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Unless otherwise noted, editorial narrative is by Rima Lunin
Schultz.
Urban Experience in Chicago: Hull-House and Its Neighborhoods,
1889-1963, is a history website that has been constructed
at the University of Illinois at Chicago and is sponsored
by the College of Architecture and the Arts and the Jane Addams
Hull-House Museum. Construction of the site began in the spring
of 2002, and the site was launched on January 27, 2003, with
the basic elements of its overall design in place. Work continues
as we refine the major sections and add new material.
This history website has been conceived as an on-going research
project that engages scholars and students at the University
of Illinois at Chicago. As we finish new research initiatives
we will integrate them into the existing structure of the
site. In some cases new work provokes the construction of
different formats on the website to express and visualize
the content. The Timeline,
described below, was designed as a result of our interest
in using images rather than text to "narrate" the life of
Jane Addams. The website is completely searchable and contains
more than 900 separate texts, including correspondence, newspaper
articles, unpublished memoirs, magazine and journal articles,
maps, and hundreds of images of historic significance for
documenting the life and times of Jane Addams, the history
of the social settlement movement and of Hull-House, and the
history of the Near West Side neighborhood and its immigrant
communities.
Besides this Introduction page, the Urban Experience
website is divided into six major sections: Historical
Narrative, Timeline,
Images,
Geography,
Teachers'
Resources, and Search.
Each section has a different focus and strategy to engage
viewers in the subject matter.
When you turn to Historical
Narrative, you will find an index listing twelve major
chapters and numerous subsections. These subsections contain
lists of historical documents (including letters, newspaper
and magazine articles, memoirs, unpublished manuscripts).
All of these documents have been transcribed for the site
and some also contain a PDF version to capture the actual
historical image. Also listed in the subsections are galleries
of images and essays written by historians specifically for
this website. The twelve chapters are:
Beginnings
of Settlement Life in Chicago
The
Social Settlement as Contested Space
Constructing
the Hull-House Complex
Social
Research and Social Activism at Hull-House
The
Nature of Residency
The
Resident as Labor Activist: A Contested Role
Immigration
and Migration: Ideas of Race, Citizenship, and Community
Hull-House
and Education
Cultural
Space in the City and Neighborhood
Recreational
and Public Space
Jane
Addams: The Personal and the Political
Hull-House
After Jane Addams
Each of the chapters contains an interpretive narrative, selected
essays and images, and a great variety of historical texts
including relevant letters, memoirs, newspaper and magazine
articles, popular literature, political tracts and cartoons.
The Timeline
contains an animated photo biography of Jane Addams that runs
with Flash player 6.0. Images of Addams are arranged both
chronologically and topically, and contain annotations written
by the Editors of the site.
The Images
section takes viewers directly into the image essays that
the Editors have created. These image essays are listed under
the chapters in which they appear and contain brief descriptions
of the photographs and illustrations in each essay. Once "inside"
an image essay, you may click on a thumbnail image to see
a larger image with a caption and full citation, and then
make your way through the rest of the essay by clicking "Previous
Image" or "Next Image."
The Geography
section contains historic neighborhood maps in PDF format
as well as a series of reconstructed ground plans of the Hull-House
complex that were created for the Urban Experience site using
data gathered by architectural historian Vincent L. Michael.
These ground plans reveal the ways in which the Hull-House
complex grew and changed over its 74 year history on Halsted
Street.
The Teachers'
Resources section contains a variety of materials designed
to guide curriculum focussed on Jane Addam's best-known work,
Twenty Years at Hull-House. Drawing on scholarly research
by Addams biographers and Hull-House historians, the Editors
use this section to problematize the concepts of autobiography
and history and reveal the ways in which Addams fictionalizes
and mythologizes her own history and that of Hull-House. Included
is a set of study questions and comments related to one critical
chapter of Addams's book: "Reading
Chapter 5: 'First Days at Hull-House.'" This study
guide introduces primary sources (such as letters and newspaper
articles) that address the same points that Addams makes about
the development of the settlement. Teachers and students are
asked to interrogate these documents and consider the ways
in which they challenge the story that Addams tells. The Editors
also use an image essay "Illustrating
Twenty Years at Hull House: Ladies' Home Journal,
Lewis Hine and Norah Hamilton" to encourage teachers
and students to think about the meaning of the photographs
and illustrations that Addams and her publishers used to tell
her story.
Finally, the Search
page allows you to find primary and secondary source documents
from the Historical Narrative by title, author, advanced author
(which allows you to narrow your search by typing in an author's
name, date of publication, and type of document), or word
or exact phrase from a document. You can also browse our list
of general keywords to find documents by subject. The Search
Results page that displays after you have performed a search
allows you to click on the document itself or to go to the
subsection in which that document appears so that you can
find similar documents. The Search page also allows you to
find images by year or word/phrase.
[Updated on January 14, 2005.]
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