University Place

Today we are pleased to introduce Thomas Broman and Sergio M. Gonzalez as part of the Wisconsin Historical Museum's History Sandwiched In lecture series. The opinions expressed today are those of the presenters and are not necessarily those of the Wisconsin Historical Society or the Museum's employees. Thomas Broman is a professor of history of science and history of medicine, and has been at the University of Wisconsin since 1988. Broman has written on the history of medical education and the history of the periodical press. Sergio M. Gonzalez is a doctoral candidate in the department of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research and teaching interests include labor, working class, and immigration history. His primary research focuses on the development of Latino communities in urban areas in the American Midwest with an emphasis on the religious communities Latino immigrants developed in Milwaukee, Wisconsin throughout the 20th century. He is currently completing a book manuscript entitled Mexicans in Wisconsin for the Wisconsin Historical Society Press. Here today to discuss an exciting new public history project called Wisconsin 101. Please join me in welcoming Thomas Broman and Sergio M. Gonzalez. (audience applauds) Thank you, Katie. It's a great pleasure to be here. I'm only one of two people (audience laughs) and the way this is going to work is that I'm going to speak for about 15 minutes on the general background of the project, why we thought an object-based public history project would be interesting, give you some idea for the kind of ways we think about objects, and then Sergio is gonna take you more into detail on the website and give you some more insight into the ways we've come to think about objects as being good vehicles for doing history, or not so good vehicles for doing history with some specific examples, so that's kind of the roadmap. This project began basically with a question that I had in conjunction with my partner on this project, Sarah Thal, who is a professor in the history department. Sarah and I were interested in trying to give our undergraduates a sense of why history has a value beyond the classroom. If you take history courses in college, you sort of listen to a bunch of lectures, and do some readings about a particular time period like US history before the Civil War is a typical topic. And then at the end of that period you write, maybe if it's an upper level course, you write a 12 to 15 page paper and then you're done. You throw away the paper, and you go onto the next class. And we were hoping to give our students a greater feeling for why history matters beyond the classroom, and in thinking about that, we also wanted to have our school, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, have a greater role in communicating history to the public. Madison's a very long tradition of history teaching and history research. It's a very distinguished history department, but its role in public history has not been so great, and so we were sort of hoping to increase that as well. And we also felt that it would be kind of good service by our university to the state to get into this project, and all of those things were very much on our mind. We immediately thought when we thinking about this, and this now goes back about three years, so in some ways Wisconsin 101 is not a new project at all because we've been trying to ratchet it into existence for quite some time, but what we were hoping to do was to get the students involved in some public aspect of the history, and maybe through, (clears throat) excuse me, through a web-based program because there's a lot of useful ways you can use the web to reach a public, although one of the dangers of using the web is to get people to pay attention to it. That's also a problem. In any case, Sarah and I began thinking about various ways the students might publish their work on the web and we would make the work available to the public. That would actually be very useful for the students because the students then would be able to list their web publication as a publication. So it immediately came to our attention that the web might be a very good way to do this project, and then something, we were alerted to something else that really became quite important in our thinking, and that was this project by the British Museum, which was called "A History of the World in 100 Objects." I just put their logo up here. We might as well give them credit. In 2010, Neil Gregor, who is the director of the British Museum, came up with this idea of doing a big history project in which 100 objects in the British Museum's collection would be subject to a kind of intensive look. Each of the objects would receive, it was a exhibit installed in the Museum, but even more importantly, it was also the subject of 15 minute podcasts on BBC program Four which were broadcast domestically and then later rebroadcast through podcast, and this project really got a lot of attention from the museum world because it bought into this idea of using lists which had become very popular, I think first with David Letterman, although I don't remember. But Letterman, remember, had his Top 10 List, and so the British Museum came up with this History of the World in 100 Objects. I'm gonna just show you, if you click on this, you think you're going to to