Final Thoughts on HST 480!!!!!

This semester in HST 480, I have been able to have a very different seminar experience than most other 400 level history courses offer. The focus on public history this semester has allowed to me realize that there are so many ways in which history can be shared with the public instead of just academics. When coming into this course and being asked who history was written for or why it was written I would have never responded with "the public." I had a preconceived idea of history being very complex described in very wordy language making it so the general public would not be interested. I have learned that all presentations have an audience and that audience is important when sharing historical events or ideas because if you do not cater to your audience they will not be interested. For example, if a very intellectual academic writes a thesis on a significant historical event and his intentions are to share it with the public because the public should know about it, he is going to fail greatly. The public is not only not all highly educated to read a thesis and understand it but also it is something that would rarely be appealing to the general public. To reach the public you have to grasp and idea that is appealing to them such as a documentary, a novel, an oral presentation and such and then you have to make the language you use in these very simple and easy to understand so all walks of life can understand what you are telling them.

I think public history is more important than I ever thought it was at the beginning of the course. I had the idea in my head that not really many people cared if history was shared but then when finding out more about our own project I realized that I was interested in this type of thing, when it was easy to understand and shared properly. Then I almost felt bad that such things were not shared with more people in the city of Lansing. My parents did not even know that the construction of the highway had a bigger story to it than it just being constructed. I am sure that many of us who live within miles of this highway that we use everyday to commute do not know the underlying story and controversy that arose at its initial construction. It is sad to think that not a lot of photos were taken of this at the time since it was not thought of as a huge deal because things like that would have been great to share with people today!

The project we created as a class on the construction of highway I-496 was a great opportunity. It was very hard and challenging to work as a whole class on a single project but I do believe that we may have been able to bring to life a historical event that has gotten simply overlooked for years thinking that its occurrence was not very significant to Michigan history. We were able to dig deep and fnd information that exists right here within miles of campus and were able to compile a bunch of facts, documents and ideas to create an exhibit proposal. Now whether the actual proposal will ever be used is unknown but even if it is never used, it was still shared with people all around us including Maria from the MHC. This could give the museum ideas on how to construct some sort of exhibit on the construction of highway I-496 even if it is not our idea exactly that we presented to her.

I think overall history deserves more than it gets credit for. More students should be required to take history classes because I feel a lot of historical concepts and events are getting overlooked more and more as time goes by. Students know less about our history as a nation than they did years ago and this is because it is not a huge focus for anyone to study anymore. Even me being a history minor in the teaching field, I do not feel prepared to share vast amounts of knowledge with a classroom full of students. Also, it was not until I got to college that I felt I even learned in detail about significant events in our own history such as Columbus' voyage to the New World being something both positive and negative. It would not surprise me that teachers who teach this specific event to their class do not know the negative aspects of Columbus' voyage, having possibly never learned about it. Who knows!

Overall this class was a good one. People should take it, especially if they like projects rather than papers. I do think as a future idea, more time should be spent on the project to be able to form a more detailed and finished project than what we were able to create in our time frame given. I would have liked to have the chance to look for more item for the Omeka site and also to take more time exploring the MHC and seeing more details on exhibits. Even studying students in the MHC and seeing what most interested them would have been fun because then maybe we could have thought of more creative ideas for our site to attract children since the focus of the MHC is mostly school children.

Individual Project - Christopher Columbus - Hero or Villain?

For my individual prject, I am creating a series on lesson plans with a culminating project on Christopher Columbus. As known, we all learned about Columbus all though school but most of us probably only learned how great a man he was. I have created a 3 day lesson plan in which students will work as a class to find out who this man was. They will be reading and pulling information from various first hand documents such as Columbus' journals and his Letter to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. Students will also use various other documents that talk about the positive and negative aspects of Columbus. Accompanied with this will be a teacher presentation on various facts about Columbus such as his birthday, when he sailed to the New World etc.

At the end of this 3 day lesson, students will work as a class to create a large display case about Columbus to be shown to parents, teachers and students on Open House night at the school. The audience is therefore students, teacher and parents and anyone who attends this school function. Other classes in the school will be doing the same thing for their own classes so there will be lots of display cases to be looked at that night. Students will have both group expectations as well as individual ones. Students will be divided into 4 groups and each group will complete a panel on a specific topic about Columbus for the display case. There will be specific things to be included listed on an assignment sheet. Students will also be required to complete two things individually which will be used in the display case as well.

Residential Cards Finally Arrived!

