Focusing on local history in our teaching and research can provide a clear way into what are sometimes overwhelmingly complex ideas and issues. In the classroom, teaching local history speaks to the experience of many of our students, encouraging them to see themselves - and their communities - as historical actors. Asking students to research that which they live every day can challenge and expand their ideas around who and what is “important” while also complicating the idea of what an archive might actually look like. In affirming student experience, we are asking them to think critically about the historiography they have come across and to evaluate new sources with that same critical eye. Understanding local history can also provide avenues for students to become active on a local level, providing historical roadmaps to shaping a more just and equitable future. Engaging local history allows for highlighting of the people and places that do not always receive the scholarly attention they warrant.

As scholars, doing “history from below” helps us formulate questions leading to larger questions, and ultimately, if lucky, answers that are applicable even as the lens becomes widened. As with teaching, researching local history provides attention to places and people that do not always qualify as relevant to historical discourse. Newark, New Jersey certainly falls under this category. To many who have not visited, it is simply a place with that big airport and crime-ridden streets. Even as the fates have somewhat improved in Newark, entrenched ideas around the city – as happens with so many urban spaces – have created roadblocks to understanding the ways in which it can offer up illustrations, examples, and responses to so many historical queries. These can include everything from housing, to environment, to civil unrest. As well, when our research is local, the opportunity for genuine public history avails itself. There is nothing like sharing one’s work within the community upon which the work is based; the public becomes invaluable, as both resource and critic.

In our round table, we would like to briefly share some of the research and/or teaching we have done surrounding the city of Newark. With Newark-centric presentations on queer labor activism; one neighborhood’s demographic shift; a 1990s oral history collection; and the life of a baseball stadium, we hope to catalyze a larger discussion on the ways that local history can carry us into larger historical concepts. We also anticipate discussion around the challenges involved with focusing on a singular community in attempting to utilize the principle of microcosmic study. We look forward to an exchange of ideas during the session, both practical and abstract in nature. Our hope is that this conversation equips participants with some new tools for the classroom, and perhaps some fresh ideas about future research projects.