Three months ago, I began a mild sabbatical from my work with NorthOmahaHistory.com. Thrown off by the shifting political climate nationwide as well as transitions in my personal life, I decided it would be best to ease off the pedal a bit before jamming on.

Since then, I’ve developed some new intentions for my efforts related to the community’s history. For more than a decade, I’ve been determined to study, research, examine, synthesize, and share the people, places and events in the history of North Omaha. That determination to build a historical foundation for the community has been exhilarating, and led to the creation of so much content! However, increasingly I find myself wanting to move beyond simply piping out what actually interpret and question the foundations of the entire city of Omaha’s history, especially with regard to the low-income and working class past in North Omaha, but extending throughout Omaha.

I’m thinking of it like building a house.

Creating the Foundation: Researching, Studying, Examining and Synthesizing North O’s Past

My hours of reading ancient newspapers, digging across the web and through old books, drawing crazy mind maps with lines between everything to make complicated connections more obvious, and frequent trips to Omaha museums, conversations with churches, and time with other historians is the foundational work of my project. This is also the foundation of the North Omaha history house.

It’s about gathering all the raw materials and putting them together into a coherent structure. I have researched the community’s history extensively, systematically and strategically examining newspaper archives, conducting oral histories, looking at artifacts, and taking in a lot of different information. In studying North Omaha history, I have tried learning and understanding the raw facts of the community. I have come to understand the timelines, identify the people, places and events that formed the nucleus of North Omaha’s history, and sequenced a lot of the themes in the past.

My next step in building the foundation has been to give a cursory examination of everything I’ve uncovered. If you’ve read my analysis about the economics, politics, race, and culture of the community then you’ve seen this examination. Synthesizing what I’ve found has meant putting together the different components of history to build a firm foundation. I’ve worked to ensure my website and books gave a complete, cohesive narrative by combining info from a lot of sources that helped me make a stronger base and a more resilient bond between the themes I’ve identified. Showing the bigger picture, the overarching patterns and the connections between seemingly unrelated topics has been exhilarating to me, to say the least!

Building the Walls of the House: Analysis and Popular Engagement

This is the process of building the structure of the house by looking at North Omaha’s history from different angles and understanding its deeper meanings.

My analysis of North O is an intellectual breakdown (takedown!) of the historical narratives from the past. Instead of just telling the popular story of the community, I ask “Why?” and “How?” I have tried breaking down, taking down, and wrecking the historical misinformation so predominant in Omaha history by examining its component parts in order to understand the causes and effects. This has meant constantly looking at the sources for bias, evaluating the evidence for its reliability, and scrutinizing the motivations of the people involved.

A frequent finding in my examinations has been the prevalence of eurocentrism, American exceptionalism, and discrimination against non-white, non-male, and non-upperclass perspectives, especially those of the working class, people of color, women, and people who identify as LGBTTQQII+2S.

Maybe the highest goal of my work so far has been the attempt to install a transparent roof on the structure of North Omaha’s history. I’ve tried to go beyond the “why” and “how” to ask “So what?” and “What does this mean for Omaha today?” If you’ve read my analysis you’ve seen my attempts at challenging the established narratives, my efforts to consider alternative perspectives, and my way of reflecting on the moral and ethical implications of the community’s past. I have often tried to connect the history of North Omaha to broader concepts like power, justice, memory, and identity throughout the city and beyond. I have asked why certain histories have been marginalized, and tried to nurture spaces where the public can talk about what impact that has had on the community’s identity today.

Researching and synthesizing have been the tools I used to build the historical record and analysis and popular engagement have been the intellectual processes I used to understand and interpret that record, making it relevant and meaningful to a contemporary audience.

Making It Matter: Installing a Transparent Roof through Public Engagement

Maybe the biggest, broadest thing I’ve attempted is teaching the public about the history of the community. This is all about relevancy and helping people see why it matters so much.

