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Who’s a Brooklynite? Oral Histories from Inventing Brooklyn

Inventing Brooklyn Postcard FINAL2Inventing Brooklyn: People, Places, Progress, now open at Brooklyn Historical Society, traces the evolution of Brooklyn into the place we know today. From Native American roots and lasting Dutch colonial influences to icons such as the Brooklyn Bridge and the Dodgers, Inventing Brooklyn looks at how various peoples, places, and historical events have shaped the development of the borough. 

Brooklyn’s diversity has long been a point of local pride and continues to define the borough today.  The oral histories featured in the exhibit speak to the diversity of Brooklyn’s people, neighborhoods, and many immigrant experiences. 

Paul Mak  was born in Hong Kong and immigrated here with his family.  He is the founder of the Brooklyn Chinese-American Association, which serves the Chinese-American population of Brooklyn, and specifically Sunset Park.  In this clip, Paul recalls his experience at James Madison High School where he witnessed the influx of Chinese immigrants as a student in the 1980s.

8th Avenue Sunset Park Oral History Collection (1993-1994)

Interview date: March 26, 1993

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Encarnacion Armas, a well-educated and well-traveled resident of Brooklyn, describes her involvement with the Puerto Rican community in Brooklyn in the 1940s.  In this clip, Armas reminisces about moving to Bay Ridge as a teenager and shares her experiences serving the Puerto Rican community.

Puerto Rican Oral History Project (1973-1976)

Interview Date: October 21, 1974

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Milton Wurtzel  was born in Manhattan and grew up in the Bronx and in Stuyvesant Heights, Brooklyn on Kosciusko Street. Wurtzel worked at Lieberman Shoe Factory as a foreman and at a slipper factory before he began his job as a welder at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. In this clip, Wurtzel discusses the ethnic diversity at the Navy Yard during the 1940s.

Brooklyn Navy Yard Oral History Project (ongoing)

Interview Date: February 12, 2009

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Inventing Brooklyn: People, Places, Progress was created by the high school students in Brooklyn Historical Society’s Exhibition Laboratory program.  From archival research to writing labels to selecting these oral history clips, the 2011 Ex Lab students worked closely with BHS staff, consulting historians, and professional exhibit designers over the course of the spring in order to make Inventing Brooklyn come to life.

Ex Lab Preps Students for College

As the Ex Lab students put the finishing touches on their exhibit, Christina Valdez took a moment to share some of the ways working on Ex Lab has helped her prepare for the challenges of college.

Thanks, Christina!

Open to the Ideas of Others Working on Ex Lab

Guest Ex Lab Blogger: Christina Valdez (Cobble Hill School of American Studies)

Guest Ex Lab Blogger: Christina Valdez (Cobble Hill School of American Studies)

My name is Christina Valdez I am a senior at Cobble Hill School of American Studies. This is my third year in Exhibition Laboratory (“Ex Lab”) and this year’s exhibit, Inventing Brooklyn: People, Places, Progress opens this Thursday, June 2nd.

One of the main skills I learned in Ex Lab was to be more open towards people’s ideas. I wrote a panel for one of the exhibits and I was having trouble formulating the words. When one of my colleagues came over to help and give their opinion on my writing, it felt good to know that someone is there to help you when you need it. Their ideas helped me to check my grammar and spelling so that I have a better understanding of what I want to really convey.

Another example was when we all began choosing the design for the exhibit’s promotional postcard. The majority of my colleagues went with one design while I wanted another but, after they explained why many choose another design, it made me realize that I liked the other design as well.

Being open to other people’s ideas will be helpful to me because when I start college in the fall there will be people that have different opinions about various subjects. It is important for me to know that what brings people together is the fact we are open toward ideas and experiences that we may never have dreamed of otherwise. Ex Lab was an experience that I will never forget.

Ex Lab students working together in the Brooklyn Historical Society library.

Ex Lab students working together in the Brooklyn Historical Society library.

All photos in this post by Keiko Niwa.

Inventing This Year’s Ex Lab Exhibit: People, Stages, Progress

This spring, BHS’s fifth annual Exhibition Laboratory after-school museum studies program is underway. The fourteen participating high school students are hard at work co-curating BHS’s newest exhibit. A few of the students wanted to give you the inside scoop on what it’s been like to work on the project. It’s my pleasure to introduce guest blogger, Brooklyn Technical High School junior Neil Alacha.

Thanks, Neil!

Inventing This Year’s Ex Lab Exhibit: People, Stages, Progress

Guest Ex Lab Blogger: Neil Alacha (Brooklyn Tech)

Guest Ex-Lab Blogger: Neil Alacha (Brooklyn Tech)

by Neil Alacha

For several years, BHS has run Exhibition Laboratory (or Ex Lab, as we call it), a program that lets interested high-school students such as myself curate an exhibit that will then be put up for display. You may have seen last year’s exhibit, “Home Base,” a nostalgic tribute to the Brooklyn Dodgers and Ebbets Field. It sure was a home run! This year, those of us in Ex Lab were given the challenging – but exciting – task of bringing together into one exhibit all of Brooklyn’s history; Native Americans, Breuckelen, Brooklyn, and everything in between. We began towards the end of January, and have been meeting every Tuesday and Thursday since, so that our exhibit will be ready for viewing on June 2nd.

The toughest part about our exhibit has been figuring out how to organize it. With such an expansive array of topics to cover, we knew we had to subdivide the exhibit into more manageable sections. But what would those sections be? And how many should we have? We figured that the best way to answer those questions was just to start working on the exhibit and see where it leads us. After some greatly appreciated insight from our two historians, Professors Ted Burrows and Craig Wilder, and a preliminary perusing of the BHS Collection, we had a rough idea of how the exhibit would look, with seven sections in mind: Native Americans, Colonial Brooklyn, American Revolution, Print Culture, Abolitionism and the Civil War, Immigration and Consolidation, and Pop Culture.

