Final Thoughts

This semester has been quite a crazy one! I did not expect this course to be what it was. I expected another American history course with reading hours every night and writing paper after paper. It was a pleasant surprise to work on class projects and do research other than at the MSU library. I enjoyed having to blog because I felt like people were actually reading what I was writing as opposed to strictly writing for the professor and a grade.

My thoughts on what it means to "do" history have changed. I always thought history was just researching a topic a professor gave you. I never experienced a class where I could choose what I wanted to research and what interested me and work on a project of my choice. I also realized that history is not just a list of topics and events to learn about and know facts about. History is about how people interact with each other and interpret the past. I realize that history is all about questions and the more you find out the more questions you have, which seems backwards but is true. The more we learned about I-496, the more questions came up that we wanted to know the answers to.

Overall, I really enjoyed the class. It offered me a new perspective on history and history classes.

Last minute findings for the design team

In class on Thursday I was asked by the design team to try and dig up some last minute photos to incorporate into our exhibit. I was asked to find pictures of the GM plants in Lansing in the 1950s and any pictures of workers on the assembly line there during that time. I was able to find both suprisingly since the second request was a very specific one. I found a man named James R. Walkinshaw's wiki page through GMnext. I found images of the Lansing Assembly Plant in 1950 and 1955 on his page titled Co-oping int he 1950s at GMI

I was also able to find an image of two men working on the assembly line at the Olds plant in 1966 at Walkinshaw's wiki page titled Olds in Lansing.

At another site I was able to find an aerial photo of the Lansing Assembly Plant #1 which was taken after the highway was built. I decided to incorporate that image onto our classes Omeka in case the design team was interested in doing any type of comparison. I am hoping this helps the design to team to wrap up our exhibit proposal!

Oh, the satisfaction of finding what you're looking for..

After spending another long night at the wonderful MSU library I was actually able to find a couple of books full of fantastic pictures of Mackinac Island, past and present! Of course the book I really wanted was not on the shelf and the shelf was back in the basement with the books I wanted on the top shelf with no step stool around but whoever said anything had to be easy!

Of the books I was able to find, I found pictures of the harbor sequenced from the late 1700s up until the present as well as other developments around the island. I'd like to look into Census reports more if possible to find out how the population of the island has changed. So far I was able to find statistics for 2000 up until 2009 but I'd love it if I could go back farther.

I am working my way through the other books I found to get a more detailed understanding of the history of the island and creating an outline of ideas and facts that I have uncovered so far. I am not sure how detailed our background narrative for our final product is supposed to be or if there is a page length/requirement on it but I guess I will start writing and see where it takes me.

My goal over the next few days is to nail down my goals for the lesson and look through the GLCES to see where exactly this fits into the curriculum and what standards I can address with a lesson like this. I am glad I could find images and sketches of Mackinac Island in the 1700s and 1800s because I feel it is always good to have first hand documents for the students to look at and analyze.

I am slowly but surely getting my ideas together and organized! It is helping that my other classes projects are gradually wrapping up and I will be able to devote more time to history!

Exhaustion

I am at library attempting to do some research on individual project for class in the middle of a jam packed week of teaching and exams and library visits. I was able to find a quite large selection of Michigan History books and now I currently in the middle of digging through them to find information about Mackinac Island. For my individual project I would like to create a lesson plan based around Mackinac Island and its importance/value throughout its settlement. In the 1700's and 1800's it had great trade and military significance while today it is a historic site whose main value is tourism. I was interested in this idea because my family makes the annual 5 hour trek up to Mackinac Island for an Architects convention at the Grand Hotel every year. I've seen the fort and the old houses and constantly expanding harbor area and I thought it would be interesting to explore this more from a historical perspective than a tourist perspective. I will interested to look into what exactly has been preserved and hopefully in my lesson plan get the students thinking about how to decide what should be preserved and can be demolished. How do we determine what is "historically significant" enough to preserve for future viewers? What do we want to keep on the island that will be important for the future to know about it?

I originally thought of creating this lesson plan for 4th graders because that is usually around the time when elementary schoolers are learning about Michigan history and Mackinac Island is vital to Michigans history. After talking with Dr. K we discussed the thought of creating the lesson for high school students instead. I have not decide which road I want to take yet but I need to do that soon as it will determine the path I take for the lesson.

I am planning on going to the Library of Michigan this weekend to try and find more information. For now, I am taking my zombie self to bed and calling it quits for the evening!

Capital Area District Library

Today I visited the Capital Area District Library for the first time with Rachel and Nikki from class. We worked with David Votta in the Forest Parke Library and Archives working to find images of houses that had been demolished to construct I-496 and their residential cards when available. David is going to email Nikki the digitized formats in the next few days and we should have about 20 or so documents to incorporate into the exhibit.

Once we finished looking for these images, David directed us upstairs to a newspaper clippings file on I-496. From that we were able to make copies of articles discussing a variety of aspects of the construction from the amount of money spent on the project, to opening dates, the process of naming the highway, some information on the relocation going on and many more images to go along with the demolished houses found in the archives. Overall it seemed very productive. Since I went with members of the design team it was interesting to hear from them directly what kinds of things they were looking for and still needed and I feel we found a lot of information and documents that were still needed to keep the exhibit design moving forward.

Overall a great trip!

Class with no Professor

Yesterday was my first experience having a class with no professor to lead us and control us! I was worried things might not get done and the two groups might have trouble communicating but I felt we did great! The design team communicated very well with the research team about where they were going with the project and what they still needed. The first half of the hour seemed a little unorganized to me when the design team was getting there stuff organized because the research team did not have too much to discuss I felt. We settled that quite a large group would be going to the Library of Michigan on Friday morning/afternoon but of course my math class is held on Friday!

I will be interested to see how Thursday goes as most of the research team is not doing major work until Friday. I am planning on going through our class Wiki and looking more in detail as to what the design team still needs.

Research visit to the Library of Michigan

This morning I visited the Library of Michigan with Christina, Brandon and Amanda from class. We dug through a bunch of old newspaper articles trying to find out about General Motors' role in the construction of I-496 and how the highway might have affected their business and employees afterward. Suprisingly, we uncovered a lot of stories and information that the other groups were working on and we felt that instead of just skipping over it and letting them know we found information, we decided to read through those as well and make notes. We were able to find a few pictures, which I will be posting for our class, one of which is above. This is a picture from The State Journal and shows men putting up a new sign for I-496 which is interestingly enough nicknamed Olds Freeway after R.E. Olds. I found this very interesting because I was investigating the role of the automotive industry on the construction of I-496 and the freeway is nicknamed after the man who ran the industry, so to speak, in Lansing.

Overall I found it to be a very interesting and productive visit. I had never been to the Library of Michigan and being able to sit and dig through old newspapers from the 1950's - 1980's was incredibly interesting.