Image courtesy Christopher Cantwell
Christopher Cantwell
Christopher Cantwell
Scrolling through social media outlets, it’s easy to find how friends are being affected by coronavirus. This is an interesting time in history, and that made one local professor think about how people will look back at this period.
Christopher Cantwell is an Assistant Professor of History at UWM, where he is teaching (digitally for the time being) a class called “Local History Research Methods.” He wasn’t too excited about the idea when he first got the assignment.
“I initially groaned,” says Cantwell. “The phrase ‘local history’ is a very 1980s term that was part of a school of thought that argued that museums should only focus on the antiquarian world around them.”
When he realized he could make the class a laboratory where he and his students could produce local history rather than just talk about it, he got excited. His class had been participating in a project called “Gathering Places,” where students partnered with churches, mosques, synagogues and temples to document their history. When all of the closures started to be announced, he realized that was no longer practical. That’s when he was inspired to start a crowd-sourced digital archive on the impact of coronavirus on people from Milwaukee on an individual basis.
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Cantwell worked with UWM’s Golda Meir Library to put together the website for about a week before it was up and running. On Tuesday (March 17), he launched the site and shared it with his friends on Facebook. Since then (three days), there have been around 40 people who contributed around 50 total posts.
Just like many other workplaces, Cantwell was forced to pivot his working life to strictly online because of COVID-19.
“When my students ‘return’ from spring break, they’re going to collect documents and conduct oral histories with the communities that are really being impacted by this moment—educators, medical professionals, community leaders, grocery store clerks, etc.,” says Cantwell.
