An Illinois Sampler: Teaching and Research on the Prairie

Experiencing Histories of the City Mark D. Steinberg Department of History In my teaching and research I am especially interested in small stories, in the fragments and scattered puzzle pieces the past leaves behind, asking myself and my students how to connect these fragments to larger pictures. It is fine to start with large interpretive questions: in the study of Russian history these might be questions about how the autocracy and empire survived so long, what caused the revolutions of 1917 and brought the Bolsheviks to power, or how to explain the Stalinist Terror. I have found it more fruitful to work toward the answers to such questions through smaller stories—which, after all, is how most people experience history. As a historian, I want students to experience the diversity of other lives by studying times and places different from their own. What has surprised me, but I have come to value, is how students insist on seeing connections to their own lives, to our own times, and how this helps them see the past in fresh ways. I want students to experience the same excitement of discovery and analysis that I find in my own research: seeing connections and patterns in the evidence left of the past and continually asking questions, including about our own questions and assumptions.What they see as they connect their own experiences to the past can surprise me, stimulating me to continually question how I approach the past as a researcher, including how my own experiences shape what I see and the stories I tell. While writing a book about the Russian imperial capital in the years before the 1917 revolution, I developed a new course, Exploring the Modern City (which focuses on London, Paris, Berlin, and St. Petersburg from roughly the 1840s through the 1930s).The book and the course took shape together, simultaneously. The story of their creation illustrates the way I approach the discipline of history. For instance, I asked students to read a newspaper report I had recently encountered, hoping they would share my excitement in stumbling upon it and see the interpretive opportunities it offered. I found it one day while working my way through a yellowed and fragile bound copy of the popular daily newspaper, Petersburgskii listok (the Petersburg sheet), preserved in the newspaper hall of the former Imperial Public Library in St. Petersburg. The story was one of many “adventures” and “incidents” of city life that newspapers recorded, ranging from tram accidents to street fights. I was looking for stories (“evidence”) that might answer my research questions or prompt new ones. One day in January 1910, I read, a merchant from out of town arrived by train at one of the main railroad stations of the capital city. Walking to a nearby hotel, he was approached by two “respectably dressed”young women, complete strangers. One woman warmly embraced the merchant, kissing him on both cheeks, welcoming him to town, while the other started going through his pockets. When he started to shout for help, the woman kissed him tightly on the mouth until her collaborator extricated his wallet and both then fled the scene. I copied the story on note cards, for I recognized it as part of a pattern of confidence games played out in the streets of the “city of strangers.” Then I moved on to other stories. As my students began to interpret this story as evidence, they enjoyed the cleverness of the criminals, including how they could transform their femininity into a type of power.They marveled that kisses and embraces can be weapons. They laughed at the naive small-town merchant, feeling their own superiority of knowledge about the wiles of the city, which Russian newspapers were also trying to encourage in their readers so they would not fall for the confidence games that were everywhere in play on city streets. In many ways this was a story about seeing. Just as the naive merchant from the provinces was fooled by stereotypes in his mind—respectable dress means a respectable person; women are not aggressive—part of the challenge of living in cities is learning to see beyond public masks and our own expectations. Some of the historical studies we discussed in class helped students understand this story. But they also found connections to their own experiences with crime news and with confidence games using email and the internet. Together, drawing on all our knowledge, we began to turn our interpretation of...