Feature Articles
OHS Budget Reductions Will Impact History
Efforts in Ohio, by James Strider
Be It Ever So Humble: Writing About Home,
by Marian Morton, Ph.D.
OHS
Budget Reductions
Will Impact History Efforts in Ohio
An
Update from the Ohio Historical Society
By James Strider
In the last three years, the Ohio Historical Society, like most state historical organizations !hroughout the country, has been forced to reduce staff and services in order to deal with reduced private income and state operating support. Periodic budget reductions at historical organizations are neither unique nor even unusual. However, the severity of recent OHS cutbacks is very remarkable, and all who are involved in preserving and interpreting history in Ohio have a stake in the efforts to increase funding and support for history in Ohio.
On a positive note, the new state budget that went into effect July 1 increased funding for OHS operations by $1.5 million, thanks in large part to the efforts of many individuals, including members of the Ohio Academy of History, who contacted state officials urging them to increase state funding for OHS. The increased funding illustrates that there is already strong support for history in state government and that effective advocacy on behalf of history can make a positive difference. It is also clear, however, that we have much more work before us to educate state government and other potential supporters about the complexity and diversity of history efforts in Ohio.
This point is illustrated vividly by the fact that all of the increased funding for OHS ongoing programs coming this year was earmarked for OHS site operations. Reduced funding in other areas has forced the Society to diminish services in programs that are especially important to professional historians and to other historical organizations.
In late July, OHS announced its latest staff and service reductions, including the elimination of thirty-nine positions, mostly at its Columbus operations. The cutbacks result from a $1.7 million shortfall between what the Society received in state appropriations and what was sought to maintain levels of service provided during the fiscal year, which ended June 30. The state of Ohio, which funds about 70 percent of the Society’s operating costs, appropriated $13.4 million for ongoing operations in Fiscal Year 2004, which began July 1, and a similar amount for Fiscal Year 2005. Last year, in order to accommodate previously reduced appropriations from the state and to avoid curtailing access to programs and services in the first half of the bicentennial year, the Society’s Board of Trustees voted to transfer $1.9 million in reserves to the Fiscal Year 2003 operating budget, boosting it to $19.8 million. That level of reserves is not available this year for the expense budget of $19.45 million.
OHS Archives/Library in Columbus (right) have reduced their hours of public access.
Reductions are especially severe in the OHS Archives/Library, historic preservation operations, and the National Afro-American Museum and Cultural Center. However, they are also affecting programs such as Ohio History, the Society’s scholarly journal (which had already been revised into an online-only publication in previous cutbacks), curatorial services at the Hayes Presidential Center, our services to local historical organizations, and the management and curation of our historical museum collections.
To maximize public access despite reduced staffing, the Society is now opening its archives/library at the Ohio Historical Center in Columbus on Thursday evenings, but will reduce overall hours from forty per week to twenty-four per week, effective August 1. (See page 14 for the complete schedule.)
Less immediately apparent, but potentially devastating
for future historians, the Society has been forced to scale back ongoing
efforts to document, acquire, and catalog the material evidence of the
state’s history. Over the past several years, we have eliminated seven
staff positions
in our Curatorial and Collections Division, which oversees our museum
collections program. The museum acquisitions budget has been cut in half.
We have also been forced to make comparable reductions to the collections
development and management activities of our Archives/Library Division.
We may never know the full consequences of this reduction in our ability
to preserve the state’s history. These artifacts and documents form our
collective memory and are fundamental to efforts to explore and understand
the past. The Society will be making a concerted effort to strengthen
partnerships, seek alternate funding sources, and determine alternate
means to fulfill these responsibilities. We will also appreciate the support
of researchers and scholars in helping public officials understand the
importance of this work.
Budget reductions are forcing further changes in Ohio History. Robert Daugherty, Ph.D., long time editor of the scholarly research publication, has retired, and the Society is not filling Dr. Daugherty’s position. However, the journal will continue to be published with the assistance of a new volunteer Guest Editor, Shirley Wajda, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of History and American Studies at Kent State University.
Society outreach services to local historical organizations are being reduced as the OHS Local History Office staff is reduced from four to three. Coordination of the state historic preservation program will become more difficult as the Ohio Historic Preservation Office—which is dealing with both state and federal budget cuts —will be forced to eliminate six staff positions, nearly 25 percent of its permanent staff.
Thanks to the increased site operations funding, general OHS site operations will continue at current levels, including the newly enhanced operations at Adena (the home of Thomas Worthington in Chillicothe), Fort Meigs in Perrysburg, and the Paul Laurence Dunbar house in Dayton. Exceptions are the National Afro-American Museum and Cultural Center (NAAMC) in Wilberforce and the Hayes Presidential Center in Fremont, both of which have separate state budget lines that were significantly reduced. NAAMC, which received the lowest level of state support since the year before it opened in 1988, has eliminated its Sunday hours and will reduce some educational programming. The Hayes Center will maintain its hours, but it is eliminating one of its collections management positions.
OHS is now operating under a balanced budget. We are continuing and even enhancing many important programs, focusing on educational initiatives with Ohio’s elementary and secondary schools, taking advantage of advancing technologies to digitize many of our history resources, and establishing partnerships with other history and education organizations to leverage our limited resources. We are seeking ways to become an even stronger partner with the state through private fund-raising and increasing revenue streams.
We are also working harder than ever before to communicate clearly and powerfully about the importance of our services and of history in general. To be successful, that effort requires the participation and support of all groups and individuals involved in preserving and interpreting history in Ohio. We are grateful for the effective support we have already received from many members of the Ohio Academy of History. We look forward to working with the Ohio Academy of History to gain even greater support for history in Ohio, which is important to all Ohioans.
