“You’ve been gone too long, Alice. There are matters which might benefit from your attention. Friends cannot be neglected. Hurry. And do mind your step.”
Blue Caterpillar in Alice Through the Looking Glass[1]
Entering back into research when one has been gone for a while, is like returning to a special world. It is a familiar place and yet it looks quite different. Explored in stories and movies: Alice, Hook, where Peter Pan played by Robin Williams returns to Neverland as an adult, and Christopher Robin, in which Winnie the Pooh draws Ewan McGregor’s ‘Christopher’ back into the Hundred Acre Wood; it takes a while for the protagonist to regain their sense of comfort in their alternative world, so different from their current daily life.[2] When you return, you are not quite sure that you will find the same threads. I am excited to be back, anticipating learning new things and finding new insights into old stories.
The core historical research and process in the ‘Digital Age’ has not changed that dramatically: Investigation of the topic (tracking down resources and details), Analysis (pulling the pieces of a story together), Reflection (drawing the meaning of the findings), Writing the new story; Editing (requesting and adding the perspectives of others), and Revising (to make the story wonderful)! It is a labor of love to painstakingly create meaning from the past and be able to share it with others. Stepping away has value. As I thought about ‘coming back’ and drew the comparisons listed above, I had a realization; all those references are from British literature. I was reminded that my awareness is shaped by the culture that shapes my own past.
As I re-enter the world of ‘Women in Health Care in Cleveland,’ I must be alert to those unfamiliar stories, I might have missed. Cleveland is an ethnic community that is constantly changing. Original Native populations were decimated by the diseases white explorers (1670-1723). While mention of the Cuyahoga River dots the journals of traders and conflicts, it was relatively unclaimed until the Revolutionary War period, when the Northwest Territory was established by the Confederation Congress. The early settlers were predominantly from New England since Northeast Ohio was surveyed as “The Connecticut Western Reserve”. This territory was awarded to the State of Connecticut, as reparations by the new republic for losses suffered during the Revolutionary War. The city was laid out in 1796, by Moses Cleaveland but by 1809 claimed an African American citizen. The Irish would form the first major immigration wave as dockworkers for the port, ship captains, ship builders and laborers on the Erie and many other Ohio canals (late 1820’s & 30’s). Large groups of German settlers moved into the region in the 1940s and increasing numbers of African Americans began a northern migration from the South as early as the 1840’s and continuing in ebbs and flows until the early1960’s. Similar to other American port cities, Cleveland’s industrialization of the late 19th Century and early 20th, increased immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe. By the 1920’s a Mexican Latino community was established that would be augmented by the recruitment of Puerto Ricans to the nearby Lorain Steel Mills during the Second World War. When immigration quotas changed during the 1960’s, Cleveland became home to a more globally diverse populations first from Asia, and expanding to include Middle Easterners, Central and South American groups and eventually additional waves from Africa, Russia and all the world.
Digital methods can help historians uncover the
stories that were not written down in the same ways as the northwestern
European cultures and encompass larger groups.
I hope to utilize new resources, tools and methods to discover more
diverse stories of ‘medical women’ as I work with new partners. I am happy to announce that my upcoming endeavor
will be shaped by a cooperating arrangement between the Division of Medicine and
Science, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, the Western
Reserve Historical Society (the local Smithsonian Affiliate) and George Mason University’s
Digital Public Humanities Graduate Certificate Program. The dynamic, of sharing information,
artifacts, and insights, promises to uncover unrealized connections and create new
awareness and understanding of our communal past.
[1] Carroll, Lewis. Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There. United Kingdom: Macmillan, 1871.
[2] Hook. Stephen Spielberg.Tri-Star Pictures, 1991. Christopher Robin. Marc Forester, dir. Ewan McGregor. Disney, 2018.
