Month: April 2020

Reflections from Carolyn’s journal

Carolyn Wood on

This post includes direct quotations from my journal. I have made some minor edits to grammar and style and omitted some personal details. Please be aware that this contains upsetting information (COVID-19 and mentions of the Holocaust) and features my somewhat crass sense of humor.

April 3, 2020

Hello. I’ve been writing occasionally on my laptop again, but otherwise, I’ve been avoiding it, cause it requires me to think about reality.

I read the news this morning. Deaths continue to grow exponentially. 3000 in France now. 4000 in Italy? Maybe more. Over 1000 in just NYC. It’s a lot. And the response, while perhaps too limited at first (definitely because of Trump), is similarly large. Apparently 1/2 of the global population is now under quarantine, or lock-down, or “Shelter in Place” orders. In Northampton County where I live, a stay at home order was put in place around 3/25, so we’re only supposed to leave the house for life-sustaining necessities, though we can still go out for socially distanced, passive recreation.

None of this is that new. But it’s only just sinking in for me that this is a Big Problem. And a long-term problem. I’ll probably be stuck at home until early June, if not longer. And I’m not personally or emotionally prepared for any of it. I want to help people. I want to do well in school. I want to stay sane. I want to keep in touch with friends. And I don’t totally know how to do any of that, or balance it?

Basically, I need to transition from my break plan into my spring term plan, while also dealing with the whole “global pandemic” thing.

April 8, 2020

I am currently at the park and it’s just about sunset. There were three cars in the lot when I arrived, which is more than the usual zero, but the woods are big enough and the trails wide enough that it’s quite easy to maintain the mandated 6 feet of “social distancing.” Social distancing is definitely the catchphrase of these times.

I should note that all my thoughts are tinged by my extensive research (over Carleton’s winter term) of the Warsaw ghetto. While the value of comparing our times to the Holocaust or WWII is dubious, I am not the only one doing it. Especially older folks at church, who were young teens during WWII, have noted that this sense of total disruption and mass domestic mobilization (toward sewing masks, for example) reminds them of the U.S. during WWII. A few additional parallels:

Fear and uncertainty: Those who wrote diaries in the Warsaw ghetto describe a lack of accurate information about the Holocaust. Information was shared through rumor, and Jews in the ghetto accepted the reality of the situation to varying degrees. Now, we have an oversaturation of information, especially due to the global connectivity provided by the internet. This allows many people across the world to share their personal stories on a mass scale, independent of government intervention. However, it can also create echo chambers or worse, two completely different narratives of reality both claiming verity (I am thinking of my own family and the contrasts between my conservative dad and liberal mom).

Deaths: News articles and politicians have drawn connections to Pearl Harbor and D-Day. I am not sure about this. There are different causes, a smaller scale, and a different at-risk population. For the United States, most WWII deaths were soldiers, who were young to middle-aged men. This being said, victims of the Holocaust included many women, elderly people, and the sick because young healthy men were valuable to the Nazis because they could perform labor.

Hope and humanity: In moments like this, I think that it is revealed that most people are good, humans are powerfully empathetic, and that hope can survive. There are so many examples of this, but what I would like to note now is a commitment to aesthetics. People are planting flowers, cleaning their homes, posting pleasant things online, doing DIY projects, and putting up unseasonal Christmas lights. This may seem trivial, but it matters. For example, even in the Warsaw ghetto, people took time to plant flowers, herbs, and veggies in their window boxes, to bring beauty and normalcy back into the cramped city blocks. I see this same instinct, this same need to create beauty in a dark world playing out in the tacky Easter decorations, gardens, and lights in my Pennsylvania suburb.

End of quotation. I understand that comparing COVID-19 to the Holocaust is flawed/problematic, but because I took a 300-level on The Holocaust this winter, that is where my mind is stuck. I am still journaling frequently and will post a similar installment next Sunday. I am open to feedback and suggestions!

Thinking about the Past, Living in the Present, and Building an Archive for the Future

Susannah Ottaway on

For the past 21 years, I have taught in the History Department at Carleton College, where I specialize in early modern European history, with a research specialty in the history of old age and social welfare in the eighteenth century.  These research interests grew directly out of my participation in an undergraduate “Adopt a Grandparent” volunteer program, and a few years of work with individuals who had intellectual disabilities and autism, in the early and mid-1990s.  The connection between civic engagement and my academic work has continued in my classroom teaching, where I have offered community engagement opportunities in many of my courses.

My connection to public history deepened tremendously from 2011-14, when I served as the Director of Carleton’s Humanities Center and collaborated extensively with the Minnesota Humanities Center.  I was honored to be appointed to the Board of Directors of the MHC in 2015, and that experience cemented my commitment to the practice and promotion of the public humanities.  I now co-direct Carleton’s Mellon-funded initiative “Public Works: Carleton Arts and Humanities Connecting Communities,” and I regularly teach Carleton’s public history practicum course “Historians for Hire.” 

The COVID-19 pandemic has me thinking in new ways about the importance of the practice of public history.  As a social historian, I practice “history from below,” always digging in archives for information on the people whose voices are hardest to hear in the remote past.  I have been wondering, how can I help to make sure that social historians of the future can find the voices of *all* peoples affected by this crisis?  How can my students practice their public history skills (including preserving and presenting historical sources) in ways that will ensure that broader publics see the value of history at this crucial moment? These questions helped motivate me to structure Carleton’s spring term “Historians for Hire” course around the collection of materials for A Journal of the Plague Year: An Archive of Covid-19, and our local digital repository.

Through our participation in these archival initiatives, I hope that my students and I both create something of real use to future historians, and have the opportunity to reflect together on the role of public historians in times of crisis.  I will bring a personal commitment to collecting the experiences of communities with whom my classes have worked closely in the past, and to ensuring that our archive is inclusive and welcoming to older people who have been particularly hard hit by the novel coronavirus.