Final Thoughts About History 480

I can't believe that this semester is coming to an end, as well as my undergraduate career. I have taken a lot of history classes in the last four years, but I have never taken one quite like this one. When I signed up for this class, I didn't know much about what we were going to talk about, but it sounded interesting so I thought I would give it a try - I'm glad I did.

This was my first class about public history and in just one short semester I feel like I've learned a lot. There are a couple of things that this class has taught me, which I will take with me as I transition from being a student to being a teacher. The first is that history doesn't mean anything unless it is shared. I think this is a very important point that Dr. K brought up countless times in class. Part of the reason why I want to become a teacher is so that I can share my love for history with my students. I hope that they in return, will want to share what they learn with their peers, families, friends etc.

The second thing that I learned from this class is that history is complicated. It's not like I didn't know this before, but after doing the class project, I realized just how complicated history is. The class project was a challenge for me and I think for a lot of others but it was also very rewarding. When we started out, I felt like we had way too much to do and I was worried that we wouldn't find the types of sources that we wanted to. After a few weeks of contacting lots of people, running all over Lansing, and spending countless hours in the Library of Michigan, I was amazed at how much we were able to dig up (and how much is still out there). I think that we worked well together and came up with a quality product.

The last thing that I learned from this class is the value in local history. Too often, the focus is put on what has happened at the national or state level, but there are a lot of interesting things going on at a local level. There are also a lot of resources that can be found at a local level, if you know where to look. I was amazed at how much we could find locally for this class. As a teacher, I think that local history is a great tool to use to get students interested in what you are talking about, because they can probably relate to it a lot easier.

This semester has been a crazy but fantastic one. This class was a lot of fun to take but also very informative. I appreciate all the work that everybody put into this class to make it worthwhile. Thanks for a great semester everybody! :)

Engineering Reports

Last Thursday, Ed and I went to the Library of Michigan (yet again!) to look over the MDOT reports that Bernadette was able to get for us. I was so excited to finally get our hands on these plans!

Ed and I skimmed through the Engineering Reports and think that they will be extremely useful for our project, especially involving the planning of the highway. The reports contain a lot of aerial maps for the interstate and mentions an alternate route that we have been looking everywhere for. The reports we have are the Engineering Report 1588 and Engineering Report 1588 Supplement 2. We don't have the first supplement, but supplement 2 is supposed to be the "newest" information. The report lays out the reasons why they chose the area they did for the interstate and breaks down the costs for the recommended area and the alternate area (which were actually fairly close in estimates).

I am very grateful that Bernadette was able to get these documents for us and spend so much time trying to help us find information for our project. After looking through these engineering reports, I really think that our project is coming together and finishing up.

Under Pressure...

Now that it's April, I'm really starting to feel the pressure for all of my classes, especially this one. I feel like there is still so much to do for our class project, even though it seems we have accomplished a lot. I'm not really sure how far away we are from our end goal and what else we still need to find. On top of our class project, the individual project is looming overhead. I know it is a huge task and I'm worried that there isn't enough time left in the semester! I have some ideas on what I want to do but I really need to just narrow it down and get started. I'm hoping we can finish our class project soon so that I can devote all my spare time (which seems to be very little) to working on this individual project. I'll update on my progress...

Visit to the Capitol Area District Library

Today, Riley and I went to the Capitol Area District Library in Lansing. Our goal was to try and find city council minutes in the local history part of the library which is only open from 5-7 on Tuesdays. When we arrived, the door was locked and no one was in there. After talking to the librarians at the circulation desk we found out that the people that were usually in charge of the place weren't there. Luckily, they were able to find someone in the building to help us. Because of budget cuts, people have to work in two places.

We didn't really have any luck in finding the city council minutes, even with some of the dates we wrote down from our timeline. However, the person that was helping us found some plans for the building of I-496 which included neighborhoods and specific lots where construction took place. Each street was broken down into different lots and listed in a table. We are trying to get scans or even just pictures of the documents to show the rest of the class and use for our project. As we get more information, we will update the class.

We also were directed towards a folder with newspaper clippings from the Lansing State Journal about I-496. We skimmed through the contents and found some new articles and photos that we thought might be helpful to our project. We will read through them for content and upload whatever is helpful to the wiki and Omeka. We also found out that the library has aerial photographs of the I-496 area including one dated around 1948 which is a great before picture. We are going to talk to the man in charge of the photos to see if we can get copies of those pictures.