Okay so, I have received the copies of the residential cards that David Votta from the Capital Area District Library. I have loaded them onto the OMEKA site for our use in the exhibit plans. When Rachel, Erica and I went down there we were told that there are thousands of these cards, only they are very unorganized and not loaded onto their computers as digital images yet. So therefore I am sure that there are more useful cards there if the MHC wanted to actually use this in the future. The resources ARE THERE!!!! Anyway, you should check out the images.... some are nothing too exciting but others are rather interesting to look at.

YAY FOR MORE USEFUL PICS/DOCS

OKAY!!!!!!! So we encountered new documents at the library downtown this week. Rachel, Erica and I went to the library to talk with David who is one of the people in charge of the local history room. We intended to just go down and get copies of some residential cards similar to the one Dr. K showed us in class. We were able to get a bunch of these right in the 700 block of all the streets in the area that we wanted and David will be scanning these into the computer for us and sending them to me as JPG files to upload on the OMEKA site in the next few days or so. He was very helpful while we were there and was also able to show us a folder full of Lansing State Journal Articles from the period of construction that had a lot of great photos. These I have uploaded onto the Omeka site for anyone to look at. Rachel, Erica and I pretty much copied a whole bunch of possibly useful photos to use to show the construction process from a bunch of different angles. In addition to that we did come across one article that had a photo of a store front on it as well which was really exciting since one of out exhibit ideas was to re-create store fronts. I am personally not familiar with the little mom and pop store that we found but it seems pretty cool. Some of the thing loaded on the OMEKA site are not labeled with a lot of detail due to the timing that I had to put them up. Either I or the other two ladies who I worked with will add more information to this as we need it. Hopefully these items are useful for us and if we want anything else David Votta from the library will be around all this week until early next week to help out.

Library update!

OK so after getting in contact with the David from the downtown library, we have a time to go next Tuesday night the 13th. It was the only time that he was available and not busy. We should bring a tentative area/neighborhood to look at because he said there were zillions of cards to look through but that they are organized. I am not sure of the time yet I am waiting for his response to that. If anyone else is interested in going it would be great. More people the better!!!!

Residential Cards

Today, I went to the Capital Area District Library downtown to check into getting a hold of a compilation of residential cards similar to what we were shown in class last week. We on the design team thought this could be a small visual part in the actual exhibit design to show the integration caused from the construction of the highway. I am not sure if we will for sure use these if we are able to to get them but it was a tangible item that is possible. Sadly, this portion of materials in the library is only accessible Tuesday nights like Brandon had mentioned or by appointment. I have emailed/called the guy who heads this section of the library and Rachel and I will be meeting there either next Tuesday night or by appointment if we need to! Hopefully we can find something good and usable for the exhibit! The information assistant that I talked to mentioned that he may be able to find other useful things for us as well. I will update that when I hear from him!

MHC A Second Time Around!

This week, we took our second trip to the Michigan Historical Museum and I felt it to be much more productive than the first time. I had visited this museum once in grade school but I remembered absolutely nothing about it and so being able to take a quick walk through was great!

One of the things that I really liked was being able to see all of the different exhibit designs. This helped me gather some ideas of what a good/bad exhibit looked like in order to postulate ideas for our exhibit that we do not have yet. I realized, as assumed that the exhibits that I enjoyed the most were the ones that had actual objects in them such as cars, clothing, animals, etc. The ones that I found least interesting were ones that were filled with only writing on the walls. While taking our walk-through I tried to put myself in the shoes of a young child, trying to imagine what he/she might be attracted to in the museum since that is who we SHOULD cater our exhibit to, although it is not required. In the same fashion, I realized that I think they would be attracted to the same things: color, tangible objects to touch and look at, videos and music. Another thing I realized was that some of the exhibits with writing on them were a little detailed and used somewhat large words. Can 4^th and 5^th graders read this well yet? Maybe yes, maybe no! Even so, we need to make our story for I-496 not only appealing to the public but also SIMPLE so that everyone can participate.

I feel that now that we all have been able to see real exhibit examples, I think we can really get to moving on what we want to do for ours. The one thing is, is what are we going to do. We have a story but we have no actual personal interviews or photos of people from the time. The only things that we have are maps of the area during the time and how they have changed, so my question is, is what can we do with what we have to make an interesting exhibit that people want to look at? Most of the exhibits at the MHC had objects and things to possibly touch or music? What can we do to compete with this? I am not sure the answer to this but I do think this is something we need to brainstorm about!