Microhistories Connect Pandemic To Past

Getting itchy in isolation? Consider the story of Jorgen Tonnessen, cooped up in the lighthouse on the breakwater of New Haven Harbor with a co-worker slowly, and then suddenly, going mad. What might travel look like as we move out of lockdown? There’s precedent in the polio outbreak of 1916 — which turned out to be ​“a prelude to the worldwide Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918,” writes Jason Bischoff-Wurstle, director of photo archives at the New Haven Museum.

These stories and ​“microhistories,” as Bischoff-Wurstle called them, appear on the New Haven Museum’s website as a growing collection of online exhibitions, made available as the museum on Whitney Avenue is closed to visitors during lockdown. For Bischoff-Wurstle, the microhistories are a way for the New Haven Museum to continue to serve the public during the Covid-19 pandemic. They are also moving the museum into the future.

“It’s a running idea I’ve had, especially for New Haven,” Bischoff-Wurstle said. ​“I’m more fascinated with what happened on the corner of a street — say, a market that was there, that used to be a mom and pop diner, and it was something else before that, and now it’s a bodega.” Regarding unearthing that local history, ​“in New Haven it’s easy to do because we’re a medium-sized city,” so there’s no lack of material. Particularly as ​“each piece of New Haven has 400 years of European history attached to it, and thousands of years before that, which is even more fascinating.”

He added that ​“Fairmont Avenue,” in Fair Haven Heights, ​“is where the original Quinnipiac village was. You go there today, and you would not have any clue. Those little pockets and stories — that’s what gets me going.” Those human-scale stories, in some ways, provide a deeper connection to the past than the histories of great events do. ​“We walk down the street and have an interaction, and we add to that story,” Bischoff-Wurstle said. ​“The things that are minor are actually the most important stuff.”

Working from home, Bischoff-Wurstle is also able to take advantage of the New Haven Museum’s work in digitizing its collection — which it has been doing for over a decade. ​“The stuff we’ve been working on in the background — the digitizing of materials — has turned out to be really useful,” Bischoff-Wurstle said. It was happening when Bischoff-Wurstle started working at the New Haven Museum 13 years ago, and ​“it’s been a priority for at least 11 years. We really stepped it up in the last couple years. We have our online database, and we’re adding to those.”

Apart from what’s been digitized at the New Haven Museum, Bischoff-Wurstle also has what he grabbed from his office on the last day the museum was open before lockdown. ​“We were meeting all through the week,” Bischoff-Wurstle recalled. The consensus among the staff was that ​“this is happening, and happening fast.” On Thursday, March 12, ​“we had a meeting and decided, ​‘we’re closing to the public as of 5 o’clock today.’” The next day Bischoff-Wurstle went in to ​“close up affairs and set up our home offices,” he said. ​“That morning I went in with empty tote bags and boxes and loaded them with books, folders, and external hard drives.”

The museum staff are all now working from home, making do with the disruption, and trying to take advantage of some of the opportunities the disruption has created. ​“It came together quickly, but it’s working well,” Bischoff-Wurstle said. In some ways, ​“it’s good because it’s a culture thing. We’re an old institution and there are old habits that came with that institution.” The New Haven Museum was already making progress in adapting to the latest technology. ​“This gives us a focus to do it,” Bischoff-Wurstle said. ​“That’s what we’re trying to do with our weekly newsletters” as well as the microhistories — convey the concept that ​“we are open, just not physically open. It pushes the idea of what a museum can be online.”

“Exhibits, by design, are about going into a room, and looking at things, and being with people,” he added. Online, ​“there are no set standards, so you get to dream up possibilities.”

In working on the microhistories — and more generally as a historian dealing with the Elm City’s past — Bischoff-Wurstle has the chance to take a longer view of the Covid-19 outbreak even as it’s happening. ​“The way history portrays the pandemic is going to be interesting,” he said. ​“It’s going to be a giant web of personal experiences. So these little microhistories are what adds to the entire web of the fabric.”

“I find a lot of solace in history as time goes on, because you see the patterns,” he said. ​“People may have had the same concerns” as we do in the present day, ​“and eighty years later, we think it’s nothing. This has happened, and people had to figure it out, and yet we’re still here. Things continued.”

“The world’s too big to collapse,” he added.

It has been common to talk about going back to normal. But ​“necessity creates new things, and people could change,” Bischoff-Wurstle. He pointed out that the ​“normal” that vanished in mid-March ​“wasn’t necessarily great” for a lot of people; the pandemic is an opportunity to address some of the deeper social and economic issues that have made the shutdown so damaging. And, he pointed out, ​“this is all just sort of a trial run — working out the kinks for what you have to do with climate change anyway.”

Having begun his microhistory series in response to the outbreak, Bischoff-Wurstle is thinking of continuing it even when the museum reopens. ​“I’ve got tons of research notes and notebooks and digital files that I’ve been saving, and I’m going back to those now,” he said. And the microhistories give him a chance to explore the marginalia embedded in the museum’s collecting that usually don’t find their way into a larger exhibit. ​“I get to use these collections in a different way than what I do on a daily basis,” he said. ​“My hope is maybe down the line, other people can contribute to it as well.”

“More than anything I just like talking about the past, and from that, you can talk about the future, and have a good discussion,” Bischoff-Wurstle added. In the near future, he plans to write about the older incarnations of Yale-New Haven Hospital; it opened in 1833 as the State Hospital and became the Knight United States Army General Hospital during the Civil War. This made it the site of some unrest. ​“Civil War soldiers had to go back” to combat, Bischoff-Wurstle said, ​“and they didn’t want to go back, so they rioted.” In keeping with the theme of isolation, Bischoff-Wurstle pointed out that the location of the hospital itself was no accident. It was built away from the center of the city, and ​“there are reasons for that.”

“The danger isn’t running out of stories,” Bischoff-Wurstle added. ​“It’s not telling them.”

Find Bischoff-Wurstle’s microhistories at the New Haven Museum’s website.