All in all, I thought our trip was pretty successful. Although we didn't really find what we thought we were going to find, I think we found a good amount of material.

Library of Michigan

On Tuesday, Ed, Riley, and myself went to the Library of Michigan to begin our research into the planning of I-496. We enlisted the help of a librarian right away but there was a little miscommunication between us. At first, she thought we were looking into the highway I-96 which we repeatedly told her we were looking at I-496, specifically in Lansing. There just happened to be a folder labeled "Highways - 1950s and 1960s" on her desk when we got there because another librarian was using it earlier in the day for an unrelated question. We skimmed through the articles in that folder and didn't find very many that had to do with I-496 but we found out that there was a separate folder that had clippings exclusively on I-496. While Ed and Riley went to check out other stuff, I located this folder and began to skim through and make copies of some relevant articles and pictures that I thought could be useful for our project.

Copying the articles was a huge pain and I wish I would have thought about bringing my camera to make the copies which would have been much easier to do and upload to Omeka or the Wiki (and I wouldn't have had to deal with the lady that kicked me off the copier while I was using it, but that's a different story). I wasn't able to copy all of the articles in the folder that I wanted to because the Library was closing but I will go back and finish looking. After Dr. K scans in the articles as PDF's, I will read them for content and upload what I think is necessary to our project site at Omeka.

Research for the I-496 Project

For our class project I have been assigned to the research team. Tomorrow, the research group I am in is going to the Library of Michigan to begin looking at documents for our project. Ed, Riley, Michelle and myself are looking for planning documents for the highway including alternate routes that were debated. We are going to be looking for maps, documents, pictures, newspaper articles and anything else that might relate to our topic.

Tomorrow is just the beginning. Because of the limited hours, we are probably going to have to go back at some point to continue our search but we want to begin digging in to see what we find. We have looked at the background readings that everyone did for specific document names that might be helpful but I plan on asking the librarians there to help us out if we need it.

I will update later with what we find (which hopefully will be a lot!)

Behind the Scenes Look at the Michigan Historical Center

Last Thursday our class went to the Michigan Historical Center for the second time. I thought that this visit was very informative and helpful for our project on I-496. On our first visit, we didn't really explore the museum's exhibits. This time we got to walk through a couple and talk to Maria Leiby about how they were constructed and some of the problems that staff faced when designing the exhibits. I think this was helpful for our class because it gives us some background knowledge when we are working on our project. It raised some questions that we will have to negotiate as a group - what are we including, what are we not including, what are our goals for the exhibit, who is our audience...

I really enjoyed seeing the room where a lot of the artwork was constructed for the museum. It is incredible what people can create and restore and it made me realize how much work goes into creating an exhibit in a museum. It is so much more than just thinking of an idea and constructing it. You need to plan and design and create from scratch. It seems we have a lot of work ahead of us, but like the MHC staff said, all the work is done in groups so everyone helps each other.

Focus # 2: The I-496 Controversy

I can't believe Spring Break is already behind us, and I hate to say this but I wasn't able to look deeply into the sources surrounding focus choice # 2 - the I-496 controversy. However, now that we are getting back into the swing of things, I am excited to start our class project which means hunting down sources we can use. I think that this focus sounds more interesting and I would like to use it for our class project. I think that focus # 1 (the African American community that lived where I-496 was built) is important to look at but I think that it can be incorporated into the second proposal. A lot of the controversy surrounding the construction of the highway dealt with the fact that the highway went straight through a large African American neighborhood in Lansing.

When we were assigned a group and told to look into the available sources, Brianne and Brandon both said that they had contacts they could talk to regarding proposal # 2. I'm not sure what they have so far, but it sounded like they had great resources to use.

Whatever option we decide to do, I am excited to start doing a little research and putting together our class project. I think that our group will work well together and the end result will be fantastic!

Creating Chicago's North Shore

The book I read for background information on our project was Michael H. Ebner's Creating Chicago's North Shore: A Suburban History. This book focuses on the creation of Chicago's North Shore which consists of 8 communities: Evanston, Wilmette, Kenilworth, Winnetka, Glencoe, Highland Park, Lake Forest, and Lake Bluff. The book begins with a short history of the suburbs, including some reasons why people wanted to get out of the urban centers - overcrowding, dirtiness, lack of garden landscape etc.

