Ode to My History Professors

Week 11

This week, I developed a new appreciation for all the work my various history professors have done to develop the skills needed for working with primary documents. While I did move forward in scanning and documenting the two boxes I organized last week, I spent a lot of time this week going through the last three boxes of unorganized material. As the majority of these documents are not easily identified, this process took a fair amount of analysis on my part. To top it off, many of these documents are from the turn of the twentieth century. The older the materials are, the more difficult they are to physically handle (the paper is often very thin and/or significantly faded), and read (the handwriting can be difficult to decipher, both due to the fading ink and the handwritten style of the time). As a result, I often utilized the skills I’ve been taught by my professors to review and analyze these primary documents. That education made this process significantly easier!

I encountered a few difficulties this week. For one, analyzing and organizing these new files took a fair amount of time. Fortunately, as all of the files relate to the history of River Forest in one way or another, the fact that I was born and raised in this down gives me a great amount of insight into its history and allows me to contextualize the material. For another, I had to be very careful with the materials themselves. I once again used gloves when handling the majority of these files, which helped prevent me from smudging or ripping the pages. However, the most significant concern I encountered was one of a practical nature. With the delicate nature of the older documents, I can’t scan them in bulk without tearing them, so I have to scan each file individually. As the majority of the documents in the final two boxes are individual leafs of paper, that’s a lot of material to scan individually. As time consuming as this process is, I did manage to scan and document another box of materials.