Diversity more important than ever

John Jones

     The Organization of American Historians is meeting in Chicago this weekend. So if you don't mind, allow me to talk shop with 1,676 scholars and teachers.
     Can I put in a plug for DEI? Someone should. When President Trump roots out efforts to reflect the diversity of this country, he paints the idea of inclusion as some kind of undeserved sop.
     That isn't how I see it.
     Let me explain how diversity is reflected in my work. The 150th anniversary of the Great Chicago Fire was in 2021. I volunteered to write the newspaper's stemwinder article about the fire. Because I'm crazy.
     Kidding. Because I was writing a book of Chicago history, and stumbled upon an approach I thought could make the story sing. A huge peril of teaching history is boredom. When everybody knows a familiar story, or thinks they know: Mrs. O'Leary's cow, a lantern, and the reader drifts off.
     I had one fresh fact, pulled out of Carl Smith's book, "Chicago's Great Fire": Mary Todd Lincoln was living here at the time of the fire. This floored me. I had no idea. Smith tucked that in as an aside on Page 48.
     To me, it was fresh and fantastic. Lincoln's widow! In Chicago! One guideline I use is, if I don't know something, nobody knows. If a fact excites me, I can use it to excite others.
     I began the tale with how the summer of 1871 was terrible for Mrs. Lincoln — her beloved son Tad died, she sank further into mental illness. And then the city burned down around her.
     That start gave me my structure. I would hand the narrative from one witness to the next — the maligned O'Learys, a reporter for the Chicago Evening Post, the night watchman, a fireman. It wasn't a story about flames. But about people.
     The form gave me flexibility — I could include anybody who encountered the fire. Some fell into my lap — a seamstress, Mary Jones, who would be radicalized by the fire and become Mother Jones, an important labor figure.

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