The book focuses mainly on the impact of the railroad to the creation of these communities which were only settlements before the railroad laid tracks along Lake Michigan. The railroads made it easier for people to live outside of the city and still commute to Chicago. The book does mention that some people were opposed to these technological changes in transportation because they moved too fast, changed the landscape etc.

When skimming through this book, I was fairly interested in the topic because I thought it was interesting in finding out more about the formation of the suburbs and the impact that new transportation had on them. I used to live outside of Chicago when I was a kid, and my dad used to take the train to commute to work in the city. Chicago is a central hub for railroads and it's fairly easy to travel there by train. I have taken the train from Michigan to Chicago several times.

It was easy to get bogged down when skimming through this book by the descriptions of the different communities. Since this wasn't really relevant to our topic, I tried to stick with the sections that could be used when looking at the construction of I-496. The book doesn't discuss the construction of highways (it only goes up to the invention of the automobile) but for our project we can use the information about the impact of the railroads and the car on the creation of suburbs. The highway system relates to this idea because I-496 was probably constructed to make travelling easier and resulted in people moving out of the city because it was easier to commute.

Landscapes and Buildings

So far, David Kyvig and Myron Marty's book, Nearby History, has been my favorite book to read in class. The book is an easy read and covers very interesting topics having to do with nearby history. The chapter I read for class was about Landscapes and Buildings (Chapter 9). The chapter talked about looking at the cultural landscape to understand the history of a particular place. The cultural landscape allows you to see how a place has changed over time by looking at, for example, migration patterns, transportation routes, architecture etc (165). It was stressed that "historical evidence found in the landscape must be supplemented by information derived from written documents" (165). A building needs some sort of background to describe why it's important, otherwise it just stands alone.

To understand the cultural landscape, Kyvig and Marty recommend the starting point be to see the whole and its parts. A historian should look for form, balance, harmony, and unity as well as shapelessness, imbalance, incongruity and disorder (168). It also means looking at the natural landscape and seeing how that affected constructing the cultural landscape.

The chapter also focused on buildings because they are "not only the most prominent artifacts on the cultural landscape but the centers of human activity as well" (170). When looking at buildings, historians should pay attention to their function, structure, and symbolism. The point of this chapter was to show that the cultural landscape is full of materials and it is up to historians to understand these materials and use them to recreate the past (176).

Beginning our Class Project - I-496

After reading Matt Miller's article, "Looking Back: I-496 Construction: A Complicated Legacy" from the Lansing State Journal, I was able to get a little background information on our class project about the construction of I-496. Miller's article offers two different viewpoints about this event - destruction and a blessing. The article was a great start for information on what we will be focusing on this semester, but I have some questions that hopefully we will be able to answer during our research and proposal.

1. What is the timeline of events? When was it decided that 496 was going to be built? What objections were there?

2. What reasons were given for the need to construct I-496? Pros/Cons?

3. What new neighborhoods did displaced people move to (both White people and African Americans)?

Central School

Today I visited a historic site in East Lansing - Central Elementary School on Grand River. The school is an important site to the local history in education, the community, and architecture. It was built in 1917 and is the oldest schoolhouse in East Lansing. It is one of the oldest, public structures in the city, not located on the campus of Michigan State. The early formation of a school district helped to create the City of East Lansing in 1907. The schoolhouse played a role in the development of MSU's teacher preparation program in the early 1920s. The building was designed by Edwyn A. Bowd in a Neo-Classical style. Today, the school is used as a day care facility. Central School made the State Register list in 1984 and the National Register list in 1986. (http://www.mcgi.state.mi.us/hso/sites/6306.htm)

The school looked like a typical small schoolhouse of the 20th century. I wasn't aware of the significance of this school house to the city of East Lansing or even to Michigan State. Learning some of the history of this local historic site was a great way to jump into our project on the building of I-496 in Lansing.

The Enola Gay Controversy

Before this class, I didn't really know anything about the Enola Gay Controversy. After reading a few articles, I was able to understand the basic story and what the big deal was surrounding the Enola Gay. The Smithsonian was planning an exhibit at the National Air and Space Museum to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II. The exhibit was to feature the Enola Gay, the plane used to drop the atomic bomb on Japan. The Air Force Association and the American Legion (among others) wanted the exhibit to be cancelled because they felt the exhibit script was biased and didn't put the American veterans in a favorable light regarding the dropping of the bomb on Japan. The huge battle was whether the exhibit should promote heritage or history.

