Creating Access, Use, and Relationships

Just the other day, Bill Barrow surfaced to make an entry into his Cleveland History Blog. It provides an overview of the exciting work being developed here in Northeast Ohio to make historical sources available to the public. Our work on the Euclid Corridor History Project takes it to the next step and builds the capacity in the community to interpret these materials and to use them in reinventing the region’s history, helping to recreate Cleveland as a place. Incidentally, this will also allow us to use the regional landscape to intervene in broader questions in United States history. Bringing historians, librarians, and the community together really promises to remake the paradigm of history writing–realizing perhaps the goals of early social historians who imagined a more community-based history.