence in battles over place names at Bde Maka Ska and Historic Fort Snelling at Bdote. Meanwhile, the Board of Regents at the University of Minnesota is unwilling to reckon with the racist histories associated with campus building names. The nostalgic characterization of the Midwest as perpetually white and simplistically rural is not cute or benign—it perpetuates the violence of colonization and racism and should no longer be entertained as the uncritical starting point for the next reflection on America’s heartland.

Lessons from Notre Dame: Preservation and the Power of Historic Buildings

The first part of this post is filled with a whole lot of navel-gazing. If you’re not here for that, skip down to “so, what can we do with this energy?”

Early Monday afternoon, my sister sent me a text message. “Did you see that Notre Dame is on fire?” she asked. The university in Indiana, I thought? Or the school I attended for seventh grade in Schenectady, NY? I jumped online and googled Notre Dame and saw what she meant. The Notre-Dame de Paris, the famous Cathedral, was on fire. It seemed inconceivable to me and yet there it was, in flames, smoke billowing from its roof and across the Paris sky. I watched live streams on and off for the next few hours, staring in open-mouthed horror as the fire spread and intensified and as the burning spire finally fell, feeling teary at the sight of so many Parisians and tourists from around the world watching silently from nearby bridges as flames ate away at one of France’s most visible landmarks.

I wasn’t alone in my reaction and, like millions of others, I felt relieved when French authorities reported that they had managed to control the fire, and again when they said that they knew for certain that no one had died in the blaze, and again when they shared footage showing that the sanctuary remained mostly-intact.

I’m deliberately emphasizing my emotional response for a reason. Material culture, including physical structures, has the power to evoke strong emotions and overcome some of the abstraction that can make it difficult to connect with people who lived so long ago. People care about historic buildings, ruins, and other historic elements of the physical landscape because, quite simply, they connect us in a very concrete way to an earlier time. They allow us to think about the humans who lived and loved and suffered in these spaces long before we came along. It’s the closest we come to meeting people who lived in the past– we can stand where they stood and know that they moved through the same space.