Popular education has been crucial to my success with NorthOmahaHistory.com because it has helped the work reach the community and benefit the community itself. I have more than 20,000 daily social media followers, and along with my newsletter, frequent presentations, and hundreds of articles, and several books, I work hard for my project to transcend old school academia and collecting by so-called “history buffs.” By providing free e-books and doing interviews with the media and podcasters, I try to make sure these histories get to a broad audience. I hope my public-facing approach doesn’t just share valuable historical information but also empowers everyday people—especially but not only youth—to engage with their own past, and by doing that fosters a stronger sense of identity and community pride.

This has been my active process of using history to promote a more just and informed reality for everyone today.

Rebuilding the Building: Moving More Deeply Into Popular Engagement

I started analyzing the existing history narratives and interpretations in Omaha’s history a long time ago. It was 2006 when I started writing encyclopedia articles about the city, and in the course of studying and generating more than 300 articles I constantly ran into questions I learned to ask in my professional work:

• What were the dominant perspectives?
• What voices were missing?
• How could my writing challenge or expand upon these established histories?

I began diving deeply into the commonly cited sources in Omaha’s history, including the Omaha World-Herald, mainstream media, and the writing of prior historians that was much lauded and common in schools, museums, the media, and beyond. I analyzed the reliability, biases, and perspectives of the already-created histories I found, along with newspaper archives, census data, and personal documents that were available online. Through the lenses of a “North Omaha Boy,” I immediately saw how local history coverage of North Omaha differed from the reality experienced by the community.

That led me to critically analyze the relationship between politics, economics, and race in the history in the entire city Omaha. Over the initial years of my study (2006-2012), I learned that redlining, urban renewal, and transportation projects often sold to the community as “economic development” often decimated the community instead. I saw white Omaha’s apparent affliction of white supremacy and intermixed white fragility has been present throughout the city’s growth and development.

Strengthening the Foundation? Re-siding the House? Landscaping the Yard? The Future of My North Omaha History Project

It’s time for me to go further with this project. Since I began it more than 15 years ago, this has been entirely a passion project that is unfunded by institutions and untethered to foundations. Donors have been kind enough to provide some support “to keep the lights on,” but these thousands of hours of research, study, examination, synthesis, and popular education aren’t paid for in any way by anyone. Not that I’m unmoored, because I have a lot of people who are invested in what I’m doing. Some of my advisors have included community leaders, advocates and activists, youth historians and students, as well as elders from my own past and more than one grio. Keeping me intellectually humble and ensuring my curiosity, these people are my anchors through the storms I’ve endured in this project.

However, these same people and others are emboldening my ongoing evolution as I seek to travel deeper into Omaha’s history. From this point forward, I’m going to focus my work on critical engagement with history. I’ll still research the basic foundational information and teach the public, but my studies and writing are going to shift from simply telling the facts towards more deliberate analysis through critical lenses. Inspired by my intellectual ancestor Matthew Stelly, I want to dissect, bisect, transect and otherwise deconstruct every narrative history in the city that has concentrated on whiteness, maleness, upperclassness, and conformity.

In the ridiculously long title to this section, I wonder whether I’m strengthening the foundation, re-siding the house, or landscaping the metaphorical yard of North O’s history. As I become clearer on these next steps, I’m going to focus more intentionally on…

