In the era of Black Lives Matter and under a presidency that stokes racial division and traffics in lies, the website Black Perspectives feels all too relevant to our times. “[I]n order for Black lives to matter, we must engage the matters of Black thought,” Associate Editor J.T. Roane noted in an interview with The Metropole. Though not focusing solely on urban history, Black Perspectives nonetheless provides insight into cities around the globe and the people that inhabit them–particularly people of color. Executive Editor Keisha Blain, Associate Editor Ibram X. Kendi, and Roane have endeavored to create a “critical digital public” that will enable readers to slice through the “chicanery” of the modern news cycle and the layers of false historical discourse.

What was the impetus for creating Black Perspectives? Who do you see as your audience? 

Within far too many American mainstream institutions, including its academic ones, the communities of the African Diaspora are either ignored, labeled as incorrigible social problems, or marked as helpless victims. Black communities are rarely and inconsistently acknowledged as the progenitors of generative intellectual thought, as producers of information with meaningful bearing on the matters we face as a global society.

We understand that Black intellectuals, those formally trained and those practitioners invisible from the purview of formal academic acknowledgement, are important to historicize and recall collectively, especially given our great perils, including the realities of peak oil, the violent reterritorialization of our cities, the mounting immigration and refugee crises. I approach my writing and editing for the blog from the premise that Black intellectual histories contain insights about our present, ones that can help us shift the grounds of the perilously anti-Black world we inherited through slavery, colonialism, apartheid, and racial capitalism. I see this as critical in shaping and invigorating a critical digital public, such an important task in an era when inequality in information accessibility is sharpening and in which a faction of the country has embraced outright chicanery.

Black Perspectives combines original historical research and contemporary social analysis organized in part through the basic understanding that that in order for Black lives to matter, we must engage the matters of Black thought.

I’m proud to serve in the capacity as associate editor for a platform that can produce such stunning public commentary as the July 2018 forum organized by Keisha Blain and Phillip Luke Sinitiere to honor the life and work of Sandra Bland. Taken together the pieces charted Bland’s death three years ago within histories of state violence and resistance, honored Bland’s important social justice activism, and poetically mourned the premature snuffing of her flame.

What do you hope people take away from Black Perspectives? 

I hope that people come to view the matters of Black thought as myriad and complex engagements with social, economic, political, and intellectual problems as they emerged within the various historical contexts of the Diaspora. I hold these as a key roadmap to the Black Radical Tradition and as the intellectual seeds for unrealized but not unrealizable futures.

 

How did Black Perspectives come into being and what obstacles did you have to overcome? 

Black Perspectives was organized as an accessible digital platform in 2017. It is an outgrowth of the AAIHS blog, which was founded by Christopher Cameron in 2014. Under the sage leadership of chief editor Keisha Blain and associate editor Ibram X. Kendi the platform has become a recognized site for information about the histories and ongoing work of Black communities to make sense of, survive, thrive, and lay the groundwork for a different world. Some of the obstacles we face are unique to the particular precariousness of being junior Black faculty writing publicly in ways that the academy still doesn’t fully embrace as “the work”—i.e. the print form journal articles and books that guarantee tenure. Other obstacles are the speed and nature of online platforms like Twitter where people can use anonymity to be cruel and violent. We have had to learn to take real-time feedback in stride and to brace ourselves and ignore some of the vileness that comes with the territory.

Where do you hope Black Perspectives goes in the future? 

My hope is that Black Perspectives will continue to expand to include longer-format, more in-depth pieces within our repertoire as we transition to an online magazine format. My hope is also that we will continue to remain accessible—i.e. on the free side of a pay wall—as we also infuse public discussions with the critical insights derived from Black intellectual history.

How does Black Perspectives speak to urban history and what does it tell us that other sites don’t or can’t?

Much of my writing for the platform centers in the ways that urban Black communities from Philadelphia to Havana historically and in ongoing ways express alternative, often heterodox visions for cities and their futures. I hold these dissonant intellectual traditions about the urban form as the containers of epistemologies vital in the face of the radical criminalization and displacement that defines Black urban life from Detroit to Rio de Janeiro. They can help us to make sense of what is happening and also help us to draw forward out of latency processes and practices that resonate with and edify contemporary struggles to make the city livable for all.

J.T. Roane is assistant professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Cincinnati. He is also part of the University’s urban futures initiative. Roane is broadly concerned about matters of geography, sexuality, and religion in relation to Black communities. He is at work on a manuscript, Dark Agoras: Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place in Philadelphia, which historicizes multiple modes of insurgent spatial assemblage Black communities articulated in Philadelphia in the second half of the twentieth century. Follow him on Twitter @JTRoane.

