My grandfather, Ernest Winling, spent his youth in the Soo, enlisted in the Navy in 1942 and spent the war years overseas, then returned home to the Soo to marry his next-door neighbor, work as a painter at the Kincheloe Air Force Base and as a freelance house painter, have three kids with my grandmother, and has spent the last 35 years as an outdoorsman, fishing and hunting his way through the seasons.

Four Winling Generations

The Soo is a quite small town (~14,000), but I always enjoy visiting. There are two main attractions and drivers to the economy, the Soo Locks, an Army Corps of Engineers project dating back to the 1850s to facilitate Great Lakes shipping through the St. Mary’s River falls, and Lake Superior State University, a 4-year college of 2500 students. Whenever I’m thinking about a site in the American landscape, I turn to the digital collections of the Library of Congress, and the LOC does not disappoint. The Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) documented the hell out of the Locks in 2000 (probably before the latest lock was rebuilt) and has pretty much everything you could want for visual information.

Enjoy.

The Locks at Sault Ste. Marie

Evanston’s no Rome, but it’s pretty nice. Even better, I think since I have been living at moderate altitude the last 4 months (Blacksburg is a 2100 feet), I feel much better running these days.

Later this week I should be getting a new laptop and monitor from my employer. The one I’m currently working on has been held together with chewing gum duct tape and whispered prayers. It’s been in particularly rough shape since it fell off a ledge at a Starbucks in London last July, which cracked the screen in an unsightly spiderweb.

Sticking with a MacBook Pro, going to have a dual-boot machine so I can run ArcGIS, and getting a big desktop monitor.

Based on that experience, I offer some advice for students applying to this kind of program, a mid-level MA at a fairly robust university:

Test Scores: There are a variety of attitudes about GREs. For many, GREs are of high importance since they are the only equivalent measure among students and disciplines. However, they are clearly problematic and in no way objective measures of ability or potential. For the most part, GREs are a kind of gateway or early filter for the application pile — your GREs have to meet a certain baseline number, but it is unlikely that it will get you in or be a decisive factor.

Personal/Research Statement: This is not a personal or autobiographical statement, whatever it is called. Grad admissions committees don’t particularly care about your personal story — that’s something undergrad admissions people look for. We do not want to hear how you have always loved history. We also do not want to know how you always wanted to become a history professor. The former means you have not been adequately challenged in your undergrad career and you don’t really understand what the intellectual work of a historian is about. The latter means you do not really understand what the job a history professor is about — there are few jobs, they are highly demanding, and things are getting worse.

What do we want to hear about in your statement? Your research interests and an analysis of the topic you want to study. This is more or less a research statement and should be written as such. You might include a few details about how you became interested in the topic (a professor’s course or a study abroad experience), but the point is you have to show that you are already prepared to do the intellectual work required in graduate school. Always be preparing for the next stage. Also, make some reference to members of the faculty you would be interested in working with and why — tell them why that department is the right place for you.

Letters of Recommendation: There is often a tradeoff or sliding scale between the prominence of the letter writers and the detail and amount of positive material they provide about you. A baseline for a strong application — three letter writers who are visiting assistant professors or tenure track professors (ie engaged in a research trajectory), with whom you have taken two classes each (and done well), and with one of whom you worked on an intensive, high-level research project like an undergrad thesis, a significant independent study, or some kind of capstone seminar. These people will have position in the field, a meaningful gauge of your research prospects, and the ability to write well about you. If this is not possible (and for all but honors college students or students at small liberal arts colleges, it is likely not), you will have some decisions to make. It is almost always better to have a letter from a tenure track faculty member than from a graduate student, even a candidate who taught his or her own course. The only exception is if the tt faculty member would write less than a page about you. An adjunct letter writer would not hurt you, for example, if they are a practicing professional at something and you are going into a professional program, like public history or museum studies. Much of this kind of information — what kind of letter-writer is senior professor so-and-so? — is not really available to undergraduates. What to do? Talk to your advisor (and if you don’t have an advisor who is your strong advocate, you might want to reconsider grad school) and ask about the people you are thinking of asking to write for you. Without getting into department politics, your advisor should be able to gently steer you to a good set of letter writers and away from any problem professors.