• Interdisciplinary Synthesis: Taking in insights from multiple academic fields, I want to combine historical data with concepts and knowledge about Omaha from the fields of sociology (e.g., race relations, community development), urban studies (e.g., urban decay, gentrification), and cultural studies (e.g., identity, memory).
• Chronological Synthesis: I want to weave together events across different time periods in Omaha’s history and beyond to show long-term trends and cause-and-effect relationships that haven’t been made apparent before. I want to explore how people, places and events influence the social and economic landscape of Omaha today and show how larger historical movements to create a cohesive narrative.
• Thematic Synthesis: Omaha has so many diverse stories and facts that need organized into coherent themes. I want to draw out themes like resilience, resistance, community building, or cultural heritage throughout the city’s history.
• Challenging Master Narratives: I am going to grind into critically examining and deconstructing the dominant “master narratives” of Omaha’s history, and offer a more nuanced, complex, and empowering narrative that emphasizes agency and triumph in every community throughout the entire history of the city.
• Memory and Commemoration: When I think critically about how history is remembered and commemorated in Omaha, I see a lot of stories are forgotten, neglected, and intentionally denied and repressed? I am going to critically analyze the politics of memory in Omaha, and how show how the written history, historical sites and monuments, museums, public education, and other systems of history in Omaha ignore significant events, places and people.
• Public History and Public Engagement: I have been thinking a lot about the ethical implications of writing and publishing public history. Throughout these years, I have done a poor job of ensuring the community’s voice is accurately represented. While some people in the community have affirmed my role as a historian in shaping public perception and inspiring action, I haven’t done well at engaging the community in turn. Reflecting critically on the impact of my work and how it can be used to promote dialogue and social justice has led me to believe I can do a lot more.

Practically speaking, this is what I’m going to actually do in the next year of my North Omaha History project:

1. Advisors: Gather a group of advisors to inform my ongoing efforts as well as create more intentional spaces for public engagement in this project.
2. Impact: Analyze how my 6 published books and 4 free ebooks have (or have not) changed the way people talk about North Omaha’s history. I want to see clearly which stories, places and people I brought to light that were previously forgotten, and I want to identify how Omaha has failed to keep pace with me and name those missing faces, spaces, and times.
3. Community Voices: I will focus on using existent oral histories and community memories in my work. I will assess how these stories differ from what I have found in newspapers or official records, and share that openly and often.
4. Challenge Negative Stories: More than ever, I want to critically engage and challenge the common, often negative, stories told about North Omaha. I will highlight how my work shows a more positive or complete picture, and encourage people to engage accordingly.
5. Connect Past and Present: I will concentrate on showing how historical events—like specific urban renewal projects and the impending school closings that are inevitably coming—affect North Omaha today and historically.
6. Policy and Structures: Instead of just saying that North O declined, I want to analyze the specific policies (like redlining or freeway construction) and social dynamics that caused it. I will continue to analyze the perspective and potential bias of the sources, but reveal more of my findings more deliberately in order to highlight how systems of oppression continually use history as a bludgeon to force popular narratives that are politically and economically convenient.
7. My Process: Reflecting on the journey of writing my books and running the website, social media, and the presentations, I want to share what I learn about doing historical research and sharing it with the public.

I will continue to fight historical injustice by deliberately centering the experiences of marginalized communities in my work on Omaha’s history. My books, website, and public engagement will keep challenging the pervasive biases of eurocentrism, omission, and a “decline” narrative that have historically distorted the public’s understanding of Omaha’s story. Through accessible public education and a critical focus on systemic issues, I am determined to empower the community to reclaim its past, understand the root causes of current challenges, and foster a stronger sense of identity and civic pride for the future.

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• About NorthOmahaHistory.com
• About Adam Fletcher Sasse
• North Omaha History Articles

BASICS OF NORTH OMAHA HISTORY
Intro: Part 1: Before 1885 | Part 2: 1885-1945 | Timeline
People: People | Leaders | Native Americans | African Americans | Jews | Scandinavians | Italians | Chinese | Hungarians
Places: Oldest Places | Hospitals | Schools | Parks | Streets | Houses | Apartments | Neighborhoods | Bakeries | Industries | Restaurants | Churches | Oldest Houses | Higher Education | Boulevards | Railroads | Banks | Theaters |
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Related Topics: Focus Areas | National Register of Historic Places | Architecture | Museums | Markers | Historic Sites | History Facts | Presentations | History Map
Omaha Topics: Black History | Racism | Bombings | Police Brutality | Black Business | Black Heritage Sites | Redlining
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