Featured image (at top): African American school children holding signs of protest against Norfolk school board’s treatment of black teachers, Norfolk, Va., June 1939, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

While most of the projects highlighted by our Digital Summer School series have been place-based–such as the Encyclopedia of Milwaukee, Gotham, Chicago Elections Project, and even Tropics of Meta, though to a much lesser extent (somewhat Sunbelt, California leaning)–Nursing Clio represents a broader approach focusing on gender more than any one place or region. Launched in 2012, Nursing Clio has become one of the leading blogs in the academic universe and though not strictly urban in its orientation, cities and suburbs factor sharply in its coverage. One of its co-founders, Jacqueline Antonovich, sat down with The Metropole to explain how it came into being, where it’s going, and what insights she and her fellow co-editors have gleaned from the experience.

Why did you establish Nursing Clio and who do you see as your audience?

We started Nursing Clio back in 2012, right in the middle of an election year. If you remember, things like reproductive justice, affordable healthcare, and same-sex marriage dominated political debates and news headlines. In that one election cycle, the House passed a bill that weakened the Violence Against Women Act, the Senate blocked a measure to address sex-based wage discrimination, and several red states attempted to roll back access to abortion, repeal Obamacare, and increase efforts to discriminate against LGBTQ communitites. And of course, we had Mitt Romney’s “binders full of women,” Todd Akin’s definition of “legitimate rape,” and Foster Friess’ “aspirin between the knees” contraception advice. The media labeled it a “war on women”–and it was. In debating these issues, however, pundits, politicians, and reporters often failed to include any actual women. There was also a discernible absence of historical scholarship in these conversations that could have provided important context to these issues. Our goal, then, was to create a digital project that could amplify the voices of women by providing the space and scaffolding for both scholars and non-academic audiences to comment on these connections between past and present. We believed that a collaborative blog project was not only intellectually appealing but genuinely necessary.

What do you hope people take away from Nursing Clio?

Nursing Clio’s mission statement emphasizes the goal of connecting historical scholarship to contemporary issues related to gender, health, and medicine. Our tagline, “The Personal Is Historical,” adds an important dimension to the groundbreaking feminist claim that “the personal is political.” So I hope that the big takeaway for our readers is that “everything has a history,” as Jim Grossman says, including everything you think you know about medicine, health, and the body.

How did the Nursing Clio come to fruition? What obstacles did you have to overcome?

In 2012, I conceptualized Nursing Clio as a first-year doctoral student at the University of Michigan. The project was born from a public humanities graduate seminar taught by Matthew Countryman. The final project for the course was to create a project that would engage the public in some way. I contacted five other gender and medicine scholars across the country and asked them if they wanted to be co-founders of Nursing Clio, and from there we worked together on developing the theme, scope, and content of the blog.

In the six years since its founding, Nursing Clio has grown to a staff of eleven volunteer editors from various backgrounds. The editorial team includes tenured and tenure-track professors, public historians and museum educators, and historians working outside of academia. The contributor base is similarly diverse: Nursing Clio has published essays from over 150 writers, including academic historians, public historians, art historians, sociologists, anthropologists, K-12 teachers, community health activists, graduate students, and others.

Like many collaborative projects, we’ve faced our share of obstacles. About two years in, we took a hiatus to reconceptualize the back end of the project. A few of our co-founders left, we brought in new editors, and developed a new and more streamlined method for editing and publishing. The biggest lesson I’ve learned as an executive editor is that fostering a deliberate feminist space for collaboration means everyone on the editing team has an equal voice and decisions come through consensus. And although the blog is an important project, in the end, it’s just a blog. That means that sometimes life, jobs, or just self care comes before Nursing Clio and that’s totally ok. In fact, I think that’s been the key to our longevity.

Where do you hope Nursing Clio goes in the future?

Our goal for the upcoming year is to possibly create a funding mechanism for Nursing Clio. This is sort of a contentious topic among our editors. How do you ethically monetize a project like this? We would love to be able to pay our writers, and maybe ourselves one day. I’m also looking forward to establishing a paid internship program that will allow undergraduates and graduate students an opportunity to learn digital publishing skills.

So far, what moment or event related to Nursing Clio comes to mind when one ask’s about its greatest achievement or most unique insight?

I am incredibly proud of our Power of Protest series that we produced in 2017. Shortly after the election of Donald Trump, the editors held a Skype meeting to brainstorm ideas on how to effectively respond to our collective sense of despair and helplessness. We put out a call for writers to contribute to a series focused on historical protest movements across the world. We were not prepared for how many submissions we received. But the very act of protest has a long and complicated history, one that defies geographic or temporal boundaries, so I think we tapped into something very tangible and accessible for historians across subfields. We covered topics as varied as AIDS protest funerals, Bolivian housewife hunger strikes, squatter’s rights in the UK, disability sit-ins in San Francisco, and even children’s letters to US presidents.

