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Last summer, Iowa’s Department of Administrative Services (which oversees, among other things, the state’s cultural institutions) announced its plans to shutter the Iowa City branch of the State Historical Society of Iowa (SHSI). Under the pretense of efficiency, its diverse historical collections are to be moved to Des Moines or discarded. This decision — stalled for the moment by a temporary court injunction — was made without meaningful consultation of any of the Iowans who have entrusted the SHSI with their historical records, of the archivists responsible for the security and integrity of those records, or of the scholars and students who employ those records to research and tell Iowa’s history.
As historians at the University of Iowa, all of whom have relied on the local SHSI branch to support our scholarship and our teaching, we decry the threatened closure. We urge the Department of Administrative Services, in consultation with the University of Iowa, to find a way to sustain this treasured local resource. The Legislature is pressing us to be more attentive to our heritage, and to the history of our state, as a foundation of civic education. We take that charge seriously, but losing access to the resources of the SHSI makes it hard to rise to the challenge.
Closure of SHSI’s Iowa City branch will undermine our work — as scholars and teachers — in several ways. First, and foremost, it will dramatically constrain our ability to teach the craft of historical research to our students. History is a social science; archival collections (like SHSI) are our laboratories. Local access to SHSI collections allows us to introduce students to the range and richness of diverse and tangible primary sources — such as Civil War diaries, the letters of farm homemakers, the oral histories of labor union activists, the minutes of women’s clubs, and the personal papers of local and state political figures. Some of SHSI’s material artifacts, such as a piece of plaster allegedly signed by followers of John Brown or a Victorian artwork fashioned from human hair, inspire or even befuddle students, encouraging them to question the past.
In our courses like “History of Iowa and the Midwest” and others, students have conducted research projects on everything from industrial accidents in Cedar Rapids, to labor unrest in Muscatine, to nativist attacks on German speakers in Iowa during World War I. Students have benefited from both the SHSI archive and the expertise of the archivists who work there. Indeed, SHSI has been vitally important to the training of undergraduates in the basics of historical research. The archivists who work there have helped our students learn how to make sophisticated historical arguments about Iowa history, using everything from SHSI’s rich photographic archive to its abundant newspapers.
More broadly, integrating the SHSI and its collections into our classes allows us to teach invaluable research skills. Such skills are important not just to future historians but align to a wide array of workforce fields — the law, property development, K-12 education, corporate communications — in which “job readiness” includes the ability to locate, contextualize and interpret written texts.
Second, the SHSI’s closure threatens our ability, as historians of Iowa, to enrich and disseminate our state’s story. It is essential to maintain these collections where they are accessible to University of Iowa students and scholars. Generations of undergraduate and graduate students have relied on the SHSI’s collections to write K-12 curriculum, undergraduate theses, masters’ essays, and doctoral dissertations on Iowa’s rich and varied history. Our own current research projects include examinations of the Great Migration and its impact in Iowa’s metropolitan counties, patterns of urban unrests in the Midwest, and the history of indigenous peoples in Iowa and the Midwest. Citizen scholars from all over Iowa have used these records to write the histories of their families and communities.
Finally, the closure of the Iowa City SHSI branch threatens the University of Iowa’s broader research enterprise. For decades, the University Libraries and SHSI have collaborated on an efficient and mutually rewarding collections and accessions policy. Many manuscript collections have been archived at the Iowa City branch with the expressed intent that this would make them accessible to UI students and scholars. Moving or removing those collections not only renders them less accessible, but it violates the terms and conditions under which Iowans entrusted those records to SHSI in the first place. In turn, the UI and SHSI have historically coordinated collections: the University Library does not collect state and local history journals, for example, because the SHSI does so. Closing the Iowa City branch would close off local access to these important resources as well.
Closure of Iowa City’s SHSI branch would strangle access to the state’s documentary legacy. It would mean not only losing a valuable archival resource but losing it in the place where its has been (and can continue to be) used by University of Iowa students, scholars, and a wide assortment of visitors to effectively research, teach and learn the craft of history. That history is a powerful force. Like blizzards, derechos, and other environmental phenomenon, the narratives we share shape our civic landscape. Sharing the stories of all Iowans highlights resistance, collaboration, and continual commitment to “our liberties we prize and our rights we will maintain.” A community is nothing without their history. The closure of the SHSI-Iowa City branch poses a grave and multi-generational threat to ours.
Colin Gordon is a professor of history at the University of Iowa. This essay is also signed by Iowa historians Ashley Howard, Linda Kerber, Tyler Priest, Leslie Schwalm, Landon Storrs, Shelton Stromquist, Stephen Warren, Nick Yablon and Cory Young.
For more details on the on-going battle with the State of Iowa – click here.