I think it was unfortunate that the exhibit was cancelled and instead the Enola Gay was displayed with little information or interpretation. While I understand veterans were upset that the exhibit was going to show the effects of the atomic bomb through pictures and artifacts that would have elicited a strong emotional response from the public, I don't think that part of the story could have been ignored or scaled back. It would be hard talking about the atomic bomb without mentioning its disastrous effects. The public should have been able to see the original exhibit. History is about exploring all sides of a story.

National History Standards

After looking at Hawaii's state standards for History I was curious to see what some of the National History Standards looked like. UCLA's website, National Center for History in the Schools, goes more in depth than Hawaii's website. The website is basically split into the standards for grades K-4 and grades 5-12.

Like Hawaii's standards, the National Standards include learning about local and state history starting in the younger grades and working up to a more detailed study of US and World History. The National Standards also emphasize critical thinking, analysis, interpretation and comprehension at all grade levels which Hawaii tries to accomplish as well.

The National Standards break up US and World History into eras for students to learn. They provide benchmarks that students should be able to reach by certain grades that follow the standards for that period of history.

After briefly looking at the National Standards, I would say that Hawaii's state standards follow the same guideline. The National Standards only provide a framework for teachers which gives them room when teaching the subject. The National Standards treat History as its own subject and not part of the greater Social Studies.

Hawaii State Standards

The first thing I noticed about Hawaii's State Standards for Social Studies is that they were only 28 pages, much shorter than Michigan's. The Standards begin by saying, "Social Studies education in Hawaii must not only ensure our students' development as active and responsible citizens of the community, nation, and world but it must also enable the maintenance of the unique lifestyle that is Hawaii" (Hawaii Standards, 2). The aspect of citizenship is mentioned frequently in the standards and is a huge component of their Social Studies education. They also emphasize using Social Studies to understand and continue the unique lifestyle and culture of Hawaii.

The Standards for Social Studies are broken down into 5 disciplines: History, Political Science/Civics, Cultural Anthropology, Geography, and Economics. Each discipline lists a set of standards which is broken down into grade cluster benchmarks, K-3, 4-5, 6-8, and 9-12. The benchmarks for each grade cluster list some ideas/content that students should know or be able to do by that time in school.

For example: In History, there are 5 general content standards such as "Historical Empathy: Students learn to judge the past on its own terms and use that knowledge to understand present day issues, problems, and decision making" (Hawaii Standards, 4). For grades 4-5, students must "explain how rules and values of a society determine the behavior and attitudes of its members" (Hawaii Standards, 4). For grades 9-12, students must "apply knowledge of historical periods to assess present-day issues and decision making" (Hawaii Standards, 5).

Each discipline has their own standards and benchmarks, but History is the only one that includes a suggested framework for using the Standards. On this page, certain history topics are suggested for each grade cluster to cover in school. For example, in grades 6-8, the teacher can cover World Cultures (examine select societies around the world), the history of the Hawaiian Kingdom, Pacific Island Studies, and US History through Reconstruction. It is stated that "this framework is not a checklist of subjects that must be taught. Instead, it provides possible topics for implementing the history standards" (Hawaii Standards, 6). In this way, teachers have a lot of room to be creative to teach history in Hawaii. It is emphasized in the standards to teach certain topics that are more relevant to students. Teachers are encouraged to bring out the best in each child and it is believed that all students are capable of achieving these standards.

At the end of the document, each discipline has a glossary defining terms specific to the discipline. There is also a box labeled with tools that you might use for each discipline and methods/skills that would be helpful.

These standards encourage critical thinking for students in every discipline of Social Studies. Students are expected to analyze, evaluate, question, interpret, empathize, and explore all perspectives. All of these expectations should push students to go beyond learning just facts and actually use historical thinking.

After looking at Hawaii's Standards, I feel that I would be able to teach there. I would have to learn more about Hawaii's history and culture, but I think that no matter what state you teach in you have to do that. All states usually require some kind of state history to be taught in the schools. Because the standards are more open, I would be able to teach with a little more freedom and cover topics of interest in my class.