History students develop valuable skills in lab setting

History students develop valuable skills in lab setting

Research tracks early Native and African American citizenship

The students working with Margaret Newell in her historical research lab at The Ohio State University over the summer spent a lot of time looking at original documents. It was challenging for them, said Newell, a distinguished professor of history.

"Looking at 18th-century manuscripts isn't easy," she said.

Despite some unfamiliarity with script handwriting, Newell's students persevered and gained valuable research experience during the four-week lab. In its second year, the lab is funded by a grant from the Mellon Foundation. Over three years, Newell's team, including faculty from Case Western Reserve University and the University of Victoria, who earned their PhD's at Ohio State, will receive $493,000 to research African and Native American citizenship.

"The grant is under a rubric of civic engagement and higher learning," Newell said. "So, I think Mellon expected applications about the modern Civil Rights Movement, but we surprised them by pitching and asking questions about this instead."

Newell's research focuses on the years between 1780 and 1920.

"We're seeking ways to get at these questions: What's going on with Native Americans and African Americans in terms of voting, in terms of citizenship, in terms of other expressions of community and belonging - the founding of schools and land ownership rights advocacy, access to public 'goods' like parks and streetcars, and the creation of independent political organizations?" she said. "Native Americans had to decide at different times and places whether the benefits of U.S. citizenship outweighed the loss of sovereignty and citizenship within their tribal nation."

In the first year, Newell's team worked locally and primarily with digital resources. For the second year, she and co-researchers Noël Voltz, John Bickers and Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles wanted the students to experience more fieldwork. The lab has traveled to different parts of Ohio, Massachusetts and Rhode Island, and met with descendants of people who were removed from land they owned, as well as the descendants of people who were able to stay.

"We're interested in both: the communities that persist and the communities that don't," she said. "What are some of the factors that cause these communities to disappear? Do people move voluntarily, were they subject to the race massacres we know were happening in different parts of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois before and after the Civil War?"

Interviewing subjects in person, sometimes on their original land, was a first for many of Newell's students.

"Talking to these descendant communities has been particularly moving," she said. "The idea that we can assist in telling their stories is interesting to students."

Students leave the lab with extensive research skills that are useful not only in academic settings but professional ones, Newell said.

"It's an employable skill," she said. "I have this question; how do I answer it? What sorts of things can I look at? … It's being a detective. It's being creative. It's thinking about what might help me answer these questions."

In fact, Newell's lab has become a model for research practices.

"The National Park Service is interested in what we're doing," she said. "They want to send their scholars and researchers to the lab. They're interested in helping smaller historical sites get recognition. … We're talking about workshops and not just for higher ed but for people in this profession, broadly, of researching, interpreting and sharing American history."

This kind of lab-based research is just as valuable to the humanities as it is to STEM fields, Newell said.

"Labs are where research occurs," she said. "And history is a research-based discipline. We're not making things up. We're not going over the same ground. We're trying to ask questions that haven't been asked before or answer questions that people may think can't be answered."

For Newell, the question she and her students circle back to is "What is the purpose of the humanities?"

"Is it to reaffirm what we already know or is it to break new ground?" she said. "We think there's plenty of new ground to be broken and stories to incorporate into the larger history of the United States."

More Ohio State News