Editor’s Note: This is part of a series called UChicago Class Visits, spotlighting transformative classroom experiences and unique learning opportunities offered at UChicago.
The thought of an archive might bring to mind images of dusty books and dark basements where items are stored but rarely touched. A new course at the University of Chicago is proving otherwise.
“Archived Chicago: Uncovering the Hidden Stories of the Second City” takes students into real collections across the city to learn how they actually work—as well as how to harness these often overlooked assets for their own research.
“I wanted to teach students how to use an archive but not keep them contained to a classroom,” said Nick Foster, the assistant instructional professor who leads this new offering from Chicago Studies. “This class gets them out into a city that is steeped in such fascinating history where they can explore these resources and meet the people who help preserve it for generations to come.”
Each archive tells a different story
The class visited a different archive each week, learning how each is compiled and maintained to best preserve its historical record.
Locations ranged from UChicago’s very own Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center to the Harold Washington Library Center and the Stockyard Institute at the DePaul Art Museum.
At the Harold Washington Library, the largest public library building in the world, students met with one of the Chicago Public Library’s archivists to understand what goes into the job of organizing and displaying its exhibits. In a later discussion with Stockyard Institute founder Jim Duignan, students explored the idea of an archive not as a static collection of items but as an ever-evolving display of artistic expression that captures moments in time.
These looks behind the curtain gave first-year student Jacqueline Collins a unique understanding of the work that goes into maintaining a collection, including the impact that financial resources have on one.
“We have been able to hear from all different perspectives and it’s been enlightening,” she said. “However, we also learned that an archive greatly depends on funding and how each allocates their limited resources in order to keep the preservation of history going.”
Foster doesn’t just want the students to know where to go when they need a rare book to provide their next paper’s source material. Learning how to interpret what you find in each archive is just as important.
“It’s useful for students to see how the story that survives is that story that is preserved,” he said. “There are basic facts that we can agree on. For example, we know that the Haymarket Affair took place on specific days but the meaning of the documents and items that have been found on the grounds are open to interpretation. These archives that collect and maintain these items play a major role in how we look at history.”
Researching the research
The age of digitalization has put a universe of information in the hands of anyone with an Internet connection.
However, Foster would argue that even being able to look up documents from a website takes away from the experience that one would have if they were to do it in person.
“We’ve been conditioned to be able to get answers right away, but deep thinking and researching something takes time,” he said. “It takes being wrong a lot and finding the unexpected in papers, letters or even obscure objects that eventually lead to the stories that explain something bigger than the questions they started with.”
Collins, a political science major, took the class to learn more about Chicago but came away with a deeper appreciation for how these archives will continue to help her throughout her educational and professional career.
“I have a newfound respect for the sources found in non-fiction books now that I know how archives played a pivotal role in allowing those works to come together,” she said. “The class has deepened my appreciation for history, primary sources and ephemera and I hope to incorporate this knowledge into my work moving forward.”
That takeaway is exactly what Foster was hoping his students would find during their series of visits.
To drive it home, he asked them to research an archive and use its collection as the basis for a future project, whether that be an academic thesis, a documentary or a longform non-fiction investigation.
The open-endedness of the final project is intentional,as Foster hopes the class has instilled a sense of excitement in asking deeper questions about topics that they have always wanted to know more about.
“I hope they’ll take this experience forward, even beyond academia, so that they’ll know how to research questions that may arise in their professional lives or at least scrutinize what others have written,” he said. “I think it’s important in the age of search engines, AI and instant gratification to learn how to navigate these immense, and often intimidating, wells of knowledge.”
—A version of this story is published on the University of Chicago College website.
