Category: Introductions

Hello! My name is Elias (he/him) and I am a junior history major. I am from the Hudson Valley of New York, which is where I will be living for the duration of the term. My primary focus in history at Carleton has been on histories of colonialism and decolonization, resistance against structures of oppression, and international exchange. Additionally, over the past few terms I have developed a keen interest in public history, particularly in theorizing about how history might best be produced and reproduced for diverse public audiences. Beyond the realm of the theoretical, however, I do not have a lot of experience in this area. I am very excited to be working with my peers in HIST200 this term on creating and curating an archive dedicated to this particular moment! 

My focus throughout the term will be on how organizations and institutions have evolved and changed their practices to continue serving their communities. Decision making within public institutions is fascinating enough as an object of historical inquiry, and this moment of urgency and uncertainty has raised the stakes substantially. I have been very interested, over the past few weeks, in observing how organizations and institutions that communities depend upon for various services and goods have responded to these troubling circumstances. In the chaos of this moment it is also important to keep in mind the various stakes and incentives that drive decision making. Economic, relational, and public health imperatives are interacting within every household, business, and Zoom call. From newspapers providing increased online services to public parks making admission free to the subway system in NYC running fewer trains, the landscapes of our lives are changing significantly and – importantly – differentially. 

It is important to highlight these changes in the public, institutional infrastructure of this moment in order to allow historians of the present and future to examine the structural and cultural contours and faultlines that this moment has elucidated.

My name is McLain Sidmore and I am a Junior history major at Carleton. My focus is the study of American history and I have had several experiences working in public history, particularly in the area of education in the Northfield Middle School SCOPE project and at the Minnesota State Academy for the Blind. I hope to rely on this background in research and archival creation to allow me to shift my focus to compiling an archive of this new world we are living in and working to identify and preserve diverse voices for future generations of historians.

I am spending this quarantine at home in Juneau, AK which has thankfully been somewhat isolated from the worst of the disaster. Yet rural areas present their own risks and we will likely see far greater impacts in the coming months on these areas. The lockdowns and mitigation efforts are also having tremendous impacts around the country but their certainly not being felt equally among all Americans. For this reason, I am interested in working this term on how this pandemic is affecting different age groups, from seniors and elders who are being separated from their families and communities that rely on them as leaders, to children, some of whom are without access to the education, food, or safety that school affords them. These are stories we need to highlight and understand during the pandemic, and to preserve and remember for years to come.

Hello, I’m Miyuki, a sophomore and a History major, from Tokyo, Japan.

This is my third time to take HIST200 Historians for Hire, and I’ve been working on curating historical objects and creating an online exhibition for the first two terms. For this time, I’m going to dive into this project of the ongoing pandemic, COVID-19, and I’m proud to be part of this project.

Currently, I’m away from home and stay on campus in Northfield, Minnesota. Making use of my current situation, I want to set my theme of this project “Me being Distant from Home.” I’m going to share the stories that I experienced not only in Northfield but also (mostly) online in the course of communications between me and my family or friends back in Japan.

As one of the means to share my stories, I’m going to use the photographing skills that I gained from an art course at Carleton and knowledge of Digital Humanities that I leaned through the working experience at Digital Humanities Associates(DHA). I hope the stories I’ll share will connect people even if they are on the opposite side of the world.

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.