The insight I gained from this series was twofold. First, blogs are a unique platform that can quickly respond to political and cultural moments in a way that journals and books cannot. Second, the informality of a blog allows for more flexibility in content. Many of the essays in our Power of Protest series were about health and medicine, but many were not. Collectively, however, they made a powerful statement on what protest could and could not achieve. For these reasons, I think scholarly blogs, podcasts, and even twitter threads are indispensable and important tools for historians.

More broadly, one important achievement of Nursing Clio is that we take a deliberately feminist approach to our peer-review process. Our process is not blind – our writers know exactly who is editing their piece – and this method allows for the editing process to be a friendly conversation, rather than a sterile (and sometime adversarial) process. As one of our editors, Cassia Roth, told me recently, our editing process could be a lesson for the rest of the profession. We are a public history blog. We have rigorous peer review, but we do so to help our writers flourish.

Jacqueline Antonovich is an Assistant Professor of History at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, PA. Her current research focuses on women physicians, reproductive surveillance, and medical imperialism in the turn-of-the-century urban American West. She is also the creator, co-founder, and executive editor of Nursing Clio. Jacqueline received her PhD from the University of Michigan in 2018.

Featured image (at top): Mural: Women of the Wiregrass, 126 N. St. Andrews Street, Dothan, Alabama, photograph by Carol M. Highsmith, April 1, 2010, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

After sojourning to the East Coast to visit the Gotham Center’s Gotham blog last week, we now travel to capital of the Midwest, Chicago, where LaDale Winling and others have embarked on an ambitious project that combines political science, history and GIS mapping to create the Chicago Elections Project (CEP). Winling, who has both a new book out, Building the Ivory Tower, and worked on the very successful Mapping Inequality project, sat down to discuss the roots of the CEP, the challenges faced in putting it together, and what makes Chicago such a worthwhile case study for urban political history.

This is the fourth in our Digital Summer School series, including the aforementioned Gotham blog, the Encyclopedia of Milwaukee, and Tropics of Meta.

Why did you establish this digital project and who is your audience?

In the summer of 2017, I was doing some research on Oscar DePriest and Arthur Mitchell, the first two black Congressmen from a northern district, DePriest as a Republican and Mitchell, a Democrat. Devin Hunter, a fellow Chicago historian, told me that the Chicago Public Library held detailed election results for their two head-to-head elections in one of their collections, so I went to check it out.

The Harold Washington Library of the CPL has nearly a hundred thousand “aperture” microfilm cards of detailed election results, down to the precinct level, going back to 1886. They have data for municipal, state, and federal elections and primaries, as well as the precinct and ward boundary maps to go with them. It was exciting and nearly overwhelming to find such a treasure trove of material on urban political history. It was also extremely frustrating to wrestle with the microfilm reader and squint at the faint and grainy data in negative on the screen. Through social media inquiries, I heard from a few historians that they had used this collection before, with some of the same difficulties, and the wheels in my mind began to turn. Margaret Garb at Washington University had used this collection in her recent book Freedom’s Ballot on black politics in Chicago.  Also, Richard Anderson, who is just completing his PhD at Princeton University, had digitized some elections for his dissertation on post-WWII Chicago politics, called ‘The City That Worked.”

One of my fundamental ideas as a digital historian is that there is value in providing access to data, something I saw, for example, when a group of my collaborators made the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation redlining maps available through Mapping Inequality. Since there was established demand for these election results, I thought there would be opportunities to broaden access and simply make it easier for people to conduct the research they were already doing.

In addition, access to this data and digital mapping resources can help us think about urban political history in new ways—as diverse coalitions, independent individuals, and communities with shifting interests and alliances. We often use the metaphor of the political “machine” to describe urban politics. That image and concept can obscure the variety of political activities, patronage employees and power centers operating in cities. A political machine can be decentralized and some of the key connections may be between the ward offices, precinct captains, and the local voters, rather than through city hall. We know this, and some of the best urban political history accounts for this. However, the research burden of investigating the variety of neighborhoods and communities in a large city can be very challenging—that spade work often gets lost in favor of synthesis or providing context.

Finally, I want to emphasize that elections matter. Studying these popular expressions of political sentiment is an important way of understanding social change. My suspicion is that we often rely on qualitative explanations and narratives for political change without drawing on the messy data where voters express their actual choices.

In terms of audience, we want to provide for scholars, to reach journalists, and to connect with the public at large. Chicago historians and urban political historians who have already been using the microfilm will get better, easier access. Chicago journalists will be able to draw on this material for data visualization and to craft more detailed and meaningful stories about Chicago politics that go beyond the typical mayoral narratives. Chicagoans interested in the history of their city, their ward, their precinct, or their neighborhood will find something about the history of their communities. Chicago loves to talk politics and this will help us do it better.

Why Chicago?