Writing Sample: You have to illustrate three things: you know how to work with archival or other primary source material; that you have read the relevant literature; and, ideally, that you understand how those works were shaped by intellectual forces and responded or revised the subfield. This paper has to be sharp, and will have to impress quickly, so take as many revisions as necessary. It is not necessary that this paper be the one you got the highest grade on — you may have had a great idea and project that just couldn’t come together and flopped, but it still has that top-side potential if you put a month or two of work into it. If you have an undergrad thesis, one of the chapters would be a good writing sample. Also, make sure you have structured the paper and writing well, so that it can be skimmed and evaluated quickly by the committee. Tighten up the prose and excise rambling digressions.

And good luck!

*Note, this is not advice for those applying to PhD programs. Some of the principles are the same, but in that case the grain is much finer and there is less room for error.

Recently I have been working on a chapter on Austin, Texas, and the relationship between higher education institutions (eg UT) and the federal government at mid-century. Prompted by this, I have gone back through some of my PWA research from the National Archives (map, images). You might know that New Deal programs were amazingly robust in documenting their own work and operations, in part to be able to issue promotional reports and other documentary materials to justify their continuation in the face of conservative criticism. These are now wonderful sources for historians to draw upon.

In the course of reading one report I found a quite striking project. Ohio Stadium, the famed Horseshoe football stadium at Ohio State University, included dormitories for most of the 20th century. During the Great Depression, a group of students set up cooperative housing with the help of OSU’s dean of men. Later, OSU applied to the PWA for a grant to expand and update the stadium, including the cooperative dormitory. In institutions all around the country, cooperatives sprang up or expanded during the Depression (like the Coops at Michigan, started by a socialist organization), but inclusion within a major public building like a stadium (though football stadia are often underutilized) seems like a quite innovative response.

A wonderful source. Unfortunately, these are given a hefty price tag by ProQuest, to the point where most universities don’t subscribe to all states. The nation’s knowledge behind a paywall.

What am I working on now? My main effort is revising a book chapter on Austin, Texas. I’ve got research assistants preparing two GIS projects that will be great when they are done. Then there’s an article on Philadelphia, urban renewal, and historic preservation. Almost ready to announce are two public history projects that are fairly exciting. More soon.

As other members of the working group have noted, academic historians and popular audiences alike tend to recognize the importance of the New Deal and much of its legacy.¹ In the course of my research, however, I have come to believe that both scholars and the public underestimate the extent and scope of the New Deal’s work relief and public works projects. The PWA, for example, provided grants and loans to public institutions of higher education for housing, administrative, instructional and maintenance facilities. In total, the PWA enabled the creation of 1286 college buildings worth $747 million² through $83 million in grants and $29 million in loans.³ At my institution, Virginia Tech (then Virginia Polytechnic Institute), the PWA helped fund the construction or expansion of 14 buildings, including what is now the administration building, the student center, and several dormitories — Virginia Tech, in terms of its physical plant, is a New Deal institution.

Owing to this underestimation, I am interested in building out such a national inventory to help reinvigorate popular appreciation of the New Deal, making it publicly accessible through the web, and enriching it with historical data and media including photographs, oral histories, film, and audio, where possible. While a number of recent controversies and the broader conservative effort to roll back the New Deal have rallied defenders to the Roosevelt administration’s relief and infrastructure efforts, my experience indicates that a broader-based effort to reconnect the public with New Deal public and art works would be more effective in building public support than targeted defense of particular projects or the Roosevelt administration.

