Greetings from the Public History Project ! Happy end of the semester and congrats graduates! This month’s installment of the newsletter includes project updates, events, archival finds showing comencements past, new book recommendations, and more!

The University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Public History Project (soon to be the Rebecca M. Blank Center For Campus History) is a multi-year effort to uncover and give voice to those who experienced, challenged, and overcame prejudice on campus. As always, if you have a story to share, an event you think should be researched, or a person you think has been overlooked, please email us at publichistoryproject@wisc.edu.

Meet one of the Project’s student researchers — Siobhan Ryan!

Siobhan is a first year PhD student in History and Educational Policy Studies. She is interested in the link between urban history and universities after WWII. Her work examines how urban university expansion displaced working-class communities of color, contributing to racial and economic stratification in cities.

Siobhan grew up in Sydney, Australia, so she’s unafraid of spiders but is afraid of Americans asking her to pronounce the word “no”. In her spare time, she enjoys watching TV (currently: Succession and The Other Two) and exploring Madison by bike.

Campus was filled earlier this month with people celebrating their hard work and accomplishments during commencement. The UW became an alma mater to thousands of scholars and is preparing to usher in the next class of Badgers come fall. Commencement is not only a time to refresh and begin anew as people start new lives, forge new paths.  It is also a time to regroup— to prepare for how the next school year furthers our mission and purpose, develops our shared beliefs and values.

We have been thinking a lot about what the future looks like for our campus community. What it means for our entire campus community to hold the mission and purpose of the university to high esteem, and how to hold everyone equitably accountable for our believed shared values.

The antiblack racism and hatred expressed in the video that circulated campus this month is unfortunately not the first of its kind in the history of this university. The history of racism and discrimination against Black people at this university is extensive, complex, and heinous. It is deeply rooted in the history of antiblackness in this country and across the globe. With the unfortunate commonality of it in our history, it is hard for some of our community not to believe that others view those sentiments as part of the UW’s shared beliefs and values. We know our community wants a different reality.

As we begin to prepare for the new academic year and reassess our mission and purpose, reenergize our shared beliefs and values, we should do so by making sure the more abhorrent things from our university’s past do not make it into the university’s future. The Blk Pwr Coalition has recently provided the UW with ways to begin that work while Black students and other dedicated community members have advocated for the same. But this important work is not the first of its kind. Similar protests ensued and demands were made as early as 1969 during the Black Student Strike and as recently as 2019 prompted by the Student Inclusion Coalition. The history of resistance at this institution is as expansive and nuanced as the history of exclusion, especially those resistance efforts led by the Black community. 

We will continue the work of making our history available, accessible, and useful to our entire community to use it as a tool to facilitate change. We will also continue to support the efforts of our campus community in advocating for their safety, wellbeing, and belonging on campus. We ask that as we all rejoice in the triumphs of our graduates this year we also remember and honor the work of our current students, and the legacy of advocacy and activism that many UW alumni have contributed to this university and beyond.

Is it defacing government property? Maybe. But it’s also a pretty good entry in the long history of UW students creatively amending their graduation attire for commencement ceremonies.

In this photo from the archives, an unidentified graduate in 1988 uses an America’s Dairyland license plate to celebrate “the end” of their undergrad career during commencement at Camp Randall Stadium.

Join professionals from across campus and the broader Madison community for the university’s annual Women and Leadership Symposium. The event includes opportunities for networking, professional development, learning from women leaders, and sharing of best practices. In addition to the keynote address, there will be 28 breakout sessions on topics related to relationship building, well-being, career management, engagement, inclusion, and diversity and more. 

Tuesday, June 6, 2023 – 8:30 am - 3:30 pm at Union South

Find more info and register here. 

Each month, we like to share one of the many (many… many… ) books that have helped the Public History Project’s research.  

For this edition of the newsletter, we’re recommending On Being Included by Sara Ahmed. The book offers an account of the diversity world based on interviews with diversity practitioners in higher education, as well as Ahmed’s own experience of doing diversity work. Diversity is an ordinary, even unremarkable, feature of institutional life. Yet diversity practitioners often experience institutions as resistant to their work. On Being Included offers an explanation of this apparent paradox, exploring the gap between symbolic commitments to diversity and the experience of those who embody diversity on campuses.

We get asked a lot of questions about UW history. Each month we’ll answer one in the newsletter. This month: What is the history of student demands on campus? 

The answer: Hundreds of UW students gathered in protest this month in response to a racist video circulating on campus and presented administrators with a list of demands to address discrimination at the university. It’s the latest instance in a long history of UW students using formal and informal demands to fight against marginalization. 

The most significant example you may remember from the Sifting & Reckoning exhibition is the list of demands during the 1969 Black Student Strike. Students presented 13 demands to university leadership, the results of two of which still exist on campus today — the creation of the African American Studies Department and the creation of a Black Cultural Center. Similar demands followed in 1988, following a string of racist controversies. In the 1990s, LGBTQ+ students demanded the ROTC be removed from campus for their discrimination against gay students. And students with disabilities demanded equal access to Athletic events. As recently as 2021, members of Black Student Union and Wunk Sheek demanded Chamberlin Rock be removed from campus. In short, students have continually made demands of university administrators to create a more welcoming campus for all. 

We’ll leave you to ruminate on a favorite quote of the Project’s staff:

“Power concedes nothing without a demand.” – Frederick Douglass (1857)

Got a question? Email us uwpublichistoryproject@wisc.edu.

Each month Project Director Kacie Lucchini Butcher will share a book, podcast, movie, quote, or something else she thinks has been adding to the PHP. We're calling it "From The Desk of KLB".

This month From The Desk of KLB, If Books Could Kill. A podcast with the tagline “the airport bestsellers that captured our hearts and ruined our minds,” it features hosts Michael Hobbes and Peter Shamshiri taking critical and irreverent dives into literary blockbusters from self help to pop science.