the particular object, but in fact what you're going to, this is actually a poster, and so wherever you click on it, you go object number one. Object number one is this mummy from... an Egyptian sarcophagus, and if you choose to listen to it, you can then go to listen to the program on the BBC. The programs are 15 minutes long. These are not short programs, and they're very high production with music and sound effects, and they're quite interesting. So if you have at any kind of inclination to do this, you should listen to these 'cause they're really quite interesting. The first one with object number one is especially interesting because in the very first broadcast that came out in 2010, the British Museum has to issue a worldwide apology for having all of this stuff. Having plundered the world and having refused to give it back, the British Museum has to explain why they still have it, and so this is a really interesting one to listen to. I mean, it tells you something about the object, but even more interesting is the apology they have to explain. Now, the British Museum conceived of this clearly mainly as a vehicle for the radio broadcast, and the web presence is pretty limited. What you see here is basically what is called the museum labeled description of the object. I'll show you the whole thing, that's it, and this is probably, I wasn't in London for the exhibit, but this is probably the transcription of what the label itself said when the exhibit was there in the British Museum. So it's not much of a web presence. It's a picture, it's a link to the program, it's meant as a vehicle for the BBC programs, and then later, Neil McGregor put out a big, fat book on the History of the World in 100 Objects, which some of you have probably seen, and it's very readable, but the other thing that's quite characteristic about this project is it's very high profile, it's meant to educate you about the sarcophagus or about other objects, I'll just give you a brief idea. So here's how they organized the project. They basically cut it into 15 one week segments, right? There's five objects in each segment. So if you click on this one, you can see the five objects that were talked about in that week, and if you look at the dates on these objects, you can see that this is, the British Museum is built on a collection of what used to be called antiquities, stuff from former times that were highly valued by collectors at the time the British Museum was starting in the 18th and 19th centuries. So it's heavily weighted toward earlier periods in history, and the objects that come from later periods are really quite limited, and so it's interesting stuff, but it doesn't deal with recent history at all. The difference than for Sarah and me in thinking about this project was to make it more web-based first, and, secondly, to make it not a project where we would dictate to the world what the 100 most important objects in Wisconsin's history was, but, in fact, reverse the logic and to solicit from contributors objects and stories they wanted to tell about themselves. As time went on, we began to gather some collaborators, and some of our most important collaborators have actually come from the Wisconsin Historical Society, so Jennifer Kolb, who at the time was the director of the Museum here, was an early advisor for us and we've had help from David Driscoll, who's one of the curators for the Historical Society, and gradually we've been sort of collaborating more and more closely with the Society, and it's been wonderful because one of the outstanding characteristics of the Wisconsin Historical Society is that it's spread all over the state. It has this wonderful infrastructure of association with local historical societies. Some historical societies call themselves a statewide historical society, but in fact they're very locally centered, so the Massachusetts Historical Society, for example, is about Boston, and that's because in Massachusetts, according to them, apparently the only thing that counts is Boston, and everything west of there is in New York or somewhere. Same thing is true of the Pennsylvania Historical Society, that's about Philadelphia. Pittsburg has its own historical society, which doesn't call itself the Pennsylvania Historical Society. So there's a lot of organizations for state historical societies, and when we were first beginning this project I tried to actually learn something about them, but it is not itself statewide, but the Wisconsin Historical Society is statewide, even though it's headquartered here. It's got sites all over the state. So it's a very good vehicle for trying to do what we wanted to do. Now, I wanna mention a couple of other things, and then I'm gonna turn it over to Sergio to continue the discussion. Objects are a very odd thing for me personally to work about because my career as a historian has been based mainly in reading old books and reading stuff written on paper because as a historian of science, I've been mainly interested in the history of the ideas of science and medicine. There are historians of science who work on objects. In fact, one at UW-Madison now is very interested in chemical apparatus. How did people do experiments? What kind of stuff did they work with? How did they blow the glass? In fact, she's learning to be a glassblower 'cause she wants to try and recreate that experience. That's