Just when we thought we had crossed the first hurdle, however, we soon found that after coming up with those seven sections, we had more questions and doubts than before. Many of the objects we wanted to display and stories that we wanted to tell seemed to overlap between categories. We knew we needed to change our game plan. After some creative thought, we decided that rather than focus on chronological sections, we would create thematic sections. As a result of that development, we are now confident in our current plan, which includes five sections: People, Places, Wars, Print Culture, and Brooklyn’s Image.

Ex Lab students researching BHS's archival materials to chose objects for their exhibit.

Ex Lab students researching BHS's archival materials to choose objects for their exhibit.

Concurrently with deciding on the content and layout of our exhibit, we also had to select a title. The few weeks we spent on brainstorming and debating possible titles felt like a nerve-wracking limbo period – our designers needed a title to aid them for inspiration, and we needed a title to begin to publicize the exhibit. To start off, each student in Ex Lab came up with at least one possible title. Here is a sampling of the ideas we threw out there: Inventing Brooklyn: From Farming Village to Urban Jungle (my own creation), Building Brooklyn: Brick by Brick, Inventing Brooklyn: Collage of a Borough’s Past, and Brooklyn: The Amazing History, to name a few.

Ex Lab students using a classic democratic method to choose potential exhibit titles.

Ex Lab students using a classic democratic method to choose potential exhibit titles.

From all of our titles, we chose five or so of our favorites and sent them to the BHS staff for input. “Inventing Brooklyn: Collage of a Borough” emerged as the front runner. But after a follow-up meeting with Professor Wilder, however, we realized that we needed to do better. “Collage of a Borough” would not give prospective visitors any more information about our exhibit than “Inventing Brooklyn” gives. We needed a more descriptive subtitle. Professor Wilder gave us the idea of somehow including “People” in the title; after all, it’s the people of Brooklyn who make it so special, right? After a few days of back-and-forth, and quite a few word changes, order shifts and punctuation doubts, we finally landed on “Inventing Brooklyn: People, Places, Progress.” And we couldn’t be happier.

I hope you enjoyed reading my snapshot on this year’s Ex Lab. You can look forward to hearing the perspectives of other Ex Lab students in the weeks that follow. I can’t wait to see you on June 2nd, when our exhibit officially opens!

All photos in this post by Keiko Niwa.

Students and Faculty in the Archives

Connecting to Universities

The Brooklyn Historical Society has officially kicked off our Students and Faculty in the Archives (SAFA) project.  The BHS has long been committed to introducing students of all ages and backgrounds to our remarkable facilities and collections.

SAFA is a three-year, US Department of Education Fund for the Improvement of Post Secondary Education (FIPSE) grant that will create a replicable pedagogical model for collaboration between museums like BHS and institutions of higher learning.

In the first year, we will be working with local partners from New York City College of Technology; Long Island University, Brooklyn Campus; and St. Francis College.  First-year undergraduate researchers will have the chance to conduct archival research in the Othmer Library and to create physical and digital exhibits with BHS. 

Over 20 enthusiastic faculty collaborators representing a wide range of disciplines came to the February 25th SAFA planning meeting with ideas and energy to spare.  Deborah Mutnick, Professor of English and Director of the Writing Program at LIU Brooklyn, reported, “We all walked away feeling very energized and excited about the project.“

BHS Welcomes SAFA Staff

To help support this exciting new venture, BHS has hired two new staff members:

Robin M. Katz, Outreach and Public Services Archivist, was previously the Outreach Librarian for the University of Vermont Libraries’ Center for Digital Initiatives.  At UVM, Robin helped a wide range of constituents collaboratively produce unique digital research collections.  She has also worked to connect people to primary sources at Kent State University’s Special Collection and Archives Department, Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Ingalls Library, and the Cleveland Institute of Art’s Gund Library.  She expects that SAFA will demonstrate the many benefits of incorporating primary source research in undergraduate education, and she hopes the project will inspire similar collaborations nationwide.

Julie Golia, Public Historian at BHS, is a scholar of American history, with interests in the history of women and gender, race, popular culture, and media.  Julie received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2010, where she served as a teaching fellow and wrote a dissertation examining the cultural and economic history of advice columns in early twentieth-century newspapers.  As a public historian, Julie has helped produce documentaries including the 2003 film “Tupperware!”   She has researched and curated exhibits at the New York Historical Society and the Columbia Rare Book and Manuscript Library.  And she gives vibrant and informative walking tours in neighborhoods across Brooklyn and Manhattan.  She hopes that SAFA will continue to break down boundaries between academic and public history, and reveal the intellectual joys of using the BHS collections to a new generation of students.

Looking Forward

Robin, Julie, and the SAFA faculty will spend the next several months immersed in the BHS collections. A good deal of research, planning, and collaborating will occur during the upcoming SAFA Summer Institute at BHS. The result will be archives-based approaches for courses in History, Photography, English, Architecture, and many other disciplines. 

We are looking forward to sharing our discoveries and ideas with the BHS blog.  Check back soon for more updates on our work!

Remembering First Grade

BHS partnered with the Brooklyn School of Inquiry (BSI), a citywide gifted and talented school located in Bensonhurst, to conduct oral history interviews with all of the students in the school’s first First Grade class.  Although these narrators are only 6 or 7 years old, their interviews add much to BHS’s Oral History collection, documenting important things about life in Brooklyn in 2010, including details that can only be captured by youthful candor.  Students will receive copies of their interviews when they graduate from 8th Grade in 2017.

Check out this video from BSI’s series A School Grows in Brooklyn: