My Research Process: Applications Beyond Chicago
This unit might seem less relevant to someone who does not live in Chicago. Yet, the process I went through to create the document sets for each time period are reproducible and can be applied to any locale. My starting point was to read multiple monographs about the specific neighborhood. Not only did this solidify my understanding of the larger narrative of the community and its place in the city and national history but it also gave me small excerpts to use as secondary documents to help students make sense of what they are seeing. Armed with a greater depth of the narrative I could seek out the sources that best represented a mosaic of partial stories to help my students put the puzzle together for themselves. In one book I found a copy of a 1909 map of population density within the neighborhood. I knew I wanted to show my students what this density looked like at a house level. Once I identified the most densely populated street, I sought out census records from 1900, 1910, 1920 from the same two addresses. Through my local history museum, primary and secondary texts, and the Library of Congress site, I was also able to find images of people in the neighborhood during the three time periods. Similarly maps of the area can be found in housing reports and other government documents as well as the Sanborn Fire maps that are often available at your local library. Finally, I was able to find translation of foreign language newspapers such as the Polish language, Dziennik Zwizkowy, and Lietuva, a Lithuanian language newspaper for students to get a sense of the community building and sustaining that occurred outside of the working hours.
An important part of our study in seminar focused on seeking the spaces where immigrants encountered one another. So much of the past historiography on immigrants and ethnic enclaves speaks to the isolation and segregation of ethnic groups. Yet, in reality there were many places of interaction including (but not limited to) work, labor union halls, settlement houses, saloons, and dance halls. These encounters show both the ways in which people were shaping their own lives and spaces, but also the fluidity of membership groups within a community.
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