Chicago has been a well-studied center of urban sociology and urban politics that, through the tradition of scholarship coming out of the many Chicago universities, has strongly shaped the way we think about urban history. By taking this new look at Chicago, we can enable an interesting set of inquiries about neighborhoods, political figures, and policymaking that can be a model for other cities around the country.

I also lived in metro Chicago (Evanston) for several years in graduate school and studied the University of Chicago and surrounding for a chapter in my book, Building the Ivory Tower. It is a place I return to for archival research each year, so Chicago also makes sense for me logistically.

How does GIS contribute to a data-rich effort like the Chicago Elections Project and what do you hope people will take away from this?

We’re in the early stages, but when we launch, I envision this project as a comprehensive data resource for Chicago political history – one where users can appreciate the multitude of Chicago political figures, the fine-grained geography of city neighborhoods, and the interaction between space and politics. We live our lives in space, build community in space, and spatial relations structure our politics, whether it be racial segregation, the provision of civic infrastructure, or other investments. So we’d like people to appreciate the historical importance of counting votes, getting out the vote, of targeting appeals to specific neighborhoods and demographics. We recognize all of these things in contemporary political campaigns and elections, but they are hard to reconstruct and do justice to in historical research. Digital data management and mapping technologies help us handle this type of research.

Through a project like this we can also teach history students and research assistants digital skills in the course of building the site and collections. History students learn GIS, HTML coding, image editing, digital archiving, and data management by working on some pieces of a larger digital project as part of their college or grad school experiences. They can go on and apply these skills to their own research or to their career work after graduation.

This project is in its early stages. What obstacles do you face?

Building any new collaboration brings questions and challenges – how much time people can devote to the project, whether we have compatible interests and visions, how we can accumulate the resources to pull it off – and that takes time to negotiate and navigate. There is a set of supportive participants and advisors with interests in Chicago politics (Richard Anderson, Margaret Garb, Brad Hunt, Nora Krinitsky, Christopher Manning, and Christopher Reed, in addition to me), which has been a great help, and we would always welcome additional collaborators.

We next would like to find an institutional home for the project that is publicly engaged with the city of Chicago. Chicago Public Library administrators have not yet agreed to host this as a digital project. It takes a while to reorient institutional priorities and we’re working to get the library to take this project seriously. Some of the staff has been very cooperative in facilitating the digitization phase of the Chicago Elections Project, but we’re just at the start of a long process. Scanning; data entry, checking, and cleaning; creating relational databases; and drawing digital maps in ArcGIS all take a long time and a lot of labor.

Where do you hope it goes in the future?

The ambition is to catalyze a data-enabled, spatially-informed way of approaching urban political history, so building relationships with scholars in other cities could help start that process and demonstrate the possibilities elsewhere. I have just started conversations with a library in New York City that also has a large collection of elections data somewhat like Chicago’s, which may be the first step.

 

The career of Barack Obama prompted several projects examining Chicago politics, from the Making Obama podcast to David Garrow’s book, Rising Star, and Gary Rivlin’s book on Harold Washington, Fire on the Prairie. What does this project have to contribute to our understanding of the already well-trod topic of Chicago politics?

All of those very good projects rely on narratives that are fairly triumphant about racial dynamics – either voters’ acceptance of African American candidates or black elected officials’ skillful navigation of racial politics.

David Axelrod, who worked for both Harold Washington and Barack Obama, tells a tale about how Harold Washington’s mayoral tenure helped pave the way for Barack Obama’s rise. It’s a neat story, and he illustrates it by saying on election night for the Senate primary in 2004, Axelrod checked a northwest side precinct where Washington had faced protests and white opposition. Washington lost the precinct, 10 to 1, but in 2004, Obama carried the precinct. Axelrod’s takeaway is that Chicago grew more tolerant, even in its most regressive neighborhoods, because of Harold Washington.

It’s not as tidy as that. Groups like the “lakefront liberals,” who were supposedly strong supporters of Washington, voted for his opponents, in many precincts, by large majorities. Northwest side precincts were changed as much by demographic transition as by any changes in hearts and minds, and this spatial and voting data helps us investigate that in detail.

So this project can help scholars bring together comprehensive data resources with excellent, synthetic scholarship. The combination of data and narrative can help us enrich the stories that we tell, improve our arguments, and help us appreciate both the optimism and the failures of our very messy democratic process.

Featured image (at top): Chicago silhouette, Chicago, Illinois, photograph by Carol M. Highsmith, between 1980 and 2006, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress 

LaDale Winling is an associate professor of history at Virginia Tech, where he teaches U.S. urban history, digital history, and public history.  He is one of the co-creators of ‘Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America’ and a forthcoming project on U.S. Congressional elections, both part of the American Panorama digital atlas from the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond.  His book on universities and urban politics, Building the Ivory Tower: Universities and Metropolitan Development in the Twentieth Century, was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2017.