a very object-based history, but normally we don't really think about objects as being the kind of vehicles for history that they can be, and as I learned, and I didn't have that experience, as I learned more about it, I became more and more fascinated with how objects themselves can be focal points for history, and I won't say that much more about it because Sergio will be diving into that part in particular, how we can talk about objects. But going back to the BBC project for a minute, what's kind of interesting is they don't talk about the objects much either. In most cases, the objects that they use are a kind of staging for telling a story about a past culture. It might be the Korean people in the 8th century. It might be the Olmec people who preceded the Aztecs in Mesoamerica. In all of these cases, the object is kind of an opportunity to then go right to talk about the society or the culture that preceded it. We wanted, by contrast, to talk about the object, to actually make the object the focal point, and that requires that people needed to start thinking about the objects in new ways. So I discovered this when I kind of taught an experimental course around this for the first time, and I and the students had to get into the thinking about the objects. The students wanted to use for their objects books or newspapers, but I kind of forced them to think about objects, and, in fact, one of the objects from that course is object number one on our website, so Sergio will show it to you, it's kind of an interesting one. But thinking about objects is actually exciting because once you get into doing it, they open up a world of experience, which is really not very typical for thinking about history, and it's a funny thing to be giving this talk in a museum which is stuffed with objects because museum curators understand the value of objects, but those of us among the public don't tend to do it as regularly. One of the things we'd like to do then with this project is to get people thinking about objects, and the other thing we'd like to do is to make this a statewide project. We want this project to have contributions from all over the state, and, in doing so, we want people to choose what they do. We're calling it crowd-sourced history. We have an editorial board which kind of decides which objects we'll take, but we want them all to come in from around the state. People sometimes say, well, why don't, you've got all the resources in Madison, you've got the collection of the State Historical Society there, you've got the resources of the university, why don't you guys just write it up and do it? And we said, no, we really want this to be locally based in different parts of the state in which people come to us with proposals for objects they want to put on it, and then through this website and through the stories that will appear on Wisconsin Life, on Wisconsin Public Radio, when we have enough running, they'll start running 'em. That's gonna give people a chance to share these stories on a statewide basis. So it's a statewide project that's locally based, and that's what I think is unique about it because we're reaching out across the state. So we've had our course taught not only at UW-Madison but it's been also, teaching with it has also been done at UW-Eau Claire, UW-La Crosse. UW-Whitewater has a course this semester that's using it. We've had a high school teacher in Oconomowoc use it, and we've hoping to get more high school teachers to use it. The problem that high school teachers have is that they have such a structured curriculum that they need guides on how to incorporate what we do into it, but this should be useable to high school students. That's what we're excited about, and we're hoping that as more objects get up there, it'll interest more high school students in doing it. So that's a sense of the project. What I'm gonna do now is turn it over to Sergio who will give you a kind of tour through the project and talk about some of the objects. All right, thank you, Tom. So I'm gonna be holding a microphone, and I used to be a middle school teacher so I'm also used to moving my hands around so hopefully this doesn't go too far away here. So I was the project assistant for Wisconsin 101 for the last two years, I started in the summer of 2013, and, a lot like Tom, I come from a historical background based mostly on archives that don't deal with material objects. I do immigration and labor history, and the majority of my materials are also written documents, and so I also had to have a bit of a crash course on the importance of material objects but also how to understand them as stand ins for larger historical topics but also to respect them as objects themselves. So the first thing I wanna talk about is an object that's not on our website, but it's an object that we've talked about a few times in our discussions at the editorial board level and when we're meeting with potential contributors as well, and that object is a bed. This bed is from the Tallman house down in Janesville, I don't know, in Rock Country. I don't know if you guys are historical with, are aware of this bed, but this bed is from the Rock Country Historical Society, and the story behind this bed is that in 18, let me think, it's 1859 I believe, maybe before then. Abraham Lincoln was stopping through Janesville, one of his only stops in