James Strider is Director of Historic Preservation and Statewide Outreach Services at the Ohio Historical Society.
Be It Ever So Humble: Writing About Home
By Marian Morton, Ph.D.
Two things helped bring about this change, at least for me. First was the development of what used to be called the “new social history,” although by now it is old hat. In this country, the political and social turmoil of the 1960s turned the attention of professional historians to groups, individuals, and topics that certainly did not get discussed in my undergraduate or even graduate classes. Out of this new perspective on the past came, most obviously, African American history and women’s history. Then the floodgates opened. The history of almost anyone and any place became fair game.
The second thing that happened was The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, the brainchild of David D. Van Tassel and John J. Grabowski (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987; second edition 1996). The encyclopedia was the first of its kind and other cities have followed suit. The more than 200 of us who contributed to ECH (as it is fondly referred to) learned a lesson from David and John about how to accomplish what had seemed impossible. We also learned about our home town. And so have many others.
ECH has made it possible to teach the history of Cleveland to undergraduates. Students, like faculty, are initially skeptical that history can be about them and the place where they live. Some remain skeptical, but others enjoy reading about something they have seen themselves (“I know where that is!”) or simply get a kick out of knowing more about their home town (The Cleveland Indians won the World Series twice?”). Local history is also ideally suited for research papers that must be based on primary sources. In addition to ECH and a large secondary literature, Cleveland has rich archival repositories such as the Western Reserve Historical Society, the Cuyahoga County Archives, the Cleveland Public Library, and numerous institutional collections. Teaching local history acquaints students with these historical resources, challenging them to find and use primary sources just as professional historians do.
So that’s how I came to write about home. First, I wrote about Cleveland women, a new and exciting subject for someone who had enjoyed standard political history and had done her dissertation on five male historians.
Most recently, I finished a history of my hometown, Cleveland Heights. I had begun this as an academic monograph even though it is difficult to get local history published. (It’s not that acceptable.) Like every member of the Ohio Academy of History, however, I received in November 2001 an e-mail from Arcadia Publishing, soliciting manuscripts. Arcadia publishes only local histories—hundreds and hundreds of them; all have lots of pictures and are intended for a general, but local, audience. (Their books are not sold out of the region about which they are written.) I jumped at the chance to write that kind of book. Less than a year after that e-mail, Arcadia published Cleveland Heights: The Making of an Urban Suburb.
Because I was a longtime resident, I thought I knew a lot about Cleveland Heights. I didn’t. I knew nothing at all about its beginnings at the turn of the twentieth century, although my father and grandfather had grown up here. I had forgotten even very dramatic events, like the racial bombings and murder, that had occurred while my children grew up here. In many ways, writing about this suburb’s past was reliving my own.
If you love to travel, take note: writing about home pretty much rules out those expensive trips abroad, or even out of town, to track down that missing diary or document. Most of the public records I needed were at the city hall, a quarter of a mile from my house. Other materials such as maps and manuscripts were at the Western Reserve Historical Society or in Cleveland State University’s Special Collections. The local weekly newspaper is on microfilm at the local library, and xeroxing was cheap. I also counted walks around Cleveland Heights as research, and how often is research also healthy exercise?
Arcadia Publishing, and the intended audience, did impose constraints. The manuscript had to be finished within six months. There could be no doddering around, as we academics are wont to do. Arcadia also specified the length of the manuscript (40,000–45,000 words) and the number of pictures (120). Footnotes were discouraged since they give the average reader a headache. Here, however, I prevailed. In a community that now prides itself on its racial diversity, for instance, I could not describe the racial violence of the 1960s and 1970s without footnotes to back me up; no one would have believed me.
Morton's
book is filled with images from Cleveland Heights,
including this 1936 high school band performance.
And writing about home creates another kind of difficulty: the conflict between loyalty to your community and your professional commitment to telling a story as accurately and truthfully as you can. This is just the local version of the problem of achieving some measure of objectivity that all of us have when we write or teach. In order to keep myself professionally honest, I had to include some of the bad news about Cleveland Heights: the suburb’s initial elitist pretensions, its religious and racial intolerance, the conservatism of elected officials, the occasional suggestions of malfeasance in office, and its declining, less wealthy population. (This is surely why I have not yet received the key to the city.)
Yet, in many ways, the book became a community effort. The city’s historic preservation planner and the Cleveland Heights-University Heights Board of Education lent me photographs of public buildings, now demolished, and school children, now grown up. Friends and neighbors dug up pictures of block parties, a Cleveland Heights tradition.
For writing about home often hits home. People bought the book and read it—a heady experience for most academics, including myself. Because the book was about them, because they found in it themselves or their friends or their neighborhoods or their schools, most readers enjoyed it. Or said they did, when I met them on the sidewalk, in the local bookstores, at the swimming pool. Of course, precisely because the book was about a place they knew well, readers caught many mistakes and pointed them out to me in phone calls, e-mails, and in person. One zealous reader presented me with a whole list of errors at a library book signing.
On the bright side, the author of a local history doesn’t get skewered in the Journal of American History because local history for a general audience will never get reviewed. Also on the bright side: be it ever so humble, writing this book was lots of fun.
Marian Morton is Professor of History (Twentieth Century U.S., Women’s History, and History of Cleveland) at John Carroll University.
Editor’s note: Cleveland Heights: The Making of an Urban Suburb is going into its third printing and has occasioned its author’s nomination for an Award for Achievement in Writing from Northern Ohio Live Magazine. Holding the local history banner high, Marian Morton is presently writing a history of Cleveland’s Lakeview Cemetery.