In pursuit of this project, I would like to suggest a mixed strategy of centralized and decentralized efforts including building a central inventory through National Archives research, but enriching it through state-level efforts or crowdsourced contributions led by working group participants. I could contribute my PWA higher ed database, for example, and lead groups in photographing or researching the history of individual VA sites. While such a strategy would lead to uneven enrichment, it would provide a central spine of information to build from, and would allow for school groups, college courses, or communities of interest at the public history grassroots to make a meaningful contribution to a national effort that also expressed local or regional pride.

10. Reconstructing the New Deal: Towards a National Inventory of New Deal Art and Public Works
Facilitators:
Eileen Eagan, University of Southern Maine; eagan@usm.maine.edu
Gray Brechin, University of California at Berkeley; gbrechin@berkeley.edu
Sean Lent, Independent Scholar; sean.lent@maine.edu

This working group centers on interdisciplinary efforts to locate, collect, and bring to light the federally sponsored art and public works of the New Deal. We also plan to relate discussion of New Deal projects to recent controversies such as that over the labor history mural in Maine. This is public history in terms of locating and interpreting public sources and also doing so in relation to public policy. It also represents cultural democracy on the edge of capitalism, and its crash. This revival and renewal of New Deal history seems especially essential in light of recent debates over the impact of New Deal policy and efforts to forget or distort the legacy of those policies. A group at the University of California at Berkeley has developed the California Living New Deal project to map New Deal projects in California. Groups elsewhere, including Maine, have engaged students in similar projects in those areas. A new project could expand these efforts into a national inventory. This working group will bring together faculty and students involved in these efforts. We invite others from around the country to join us in this discussion and planning to pursue this project. Eileen Eagan and Sean Lent will discuss and present results from the activity in Maine. Gray Brechin, from the Geography department at UC Berkeley will discuss his experiences and plans based on the California project. He will also assert the urgent need for a national inventory of New Deal public works. Discussion by the people attending the working group will follow short presentations by Brechin, Eagan and Lent. This working group will take place at the Milwaukee Public Museum, a short two block walk from the Frontier Airlines Center.

I have been poking around in the Virginia Tech Special Collections recently doing some scout work for my classes, especially a class I am focusing on Blacksburg in the 1930s. Recently I came across an extensive collection pertaining to a Roanoke architectural firm, Smithey & Boynton, and today I was looking at some from a Richmond firm, Carneal and Johnston — both of whom designed buildings in Blacksburg and on the VPI (VT) campus. In trying to learn a bit more about the firms I found some other collections as well as some digital materials.

No MA theses, though. The MA thesis is a product that seems to be in decline as programs focus either on seminar papers that could turn into articles or on pushing the dissertation and not worrying about the MA thesis along the way. Not quite the bite size of a seminar paper/article, and not quite big or original enough to create new scholarly frameworks, the MA thesis seems to be the red-headed stepchild of academic products.

It is a work of scholarship I have an increasing appreciation for. In that the intellectual ambitions are typically fairly modest, the scope of theses often really are manageable in size. In addition, since students are not trying to make their career based on it, they don’t often push the boundaries of theory or creativity. Instead, they are often solid exercises in demonstrating mastery over a broad topic and specific ability with a manageable set of sources. Just the kind of thing I’d like to see students do for a firm like Smithey & Boynton or Carneal & Johnston.

I’m in the early stages of a career and won’t have the opportunity to do much with these materials, much as I might like to get to know all about architecture in Virginia. But I got excited thinking about the possibilities of Virginia Tech students doing MA theses on firms like these — it really would be a great set of projects that could be valuable resources for scholars, researchers, and the public in years to come. Just reading the finding aids is not enough background on the firms, the principals, or their buildings. Digital catalogues don’t offer the appropriate context or analysis. Only an actual narrative piece of scholarship can both give the background information and make an argument about the trajectory of the firm over time. And an MA thesis would be just about right for one of these firms or another. So students: think about it.

Carneal & Johnston resources: Digital Library of Virginia (photos)

Carneal & Johnston papers

Smithey & Boynton papers

More Smithey & Boynton papers