Wisconsin, and he stayed in this inn and slept in this bed, and so if you stop by the Rock County Historical Society at the Tallman House you can see this bed on display, and anyone walking through might look at it and they might have a few different ideas. They might say, they might think to themselves, wow, what was Lincoln thinking when he was here? What was the importance of his trip here? But the bed itself, if you're thinking about it, doesn't really have much historical significance. We don't know much about the bed itself. We don't know who made it. That might not matter as much as well to the figure of Abraham Lincoln. The only really important thing about this bed is that Lincoln's head was on it. So when we're thinking about the importance of objects, we thought to ourselves, is this the type of object that we're looking for, for our project? And in some ways it is because historically it's significant in that for the community it represents an important event, and it represents a contribution of a certain historical figure, but in many ways it's also a complicated object because the object itself isn't that interesting, it's just a bed. So I'm gonna walk you through a few of our different objects that are on the site and talk about some of the benefits or the reason that they're on the site, but also some of the complications, and the first one is an object that Tom already mentioned, it's this cupping kit, and I'm gonna jump down to the bottom first because I think it's important. Tom mentioned that one of the great things about our project is that the contributors, the people who write the object histories, have actual attributions on the page, so they're actually recognized as the writers of these object histories, and the creator of this object were two undergraduate students, Eleanor Miller, McKenzie Bruce, who were two undergraduates in Tom's first iteration of this Wisconsin 101 undergraduate course. So Eleanor McKenzie found this object at the Wisconsin Historical Society and decided they wanted to write about it, and this object is a cupping kit. I don't know if you guys are familiar with the cupping process. It's a medical process that's very much out of date today, but it was all the way up until the 19th century still in some sort of use, and the idea is, perhaps you're familiar with leeches, right, the sucking of bad blood to cure people who have whatever ails them, right? So this was an object that was used by a doctor in Wisconsin. The doctor was actually the head of the Wisconsin Medical Association for many years, and so the significance is important because it's the object of an important figure in Wisconsin history. We can talk about the Civil War, which the doctor served in the Union forces under, but the object itself we don't have a lot of history on. The object is not Wisconsin based. In other words, it wasn't created in Wisconsin, and it's actually somehow hard to track the historical provenance of the object. For that reason, this is complicated because it doesn't have a whole lot of Wisconsin base as an object history. The next object I wanna talk about is one that I actually wrote. It was my first attempt to write an object history, and it is a poster from a recital from 1904. So as you guys heard in the introduction, my background is on Milwaukee's Latino history. I look at the development of the Latino community at the beginning of the 20th century up until the end of it, and this poster actually is the poster of a musical recital performed by a man named Raphael Baez and his wife Mary Schoen Baez, and Raphael Baez arrived in the late 19th century, 1880s, and he is the first documented Mexican to come to Wisconsin. He was a classically trained musician. He was recruited by an opera company, and he came to work as a musician. He performed in a few of the different operas and musical companies in Milwaukee, but specifically he also became the director of a number of church organizations or of church choirs, and so this is a poster for a concert that he gave in 1904 at the Athenaeum. Now this object is an amazing object because it's an object that's been preserved from 1904. It represents the work of the first Mexican to come to Wisconsin. That in itself is an amazing history, but the object isn't really that interesting. It's a poster, right? It's just a poster. You could have hundreds of posters, there are posters on these walls today, and objects in general are not really interesting material objects. However, the object itself is interesting because it gives us a window into these different stories. And so really quickly I wanna jump into one of the features of the website, which is objects as portals to talk about other parts of Wisconsin history. And so as I said, this poster represents or is advertising a musical recital that Raphael Baez and his wife put on in 1904 at the Athenaeum, and so there are four different stories that we can learn about from this poster. We can learn about Milwaukee's music scene in the later 19th century, right, so if you click on that, you get a whole other essay that would allow the reader to learn a little bit more about what music was like in Milwaukee when Raphael Baez was a musical conductor. So you have images throughout the article. You also have, I wanna point out, citations. Right, so just as if it were an academic article, there are citations