David Ward Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley

Photo by Jane Scherr

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Research

Before we talk about your career as a university administrator, help us understand the sorts of research problems that became your focus, so long as you remained in academics.

My work in Leeds had curiously been on Leeds. Leeds was like Manchester, a prototypical city of the nineteenth century, a relic landscape in many ways; not much had happened since the Great War, the First World War. My generation, that is, in the late fifties, was the first generation to look at history from the bottom up, a kind of vernacular history, a history of voluntary organizations, a history of working class, a history of northern cities, not of the national government. I was one of these pioneers who used Leeds as my laboratory to outline what were the geographic changes to a city between 1800 and 1900, using original documentation, and also reading the landscape that's still left behind.

When I came to North America, it was pretty obvious that this surge of interest in history from the bottom up, the new social history, as it's called, and the new urban history, was really also just beginning to develop. So I began to look at American cities with much of the same perspective, and looked at Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and particular cities of the Northeast and northern Midwestern America. I basically prepared myself to do historical geography of the industrial revolution. My Ph.D. was a fragment of that interest, titled Nineteenth-Century Boston: The Geographic Transformation of an American City during Industrialization. So a lifelong commitment to the study of the industrial effects on urban life, including immigration, including the rise of the factory, including the rise of modern transportation, the development of subways, all of those things were wrapped into this. Throughout my period as a teacher at Wisconsin, I taught a course called "The Historical Geography of the American City," which basically took the topic from the colonial times to the twentieth century. That was kind of the bread-and-butter course that I taught there. It was very popular; it had a very close association to me as an academic.

How did the early phase of your life, growing up in Manchester, impact this research focus? It sounds like you were studying problems that would have been of interest to that city.

Yes, I think so. I think that growing up, being reflective of the city I grew up in, and knowing that Manchester was the shock city of the early 19th century, as Chicago was at the early 20th century, or L.A. was of the late 20th century -- living in a city that I knew was a museum of the past had a big effect on me. Knowing the world my grandparents came from, being curious about that, and then recognizing that the landscape itself was a museum, I think that brought this history and geography together. You could literally look at a slum, you could literally look at a neighborhood, and in 1955 it was not that much different than it might have been in 1870. And I was a very keen photographer, by the way. Some of the photographs I took are now in archives in Leeds and Manchester, where these [neighborhoods] have been knocked down in the seventies and eighties. But when I was growing up, the museum-like character to this society was still there.

I also realized that poor people did not necessarily have to be socially disorganized. The world I grew up in was not one of poverty, but certainly not one of great wealth. It was a very organized society, a society of great integrity, either through trade unions on the one hand, or through kind of entrepreneurial ambition on the other hand, both side by side. So the idea that great cities were necessarily the pits didn't necessarily fit my picture of it. I think there was some feedback between my reinterpretation of the past and a kind of living past that I experienced growing up.

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