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.