with actual opportunities to visit the citations themselves at the bottom. So this is one history you might learn about the music scene in the late 19th century. We might also learn about Milwaukee's early Mexican community. So the Mexican community really started in the 1920s in Milwaukee, right, so a reader might get a little bit of history on the immigrant community that developed at the time. I'll show you the last two and then we'll jump to one other object. The Athenaeum, which was the location where this concert was performed. The Athenaeum is important because it's also known as the Women's Club of Wisconsin and it was the first completely woman-owned, privately-funded building in the United States. It was founded in 1876. So a reader might learn a little bit about that. And the last story I wanna turn to is a bit of a biography on the man himself, Raphael Baez. So the object, the poster, not that interesting on its own. It's just a piece of paper, right? But it gives us a different window into different stories. The last thing I wanna, or the second to last one, 'cause I'm gonna save one more here but, is the newest contribution to our page. This is, I'll go down to the author first. This is from Joe Hermalin. He's from Langlade Country. He's a member of the Langlade County Historical Society. It's a handmade, hand-woven pillow sham from the 1930s, and it represents the CCC, the Civilian Conservation Corps, during the Great Depression, and it's a handmade object made by someone in Langlade County, and so the object itself is an amazingly rich looking object, right? It's very unique, you'll never find anything like it because it's handmade. It wasn't produced in a factory, and it's not a poster, but the problem with this, the potential problem we see with an object like this, a handmade object, or a quilt, a blanket that was made by someone's family, is that everyone possibly has something like this in their closet somewhere, right? So one of the problems we thought about is, how unique is the object itself and is this just an object that is from someone's family history? And it may be particularly important to them and to their family, but it might not represent a larger story for Wisconsin. Now luckily, this object does all of those things. It's both a particularly important personal story, but it's also an important story that opens windows about Wisconsin during the 1930s and the United States in the Great Depression. The stories that are associated with this might talk about the Great Depression in Langlade County, immigrant families in rural Wisconsin. There's a few other ones that were cut off but, so it gives us windows into these other stories. And since I have a little bit of time, I wanna show you one last object that kinda does everything. It's kinda the object that does it all. It's both particular as an object, but it's also important as a Wisconsin-based object. Hopefully, it's on the front page, so we'll go to it, give you a little tour of the website. So we'll jump down to objects... and we'll scroll down a bit. See we have a few objects already on the page. I invite you guys to take a look at it after today's presentation. All right, there it is, at the bottom, of course. I don't know if you guys are familiar with this from the 1950s, the penguin server, I can hear some people remembering this from back in their childhood maybe. This is the penguin server. The penguin server couldn't be any more Wisconsin. It's from the West Bend Aluminum Company. It was produced here in Wisconsin at the West Bend Aluminum Company in the 1940s and so it represents a very particular Wisconsin story, the West Bend Aluminum Company story. It represents, it can tell us a lot about consumer culture in the 1950s, and it can also tell us a little bit about the West Bend Aluminum Company before it started producing these. So why was it in the aluminum business to begin with? What was it doing? Why don't we scroll down to the stories, we might find out about the aluminum industry and wartime demands. So this object is a visually appealing object. You guys look at it, and there's nothing like it anywhere else. It's a very particular object, but it's also a very special Wisconsin object, and so this kinda does it all in terms of what an object can do for object history, for material history, but also when you're thinking about broader historical narratives in talking about our state's history. So cocktail parties, right? It will tell us a little bit about cocktail culture in the 1950s, outdoor grilling during the period, the aluminum industry and wartime demands, and finally a little bit of a biography on the company itself. So I'd invite everybody to jump on the website after today's presentation. We have quite a few other objects. We're very proud in that it's a very navigable website, it's easy to get around, and then we also, the last thing we'd invite everybody to do after you've had a chance to learn about the project a little bit more is to go to the contribute page and consider contributing your own history. As Tom said, this is really a crowd-sourced history. One of the things we're most proud about is that it's an opportunity for everyone in the state to get involved. It's not just doctoral candidates and professors, but anyone who has interest in the state's history. So thank you very much. (audience applauds)