Session 5 Abstracts

Citizen Historian: Crowd Sourced Public History, Undergraduate Learning, and Chicago’s Pullman Community

Jane Baxter, DePaul University
Andrew H. Bullen, Historic Pullman Foundation
Samuel Mitchell, DePaul University Class of 2024

How can organizations interested in community history and heritage leverage the power of individual citizens to help produce and present historical research to the broader public? How might undergraduate students participate in such an endeavor? These questions helped guide an experimental and experiential course in public history in Chicago’s Pullman Community. This community on the far south side of Chicago has for decades been a place of active, grassroots efforts in preservation, interpretation, and presentation of local history. When the neighborhood became a National Historical Park in 2015, much of these efforts were shifted towards the National Park Service. This partnership between DePaul University and the Historic Pullman Foundation sought a way to find new avenues of grassroots participation through the Pullman House History Project. The Pullman House History Project involves a database created by Andrew Bullen that enumerates the residents of every Pullman home address using “snapshot” sources (city directories, census records etc.) from 1883-1950. This course established research teams comprised of a DePaul undergraduate and a Pullman resident, and each team researched the resident’s address using additional historical sources, such as newspapers, Ancestry.com, and company publications. These sources were used to create “house history” narratives that tell the story of the residents who lived at a particular address over time. These house histories are now available on the internet for interested members of the public, and poster versions of the projects were on display at the National Historic Park over the summer. This presentation, given by the professor, community partner/project developer, and student teaching assistant will introduce the project as an endeavor in research and pedagogy, and share some of the outcomes that might be used by other researchers and instructors in Chicago and beyond.

Using Google Maps for Crime Analysis

Andrea Krieg, Elmhurst University

This session will discuss a student research project that uses Google Maps for systematic social observation. This project comes from Sampson's sociological and criminological work in Chicago and his book The Great American City. The project uses all publicly available data to help students draw conclusions about the connections between disorder and crime. It can also be used to teach students about social research methods or even historical concepts, like redlining.